The Death and Life of the Great American School System

by Diane Ravitch

Mrs. Ratliff did nothing for our self-esteem. She challenged us to meet her exacting standards. I think she imagined herself bringing enlightenment to the barbarians (that was us). When you wrote something for her class, which happened with frequency, you paid close attention to proper English. Accuracy mattered. She had a red pen and she used it freely. Still, she was always sure to make a comment that encouraged us to do a better job. Clearly she had multiple goals for her students, beyond teaching literature and grammar. She was also teaching about character and personal responsibility. These are not the sorts of things that appear on any standardized test.

  She loved her subject, and she enjoyed the respect the students showed her, especially since this was a large high school where students did not easily give respect to their teachers. Despite the passage of years, I still recall a class discussion of Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” and the close attention that thirty usually rowdy adolescents paid to a poem about a time and a place we could barely imagine. I wonder if Mrs. Ratliff has her counterparts today, teachers who love literature and love to teach it, or whether schools favor teachers who have been trained to elicit mechanical responses from their students about “text-to-self connections,” “inferencing,” “visualizing,” and the other formalistic behaviors so beloved by au courant pedagogues. If Mrs. Ratliff were planning to teach these days, I expect that her education professors and supervisors would warn her to get rid of that red pen, to abandon her insistence on accuracy, and to stop being so judgmental. And they would surely demand that she replace those dated poems and essays with young adult literature that teaches adolescents about the lives of other adolescents just like themselves.

  At our graduation, she made a gift of a line or two of poetry to each of the students in her homeroom. I got these two: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” the last line of Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” which we had read in class, and “among them, but not of them,” from Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” which we had not read in class. As she did in class, Mrs. Ratliff used the moment to show us how literature connected to our own lives, without condescending into shallow “relevance.” I think these were the best graduation presents I got, because they are the only ones I remember a half century later.

  I think of Mrs. Ratliff when I hear the latest proposals to improve the teaching force. Almost every day, I come across a statement by a journalist, superintendent, or economist who says we could solve all our problems in American education if we could just recruit a sufficient number of “great” teachers. I believe Mrs. Ratliff was a great teacher, but I don’t think she would have been considered “great” if she had been judged by the kind of hard data that is used now. The policy experts who insist that teachers should be judged by their students’ scores on standardized tests would have been frustrated by Mrs. Ratliff. Her classes never produced hard data. They didn’t even produce test scores. How would the experts have measured what we learned? We never took a multiple-choice test. We wrote essays and took written tests, in which we had to explain our answers, not check a box or fill in a bubble. If she had been evaluated by the grades she gave, she would have been in deep trouble, because she did not award many A grades. An observer might have concluded that she was a very ineffective teacher who had no measurable gains to show for her work.

  Data-driven education leaders say that academic performance lags because we don’t have enough “effective” teachers, the ones whose students consistently improve their standardized test scores. The major obstacle to getting enough effective teachers and getting rid of ineffective teachers, they say, is the teachers’ unions. Union contracts provide job security that prevents administrators from hiring and firing teachers at will. If there were no unions, no union contracts, and no tenure, then superintendents could get rid of bad teachers and hire only effective teachers. Without the union, teachers’ salaries would be based on the test scores of their students, rather than on their seniority and credentials. According to theory, the higher compensation would attract outstanding teachers—the kind whose students will get higher scores—to the nation’s classrooms. So long as the unions insist on a uniform salary scale that gives equal rewards to effective teachers and mediocre teachers, then outstanding teachers will leave teaching and outstanding college graduates will never enter the profession. The answer to the problem of ineffective teachers, or so goes the argument, is to eliminate the teachers’ unions or at least render them toothless, then fire the teachers whose students get low scores.

  To some economists and business leaders, this analysis makes sense because it reflects the way the free market supposedly works. In the free market, incentives and sanctions matter. Good performance gets rewarded, poor performance gets penalized, and employers have the power to hire and fire their employees. According to this theory, people work harder if the incentives are large enough, and they work harder if they fear being fired. What works in the private sector should also work in the public sector. Or so the theorists say, not taking note of the many instances when executives of failed corporations collected huge bonuses after the stockholders lost everything.

  The test case for the theory that the schools should operate like the private sector is Washington, D.C. There, Michelle Rhee, the brash young chancellor of schools, emerged as a national symbol of a get-tough management style soon after she was hired by newly elected Mayor Adrian Fenty in 2007. Although Rhee had no experience running a school system, Mayor Fenty selected her soon after he gained control of the district’s public schools. Chancellor Joel Klein of New York City recommended her to Fenty as someone who shared his views about school reform. The district’s City Council turned the schools over to the mayor, because they were impressed by New York City’s reforms and were desperate to improve their school system.

  As a member of Teach for America, Rhee taught for three years in a Baltimore elementary school managed by Education Alternatives Inc., a for-profit organization that received a contract as part of an experiment in privatization. According to Rhee, during her second and third years of teaching, the proportion of her students who read on grade level leapt from 13 percent to 90 percent (critics were doubtful since the Baltimore records could not be located).1 From her experience, she concluded that effective teachers could overcome poverty and other disadvantages; as she told Newsweek about the students she taught, “Those kids, where they lived didn’t change. Their parents didn’t change. Their diets didn’t change. The violence in the community didn’t change. The only thing that changed for those 70 kids was the adults who were in front of them every single day teaching them.”2 She subsequently created the New Teacher Project, an organization that recruits teachers for inner-city public schools.

  As chancellor, Rhee made clear from the outset that “teachers are everything.”3 She moved quickly to introduce sweeping reforms. She fired central office staff, closed under-enrolled schools, reorganized low-performing schools, and ousted principals. She focused on recruiting strong teachers and getting rid of incompetent teachers. She offered a buyout to encourage teachers to resign. Her biggest target was teacher tenure, which she called “the holy grail of teacher unions.” Job protection for teachers, she believed, was symptomatic of a culture that put “the interests of adults” over “the interests of children.” She said that tenure “has no educational value for kids; it only benefits adults. If we can put veteran teachers who have tenure in a position where they don’t have it, that would help us to radically increase our teacher quality.”4 In 2008, she offered the Washington Teachers’ Union a deal: If teachers gave up their seniority and tenure, they would be eligible to receive salaries up to $130,000 a year, which would make them the highest-paid urban teachers in America. Those who chose to retain their tenure would not be eligible for the higher compensation. Rhee obtained a five-year commitment from several major foundations, including the Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation, to support the supersize salaries. Rhee wanted the freedom to fire teachers who did not sh
are her belief that all children, regardless of the disadvantages in their life, can post high test scores, and that the only impediment to academic success is not their family or their poverty but the quality of their teacher.5

  Her direct assault on the teachers’ union and on tenure won her lavish and admiring attention from the national media. The Wall Street Journal praised her fortitude for assailing the union and quoted her saying that it is “complete crap” to claim that poverty prevents students from learning.6 As a result of her confrontational stand against the union, she was featured on national television and on the cover of Time magazine, where she was shown holding a broom.7 To her admirers, she was a courageous reformer, prepared to do a clean sweep of a deeply dysfunctional school district; to her detractors, she was a witch with a broomstick.

  Of course, if Rhee’s policies are implemented, it will be years before anyone can evaluate their effects. Should teachers work without job security, like most workers in the private sector? Should the teachers’ unions lose their power to protect their members against arbitrary firings? Should the salary schedule be abolished and replaced by merit pay based on students’ test scores? And if all these things happened, would schools improve? Would students be better prepared for citizenship, college, and careers? Many like-minded reformers agreed with Rhee that school improvement hinged on breaking the unions, removing job security from teachers, and linking teacher pay to student test scores.

  Although no one can predict whether Washington, D.C., will someday be the best urban school district in the nation, as Rhee pledged, there is a body of research and experience that is worth reviewing on these issues.

  Let’s start with the hardest question: Should teachers’ unions exist? Do the protections they offer their members depress student achievement? Are they an “adult interest group,” as their critics charge, whose priorities conflict with the needs of their students? Would schools improve if there were no unions to represent the teachers?

  To answer these questions, I can no longer refer to Mrs. Ratliff, because she was not allowed to join a union. Texas was a “right to work” state, and there were no teachers’ unions. As it happened, the teachers in Houston could have used a union to protect their academic freedom, because they were frequently harassed by an ultraconservative group called the Minute Women. Members of this organization would drop in unannounced to observe classes and sit in the back row to find out whether teachers expressed any unacceptable political opinions. Teachers were frightened by these vigilantes, but they could do nothing to stop their unwanted visits, because members of the group were elected to the city’s school board. My beloved world history teacher, Miss Nelda Davis, was ridiculed in the press as politically suspicious by this group because she wanted to attend the convention of the National Council for the Social Studies, which the Minute Women deemed a leftist organization. They also thought the United Nations, the NAACP, the Urban League, and all other groups that advocated for desegregation or human rights were Communist fronts. My teachers needed protection of their basic rights but they didn’t have it.

  That’s one important reason teachers joined unions: to protect their right to think, speak, and teach without fear. In my own research into the history of education in New York City, I discovered that teachers joined a teachers’ organization for many reasons. In the early decades of the twentieth century, most teachers were women, and most supervisors and board members were men. Consequently, the administrators and politicians who controlled the schools had an unfortunate habit of imposing paternalistic decisions on teachers. The Board of Education fired female teachers if they got married. When teachers won the right to marry without losing their jobs, the Board of Education fired them if they got pregnant.8 When the Board of Education finally relented on marriage and motherhood, female teachers organized to demand equal pay with male teachers. During World War I, the Board of Education fired some pacifist teachers, but the teachers had no teacher-led organization to defend them.

  Most teachers joined a union to seek higher salaries and better working conditions. Teachers have historically been underpaid in comparison to people in other professions with similar levels of education. And most urban districts, where unionism got its start, have usually been burdened with aging facilities, overcrowded classrooms, and a shortage of supplies and resources. Individual teachers could do nothing to change these conditions, but acting collectively they could negotiate with political leaders to improve the schools.

  Critics of teacher unions seem to be more plentiful now than ever before. Supporters of choice and vouchers see the unions as the major obstacle to their reforms. The Wall Street Journal regularly publishes editorials in opposition to teacher unionism, and the business press can be counted on to blame the unions for whatever is wrong with the schools. One would think, by reading the critics, that the nation’s schools are overrun by incompetent teachers who hold their jobs only because of union protections, that unions are directly responsible for poor student performance, and that academic achievement would soar if the unions were to disappear.9

  This is unfair. No one, to my knowledge, has demonstrated a clear, indisputable correlation between teacher unionism and academic achievement, either negative or positive. The Southern states, where teachers’ unions have historically been either weak or nonexistent, have always had the poorest student performance on national examinations. Massachusetts, the state with the highest academic performance, has long had strong teacher unions. The difference in performance is probably due to economics, not to unionization. Where there are affluent communities, student performance tends to be higher, whether or not their teachers belong to unions. Some of the top-performing nations in the world are highly unionized, others are not. Finland, whose students score highest on international assessments of reading, has a teacher workforce that is nearly 100 percent unionized. Most high-performing Asian nations do not have large proportions of unionized teachers (though some do). Unionization per se does not cause high student achievement, nor does it cause low achievement.

  While I have never been a member of any union, I was a friend of Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, whom I met after my history of the New York City schools was published. His successor, Sandra Feldman, was also my friend, and I am friends with her successor, Randi Weingarten, who was elected AFT president in 2008. At the behest of the AFT, I traveled to Eastern Europe in 1989 and 1990, as the Cold War ended, to meet with teachers and talk about civic education and democracy in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. I worked with the leaders of Teachers Solidarity in Poland, which opposed the Communist regime and its puppet unions. As a result of these experiences, I came to believe that teachers, like other working people, should have the right to organize and to bargain collectively for their compensation, working conditions, and right to due process. Moreover, as a historian, I recognize the importance of the labor movement as a political force that has improved the lives of working people in many sectors of American life, including education.

  Critics say the union contract makes it impossible for administrators to get rid of bad teachers. The union says it protects teachers against arbitrary dismissals. To be sure, it is not easy to fire a tenured teacher, but it can be done so long as there is due process in hearing the teacher’s side of the story. But the issue should not take years to resolve. The AFT, which represents most urban districts, has supported peer review programs, in which teachers evaluate other teachers, offer to help them become better teachers, and, if they do not improve, “counsel them out” of the profession. When it comes to decisions about terminating a teacher, unions want to be part of the decision-making process. It is not in the interest of their members to have incompetent teachers in their midst, passing along poorly educated students to the next teacher. Since unions are not going to disappear, district officials should collaborate with them to develop a fair and expeditious process for removing incompetent teachers, rather than using
the union as a scapegoat for low performance or for conditions in the school and society that are beyond the teachers’ control.

  Tenure is not a guarantee of lifetime employment but a protection against being terminated without due process. It does not protect teachers from being laid off in a recession, nor does it protect them from being fired for incompetence or misconduct. Why does due process matter? Teachers have been fired for all sorts of dubious and non-meritorious reasons: for being of the wrong race or religion, for being gay or belonging to some other disfavored group, for not contributing to the right politician, for not paying a bribe to someone for their job, for speaking out on an issue outside the classroom, for disagreeing with the principal, or simply to make room for a school board member’s sister, nephew, or brother-in-law.

  Teachers do not receive tenure automatically. Every state has its own requirements. Typically, tenure is awarded after three or four years of probationary status, during which time teachers are supposed to be observed and evaluated by their principal. The principal has the authority to deny tenure to any teacher for any reason. Principals are supposed to carefully observe the performance of probationary teachers many times before awarding them tenure. Working with principals and unions, school boards should develop a thoughtful, deliberative process for evaluating probationary teachers. They should also put in place a peer review program to help struggling teachers, whether they are probationary or tenured.10

  To a considerable extent, the teaching profession is self-selective. Between 40 percent and 50 percent of new teachers do not survive the first five years. Maybe they couldn’t manage the classes; maybe they were disappointed by working conditions; maybe teaching was not for them; maybe they felt that they were unsuccessful; or maybe they decided to enter another profession. For whatever reason, the job is so demanding that nearly half of those who enter teaching choose to leave at an early stage in their career.