TEACHERS VS. COPS
By CHARLES SAHM, NY POST, June 16, 2004

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June 16, 2004 -- TEACHERS union President Randi Weingarten last week shrewdly joined forces with the city's cops to demand a raise. One problem: Teachers haven't delivered the same results as the police.
Crime is down 70 percent over the past decade. Education? In the latest round of testing, two-thirds of public-school 7th-graders performed below grade level in English and math.

Yet two years ago teachers got a 16 percent across-the-board increase and a 22 percent bump in starting pay, for an average salary that far outpaces the cops - and teachers only work 180 days a year.

Meanwhile, whenever Mayor Bloomberg attempts to have the Department of Education employ accountability measures like those that transformed the NYPD, the teachers union screams bloody murder.

In fact, Weingarten recently lamented in her union newspaper, "Mayor Bloomberg wants schools to operate like police precincts." New York's kids should be so lucky.

Not so long ago, the NYPD, like the school system, was a large, dysfunctional and demoralized organization. But in the '90s a new management philosophy turned it into a highly focused outfit.

Power devolved to precinct commanders who were held accountable via the famous Compstat system. Supervisors began to track crime rates regularly, rewarding commanders who pushed crime down and removing those who failed to. Resources were targeted to neighborhoods that needed them the most. A new merit-based promotion and compensation system encouraged successful commanders to move into crime-ridden precincts.

Changing the NYPD's culture was key to the 1990s reforms - and the police unions played an integral role. With crime at historic highs and morale at historic lows, they knew change was needed and worked with City Hall and police headquarters to bring it about.

It soon became clear the NYPD was being restructured - cops who were committed to doing serious police work were rewarded, while those who weren't were encouraged to find other employment.

And most of the department welcomed the changes. As former NYPD Deputy Commissioner John Timoney (now Miami's police chief) puts it, "Nobody wants to be part of a losing team. Most cops get into policing because they want to make a difference."

The same is true for the majority of the city's teachers today - but they're trapped in a system that doesn't value or support excellence.

As schools Chancellor Joel Klein notes, the goal of the ongoing educational reforms is to "change the culture of the schools." You can see what he means if you walk into one of the city's successful charter schools like Bronx Prep or KIPP Academy in the South Bronx - and see bright-eyed students in crisp uniforms, constantly pushed to higher achievement by a dedicated and engaged staff of teachers.

Both schools feature longer school days, longer school years, rigorous "back-to-basics" curriculums, and cultural enrichment programs such as chess, orchestra, theater, choir and dance. But the real reason they outshine "regular" public schools is their principals have the freedom to hire teachers who fit (and help foster) the schools' "culture of high expectations." Teachers and principals are evaluated and rewarded based on their students' success.

The children - not union work rules - are always the focus.

Mayor Bloomberg worked hard to win control of the school system - and moved its headquarters right next to City Hall, just like the NYPD. He replaced the Byzantine bureaucracy with a new streamlined management structure so there is now a clear path of accountability that runs from the mayor, to the chancellor, to the superintendents, to the principals.

But the accountability now ends there: It's still virtually impossible for a principal to get rid of a bad teacher or reward an exceptional one.

Last fall, Bloomberg proposed replacing the teachers' 204-page contract with an eight-page agreement that seeks to treat them as professionals rather than union cogs. He wanted to get rid of most work rules, expedite the process for removing incompetent teachers, scale back seniority rules to give principals more authority and offer financial incentives for skilled and successful teachers to move to low performing schools where they are most needed.

Weingarten's response? At a City Council hearing, she literally ripped up the mayor's proposal.

Since then, she's made a few small steps in the mayor's direction. But all she's offering are limited experiments in a small number of schools.

We can't afford to assign another generation of New York's children to a broken school system, especially when we already know how to fix it and are so close to doing so. Parents and reform-minded teachers should push the union to finally embrace these common-sense reforms.

Change is possible. The NYPD has proven it. A decade ago, no one would have imagined we could reduce crime by 70 percent. If the teachers union would only stop acting as a roadblock to reform, perhaps a decade from now we could be celebrating the same kind of turnaround in our children's reading and math scores.

Charles Sahm directs a Latin American police reform program for the Manhattan Institute.