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In Who's to Blame for America’s Mediocre Schools?, Hoover Institution research fellow Michael Petrilli adeptly identifies many of the problems afflicting American schools. In identifying the causes of these problems, he is...less adept.

• efforts to “reform grading” by never giving kids a zero
• ineffective supports for new teachers
• efforts to “reform discipline” by “not disciplining students”
• lifelong tenure after just a few years in the profession

In the Los Angeles Unified School District and some others, teachers are under pressure to eliminate most failing grades and to reduce D's.

We are to accomplish this through various methods, including eliminating the zero and employing the Equitable Grading and Instruction teaching approach. In case we don’t get the hint, after every five-week grading period each teacher gets a “Grade Summary” from the administration with a chart telling us how many kids we are failing compared to the school as a whole.

Teachers unions are not the driving force behind these policies, and teachers generally have mixed emotions about them. Yet there is a rational basis for these policies.

For one, during and in the wake of COVID, many districts have been suffering from significant enrollment drops as well as general attendance problems. Some districts perceive, not unreasonably, that making it easier for students to pass and graduate will encourage higher enrollment and better attendance.

There are other reasons to prefer relatively lenient grading. A student who has no hope of passing a class is much more likely to become a discipline problem both in and out of class. Late in a semester, there's a tendency to have “travelers"--students who don't attend their classes, in part because they have no hope of passing them. Instead, they spend their time moving around campus dodging school authorities.

Finally, in large city public school systems there are many students who are disadvantaged and/or come from immigrant backgrounds. In a hundred ways, it is more difficult for them to consistently attend and succeed in school.

Petrilli is correct that the supports for novice teachers are inadequate. Too often rookies are thrown into a situation that requires an enormous amount of work and it is either sink or swim. Yet it is the teachers unions who fight for the supports these teachers need, and administrators and district leaders who often undermine them.

For example, one of the biggest problems new teachers face is the enormous amount of time it takes to prepare lessons, even if one uses or adapts the canned lessons available.

The most effective way to contain that workload is to limit the different class subjects – ”preps” that the new teacher has to teach. It is far more work to teach three or four separate subjects in five periods than it is to teach one or two.

In LAUSD, the contract negotiated by United Teachers Los Angeles limits novice teachers to only two preps, and then works to enforce this provision against higher-ups who often try to skirt it.

A common scenario is this: a new teacher is hired a couple of weeks before the school year starts, but the school’s union representatives are not able to identify and meet with them until the semester has already begun. By then, however, the teacher already has a set schedule he or she is teaching, a schedule with three or even four preps.  The union reps fight it, but making large changes to schedules once school begins is often very difficult.

Other union-negotiated protections for novice teachers include barring burdensome extra duties like activity assignments and auxiliary periods, and being exempt from “traveling” – having to teach in more than one classroom per school day.

Petrilli criticizes schools for “not disciplining students” but this is simplistic. For one, there are often restrictions on transferring out students with special needs. Emotionally Disturbed students, for example, often can only be transferred if the incoming school has the same support available for the student as the school the student is leaving does.

In some districts, in practice a school can often only transfer a student to another school if it is willing to accept a student – now or on an IOU basis – who that other school wants to transfer. Deans and administrators sometimes figure the devil you know is better than the one you don’t, and grit their teeth and keep the troublesome student. However, from the outside, it can look like another example of “the student did X, Y, & Z, and the school didn’t even kick him out!”

Tenure is not the lifetime job guarantee critics like Petrilli imagine it to be. What it really means is teachers cannot be terminated without a legitimate reason and without due process.

Moreover, gaining tenure can be much more difficult than critics imagine – newer teachers often go through a cycle of layoffs, substitute teaching, long-term subbing, etc in which they put in years in the classroom before getting tenure. 

For example, in California, it takes only two years for teachers to get tenure, but with layoffs and disruption, it took me five years. Yet each year I taught full-time for the entire school year, and had uniformly “Exceeds Standard Performance” evaluations and almost perfect attendance.

As for tenure affecting teacher quality, it may surprise critics to learn that a recent National Bureau of Economic Research study found that unionized districts – the ones that are most likely to have tenure – actually fire more teachers than non-union districts. The study’s author, University of Utah economics professor Eunice Han, Ph.D., believes that because unionized districts have higher pay and better benefits, unions “give school districts a strong incentive to dismiss ineffective teachers before they get tenure.”

Blaming teachers unions for our education system’s maladies is practically a cottage industry. Examine the problems critics blame on teachers unions, and you'll usually find that the blame is unwarranted.