NEA Supports Obama

In 1996 Bill Clinton received 91% approval as the NEA’s choice. This year, Barack Obama won it with less than 80% support, which is the lowest showing since 1980. Why is this popular senator from Illinois greeted with lukewarm enthusiasm by the teacher’s union? Several reasons.

School Choice

Parents support school choice but the teacher’s union does not. School choice would allow parents dissatisfied with one school to transfer their children to another school of choice. While this is an intervention within schools labeled At-Risk by No Child Left Behind, teachers are not in support of this action. Many teachers fear that students would leave inner city schools and go to better-funded schools. If higher achieving students transferred to the "better" school, this would leave the marginal students. Marginal students are less likely to reach lofty goals set by NCLB. Administrators and teachers could lose jobs in a struggling school.

Parents argue that their children should not be sacrificed for someone’s job. They want the best education possible for their children. Obama supports this idea but he stops short of including vouchers for private schools. Therefore, parents could transfer children to a public school but not a private school. The argument has been made by parents that the next public school could be miles away from their home and it would be a great inconvenience to not attend the private school only a few blocks away. John McCain supports vouchers for students to private schools.

Merit Pay

The phrase, merit pay, brings back negative memories of the performance pay initiative. It was once thought that teachers that could raise student scores were better teachers and deserved more pay. Great concept in theory but like many theories, it just didn’t seem to work as planned.

Some students perform better and some schools perform better because the students attending that school come from less poverty, know the language, have supportive homes, have good health care, see little violence, and attend school regularly. Under the former performance pay structure, teachers were under so much pressure to raise scores that many began actually teaching the standardized tests to the students. After all, no one wants to be seen as an ineffective teacher.

Merit pay also opens the Pandora’s Box to the corruption component. What is to say that an administrator will always select the better teacher for the higher compensation? As the official evaluator, the principal may select close friends, teachers that always agree with him, or popular teachers instead of the most effective teachers. Merit pay can be very subjective. The teacher’s union has valid concerns about merit pay.

Merit pay could make teachers accountable for students coming to school with poor parenting, poor nutrition, poor health care, violence in the home, and poverty. A classroom teacher can not erase all disadvantages in a child’s life. This could result in quality and experienced teachers asking for transfers to better schools and leaving struggling students with less experienced teachers.

Other Obama Issues

Obama also supports mentoring. That is already being done. He is in favor of recruiting teachers and placing them in at-risk schools. That is already in place with Teach For America. Obama supports simplifying the college FAFSA form with a simple check off on the 1040. Congress has already introduced a bill on this very thing that is likely to go into force soon. Obama is also very elusive on No Child Left Behind legislation. While teachers overwhelmingly do not support NCLB, minority parents do.

Perhaps the reason the teacher’s union is somewhat lukewarm about Obama and education is because he isn’t really coming up with much to get excited about.

Source: Tim Nelson, Minnesota Public Radio, July 7, 2008

NEA Supports Obama

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