Comparability and “Forced Assignment”

Firstly, forced transfers would be worse than useless, so take it off the table. Try to transfer teachers from effective to ineffective schools, and watch them leave the district and/or the profession. And why would you want someone who wants to be teaching in high-performing schools to try to be effective in the inner city. The fact that forced transfers would be considered is testimony to how little some "reformers" know about the realities of poor schools. How about creating incentives for groups of teachers to transfer? What teachers want more than anything is the opportunity to teach. Empower teams of teachers to transfer to help transform the cultures of schools, and you'll get a lot of volunteers. After all, being effective teaching in inner city is the most fun you can have with your clothes on, if you can do it. Under conditions today, however, very few people can be effective. And working as indivuduals, the problems are overwhelming. We need team efforts. Why don't districts use other ways to produce equity? There are good, bad, and absurd reasons for that. They don't want to lose their remaining middle class families, and they respond to the squeaking wheels of more affluent parents who natually want the best for their kids, and aren't willing accept larger class sizes while trusting districts to help the poor. But fundamentally the problem is the culture of compliance. Districts have always had to obey a wierd variety of policies from all sorts of people, and many of them have long ago given up on addressing problems in a coherent way. They have a "to do" list with things they have to check off to satisfy all of their masters, and they barely have time to do that. In my experience, for instance, the increase of Title I funding is an example. Its the reverse of boiling a lobster slowly so he doesn't recognize what's happening. They get some more Title I money per year, but only gradually did they get to the point where its real money that could be spent for effect. Title money used to just be Title money, not real money. It was something that you just got out the door, hoping to do so without getting busted. Districts are afraid to invest in hiring people. So they dump it on principals who are working 80-90 hour weeks and no time to design a plan. And what little planning is done under the fundamental rule of CYA. I've literally seen materials bought by Title I being gotten rid of by throwing them into the crowd in a gym. Whenever I've made suggestions for better use of Title money I get the same answers from administrators all the way to the top. I hear that our "25 year old (federal) auditor" always has an objection. I hear of the Administrator who got busted for paying for a bus driver for a poor school. I hear about the district that had to pay all of its money back. I'm not God and I can't determine the difference between administrators reasons vs their excuses. I know, however, this blame game has caused them to hunker down, and that hurts poor kids. "Reformers" could match my horror stories. So, why give all this new autonomy to these bureaucracies? In these two posts Kevin has finally come clean on what he's advocating. Nobody else at Ed Sector writes anything like the wild, destroy-the-enemy stuff that Kevin writes. I sure don't hear him responding to any of the concrete compromises that I propose.

The best solution is to identify the schools where nobody wants to teach and improve them. The first step is to say that the first step is to improve the learning culture in those schools but not following up that statement by attacking the integrity of teachers for defending their collective bargaining rights. Think about the greater good that could be accomplished by comparability reform. Think how little good would be done by forced transfers. Why not work together, craft language preventing those forced transfers and make a deal?