Rhee vs. Teachers' Union: Who Comes out on Top?

by Frederick M. Hess  •  Sep 11, 2009 at 3:28 pm
Cross-posted from The Enterprise Blog

http://www.frederickhess.org/2009/09/rhee-vs-teachers-union

Bill Turque reports in today's Washington Post that the long-stalled contract negotiations between the D.C. Public Schools and the Washington Teachers' Union may finally reach an endpoint. This comes well over a year after the DCPS leadership had initially thought itself on the cusp of a groundbreaking agreement.

Turque reports that the potential agreement envisions substantial new flexibility for D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee and her team to largely disregard seniority when letting teachers go, but at the cost of sacrificing Rhee's dramatic merit-pay proposal that attracted so much attention last year. Rhee had proposed that teachers who forfeited tenure would move to an eye-popping new "green" salary schedule in which even thirtysomething teachers could earn $120,000 or more. Even those teachers who remained on the old "red" schedule would have made out just fine, with substantial new raises across the board.

There will be two schools of thought on the agreement, if it takes the shape as Turque has described. The Rhee-friendly interpretation will be that winning new authority to remove ineffective educators, along the lines that Turque addresses, would itself constitute a dramatic change. Turque has reported that the new contract language would allow DCPS to remove teachers due to "closure, consolidation, declining enrollment, budgets cuts or takeover by an outside organization" with little attention to seniority. It would also give principals much more leeway to decide whether to hire these "excessed" teachers. And the contract apparently calls for a new pay-performance program to start in 2010, though it is not clear yet what its size or scope might be. Supporters can argue that only by stretching the debate with her envelope-stretching "red-green" proposal, and by pushing as hard as she did for as long as she did, did Rhee make these gains possible.

Naysayers in the reformist ranks will argue that Rhee wound up offering a 20 percent pay boost over five years, in tough fiscal times, while leaving in place tenure and the traditional step-and-lane salary schedule (other than a new pay-for-performance program of unspecified size and scope). They will say that changing the rules on seniority and on the reassignment of excessed teachers are constructive steps but much less than they had hoped for in this heavily publicized showdown. The immensely high bar set by early signals, amid national magazine covers, talk of hundreds of millions of dollars in foundation funding, and a radical departure from industrial era norms, also raises the risk that even a solid win will appear disappointing.

It's always perilous to rush to judgment, based on news accounts and leaks from a tentative agreement. So we would all do well to wait and see whether a final agreement does emerge this month, what exactly it might say, and how to make sense of the larger tactical and strategic decisions that produced it. The wisest reaction at this point is neither cheerleading nor mourning—both are premature—but withholding judgment until more details emerge.

receive the latest by email: subscribe to frederick m. hess's free mailing list