CER and Education In The News

WITHOUT MERIT
Review and Outlook Editorial 
Wall Street Journal, July 10, 2000

        Standing before the teachers union convention in Chicago last week, Democratic Presidential candidate Al Gore was in a mood for bellowing. He bellowed: "I'm on your side and I want to fight for the people. The other side fights for the powerful. That's why the big pharmaceutical companies are supporting Governor Bush. That's why the big oil companies are supporting Governor Bush. That's why the big polluters are supporting Governor Bush."

        So you're asking yourself, What's this got to do with education? Obviously nothing. But if you'd spent the week hanging around the NEA's convention, educational reform is probably the last thing you'd bring up, too. They'd have hooted their man off the stage.    

        The NEA has always been intent on standing athwart history, and the teachers did a spirited job of it in Chicago. Aside from the usual string of non- education-related liberal policy statements, not to mention an endorsement of Al Gore, the NEA took time to thumb its nose at virtually all types of educational reform. The NEA's Representative Assembly even jacked up member dues by $5 a year to fight voucher initiatives. This can only mean that the union is feeling threatened by the voucher movement.

        While the NEA's opposition to school vouchers has long been a given, the really significant event at this convention was the rank-and-file's hostility to tying teacher pay to student performance, which is to say, the teacher's ability to teach. How radical.

        The union's leadership had already realized that in the current climate of reform it had to save some face by allowing for "performance pay" under very specific circumstances. But the delegates weren't buying it. Most parents, in fact, don't quite realize just how much the NEA rank-and-file remain stuck in the mind-set of an industrial union. And for this reason, as go steel and textiles, we suspect, so go the teachers.

        From the convention floor, they hardened the line against merit pay significantly. Led by the larger state affiliates, such as California, New Jersey, Michigan, Illinois and Massachusetts, new language was substituted banning all forms of merit pay under any circumstances. The resolution adopted by the assembly displays stunning obstinacy, and can only speak for itself:

        "The Association opposes providing additional compensation to attract and/or retain education employees in hard-to-recruit positions. . . . The Association also believes that performance pay, such as merit pay, or any other system of compensation based on an evaluation of an education employee's performance, are inappropriate."

        There it is spelled out in black and white: They will not act as any other business would to correct a labor shortage; they will not be held accountable for results.

        As a practical matter, the union is ordering the tides to recede. The ship of reform has already set sail, notes Chester Finn, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a former assistant secretary of education in the Reagan Administration. "States and localities are going to be doing various versions of merit pay," he says. "They already are."

        Jeanne Allen, President of the Center for Education Reform, points to Denver and Cincinnati, where the unions have been pressured to accept merit pay, and have reached compromises. She adds that the voucher and charter school movement has also helped increase support for merit pay. Competition is having the exact effect it was intended to on the public school system; it is leading parents and politicians to demand results.

        But in the very years that this reform movement has gained momentum, not least among minority parents, the Democratic Party has made a Faustian bargain for the in-kind political support of this big union. The result is that Democratic politicians seem incapable of coming to grips with what is going on now in U.S. primary and secondary education.

        Clinton Education Secretary Richard Riley, a Democratic moderate before he made it to Washington, addressed the convention, offered a little bit of everything and a lot of money. He proposed more than $32 billion to be split among projects like after school programs, school modernization and teacher recruitment. As if the the problem is mainly money.

        It is perhaps expectable for a steelworkers union to demand higher wages, or for a textile-workers union to demand better working conditions. But it is patently unreasonable for the nation's largest teachers' union to demand exemption from accountability. What a lesson for their students.

        The trend in the knowledge economy is to fix poorly performing schools and it looks unlikely that this trend will be stopped.

        But back to Vice President Gore before the teachers. He also bellowed, "We are the mainstream majority." Maybe not for nothing is George W. Bush extending his lead in the early polls.

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See CER Education Reform Updates from July 6 and July 12, as well as the July Monthly Letter for more on the teachers unions' convention antics.

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