Can teacher activists avoid the missteps that tripped up school reformers?
It’s been a remarkable 18 months for teacher activism. High-profile strikes in locales like West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, Los Angeles and Denver have put an end to the decades of quiet that followed the regular strikes of the 1970s.
Striking teachers won substantial pay raises while helping to accelerate a profound shift in the thrust of the education debates — away from testing, accountability and standards and toward spending and staffing. Teachers seized the spotlight and the bully pulpit, while garnering sympathetic press coverage and wide support among the public.
What should one make of all this? And what does it mean going forward?
For starters, this surge illustrates a profound failure in “school reform” as practiced for most of the 21st century. For reasons that were never clear, and that seem downright bizarre in hindsight, the reform coalition tended to focus on the problem of “failing schools” and “failing teachers.” Predictably, lots of teachers — not just the “failing” ones — wound up viewing reform as a hostile incursion launched by those who didn’t work in schools.
The single success of 21st century reform has been the emphatic insistence that it was no longer acceptable to excuse poor academic performance by saying, “Those kids can’t learn.” This shift represented a vital, remarkable sea change. That shift did raise a question, though: If we weren’t going to blame the students, then who was responsible?
Teachers sensed that the answer was simple: They were. Teachers got the idea, quite understandably, that they were being made into scapegoats, while parents, policymakers, dubious measures of performance, sleazy vendors and bureaucrats were getting a pass.
Meanwhile, teachers had plenty of other legitimate frustrations. Indeed, between 1992 and 2014, after-inflation teacher salaries actually declined by 2%. And little reform seemed to focus on solving the practical problems — like mediocre instructional materials, inconsistent leadership, an undue focus on testing, excessive paperwork or insulting professional development — that teachers wanted someone to address. To top it all off, the new accountability systems, academic standards, tests and evaluation models rarely made it a priority to compensate, recognize or support educators.
In retrospect, these frustrations may have made today’s activism inevitable. Where things go now, however, seems far less ordained.
It would be understandable if teachers who finally feel empowered don’t want to worry overmuch about where things go next. Teachers have public support, their reform nemeses have scattered or left the field and there’s surging progressive support for new spending. Riding that wave seems the natural impulse of union leaders and grassroots activists alike. However understandable, I suspect such a course will ultimately prove short-sighted.
Just as the reformers missed their chance to build something more solid and sustainable, so do today’s teacher activists risk setting themselves up for a bitter comeuppance.
After all, while teachers feel undervalued and underpaid, the fact is that taxpayers have already been ponying up for schools. Even as after-inflation teacher pay was down from 1992 to 2014, real per-pupil spending was up by more than 25%. It’s just that those dollars disproportionately went into administration and benefits. And, while talking points about “failing teachers” gave short shrift to the challenges of school improvement or the roles of parents and policymakers, schools do indeed need to improve in any number of ways.
Hard-working teachers deserve a big raise — especially in places like West Virginia and Oklahoma — and talented teachers are
profoundly underpaid. And there is broad support for raising teacher pay but, critically, that’s partly because the public thinks teachers earn less than they do. In the 2018 Education Next poll, for instance, respondents thought the average teacher in their state earned just more than $40,000 — typically, about two-thirds of what teachers actually earned. When given the actual figure, support for higher pay dropped from 67% to 48%. While teachers enjoy significant support, they will do well not to overplay their hand. Or they’re likely to face a backlash of their own.
Big opportunities loom for teacher activists. Teachers are likely to be pushing on an open door if they argue to combine higher pay with an effort to address underfunded pensions or to couple the addition of new counseling staff with trims to district bureaucracies. If teacher activists can temper the urge to wade into ideological crusades while addressing the practical frustrations of parents and educators, they’ll win allies and broaden their coalition going forward.
This said, the passions that suffuse education tend to get the best of everyone — reformers and activists alike. That can make it hard to forge real, lasting partnerships between reformers, policymakers and educators; or teacher activists, parents and taxpayers. So, when it comes to the future of teacher activism, we’ll have to see.
#BelieveInEducation
“I believe the mission of schooling is to help all children develop their talents, master essential knowledge and skills, and learn to be responsible citizens.”
– Frederick M. Hess, resident scholar and director of education policy studies, American Enterprise Institute
8 Comments
Chloe Buckelr Henry
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This is a critical reminder for policymakers to consider what voices should be leading specific policy reforms. It can be beneficial for policy makers to consider which voices will be received the best by the widest audience.
Abigail Scott
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I find this model to be such a promising and well-designed approach for teachers to advocate for enhanced support, by referring to their measurable previous success. Particularly, the potential for gathering bipartisan appeal under this approach is quite strong. The most resistance to increased spending on teachers tends to come from fiscal conservatives, due to concerns that the funds are misdirected or being spent without proper accountability. However, when this request for more support is supplemented with proven results, I am confident that a significant portion of previous resistance will be diminished.
Kelley Whelan
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This is a tremendous comment , and one that all teachers would, hopefully, put at the forefront of their mind when teaching and observing their students. It's too costly and unfortunate to allow a student to learn below their level.
John Hayes
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This comment is spot on as viewed from recent decades. Not to say that there aren't bad teachers (there are) but many times it seems like when students aren't doing well and schools are failing, the public and policy makers often blame teachers, fairly or not. So many other factors are involved but neglected, to include student ability, that teachers are probably justified in feeling this way.
Danielle Goodman
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I agree that to remain effective teachers need to focus their activism on local leadership, and in addition to this policy makers must find the right balance between effect policy between the federal and state and local level. I am unsure of exactly where the intersection of state and local vs. federal involvement will fall.
Tyson Rhodes
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This a really interesting point. Often times political debates focus on the negative aspects and the "failures." Maybe if politics was able to shift to focus on the "successes" and use those as a way to lead conversation around reform, then maybe teachers would be more receptive to the conversation. By only focusing on the bad it feels like the good is being ignored, but if we focus on the good as a way to spotlight the bad it might feel like more of a constructive criticism than an attack.
Susie Herrera
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When we think about why people care so much about education we think about the kids and how we want children to learn and develop through education. It makes sense that when the focus shifts away from that, then the public may not be as interested or supportive.
Kamaali Lama
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It is important to recognize and reward our educators for the things they do well. Constantly setting various ways to measure their effectiveness and work without recognition for how hard they are working would definitely make teachers feel undervalued. The good teachers need to be rewarded for what they are doing right, while the bad teachers need to be properly trained.