Category Archives: Writing

Evaluations– assessment in general– is a thorny issue for teachers and for teachers’ unions. It starts with the traditional union resistance to the merit raise. Unions, not too surprisingly, prefer to negotiate pay for all of their members at once, rather than for individual members. Perhaps most importantly, education is best served by a workforce of well paid-teachers. Too often, too, merit systems are used by administrators to reward what they consider good behavior.

Good behavior, for example, might include anti-union teachers, or teachers that support policies that favor the administration. So unions generally advocate avoiding the entire mess by letting the rising tide raise all boats. That’s only the start of the problems associated with evaluation, though. It’s also a question of power; not simply who has the final say on evaluations, but also which tools are used in the evaluation. Administrations tend to want full control over the entire process.

Unions and teachers resist this, for obvious reasons. If the administration controls evaluations, or controls the methods of evaluations, teachers can be written right out of the proses. It’s not just undemocratic, it’s arguable the least effective way to assess teaching. Teachers are the better judge of fairness, and more likely to take into account the conditions and limitations of their jobs. That’s true of all workers. Democracy– bottom up governance- works best, generally speaking.

All of this has left unions open to all sorts of absurd charges and, often, to a public perception that unions reward bad teachers or resist the idea of improving education. It’s fascinating, then, and probably good news, to hear that the American Federation of Teachers is resisting the weight of all of this history and trying to come up with a ‘union-made’ evaluation plan (“Union Chief Seeks to Overhaul Teacher Evaluation“). We all have a dog in this fight, to use the cliche.

I don’t often agree with the ACTA (American Council of Trustees and Alumni); in fact, to my way of thinking they are one of the best barometers of reactionary thinking in education. But I do agree with at least part of their December “Must Reads” (“Letting in the Sunshine“), in which the ACTA pays the Arkansas legislature a half-compliment.

It’s a good idea, the ACTA says, for universities to be completely transparent when it comes to administrative salaries; the legislature got that right. But the law is only necessary, they say, because the universities themselves haven’t stepped up to the plate. It’s the idea of a law that the ACTA finds so unnecessary. I think that the law is exactly the point, though.

In effect, the “Must Read” is a thinly veiled warning: either we (administrations) deal with the rising (or perhaps coming) public anger at the exploding costs of college in general, and the wildly inflated salaries of certain high level administrators in particular, or we will face increased regulation. The worry, of course, is that the legal regulations will limit administrative “flexibility.”

In the short term, in other words, universities need to deal with the public by going public. In the long term, this will help ensure that they can do whatever they want once the outcry subsides. That’s exactly why Sunshine laws that require public institutions make all salaries public are so important. We need more than superficial changes that allow administrators to get by. We need laws.