The Cell Shapes the Prisoner
The partnership between public employee unions and government creates a self-reinforcing doom loop in our schools and robs students and teachers of the chance to maximize their potential.
For a brief time, I was a union rep for our District. Because of my commitment to honesty and my penchant for dark humor, administrators don’t always love me, so I figured it might not be a bad move to have the title, especially since, from what I could see, it came with little additional responsibility other than a monthly meeting at Union Headquarters.
While there, I was a little surprised to find out how corporate the union’s culture was. We almost never discussed traditional union issues, we just went down the agenda list of items that were 90% housekeeping: updates on policy changes, upcoming events, seminars, and other trainings to share back to colleagues at our school sites. I was never impressed by anyone’s passion for the worker. In the year I was there, no rep brought an idea for action to improve working conditions. In fact, every idea the union pushed came down from leadership in Sacramento.
The cozy relationship between the Union President and the District Superintendent was even more concerning. It seemed to me that their frequent lunches and meetings and photos were altogether too chummy for two parties whose interests are supposed to be diametrically opposed. The union’s focus is getting the best deal for teachers while the District is supposed to protect the interests of students, allocating money away from labor unless the labor directly impacts student learning in a positive, measurable way.
The main claim of teachers unions is that spending more money on teachers results in two positive student outcomes:
higher pay attracts better-qualified people to the profession and
hiring more teachers lowers class sizes so teachers spend more time on individual students during class and minimizes the after-school workload so teachers can focus on improving initial, whole-class instruction.
Seems logical, but let’s take these claims on one by one.
#1 Higher Pay Attracts Better Teachers
Our rigid step-and-column pay structure proves the first claim patently false. The union shows no interest in rewarding teachers for performance, claiming there’s no good way to measure teacher impact (this is a lie). This is how they justify the ossified pay scales, whereby salary increases are based on longevity, not skill. This also explains why union contracts make it nearly impossible to fire anyone except for pesky new teachers with ideas in their heads other than the ones administrators give them. The Hoover Institute estimates that it takes on average $200,000, 15 percent of a principal’s time, and two years to dismiss a poor teacher.
One poor teacher. Now imagine you have a staff of 100. The odds are good that significantly more than 1% of your teaching force is doing whatever they can to make their job as easy as possible—there’s no enforceable expectation for anything more. I don’t know how you define a poor teacher, but in my mind, any teacher who doesn’t teach the material well, hold your kid accountable for learning the material, and/or support them in that learning is a weak teacher. The problem is the union contract creates an environment where the work required to address those issues is not required to keep your job. And you still get next year’s raise.
I must repeat: teacher pay is based on years of service. In a system as intractably backward as ours and given the fact that most humans are not masochists, survival means making your job as easy as possible — and a teacher has 100% control of his workload. He decides whether or not to assign reading. He decides whether or not to lecture. He decides whether or not to grade homework and whether to grade it for accuracy (requiring hours of time) or completeness (a single glance). He decides whether or not tests will be open-book and open-note and multiple choice, which Google will helpfully grade for him. He decides how closely the multiple choice test will align with his Powerpoints which he instructs his students to copy, word-for-word (so they ignore simultaneous lecture) or whether the test will require reading and independent practice. He decides whether any essays will be assigned and how they will be graded. He decides whether assignments come straight from the included-with-the-textbook-adoption workbook or if he’s going to craft assignments that require thought, assignments that can’t be done by Siri. He decides whether to adjust his materials to the skill-level of his current students or if he’ll just recycle 2003’s lesson plans.
Now that the Federal and state Departments of Education have incentivized school administrators to ignore poor student behavior through restorative practices and soft quotas on discipline referrals, his workload is the only thing a teacher can control. The working conditions are deteriorating rapidly as students realize there are few consequences for disruptive behavior and managing a classroom with a few bad actors is emotionally and physically draining.
Of course teachers are going to cut back on labor where they can, and that means instruction, especially considering we don’t measure the effectiveness of instruction and, even if we did, it would have no effect on a teacher’s job security.
On top of that, teachers are rarely rewarded for having rigorous standards, grading papers thoughtfully, offering feedback for improvement, developing strong mentoring relationships with students, and/or staying abreast of developments in their subject area. No, the path of least resistance is fully embraced AND rewarded: all you really have to do is know what’s in the student textbook, find a few slide decks off the internet to have kids copy, and give a multiple-choice test once a month that can be sourced directly from the teacher’s textbook (and is probably available with answers online to any kid with the gumption to search for it).
With the new emphasis on grading for equity coming down from a state DOE that is increasingly concerned with ensuring that teachers control grades for mental health, trauma, poverty, and skin color, teachers are encouraged to give a minimum grade of 50% for work that is never turned in, accept late work at any time, and offer unlimited test retakes. If a student can’t meet that bar, low as it is, we are encouraged to look at any evidence of any skill to see if the student can be moved up the chain anyway. (The union is also happy to note that with these expectations, dozens of new staff — psychologists, counselors, special education teachers, paraeducators, one-on-one aides, reading specialists, etc., have been hired to support students who show little to no desire to engage in their schooling.)
Most of the pay increases are backloaded to the oldest teachers. New teachers rarely earn much, and in a state where costs of living are approaching levels you only see in Zurich, that locks out anyone with a higher-paying career option. So who do you get?
The least competitive members of the job market.
Most elementary school teachers major in education or child development, notoriously soft majors defined by low rigor and grade inflation. Many others only ever get a Bachelors degree, and often that’s in a soft subject like English or History or physical education. Science teachers only need to pass an exam of the basics in science or get a B.S., which too many universities now hand out like candy to increase revenues and maintain high graduation rates.
There are two levels of math certification in California; since most will never teach Calculus, there’s no expectation that teachers will know math at a level higher than geometry. Regardless of how much she learns in college, a teacher can rely on the teacher’s edition of the textbook to carry her through a year of math. Grade inflation can erase the delta between her competence and what the students are supposed to know by the end of the year.
Sadly, the combination of people whose primary characteristic is how sweet they are and the hard push by education bureaucracies and governments to put ideology ahead of knowledge in every school of education has had enormous effects on the quality of schooling in California. When ideology-driven incoherent gobbledy-gook is passed off as job training to people not used to rigorous analysis but fully trained to follow rules to get a reward, it’s no wonder that our schools have become cesspools of shallow indoctrination, i.e. obedience training.
Remember: Most teachers were excellent public school students.
So higher pay doesn’t mean better teachers: it means the teachers who have survived the longest in a system that holds no one accountable for performance get paid the most and only those least qualified to succeed in a competitive marketplace for skilled labor will enter a job that, now, only guarantees systemic dysfunction and truckloads of cognitive dissonance. Add in gold-plated benefits and a 185-day work year and you can see how this would retain only those people who believe they have no other options. It also erases any drive they might have had to find an escape route.
All the worse for our kids.
#2 Hiring more teachers will improve student outcomes
Secondly, we have the Union’s position that if only the state would spend more money to hire more teachers, we could get class sizes down which would improve student outcomes.
We have an interesting data point this year with President Biden’s large allocations of additional education funding in response to COVID; this amounted to billions of dollars in California. What have class sizes done? I don’t know about your school, but my classes are still 35 or larger.
What we do have now is an army of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion specialists, Teachers on Special Assignment (so, teachers who don’t teach kids, but are supposed to teach teachers how to teach — despite the fact that I’ve already established there’s exactly zero reason for teachers to do anything other than the minimum it takes for them to survive the school year) and Mental Health and Social Work specialists to deal with the near universal student “trauma” experienced by all students that schools must now address. Since many of these people are highly credentialed™, they are often paid well into six figures.
So much for decreased class sizes.
Okay, so I guess that data point won’t work, except to prove the trend in the graph below will continue.
We DID for a short time in the early 2000s experiment in California with 20 to 1 student-teacher ratios in 9th grade English classes and Kindergarten through third grade. The results didn’t come close to the expectations of student growth.
The cost-prohibitive program was scrapped by 2010.
At the end of the day, then, what have we got?
Lots of money going to labor, with the union skimming 2% from each teacher. With roughly 320,000 teachers in California, that works out to over $300,000,000 in the CTAs coffers, which they turn around and use to influence legislators who will increase education funding for the tragedy du jour that only our schools, with their ed school-certified Highly Qualified staff, can resolve.
Or partially resolve, thus necessitating the need to hire more “experts” and get more money from the taxpayers pushing the primary mission—instruction—further and further down the list of things schools do.
Which is fine because, as we all know, our schools are highly effective.
Well, your kid’s school is anyway.
Right?
Sarcasm aside, teacher’s unions twist incentives so that even the best teachers have no reason to perform well. If they do dare to outwork and/or outperform their peers, they are punished with increased workloads, difficult students, and poorly compensated and time-sucking “leadership roles”.
Thus, the union has a simple offer for every teacher who joins: We can do this the easy way, or the hard way. It’s totally up to you.
If you want to know why every teacher movie ever made ends with a postscript of how that teacher left her job to work as a consultant or to write a book or to become a millionaire selling her lesson plans on TeachersPayTeachers, look no further than the incestuous relationship between the union and the state.
I can’t find an attribution for this quote, but when I came across it for the first time last year, the simple truth it expressed bowled me over. It’s become my favorite tool for explaining the way things are without demonizing the people trapped within dysfunctional, large-scale systems, like teachers.
“The cell,” we must remember, “shapes the prisoner.”
When every adult employed in the school system is incentivized to take the easy road, your family is left with only one option to get a real education: the hard way.
The prison whispers to our children: You too can do this the easy way or the hard way, just like the adults around you.
There are simply not enough Dissident Teachers to show students the rewards of ignoring the confines of the system’s cells, to help them eke out a real education that prioritizes risk-taking, engenders a healthy attitude toward failure, and worries more about growth of the individual than sorting kids into categories based on a single characteristic.
A cell is the safest place in the world.
But do you really want your kid growing up in one?
The Dissident Teacher is an actual classroom teacher, and the stories shared by DT here are true. Ask any California kid in a PreK-12 California public school; he’ll tell you.
Well that was sobering 😞