When Chicago Teachers Strike, It's Time for Replacements

One of my very favorite movies is The Replacements.  This cinematic gem came out in 2000 and starred the great Keanu Reeves as quarterback Shane Falco who leads a rag tag team of replacement players when the regular players get greedy and go on strike.  Like a veritable Island of Misfit Toys, the team is full of players with major issues that would keep a pro team from ordinarily considering them.  The kicker smokes during games and has huge gambling debts, the wide receiver is fast and can't catch.  The linemen are fat and speak with accent.

In the movie, they don't win the Super Bowl, they simply connect with the fans and win some games while the regular players are out on strike.  When the strike ends, they even defeat a team using real players because their love of the game overcame the talent and training of the players who had made football their lives.

Evidently, somebody as city hall saw this movie, because with teachers threatening to go out on strike next week they're starting up Children First Schools in 144 locations throughout the city and although these schools can't provide instruction, they will provide two meals and a chance for adults a chance to live out their dreams by working with children.   Maybe they work at Central Office crunching numbers or they have a couple of arrests for indecent exposure and could never pass a criminal background check or maybe they just have a short fuse and normally would not trust themselves around kids.  It doesn't matter.  The CPS will call on them all to come forward and just like the Replacements overcome their obstacles to touch our children's lives. Just because you're convicted of drunk driving a couple of times doesn't mean you no longer have anything to offer kids.

Sure, some people might say it's dangerous putting as many as twice as many students as a school is designed for into an environment where they are being supervised by people not used to working with children and where they can't receive instruction, but that's the edge of the seat risk that only a gritty bunch of outcasts can overcome.

I wouldn't actually trust my own kids to this kind of chaotic amateur hour, but I think it could be great for some students.  Who needs teachers to get an education?  Ok, maybe not an education, but to have a great time watching Finding Nemo or Swiss Family Robinson?  Hear that Chicago Teachers?  We're putting Children First, kind of.

Marketing Education Reform

The one segment of education reform that seems to always outshine the others is marketing.   I continue to be amazed at just how good we are at it.  When Walmart and other corporate reformers announced their teachers rock campaign, I expected that Americans would greet it with the same  suspicion they would regard Chick-fil-a sponsoring a gay pride parade.   Boy, was I wrong.  They ate it up.  In Chicago, corporate reformers have been battling the Chicago Teachers Union for awhile now and branding their message to appear to be grassroots.  This is great stuff as seen in this whiny CTU video:

In trying to do our part, we focused groups several key education reform concepts and found we were starting to get a lot of push back as these issues become more prominent.  However, we found a way to make them much more palatable.  We call the results Reform Catz and we present a half dozen here suitable for sharing with even the most hard core opponent to reform.

More on Using Loss Aversion with Teachers

In the movie Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese gave a good demonstration on how you could use loss aversion to run a business.   The idea is, giving somebody something and then threatening to take it away if certain goals aren't met is far more effective than just promising people something if they meet those goals.  For teachers, this has obvious implication for merit pay schemes where teachers are handsomely rewarded at the beginning of the year, but then forced to give the money back if their students do not achieve on standardized tests.

Loss aversion sounds like a new principle in economics, but it is actually quite old and only appears revolutionary when it is applied to education reform.  One way that employers have successfully used loss aversion is by having corporately run cities like Hershey, PA or the Pullman District of Chicago.   By making employees shop at a company store, you could guarantee that employees would do all they could to keep the boss happy.   Can't we do something like that with school supplies?   Teachers sure buy enough.  You were grading papers all weekend? F you.  Pay me.  Your class is upset because a classmate was shot? F you. Pay me.  Your class is all made up of children living in poverty? F you.  Pay me.

Roland Fryer, Snooki, and Building the Perfect Teacher

By Monica Caldwell

People are always surprised to find out that I wasn't an education major in college.   As a hotel/motel management major I learned a lot about how to deal with employees.  This knowledge was further augmented when I began managing a tanning salon at the tender age of 20.  Teaching was the hardest job I ever had and the five weeks of training leading up to it was even tougher than the nearly 2 whole years I spent in the classroom.

Recently, a couple of studies have come out that really got me thinking.   The first study was by the awesome Roland Fryer.  He says that the key to making merit pay work is loss aversion.  Now math is hard, but the way I understand it instead of giving teachers money if they show improvement on tests, you give them the money up front and then if their students' test scores don't improve they either cough up the dough, or your Uncle Rocco pays them a little visit.   If they're like me, they'd probably spend it all on shoes.

Another really cool report I read was called The Irreplaceables.   Now, this isn't to be confused with The Expendables which is a movie about a lot of old guys blowing stuff up, but an article by The New Teacher Project says that urban schools are not making their best teachers feel valued and instead retaining the bad ones.  I can relate to this.  The fire in my classroom wasn't what got me terminated as much as all the other teachers who were jealous of my rapport with my class going to the principal.

What we need is a way to make teachers feel rewarded, retain the best teachers, and use loss aversion to scare teachers into working really hard.  Now, if you believe like I do, the best teachers come from programs like Teach for America, this is really easy.   When teachers go through the Teach for America program, put like a dozen of them up in a mansion that they could never afford on a teacher's salary.  Then as the school year goes on, have teachers vote each other out of the mansion, but if your kids improve on standardized tests, you have immunity.

The best part is we film this as a reality television show.  Now one problem is Teach for America's training is only 5 weeks and a reality tv show season is much longer, but that's fixed by following the recruits through the beginning of their teaching careers.  The teachers will try really hard because the mansion will have like a hot tub and cute guys and a kitchen that's totally stocked with everything you could want.  The good teachers will be retained and a few teachers may even get famous like Snooki.  Hey Bravo!  Call me, we'll do lunch.

Fear and Bloating in the Motor City

30,000 teachers descended on Detroit last weekend and I think I surprised a lot of people by being among them.  Why did I decide to go to a city without a single Michelin starred restaurant with these lazy public servants enjoying their luxurious Summer vacations?  Because I go where the story is.

I have a natural distrust of Randi Weingarten if for no other reason than the Weingarten Rights she won for union employees, but I soon found myself rooting for her in what seemed to be a battle between the New York union and the Chicago union.  One particular bill which the New York faction was behind suggested that perhaps excessive standardized testing wasn't the best idea.  Chicago wanted to go further and actually do something about it.  Fortunately, New York teachers are as good at pulling teeth as New York Dentists and the resolution was passed with a healthy set of gum and no choppers as of yet.

The speakers ran the gamut from sleep inducing to nausea inducing.  Dr. Wendel Anthony was my least favorite.  I was in the middle of a really nice sleep when he started speaking and he was just too loud for me to get back to slumber land. I think he was rapping to the Bee Gees or something.

Of course Diane Ravitch was there, making her usual excuses for the teachers.   If you haven't seen it yet, Michelle Rhee has a hysterical video of a fat guy as an Olympic athlete that talks about how the United States has slipped and we need to regain our status as the top education country in the world.   Ms. Ravitch naturally disputed this by pointing out that this wasn't true.  I hate the way she attempts to manipulate an audience using facts.  It doesn't matter if our schools are in crisis, what matters is what we're going to do about that crisis.  Diane again and again uses facts to stop people from seeing the crisis that we all know must exist in the public schools.

The great Joe Biden spoke at the convention as well.   Once again the  Chicago Teachers Union provided interesting theater.  Rather than calling for four more years for President Obama and Vice-President Biden, they fliered his speech with yellow papers that they held up during his speech that said Stop Race to the Top.  How disrespectful of a great American hero like Joe Biden.  Unfortunately, I had to leave early so I never did see who won the election to be head of the AFT for the next 2 years.  I'm really rooting for Randi, whose call for a solutions driven union reminds me very much of Neville Chamberlain's fine leadership of England in the years before World War II.  I think with Randi in charge, we will truly have peace in our time.

Students Deserve 100% from CTU

Many teachers last week rejoiced that with 91% of the teachers in the Chicago Teachers Union voting, they authorized a strike 98% to 2%.   We at Last Stand for Children First recognize that this was an important showing of unity by the teachers, but we also do not believe that our students should have to settle for 98%.   We are asking the CTU to redo the election and make it unanimous.  If 100% of the teachers vote for a strike, they have our blessing.  If not, we must demand that they reconsider their vote.

Beware of Parents Across America

Parents Across America was at it again today.   They have taken the time to warn people of the dangers of seeing the new Parent Trigger movie Won't Back Down.   Apparently, their big objection to the movie stems from a viewpoint that a movie based on a true story needs to be 100% truthful, but if that was the case would we ever have learned how Jon Bon Jovi cracked the Nazi codes in World War II if it wasn't for U-571 or would we have learned how Civil War veterans banded together to save the South in Birth of a Nation.

Parents Across America wants to hold this movie to a ridiculous degree of truthfulness.   According to Parents Across America co-founder Leonie Haimson, “The movie is supposedly based on a process called the ‘parent trigger,’ which purports to empower parents. But actually, the ‘parent trigger’ has a track record of 100 percent failure, and has pitted parents against parents and torn apart school communities at the two schools where it has been tried,”

You know what Leonie, Star Wars probably didn't happen either and The Avengers was also made up, but the point is they could have happened.  A movie doesn't have to be true, it just has to be mostly true. 

Mostly true is good enough for most movie audiences.  As Pocahontas sang in the Disney movie, the truth lies "just beyond the river bend."   In the actual true story behind Won't Back Down it was actually not a crusading mom, as the PAA blog says, "it was orchestrated not by parents but by an outside organization: Parent Revolution, founded by charter school operator Steve Barr and funded by wealthy foundations."  I would say the question isn't why the movie feels the need to portray wealthy hedge fund managers as a struggling single mom, but why American can't accept wealthy hedge fund managers as the real heroes of the education reform movement.

From people like myself and Whitney Tilson to Chicago's Billion Dollar Septet Board of Education, the wealthy are the real heroes behind education reform and the quicker the American public gets around to realizing it, the quicker we can begin eroding those barriers that make it difficult to do really great things for your children.  Parents Across America should be ashamed of their anti-wealth bias.