Across the country, Democratic governors and mayors have cozied up to the teachers unions and given up on education reform. Not New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo.
Cuomo continues to push for accountability and choice in public education — even if, in the face of union opposition, he doesn’t get all that he wants.
Unfortunately, the governor’s laudable efforts will be squandered if he gets drawn into a narrow fight with the unions over details, like points and weighting percentages in teacher evaluations.
Cuomo’s current plan includes changes to the teacher-evaluation system — which he calls “baloney” — to make it easier to dismiss bad teachers. He’s also pushing other reforms, including a bump in the number of charter schools allowed in the state.
His plan for a tax credit for those who donate to public or private schools was all but dropped from state-budget negotiations, but his broad agenda still stands a chance of putting children first.
We may learn if his reforms fly over the next few days, as a budget deal is finalized for the fiscal year that begins Wednesday.
But so far, they’ve met with stiff resistance from the teachers unions, which have a vested interest in the current system. Under this system, teachers almost never lose their jobs for performance reasons.
In addition to bigger salaries and smaller class sizes (which mean less work for teachers), greater job security is a primary objective of teachers unions. That’s why they are obsessed with preventing evaluations from being used to hold teachers accountable.
“The teachers don’t want to do rigorous evaluations — I get it,” Cuomo reportedly said. “I feel exactly the opposite.” This is because 96 percent of the state’s teachers were rated effective last year but only 38 percent of high school graduates were deemed college-ready.
Job security is worth thousands of dollars to teachers. One 2003 survey found that it would take a hypothetical 50 percent salary hike to get half the unionized teachers to give up tenure.
Districts often “pay” teachers in rules that protect their jobs and make their day-to-day lives easier, as these rules don’t show up in current budgets.
The threats to job security in the governor’s agenda explain why New York’s teachers unions so fiercely oppose it. New York State United Teachers President Karen Magee has called Cuomo’s plan a “billionaires’ agenda” that is “irresponsible” and “intellectually hollow.”
The union has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads attacking the governor. In the Big Apple, the United Federation of Teachers held “emergency meetings” to strategize about how to resist the governor.
These tactics have had an effect. A Siena College poll found that the teachers unions have a slight edge over the governor in public support.
A Quinnipiac poll last week found that the fight with the teachers union has dragged the governor’s approval rating to its lowest point.
Cuomo is absolutely right on a few key ideas: Teachers need to be evaluated in light of how their students perform. Bad teachers must be removed from the classroom. Kids should not be trapped in poor-performing schools.
Rather than fight over teacher-evaluation details, though, the governor needs to keep his eye on the larger issue: work rules and excessive job protections teachers enjoy.
Cuomo should focus on increasing the discretion principals have to remove bad teachers — and on giving kids the choice to get out of classrooms with poor teachers by going to charter schools.
Let’s be honest: In most schools, all involved — parents, students, principals and teachers — know who the bad teachers are.
So the governor’s priority should be to push back on work rules, which so badly hamstring student performance. As political scientist Terry Moe has shown, as the number of rules in teacher contracts goes up, student performance goes down, especially that of poor and minority students.
This is because the rules make it hard to get the best teachers in front of the students who need them most.
Unless Cuomo is willing to take on the collective-bargaining system that produces rigid protection for bad teachers, his reforms will only make small improvements to the system.
Nonetheless, he should be applauded for continuing to press for better teacher evaluations, fewer bad teachers and more charters. His instincts are right and, at the moment, he’s nearly single-handedly keeping the education reform conversation alive.
Daniel DiSalvo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and an assistant professor of political science at the City College of New York-CUNY. His new book is “Government Against Itself: Public Union Power and Its Consequences” (Oxford).