CHAUTAUQUA - Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, spoke about the need for public education reform and the role of unions in that reform.
Weingarten spoke to the Chautauqua Institution crowd Thursday during the Week 6 lecture series, "Excellence in Public Education."
"These are uncertain times for public education," she said. "My goal is to give you some hope that this is fixable."
Weingarten began by addressing the critics of the education system, who she said seem to place the blame solely on the shoulders of the teachers. She explained that the "blame-the-teacher crowd" must realize that the teaching profession is one of the hardest professions in our society.
"When I read something negative about teachers, I think about the person who is writing it, do they think we get up in the morning and say 'I plan on doing a bad job today?'" she said.
Weingarten also explained that the unions should not be fully blamed as well.
"If the unions were the problem, all the right-to-work states and charter schools would be outperforming and they are not," she said.
The teachers' unions who are fighting for the rights of teachers and for the resources teachers need to provide equal education to all are very important in the reform of the educational system, she said.
"Our job is more than just simply fighting for resources," she said. "Our job is to save public education, not as we know it, rooted in the past, but as we know it ought to be. Right now our schools are still like factories. They were intended to help kids prepare for factory or housework. Now the national economy is totally different. Our problem is not to just prepare kids for their lives, but also for a knowledge economy."
She explained the role of teachers' unions is to help build systems on which to evaluate the educational process. In order to do this, she explained, good teachers needs to be supported by good leaders. A great curriculum and conditions that promote learning and provide opportunity to learn must also exist.
"The curriculum needs to be deep and robust, that is what engages kids," she said.
And the final thing needed to help build these systems is accountability and mutual responsibility.
"There is no other profession I know that does such a woefully bad job of evaluating itself," she said.
The current evaluation system, which is conducted maybe twice a year by the principal of the school, she said, "is like a football team watching the game tape at the end of the year. I call them drive-by evaluations."
Weingarten also criticized the test method of evaluation, which uses standardized tests to evaluate the learning of the children in the classroom. Instead, she has suggested that regular rigorous reviews by trained professionals will help evaluate the teachers and improve upon the method of instruction by deconstructing what they are doing, while weeding out the ineffective teachers.
"This notion that we are about keeping bad teachers is poppycock," she said. "If it doesn't work, we as professionals have to help sever the ties."
Funding must also be available to help this reform, she said. Without funding, the system that is in place will continue indefinitely.
"People say we need to help all kids," she said. "But summer-school funding has been drastically cut. When we know there is summer learning loss, but we cut summer-school funding, where does that leave the children who are no longer where they were before, or the teachers who have to catch them up?"
The education reform issue might be a hard one, but Weingarten believes everybody must work together if they wish to see the system replaced.
"There is no silver bullet, no one size fits all in this situation," she said.
