The vote by United Federation of Teachers members to approve their new contract is another in a series of Pyrrhic victories, protecting the lowest performers at the expense of the teaching profession.
Under the last contract, teachers identified as low-performing would get a follow-up visit from an independent evaluator along with a plan for how to improve.
Now, the ineffective teacher can only be observed by a fellow UFT teacher, approved for the job by a union leader. The new system drastically weakens even the modest accountability standards previously in place.
It’s troubling that the de Blasio administration did nothing to stand up for accountability, even as it was giving out raises of nearly 20 percent.
Yet this is just the latest step backward on accountability in our schools.
In a case brought by the UFT, an arbitrator ruled last month that a principal cannot regularly collect or have a say in the content of a teacher’s lesson plan.
Great teachers put real time and effort into planning and strategizing. We need to reward that and also replicate it. However, the UFT is encouraging its members to fight against a principal who routinely asks to see lesson plans — which means they can’t create a culture of regular sharing.
Anyone who genuinely values teaching should question the wisdom here. Can you imagine a hospital where the head of surgery is legally barred from reviewing a staff surgeon’s work? Or a bank manager who can’t review what loans his employees agreed to?
We’d never accept this arrangement in any other profession, and we shouldn’t in our schools.
If we want to get great results for kids, we need to start treating teachers like the highly valued, highly skilled professionals they are.
Instead, the trend is to undermine the teaching profession by discounting the efforts of teachers who work hard to perfect their craft.
If we believe that teachers are highly skilled professionals, then shouldn’t we treat them that way? Great teachers come into the classroom with a plan; their principal should be able to use that as one factor in their evaluation.
The only reason to keep principals from regularly collecting lesson plans is to protect the teachers who don’t plan their lessons.
Need proof? Take an example used by one of the union’s own witnesses.
In reinforcing just how ironclad are the contract guarantees that bar principals from reviewing lesson plans, an executive vice president of the principals union highlighted the case of a teacher who avoided disciplinary action after submitting lesson plans on the back of a matchbook.
This is part of a larger pattern of denigrating the profession to protect the lowest performers.
The UFT and its parent union, New York State United Teachers, have even resisted the state Education Department’s new teacher-certification exam. This establishes a new set of standards that teachers must meet before they go from education degrees to the classroom — like a bar exam for teachers.
The old exam had a 99 percent pass rate, a strong sign that it might not be stringent enough to ensure that new teachers make the grade. The new exam reflects higher standards, and will improve education graduate schools — a goal set by both Gov. Cuomo and President Obama.
Among the new standards the unions are resisting: the requirement that teachers be able to read at a 12th-grade level.
The unions consistently stand in the way of efforts that recognize and reward the best teachers. They resist needed reforms to reward our best teachers and end the long-standing “last in/first out” policy, which values seniority over performance.
UFT boss Mike Mulgrew has even admitted that he negotiated in bad faith to subvert last year’s teacher-evaluation agreement — bragging that his goal was to “gum up the works.”
Students deserve more than special interests just “gumming up the works.”
They need stakeholders who work to enhance teaching quality and improve public education.
If we want to move forward and make progress, the union needs to stop protecting the worst teachers and start valuing excellence.
Denying teachers the kind of professional feedback and environments they deserve demeans them, and ultimately hurts the students in their classrooms.
Jenny Sedlis is the executive director of StudentFirstNY.