I heard a story on NPR the other day about the chancellor of the Washington (D.C.) public schools, Michelle Rhee. She has a plan for improving the struggling urban school district:
She has proposed a new contract for the union that would undermine tenure, the teachers union holy of holies. The carrot is money. By tapping Mayor Fenty and private philanthropists, she is hoping to make D.C. teachers the best-paid in the country. Current teachers would actually have a choice. If they are willing to go on “probation” for a year—giving up their job security—and can successfully prove their talent, they can earn more than $100,000 a year and as much as $130,000, a huge salary for a teacher, after five years. If not, they still get a generous 28 percent raise over five years and keep their tenure. (All new teachers must sign up for the first option and go on probation for four years.) Rhee predicts that about half the teachers will choose to take their chances on accountability for higher pay, and that within five years the rest will follow, giving up tenure for the shot at merit pay hikes.
Of course, the goal of this is not only to reward successful teachers, but to get rid of “incompetent teachers,” as Rhee puts it elsewhere. The teachers union says, “You can’t fire your way into a successful school system.” Rhee counters that tenure does nothing to improve student achievement and only makes it harder to terminate poor teachers, which is bad for the children. The union questions Rhee’s ability to judge who is or is not a good or competent teacher. And back and forth it goes.
Rhee has a bargaining chip: charter schools.
About a third of D.C. parents now opt to send their kids to charter schools, which are public schools—but where the teachers are non-union. The union has lost more than a thousand of its more than 5,000 teaching slots during the past decade. Rhee, it appears to many, is not interested in protecting turf. If she can open more charter schools that are better than the regular city schools, she seems willing to let the old system wither away.
In either event, if Rhee gets her way, many are saying that it will have a ripple effect through the nation, with many other urban school districts trying to follow in Rhee’s footsteps.
District 150 is starting to look into charter schools, and on an unrelated note they’re looking for creative ways to save money. For the new math and science academy, they’re even looking to partner with Bradley University; such an arrangement “could help the university develop and train better teachers, as well as provide a better educational opportunity within District 150.” No word yet on what relationship charter school teachers would have to the union.
So, should District 150 follow Rhee’s plan for improving urban schools? Or, to put it another way, should Peoria’s public schools make tenure-busting and/or union-busting part of their strategy?
