Bad Ideas Never Die (if they're popular with billionaires)

One of the most frustrating things about my field is how impervious it is to data. No matter how much evidence once can marshal, certain theories return again and again. Sometimes they have a new gloss (it's not just phonics and basals: It's The Science of Reading!)¹, but sometimes it's just the same bad ideas, under the same name, with the same problems.² The Washington Post has a long and eye-roll-causing history of pushing the worst ideas of ed reform, whether it's punitive charter models, Teach for America, or just basic "Teachers unions ate my homework and kicked my dog" stuff. Today, they decided to let a pundit post like it's 2010.

I mean, this op-ed is so obviously nonsense - it ends with the "both conservatives and liberals will hate this, so it must be good!" reasoning, a claim so devoid of meaning even middle schoolers know better than to use it in their opinion pieces - that I almost hate to discuss it.

Still, for folks who are new to this argument, let's look at it a little more closely.

First, I need to note that while a $100,000 salary is a pay increase for most starting teachers, it's a significant pay cut for veterans in most cities. Does Daniel Pink pay any mind to that - or even to cost of living issues, given that many districts in the Bay Area already start around this salary? Of course not: he opposes tenure and step and column pay increases in general, and merely admits at the close that his proposal of "pay all teachers the same salary, nationally, for their whole career" is probably not a winner and there are some things to work out.

Also, in exchange for this (dubious) largesse, Pink has two demands: an end to "summers off" and also some kind of test-based accountability/and end to tenure. The latter of these is risible even given this column: Pink fully admits that robust data indicate that test-based accountability doesn't work, but he still seems to think it's necessary. Honestly, the Washington Post should've had an editor make Pink reckon with this: any high school English teacher would require revision here.

That leaves us with those eight weeks of vacation Pink wants teachers to give over. In exchange for this (possible) raise, teachers simply have to agree to work 22% more every year! A mere forty extra days a year! (Pink is silent on whether he thinks those days should also be extended - we could be looking at even more additional labor, but I am now thinking more deeply about Pink's proposal than he did. It must be the teacher in me: I am too habituated to working for free.)

Beyond the obvious question of whether something is actually a raise if you have to work an extra eight weeks to receive it, Pink hasn't grappled with what teachers are doing in those weeks. Ancedotally, I spent two entire weeks of my last summer vacation moving into a new classroom, three weeks completing professional development of my own volition, and one week lesson planning and preparing for the new year. In all, I had two weeks off. Teachers are not overburdened with planning time during the school year, and deep professional development doesn't happen in ninety minutes after school. The time teachers volunteer over the summer makes them better at their jobs. Pink does not understand what teaching is, so he cannot consider the implications of his (already problematic) breezy end to summer vacation.

What's really tiring about this op-ed is that it's been written before. We've done this all before. Education reformers and dilettantes (but I repeat myself) are forever proposing salary increases for teachers - but only if those teachers agree to some set of conditions. Those conditions are typically unsupported by data, but strip away the job protections teachers have managed to hold on to despite other workers losing them.

Here, teachers give up tenure and regular, predictable raises for an unsustainable work year and a dubious raise. You know, like at KIPP schools (another WaPo favorite). KIPP salaries often beat their surrounding public school district's - but they have miserable turnover and rely on uncredentialed, itinerant teachers because the job is unsustainable.

One has to wonder if Daniel Pink is unaware of this issue, or if he knows that his tired idea doesn't increase teacher recruitment and retention but is very popular with wealthy folks who resent teachers and our unions and our pensions and our troubling unwillingness to give them up.

1 Alas, the Science of Reading is just phonics and basals. It's not science and the data have not improved since the last time we did this, which was less than twenty years ago.^↩

2 I know this is not unique to education - I live in San Francisco, where self-described "moderate Democrats" are investing heavily in bringing back the worst ideas of the Reagan administration. Also, yes, I did just learn how to do footnotes.^↩