Educational Follies

George W. Liebmann
2007-09-24

The Baltimore Schools

Readers of the Baltimore newspapers have been regaled by a series of advertisements placed by the Baltimore Teachers’ Union, which has reached an impasse in contract negotiations with the school board. The school board proposes to slightly reduce the allowed weekly amount of what is quaintly called ‘preparation time’, in order to have additional time for compulsory annual workshops for teachers, which actually prepare them to teach classes. What is the ‘preparation time’ that the union defends? A former officer of the National Education Association, Myron Lieberman of the Education Policy Institute, explains that it is an important prerogative of the senior teachers whom the unions zealously represent at the expense of their juniors and of their students:“Teacher unions have accepted preparation periods or reductions in class size in lieu of salary increases. The benefits are not characterized as increases in compensation, but that is what they are, at least in part. The importance of seniority to teachers is often underestimated. Whose free period comes first in the morning, which means that it is likely to be pre-empted by the need to replace a suddenly absent teacher? When the free period is last, the teacher rarely loses a free period because the district has gotten a substitute by then. The union rationale for seniority asserts that allowing managerial discretion would lead to favoritism, bias and divisiveness, whereas seniority arguably places all teachers on an equal footing. Unfortunately, under union rules, fairness for teachers results in less than fairness for pupils in the inner cities, who are taught year after year by more than their fair share of new teachers, substitute teachers, and teachers not well prepared in the subjects they teach. Furthermore, less is spent per inner-city pupil than per upper middle class pupil; the higher salaries paid for teachers in the more affluent areas in the same school district constitute an inequity that is not eliminated by special appropriations for students from poor families or by increasing school district revenues. The teacher unions, which regard themselves as the leaders in the struggle for equity, are fierce defenders of the major inequity in school district expenditures.” M. Lieberman, The Educational Morass: Overcoming the Stalemate in American Education (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 132-33.
The union complaint about reduction in “preparation time”, i.e. free time, must be analysed against a background in which Baltimore City teachers have workdays that are 25 minutes shorter, and lunch periods that are 15 minutes longer, than those prevailing in most counties in the state.

The M.S.D.E.
The Governor has embarked on one of his periodic feuds with State School Superintendent Grasmick, and seeks gubernatorial control over the state school board and the State Superintendent. While executive control may foster accountability at the local level, making the Governor an education czar would undo a major part of the design of the 1867 Constitution, which undid the provisions for a single centralized system in the 1864 constitution. By reason of the size of its suburban counties, Maryland already has one of the most centralized and bureaucracy-ridden and non-competitive state systems; these vices would be compounded if the role of the state were further strengthened. The enhanced state role in school finance has already resulted in a saturnalia of extravagance in school construction and defined-benefit teacher pensions resulting from gubernatorial bargaining (or more accurately non-bargaining) with the state teachers’ union. The former M.S.T.A. President, Patricia Foerster, is the Governor’s education advisor, just as her predecessor as union president, Karl Pence, was the education advisor to Gov. Glendening. Turning the state school board, or the State Superintendency, over to the Governor thus indeed would turn the chicken coop over to the fox.

This in no way dispels our view that Ms. (or, more accurately, Doctor of Education) Grasmick’s decade-long tenure has been a disaster for the State, and that she is long past her sell-by date. It is true that on occasion, she has stood up to the unions, in connection with takeovers (or botched proposed takeovers) of a handful of schools, token merit-pay programs, and support for the State’s relative handful of charter schools. The good things she has done, however, have never been brought up to scale; not so the bad things. The great MSPAP testing fiasco, a highly debatable curriculum change dressed up as an accountability program, has been followed by a nationally-recognized dilution of state accountability standards, followed most recently by the superintendent’s suggestion that loopholes be created in state high school graduation standards. Small wonder the state’s testing results on impartial and unmanipulated national and international measures have been stagnant or declining during her tenure. She has failed to effectively seek reform in teacher certification, an area of policy clearly confided to her department, and has shown no interest in fostering competition or private or supplemental education. The State Board, as presently constituted, can do better, though the Governor, left to his own devices, would almost certainly do worse.

We tender below two bodies of correspondence sufficiently indicative of the Department’s management style and receptivity to ‘outside’ suggestions: