Radical by Michelle Rhee Page B

into.”
    â€œOkay,” I said, “let’s do it.”
    â€œAre you crazy?” she said. “The unions would go ballistic. And they are not people you want to be on the wrong side of.”
    â€œWe have to solve the problems,” I said, “right?”
    â€œOf course,” she replied.
    â€œAnd you just told me that the budget and HR issues are more easily solvable.”
    â€œCorrect.”
    â€œThen we have to pry into the guts of the union contracts,” I said.
    â€œOh, honey,” she said, “do you realize what you’re getting us into?”
    Here’s how Sandra Feldman, the well-respected head of the American Federation of Teachers, reacted to “Missed Opportunities.”
    â€œIf these transfer policies are getting in the way of recruiting new teachers in a timely fashion, labor and management should get together and create a better way of dealing with it.”
    If Sandy Feldman was willing to say that, how mad could the teachers unions be with us?
    A ND WITH THAT, WE embarked on our second major project. It required two years of research and evaluation. We collected data in five urban school districts. In November 2005, we published “Unintended Consequences.” The report enumerated in exacting detail the rules and regulations embedded in collective bargaining agreements that prohibit school districts from hiring the best teachers. In fact, we showed that union contracts required school districts to give jobs to teachers who had demonstrated their failure at teaching.
    Take what school districts call “voluntary transfers.” If a teacher lost a job at one school because of budget cuts or poor performance, he or she was not fired from the system. Under the contract, they were considered “excessed.” Translation: If a teacher failed or was deemed unnecessary at one school, he could be first in line for a job at another school in the district. There was often nothing voluntary about the transfers. Bad teachers were often forced out of one school, only to be foisted on another.
    â€œVoluntary transfer rules often give senior teachers the right to interview for and fill jobs in other schools even if those schools do not consider them a good fit,” we concluded. Most principals reported that they didn’t want to hire those teachers. But contract rules forced them to accept teachers they neither wanted nor needed.
    Under contract rules, terminating a teacher requires weeks of time in writing reports and evaluations and holding meetings. Often principals simply “excessed” bad teachers and passed them from school to school, a ritual some referred to as “the dance of the lemons.”
    Contract rules often put promising young teachers—and their students—in a precarious position. A more senior teacher could bump a new teacher from a classroom, even if the more experienced teacher was known to be a lousy educator who had failed to teach students effectively for decades.
    In reporting on these issues, we knew we were challenging powerful unions and liberal dogma.
    â€œWe hope that this report will initiate a discussion not on the merits of collective bargaining as a whole (which we support), but on the effects of the specific contractual requirements governing school staffing,” I wrote in the foreword: “When these rules were adopted in the 1960s by newly formed teachers union locals and school boards, they were an important and legitimate response to widely perceived arbitrary and poor management. Based on the now four decades of experience with these provisions, however, we believe it is time to find a new balance between protecting teachers from past abuses and equipping schools with the necessary tools to achieve excellent results for their students.”
    â€œUnintended Consequences” also presented very specific recommendations for change. We gave districts a road map for a better