Nicholas Kristof on Public Schools and Teachers' Unions

Kristof is one of those guys about whom you can often say, "His heart is in the right place." (And you know what word comes next.)

Kristof attempts to compare today's inner city schools to the era of "separate but equal", premising that argument on the fact that the inner cities (and thus their schools) are dominated by minorities. There are only a few differences... such as the fact that the schools are not actually segregated, there's no parallel set of schools for non-minority children, and for all of their faults many inner city school districts are now generously funded, but why let the facts get in the way of perfectly good hyperbole. In fact, why not kick it up a notch?

America’s education system has become less a ladder of opportunity than a structure to transmit inequity from one generation to the next.

Really? Well, no, not really.

In fairness, it’s true that the main reason inner-city schools do poorly isn’t teachers’ unions, but poverty. Southern states without strong teachers’ unions have schools at least as lousy as those in union states. The single most important step we could take has nothing to do with unions and everything to do with providing early-childhood education to at-risk kids.

So Kristof understands that schools are not "a structure to transmit inequity from one generation to the next", but are an inadequate tool for consistently breaking children out of a cycle of poverty. (Nor is "providing early-childhood education to at-risk kids" the solution it has at times been hyped to be, at least not as implemented to date, but it sounds good.)

Kristof complains,

I’d be sympathetic if the union focused solely on higher compensation. Teachers need to be much better paid to attract the best college graduates to the nation’s worst schools. But, instead, the Chicago union seems to be using its political capital primarily to protect weak performers....

Unfortunately, the union in Chicago is insisting that teachers who are laid off — often for being ineffective — should get priority in new hiring.

That would be a concern if it were true. Except when I follow either of Kristof's links I find that the union's actual concern relates to rehiring teachers who are laid off for reasons outside of their control ("because of school closings, consolidations and turnarounds"). The union's position is not about protecting "weak performers". If Kristof wants to make the case that most or all teachers who are laid off are "weak performers", he is free to try - but it seems reasonable to infer that if he could substantiate his claim he would provide a relevant link.

At the heart of his argument, it appears that Kristof is fundamentally disturbed by the idea that unions would negotiate contracts that benefit workers not only in terms of wages, but also in terms of their working conditions. He wants to get rid of the weakest teachers, spinning glorious outcomes that might be achieved if inner city schools got rid of the bottom 1% or bottom 5% of teachers. I don't think that anybody would deny that job protections negotiated by unions do help some number of people stay in jobs that they're not fit to perform. Within the context of public schools, if administrators are disinterested or are incompetent, teachers who should be terminated instead end up getting tenure and, at that point, it becomes difficult to fire them for their job performance.

Alas, a purge of the type Kristof proposes is not likely to have a significant impact on the performance of schools or students. Even if we get past what Kristof describes as the challenge of figuring out "who is a weak teacher", avoid administrators gaming the system to get rid of teachers they don't like, and overlook the fact that Kristof just told us that ""the main" problem is "poverty", the numbers are too small to have a significant impact.

Fire one teacher in 100 and most kids will proceed through school with the same set of teachers to whom they would have been assigned without the "purge". Eliminate 5%, and you're still having little to no impact on the overall school experience of most children. In early elementary, K-6, most kids have seven teachers. In middle school and high school they may have an aggregate 50 or so teachers. So they're not going to see a huge change in personnel, even if we assume that a teacher at the 94th or 98th percentile of effectiveness is materially superior to the ones who are purged.

Further, if you fire a teacher you need to replace that teacher. While it may be that if you correctly identify the worst teachers, somebody fresh out of a teacher's college who is willing to work in the inner city will be no worse, some will be no better - teachers learn a lot during their first few years on the job, and you're all-but-guaranteeing that you'll have an increased number of new teachers in the system.

It's fair to note also that purging teachers will have no impact on the racial composition of inner city schools. Although Kristof actually repeats the "separate but equal" hyperbole in his conclusion, he does so to be emotionally provocative.

While Kristof opines, "Teaching is so important that it should be like other professions, with high pay and good working conditions", he ignores the push in the opposite direction - to demean teaching as a profession, to strip away benefits, to put downward pressure on compensation. He ignores trends that make teaching less and less attractive to high performing college students, and for that matter less and less attractive to school teachers who have options outside of the profession. When you make teaching less attractive to the best teachers, guess who remains when they leave?

One of the reasons that inner city schools, or the "lousy" schools in "Southern states without strong teachers’ unions" (Kristof should be clear that some of those states have no teachers' unions) seem to have more problem teachers is that they attract a weaker candidate pool. Yes, there are teachers who want to make a difference and, despite strong credentials, seek education jobs in the inner city, but most teachers with options choose not to apply. Alas, those who try to make a difference may find that their efforts are unappreciated, if not impeded by structural problems, inadequate resources and incompetent administrators.

Perhaps Kristof should approach these issues from a slightly different angle. If the problems of the inner cities also exist in impoverished schools in states that offer teachers no job protections, the problem cannot be job protections - unless you presuppose that school administrators in the non-union states are either incompetent or indifferent to the quality of their schools. Also, most schools in this nation manage to do pretty well despite teachers' job protections - if the problem does not lie with the pool of candidates, why are those districts so much better than the inner cities and non-union states at identifying and hiring competent teachers? And if the problem is with the pool of candidates, isn't it fair to assume that the schools are already hiring the best candidates they can identify? why does Kristof believe that purges will result in those schools hiring better teachers?

George Will's Solution For Racial Justice

All that's necessary to achieve racial justics is for (good?) men to do nothing. That's seems to be the essential message of George Will's latest missive, The Court Returns To Brown. I have heard a lot of criticisms of Brown which are legally creditable, but Will's is not among them.

Incredibly, Will describes Brown as prohibiting the consideration of race in the assignment of children to schools, or implicitly in any other state action. Incredibly, Will quotes Thurgood Marshall for this purpose. Obviously the quote is not representative of Marshall's position, nor is it actually from the Court's decision as Marshall's role was as a lawyer for the NAACP. The quote,

Distinctions by race are so evil, so arbitrary and invidious that a state bound to defend the equal protection of the laws must not invoke them in any public sphere,

appears to be a favorite of right-wingers who prefer an unrepresentative sound bite to substantive debate, and I can't find any presentation of that sentence within its greater context. I suspect that Will picked it up out of a book of quotations or somebody else's column. Is that the only sentence that those opposed to civil rights decisions like Brown can glean from Thurgood Marshall's entire body of written work?

Giving the devil his due, I am not personally a fan of K-12 integration programs offered as a substitute for improving the quality of schools. Even without any discriminatory intent, it can certainly be unseemly if a school district's best schools are largely white and its worst schools are largely minority. Many integration models seem designed to avoid that appearance, but with complacency setting in once the desired level of racial balance is achieved. A bad school is bad, regardless of the racial composition of its student body.

George Will presents what he no doubt believes to be a clever analogy, suggesting that "liberals" like diversity programs for elitist reasons.

Breyer said that last week's decision abandons "the promise of Brown." Actually, that promise -- a colorblind society -- has been traduced by the "diversity" exception to the equal protection clause. That exception allows white majorities to feel noble while treating blacks and certain other minorities as seasoning -- a sort of human oregano -- to be sprinkled across a student body to make the majority's educational experience more flavorful.

Let's start with this nonsense that Brown somehow dictates a "colorblind society". Even if you believe that to be desirable, you would have to be dishonest, ignorant, or deluded to believe that's the principal holding of Brown. You would have to have a similar grasp of history to not know that the insistence of people like Will for a "colorblind constitution" grew out of the civil rights era, and was part of an effort to roll it back. Find me one person like George Will who argued that the Constitution was "colorblind" back when Jim Crow laws were in full force and minority students were intentionally shuttled off to segregated, inferior schools.

Obviously, it cannot be said that the original text of the Constitution is "colorblind".

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

The idea then must be that the 14th Amendment rendered the Constitution "colorblind". That argument fails from the standpoint of originalism. So it is quickly reduced to a textualist sleight of hand - the "plain language" of the 14th Amendment is said to render the Constitution "colorblind" not because of the intent of those who drafted it, and not because of its application during the many decades between the Plessy and Brown decisions, but because "that's what the words mean". I don't mean to dismiss textualism as an approach to constitutional interpretation, but within this context the strongest advocates of textualism are choosing that approach solely as a means to reach their desired outcome, which has always been to roll back the remedial measures implemented in the Civil Rights era.

The "human oregano" comment is meant to be both clever and derisive of Will's primary nemesis, the "liberal". And sure enough, here's one of those nasty "liberals" discussing racial diversity as if it is a seasoning....

While superficial observers might focus on the greater diversity of the Democratic contenders (with one female, one black, and one Latino among them), the eight Dems and ten GOP’ers still showed a similarly disproportionate domination of dark-suited, white, middle-aged males – with a single seventy-something curmudgeon (John McCain for the GOP, Mike Gravel for the Dems) offering some feisty seasoning.

Oops, sorry, that was Michael Medved, and I guess it's white people who are truly "spicy".

Medved, though, represents the George Will school of thought on race - the fact that he regards head counts as indicative of diversity somehow means that everybody else does so, as well. So as much as the Republican right blasted Bill Clinton for having minorities they deemed unqualified in his cabinet, they had no problem demanding that George W. Bush get special credit for having even more minorities in his cabinet, and remain curiously silent when some of those people (most notably Alberto Gonzales) prove disastrously incompetent. (In fairness, incompetence in the Bush Administration is not a racial issue - it's endemic among Bush's appointees.) Beyond the use of less inflammatory language, there's not much to separate this type of "head counting" from that demonstrated by James Watt.

The Brown court's was describing mandatory segregation, but in a manner not irrelevant to the situation which would exist in many school districts in the absence of an integration plan:

Here, unlike Sweatt v. Painter, there are findings below that the Negro and white schools involved have been equalized, or are being equalized, with respect to buildings, curricula, qualifications and salaries of teachers, and other "tangible" factors. Our decision, therefore, cannot turn on merely a comparison of these tangible factors in the Negro and white schools involved in each of the cases. We must look instead to the effect of segregation itself on public education.

* * *

We come then to the question presented: Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does.

* * *

Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system.

The current Supreme Court brushed off these concerns, apparently content that if you remove a single element from the facts of Brown, the mandatory nature of the segregation, all else becomes irrelevant. That's fine with the likes of George Will: If all of the minority students in a district are in failing schools and all of the white students are in quality schools, that's just demographics in action. But to pretend that this is the intent of Brown? To pretend that a decision which overtly speaks of the detrimental effect of segregation "upon the colored children" is color-blind?

Will also proves himself either ignorant of the facts of the Seattle integration program, or again mendacious. The Seattle program permitted students to select their preferred school, with race as a "tie-breaker" for students deemed equivalent under the school board's criteria. No student was forced to be "oregano" - minority students enrolled in schools outside of their neighborhoods by choice, and it is reasonable to believe that virtually all choices were driven by the desire to attend a stronger school, or one which offered programs not available at the local school. It remains the case that equality (or even superiority) of funding of a school does not automatically translate into superior schools, particularly in large urban school districts.

Ultimately, perhaps George Will is the type of "colorblind" buffoon parodied by Steven Colbert. (If you pretend not to see it, at least outside the context of a Republican President's cabinet, it doesn't exist.) I wonder if he sees himself as a modern day George Wallace, standing up for the rights of an 'aggrieved minority'.

At the end of the day the vision of Brown is not fulfilled by pretending that in the absense of intent, de facto school segregation, in which minority students are vastly more likely to end up in weak or failing schools, is not an issue. It is also not fulfilled by shuffling students around between schools to create "racial balance" while doing nothing to improve weak and failing schools. If you gave every school child in a district the ability to go to the school of his or her choice, and the net result were that the vast majority chose their local school because it was "as good or better than" pretty much every other school in the district, the ethnic distribution of students should not be troubling. But we're a long way from that ideal, and (good?) men like Will seem intent on ensuring that we never reach it.