Educators should stop majoring in the minors

Kati Haycock, one of the nation's most outspoken advocates of eduction reform, has a bead on why change is coming at a snail's pace: people distracted by the small stuff.

Education leaders could happily spend another decade arguing philosophies about teacher pay, standardized tests or the value of early learning. Meanwhile, as Haycock's richly mined data from her Washington, D.C.-based organization, Education Trust, points out: We've got problems.

Nationally, students are making dramatic improvements in reading and mathematics. Decades of laserlike focus on struggling students pay off with performance upswings across the board, including with low-income and minority students.

Yet, today's students are graduating from high school with educations not much better than their parents.

The data is clear: Strong academic preparation yields a strong finish in high school. The route is strikingly simple. Spend less time worrying about what adults in education need, and more time on what kids need. Provide every student the same rigorous education, backed up with the right support. Stop majoring in the minors.

When Haycock, passing through Seattle this week, said that last sentence, I wondered if she had arrived a week earlier when Seattle Public Schools and its teachers union predictably got lost in the minutiae.

Some background: Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson caused an overwrought reaction after she sent letters to teachers about a state budget cut that eliminated a workday. State lawmakers approved the $1 million and lost day. Goodloe-Johnson passed on the word.

You would have thought she had slapped a student, closed another school or confessed to a ruinous plot. The teachers union called the letter a direct negotiation with their members — illegal under collective-bargaining laws — and worse: Exhibit A in the case that teachers get no respect.

Fast-forward a week and all is calm except for the crunch of eggshells underfoot as district officials and the union prepare to negotiate a day that had always been negotiable. Talk about majoring in the minors!

When adults spend days one-upping each other about the contents of a letter, the things that don't matter take precedent instead of the things that do. More time is spent on which profession has it hardest, and less time on ways to improve schools for students and teachers.

The union's play on our sympathies is transparent, and not based on anything factual. The classrooms I visit show happy but busy teachers. Insurance giant MetLife has funded a survey on education issues for 25 years. Last year's survey was on teacher satisfaction. The upshot is that the proportion of teachers who are "very satisfied" with their careers increased from 40 percent in 1984 to 62 percent last year. More teachers today — 66 percent — feel respected by society than did their counterparts, 47 percent of whom felt that way in the 1980s. On the money front, two-thirds say they can earn a "decent" salary teaching and three-fourths would recommend teaching to a young person.

Should teachers get pay raises and better support? When there's money yes. But the union has to stop whining and the district has to stop getting distracted over it and both have to focus on the decisions that constitute education reform.

The impetus ought to come from another factoid cited by Haycock. Children who get two bad teachers in a row never recover academically. Students who get three strong teachers consecutively soar.

President Obama is banking on our desire for the three strong teachers and the lure of billions in federal education aid to push momentum on reform. But if educators, on both sides of the fence, keep getting bogged down in petty squabbles, we go nowhere.

Lynne K. Varner's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is lvarner@seattletimes.com