Matt Yglesias has a good post on the teaching trade — making the case, essentially, that teacher turnover isn’t such a bad thing. So long as we get some good, productive years out of those turning-over teachers.

It’s not a popular position with the teachers unions, and plenty of the comments (predictably) accuse Matt of insulting and devaluing experienced teachers.

I get this a lot myself, of course. Support merit pay, or acknowledge the data-supported notion that teacher productivity doesn’t go up much after they get their legs in the classroom (after three or four years), and you “hate teachers.”

The truth is, though, that skilled teachers are one of the most valuable assets our economy has. Teacher quality is far and away the most important thing a school or school system can provide. But we pay teachers based on seniority, not skill, and we put up barriers to entry that benefit no one but the teachers unions (who like to create artificial teacher “shortages” and then push for higher compensation).

Alternative certification, which Matt is supporting (and which the Center for American Progress has put out a paper about expanding), is one way of trying to recruit skilled teachers who don’t have the time or patience to deal with the rigmarole of traditional certification. Programs like this, such as New York City Teaching Fellows, have had a lot of success bringing bright young folks, and people changing careers later in life, into the system. They may have higher turnover; but 10 years of a good teacher in the system beats 30 years of a bad one.

Of course, there’s a lot more you’d have to change about the system to make it attractive to a higher quality of candidate. In general, I’m supportive of higher teacher salaries — if decoupled from seniority and all the other union-created barriers to accountability. You could give principals more control over their schools, so that they’d be run more efficiently, according to a set vision. You could create a career ladder, that would allow teachers to rise based on skill (the idea of master teachers, etc., has been around for a while).

I looked at what some teachers in the New York City school system think about all this back in 2004. The column’s called “Teachers’ Secret,” and gets into what I think a lot of teachers don’t want to say in front of their colleagues and union.

As an anti-class-size-reduction activist, my heart was warmed by today’s New York Times article on the subject. Mainly because it contained the most honest defense of the real agenda behind class size reduction that I’ve ever seen:

it makes teachers happy

Simple enough. Okay, here’s the full passage:

“We can say we just want more good teachers, which would be great, but that’s a policy that we just don’t know how to do yet,” said Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, an education policy professor at the University of Chicago. “The nice thing about reducing class size is that it makes teachers happy in their own right and it’s the one thing that we know how to do.”

Got that? It makes teachers happy, and we know how to do it (true: It’s not complicated. You just make class sizes smaller. Usually by hiring lots of teachers. In order to do this, you hire teachers of lower quality.)

Of course, we do know how to improve teacher quality. The trick is, you don’t hire and promote based on seniority and meaningless degrees, and you fire bad teachers. The only way in which we don’t know how to do this, is we don’t know how to do it in a city like New York, where doing so would violate the New York City teachers contract — a roadblock put in place by, yes, you guessed it, the teachers unions.

You also get better teachers by ditching arbitrary teacher certification requirements and making use of innovative ideas like alternative teacher certification. See: New York City Teaching Fellows, Teach for America, etc.

To be clear: Class-size reduction has it’s place. With some of the most disadvantaged students, it can be a positive step. But it’s an expensive step, and, for the most part, your marginal tax dollar is better spent on trying to improve teacher quality than on reducing class sizes.

Class-size reduction is very appealing, as the article makes clear, because parents and the public can understand it; they can see it. You can’t necessarily see teacher quality.

How do you solve that problem? By tracking teacher performance in a value-added, merit-pay system. I look forward to the Times op-ed calling for those innovative (and obvious) steps.

Some teachers in California are finding out that being “qualified” under federal and state law has nothing to do with actually being qualified to teach children.

Just another wonderful side effect of NCLB. Certification of teachers — already a ludicrous process, made deliberately ludicrous to create an artificial teacher shortage (in order for teachers unions to be able to demand higher wages) — is becoming even more complex.

School-choice supporters need to be watching Newark, where a vocally pro-voucher mayor was just elected (along with some of his favored Municipal Council candidates): Cory Booker.

As followers of the changing politics of school-choice might guess, Booker is an African-American Democrat. His main opposition in the election came from — wait, you can get this one, too — the Newark teachers union. Still, he won by a margin of 3-to-1 over the union’s favored candidate, Ronald Rice (great name).

For a further (worrying?) indication of where school-choice politics may or may not be heading, check out this, from Reason’s David Weigel (emphasis added):

The slate’s central ward candidate, Dana Rone, is probably its most vocal advocate of school choice.

…

"Vouchers have been pegged as something negative in the African-American community," Rone says. "When I explain them to people who are skeptical, I say: Look, you get vouchers. Medicare is a voucher. Social Security is a voucher. Welfare is a voucher. This is the same principle; it’s the equalizer that can get your kids into good schools. And when you explain it like that, they understand and they support it."

While support for school vouchers on this basis is better than the alternative (opposition to school choice), it’s also probably not exactly what school reformers are going for. Welfare, Social Security and Medicare are all programs where recipients are essentially passive clients. School choice — both charter schools and vouchers — is about making parents into active, informed consumers.

This will be one to watch. For now, we’ll have to wait until June 13 (runoff election) to see if the school-choice proponents in Newark have a solid majority or an even split with anti-reform candidates.

So, this jerk off goes on the dole instead of sullying himself by shopping at Wal-Mart, and the New York state teachers union thinks the story warrants a glowing profile?

Just when you think the unions’ respect for the taxpayers couldn’t be any less…

Now we have to finance the consciences of hippy-dippy morons who refuse to work?

Un-be-liev-able.

(via Politicker)

UPDATE: I just realized, we’ve got the libertarian trifecta here: Wal-Mart, teachers unions and public assistance for people who are just being lazy.

A possible explanation for that NCLB cartoon.

Presumptive Next Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer has picked state Senate Minority Leader David Patterson as his running-mate.

This is interesting for two reasons:

1) Patterson must not have much confidence in the possibility of the Democrats taking over the state Legislature’s upper house this year. If they did that, he’d become Senate Majority Leader and, by default, one of the three most powerful men in New York. Lt. Gov. is worth a warm bucket of spit next to that.

2) Patterson, who represents Harlem and is African-American, is an ardent supporter of charter schools — and thus not totally on the same page as the teachers unions on education issues.

Eliot Spitzer has shown some hints of favoring education reform in the past, and he even said he supports education tax credits in theory the other day (which surely made Randi Weingarten’s week worse). But Patterson, by virtue of who he is and whom he represents, is indicative of a broader trend that should trouble the teachers unions. Minority legislators in New York (all Democrats) have been throwing more and more support behind charter schools as their communities experience just how amazing some of the programs — like KIPP and Achievement First — really are.

The unions can’t hold the line against this for long. They’re losing more and more ground every year — up to the point where, now, in 2006, we have a Democratic gubernatorial candidate who supports tax credits and his running-mate who supports charter schools.

Unthinkable not too many years ago.

Unsurprisingly, the UFT didn’t like The Post’s editorial today poking some fun at the disclaimer on its new blog, EdWize.

They poke back, pointing to the disclaimer on this blog.

And their point would make sense if my Web site were in any way sponsored by, or formally affiliated with, The Post.

Alas, it is not.

What I didn’t expect when I wrote my column on how NYC parents could sue to get rid of the teachers contract was that the Daily News’ education guy, Joe Williams, filling in at Eduwonk, would do me one better: vouchers.

If the state can be sued for billions more in education aid, he asks, why can’t the court say that that money can’t go to the failed public system, but has to go to parents directly, for them to spend at private schools?

It’s a good idea. Unfortunately, it just couldn’t happen within the framework of the CFE case — which is probably where it would have to happen. In that case, the courts have already decided that more money for the public schools is the only acceptable remedy.

My column was intended to give a plausible alternative to the ideal scenario Williams describes, one that at least reforms the public schools a bit in exchange for giving them billions of new dollars.

(Those billions of dollars may never come, though. The dirty secret of the CFE case is it’s utterly unenforceable.)

Anyway, I probably should have written a column making Williams’ point a while ago. But I’ve become so conditioned to New York politics — and the implausibility of vouchers here — that I limit my own thinking on the matter.

But that’s not what we’re paid to do. So, in the future, I will propose even more unlikely solutions to New York’s problems. Reality be damned.

In other news about people who hate me because of my reporting on them, a New York Post editorial on Monday seems to have been responsible for torpedoing the United Federation of Teachers application to open up a charter school in Brooklyn.

Now, The Post isn’t opposed in principle to the UFT opening a charter school. But with the UFT working day and night to make sure that the 100-school cap in New York state stays firmly in place, the paper has limited sympathy for the union trying to take up one of the few remaining charters.

It’s especially offensive when the school they’re proposing is so, so poorly designed. I like to think of it as the teacher-centered school.

Here’s a broad outline from The Post’s editorial:

UFT officials reportedly visited successful charter schools while designing their application, yet seem to have perverted the schools’ best practices at every turn:

* The absolute most important innovation at the best charters has been to give weaker students radically more “time on task” — a.k.a. class time.

Schools like the KIPP Academy in the South Bronx run from 7:25 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays and a half day on Saturdays; KIPP also has a mandatory summer school that boosts its school year to 220 days, as opposed to the 180-day teachers-contract year.

At its proposed charter school, by contrast, the UFT would give teachers new (paid) “professional development opportunities,” while giving students not one extra minute of class time.

The UFT school’s two-week “Summer Institute,” for example, is nothing more than a way for teachers to pick up extra paychecks. Really: No kids allowed.

* Another key to the success of charter schools is the wide-ranging freedom principals have to pick their staffs and hire and fire as necessary.

Obviously the UFT can’t back such freedom without undermining its own job-protection scheme in regular schools. Thus, the charter’s “school leader” (not to be confused with a principal) would have to deal with just as many, if not more, layers of bureaucracy as his or her public-school counterparts. (Fair’s fair.)

Basically every staffing decision this poor school leader made would be subject to review by various committees made up of UFT delegates, UFT-represented teachers, parents and other “stakeholders.”

Here’s a taste from the application’s section on personnel policies: “Unsuccessful candidates for positions at the UFT Elementary Charter School who are members of the UFT may challenge the basis for the Staffing Committee’s decision through an expedited arbitration before an arbitrator with educational experience, jointly selected by . . . “

And on and on.

* Lastly, many of the most successful charter schools have pursued a back-to-basics approach to curriculum, making use of traditional, as opposed to “progressive,” instructional methods.

UFT President Randi Weingarten has herself been supportive of such an approach and highly critical of the Bloomberg team’s use of the so-called progressive programs.

Yet, for whatever reason, the UFT decided to use relatively “progressive” math and reading curricula. The union, according to sources, essentially admitted its discomfort with its curricula to SUNY’s board and expressed its intention to strengthen the program later.

Pretty appalling stuff, I’d say. And a little sunlight from The Post got the SUNY board members to take the UFT off the fast track to approval.

UFT President Randi Weingarten is not happy, as quoted in The New York Times: “This is a clear attempt to say that the unions should stay out of the chartering business,” she said. “Of course we’ll go through the paces, but don’t confuse politics with the merits of the proposal.” She added, “The political overtones at least to me were so overt.”

Well, she’s partly right. The UFT ought to stay out of the chartering business until they stop trying to deny others the right to enter it.

Once they let the Legislature raise or eliminate the cap — and, yes, in New York the Legislature needs permission from the union — then they can have a shot at their workers’ paradise. Parents can take it or leave it. And everyone will get to see how much their scores go up without any extra classtime.