This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, April 14, 2011 - Should teachers be paid based on how well their students perform on standardized tests?
Mary Armstrong, president of Local 420 of the American Federation of Teachers, which represents teachers in the St. Louis Public Schools, has a terse and ready answer for that: "All that makes the teacher do is teach the test or cheat."
Her response was part of a panel discussion at Washington University Wednesday night that included Kelvin Adams, superintendent of the city schools; Ron Jackson, former executive director of the group St. Louis for Kids; and Trina Dyan Clark James, CEO of the Jamaa Learning Center. It was convened as part of the Great Debates series of the St. Louis Urban Corps.
While many of the topics brought more concurrence than debate -- early childhood education needs more financial resources, charter schools need stricter oversight, city schools need support in general from the community -- other topics brought spirited disagreement, not necessarily from the stage but from the audience.
For example, when Armstrong said that too many students in the St. Louis Public Schools come from broken homes, lacking the stability they need to succeed, she was challenged by an audience member who said she was using a stereotype that was not true for many students who come from stable, middle-class families.
"They don't have dreams," Armstrong said of many of her students, in the comment that touched off the response. "They don't have aspirations. Something is wrong when you ask child what do you want to be, and they say I don't know what I want to be. I want to know where I'm going to be living next week."
Challenged, Armstrong acknowledged that not all students in city public schools fit that description, but she added:
"There is an alarming number, which is increasing, who are feeling that way. One is too many."
Here's what the panel had to say on other topics:
Teachers and Tenure
Armstrong said that the public has a big misconception that tenure is the same as having a job for life. No one wants bad teachers to remain in the classroom, she said; all that tenure should ensure is that when a district wants to remove a teacher, it follows due process.
She and Adams discussed the St. Louis plan, which the union helped to organize to match new or struggling teachers with veterans who can help them succeed in the classroom.
"The real issue," Adams said, "is having quality teachers, having the best qualified teachers in the classroom. How do we support them, and how do we remove them if they are not doing the job?"
Armstrong said programs like merit pay too often pit teachers against each other, and students are the losers in such situations.
James said teacher compensation should be based on student outcomes; Adams noted that Missouri is beginning to develop a system to help measure how much a student improves during a set period of time, to help gauge how much effect a teacher has had.
"Ideally," Jackson added, "students and teachers are a team."
Charter schools
Armstrong noted that charter schools grew out of an idea from Albert Shanker, longtime leader of the American Federation of Teachers. She and the other panelists noted that charters, which Missouri law currently permits only in St. Louis and Kansas City, should provide options but also need to be accountable.
Though the state's Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has authority over charters, it does not have the staff to pay as much attention to them as they should, James said. Armstrong noted that charter schools that have closed, like the Paideia and Ethel Hedgeman Lyle academies, have failed not because of poor academic achievement by their students but because of substandard business practices.
Adams, who has proposed having the city school system sponsor charters, acknowledged that they are not a panacea.
"They do not solve the problem in and of themselves," he said. "They are an option, and hopefully they are a successful option. The real challenge for us is how do we create schools that work for young people."
He noted that nearly 41,000 children in the city are being educated with public dollars -- 25,000 in the city public school system, another 9,000 in charters and about 6,500 in county schools under the desegregation program. All of them, he said, deserve a quality education.
Community Support
Armstrong said that property taxes may not be the best way to pay for education. Particularly in the city, she said, many property owners no longer have children in school, and they are bearing the burden that should be shouldered and shared by others.
She also noted that money for some city school programs that had come from the deseg program or elsewhere is no longer available.
"It's very hard for us to be competitive with Rockwood or Clayton because many of the programs we had before, we don't have any more because we can't afford them."
When one member of the audience asked where is the passion from the public about the plight of the schools, why isn't anyone marching in the street to demand answers, Adams noted the complex of problems -- jobs, education, housing and crime -- that come together to undermine efforts to rebuild the city.
"It's not about the mayor," he said. "It's not about the police chief. It's not about the school superintendent. It's about looking at our resources and leveraging them to support our children."
And Jackson noted that the problem belongs to more than the city.
"It's a regional problem," he said. "Until we get leadership willing to bite the bullet and call a spade a spade, 25 year from now we'll still be having the same conversation.
"We are competing in a globally complex world. By 2050 the United States will be a majority-minority country. So if we don't want to educate minorities in America, then we are saying we would rather be a nation of privileged and isolated white folks than be able to compete in a global multicultural complex society. Remember the old saying: You can pay me now or you can pay me later."