Teachers Unions May Derail Obama’s Plans to Revamp NCLB

Flickr/ <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/wiguardpics/4077665103/">WI Guard Pics</a> (Creative Commons)

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


In the ambitious blueprint for overhauling federal education policy that President Obama presented to Congress on Monday, he outlined a vision of higher academic standards and fewer federal proscriptions for how to meet them — a vision that applies to most of the country’s 98,000 public schools. For the lowest performing 5 percent of schools, however, Obama proposes stiff consequences for academic failure, including firing most of the principals and teachers who run them. The idea has drawn ire from the nation’s two largest and most powerful teachers unions and threatens to derail education reform.

Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are firm believers in the notion that the most important factor in students’ success “is not the color of their skin or the income of their parents; it’s the person standing at the front of the classroom.” Without a cadre of excellent teachers, Obama believes it will be impossible to turn around the nation’s lowest performing schools. In short, getting all students “college-ready and career-ready” by 2020 means weeding out the worst teachers at schools where students simply aren’t learning.

But Dennis Van Roekel, president of the 3-million-member National Education Association, doesn’t consider axing teachers a reasonable solution to students’ under achievement. “If there’s a high-crime neighborhood, you don’t fire the police officers,” he told New York Times education reporter Sam Dillion. “This is a huge issue for us.” American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten criticized the plan for placing too much responsibility on teachers without giving them sufficient authority to drive reform efforts. It’s unclear how AFT wants to revise Obama’s plan. Weingarten couldn’t be reached for comment.  

If unions turn key Democrats against Obama’s plan, he may be able make up the lost votes with support from Republicans, notes Alyson Klein of Education Week. Michael Petrilli, a vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute who served in George W. Bush’s Education Department, considers the blueprint “a huge improvement over current law” and says that it “backs away from federal intrusion big time….Republicans couldn’t expect anything more friendly to the states.”

Just about eveyone agrees that No Child Left Behind is long overdue for an update. And yet bipartisanship is no guarantee of success. House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller proposed a re-write three years ago. His effort failed in part due to the same snag that Obama is facing: A call to “close the teacher quality gap.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate