After its big referendum victory last week, Ohio teachers union vice president Bill Leibensperger said “There has always been room to talk. That’s what collective bargaining is about. You bring adults around a table to talk about serious issues.” He voiced an argument made by union supporters through the fight over Senate Bill 5 (and the similar battle in Wisconsin over public sector union rights): All employees want is the right to bargain; they are more than willing to make concessions during these difficult times.
Consider the survey of big-city school district leaders published by the National Council on Teacher Quality a few weeks ago. When asked how they “reduced their budget gaps” over the past two years, fewer than half had eliminated or limited cost of living raises for teachers, only 30 percent cut automatic step increases, and just 13 percent trimmed benefits. In other words, in the midst of the Great Recession and historic unemployment, teachers in the vast majority of urban districts continued to get raises and generous healthcare and retirement benefits. So what exactly are their unions conceding? In fact, more districts cut the number of working days for teachers than addressed the spiraling cost of health benefits. Whose interests are we putting first?
I can hear the response from union supporters now: But school boards and administrators signed off on these policies. They are the management; if they aren’t driving a hard enough bargain, take up your beef with them.
And that’s where we get to the logic of collective bargaining reform. Yes, school boards should drive a hard bargain with unions, but they don’t, because their members are so often elected with the support of those very same unions. As a result, the teachers end up negotiating with themselves. What Ohio legislators (and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker) were trying to do was to rein in the ability of school boards to give away the store. These efforts were about curbing local control run amuck. If school boards aren’t willing (or able) to play hardball, we’ll do it for them.
Clearly, this argument either wasn’t made well in Ohio or didn’t get through to the electorate. And to be sure, it’s hard in a sound bite to explain how collective bargaining rights lead to irresponsible priorities, bad policy, and unaffordable spending.
So where do reformers go from here? One option is to be even more radical: To go after not just collective bargaining but school boards too. Make all of the key decisions at the state level. Negotiate with the teachers around a statewide approach to pay and benefits, the whole kit and caboodle. (Marc Tucker’s “New Commission” made such a proposal several years ago.) That’s an attractive long-term strategy, but voters—averse to big, sudden changes—will need some time to get used to the idea.
The other approach—call it the “no shortcuts” plan—is to roll up our sleeves and engage in the fight for political control of local school boards. Reformers are already doing this in places like Denver. It’s not easy, and previous efforts in cities such as Los Angeles were short-lived. The unions have innumerable ways to topple leaders who don’t hew to their demands. And to make an impact, we’d probably have to engage in hundreds of school districts around the country. That would require an operation that would make Michelle Rhee’s shop look puny.
Curbing collective bargain rights, promoting mayoral control, creating an alternative charter school system—all of these are efforts to deal with the fact of union-dominated school boards. They are still worth pursuing, in my view. But they are only part of the solution. If we want to win the fight for the more immediate future, we’re going to need to take on the unions directly, and take over the school boards. Shall we get started?
-Mike Petrilli
MIke,
Getting control of school boards is certainly one way for reformers to channel their energy.
But what about the counter-argument in New York City? We eliminated our school board and gave the mayor control of the budget. Without the citizens really making a peep. We’re almost 10 years into the era of Mayoral Control.
Yet, as Sol Stern has pointed out in multiple CIty Journal essays, we did not get fiscal restraint, and we did not get improved average performance. Our schools budget went from abut $14 billion to about $22 billion and our scores have not moved much at all. Sure we have a lot of charters, and some of them are good. But on the whole, it does not seem like scandal or bureaucratic mismanagement are on the wane.
So is New York the exception to the rule? Or the rule? Because it’s a lot of effort to win over 14,000 school boards, only to discover that the fault might lie, “not in the stars, but in ourselves,” as Cassius told Brutus in another famous fight against a tyrant.
Best
Matthew
Gosh, Mike, it sounds as though you have identified the real problem that “reformers” face: democracy.
After nine years of mayoral control in New York City, it’s hard to see it as the solution to the problem of poor academic results.
As you know, the test score gains that were trumpeted from 2005-2009 went up in smoke in 2010, when the New York State Department of Education commissioned an independent study and admitted that the state tests had gotten easier every year. Once the scores were recalibrated, New York City’s “gains” disappeared. The proficiency in math dropped from 82% to 54%, and in ELA dropped from 64% to 42%. The achievement gap, which supposedly had narrowed dramatically, widened to almost where it had been in 2002, when mayoral control began. This, despite the near-doubling of the education budget, from $12.5 billion to $23 billion a year. Graduation rates are up, but some 75% of the graduates who enter our community colleges need remediation. Now the NY Regents says that only 1 in four of the city’s high school graduates are “college ready.”
I thought that conservatives supported local control. It’s pretty radical to go to the extreme of eliminating 15,000 school boards and centralizing everything in the big state bureaucracies in the hope that this will suffice to silence the teachers’ unions.
At some point, you should let the question of democracy factor into your plans for the nation’s schools. Since you are a parent yourself, you might ask whether it’s a good idea to have the decision making so far removed from the reach of ordinary parents. But I guess if you have a complete voucher system, this would not be a problem. At least, not a problem for you. Just the end of public education as we have known it for the past 150 or so years.
-Diane Ravitch
Mike,
These districts vary widely in their fiscal situations, and most received federal assistance that likely precluded the need for big cuts (at least during these years).
Yet, of the 74 districts that answered NCTQ’s survey, 38 laid off teachers.
Out of the 54 districts answering their “long-form” survey, over half either cut step increases or COLAs, while the vast majority didn’t fill positions vacated by retirements/resignations (which, for budget purposes, is similar to laying off).
What proportion of surveyed districts have to fire teachers, eliminate positions and freeze salaries to demonstrate adequate sacrifice, and how do you determine that threshold?
MD
@Diane Ravitch:
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.
Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.”
Mike states “Yes, school boards should drive a hard bargain with unions, but they don’t, because their members are so often elected with the support of those very same unions.”
Can you please provide data that proves the assertion that local school boards are controlled by teachers unions? This is an oft-repeated meme among ed reformers, especially those like Reed Hastings who call for an end to democratically elected boards. Yet no one, to my knowledge, has produced any data to back up this assertion.
Your state rule proposal is appalling. The financial interests that apply their leverage at the state and federal level would certainly applaud the concept (and fund the studies that support it). It is after all a $600 billion industry.
It is the local boards, closest to the actual human children in our schools that continue to protect the interests of their neighborhood schools and students. School boards do a lot more than negotiate contracts. They provide a very necessary and lucid balance to the check(books) that control state and federal interests and policy.
Not one board in our county is union-controlled. Most are led by current and recently former parents. None are compensated. We’re doing just fine, thank you.
Beatrice — see the data that Terry Moe collected here: http://educationnext.org/the-union-label-on-the-ballot-box/
Diane — Would-be political theorists ought to look for a more sophisticated concept of democracy than “local school boards good, mayors and state governments bad.”
Not to mention that what are commonly denounced as “overly generous” pensions and salaries for NYC teachers were negotiated by Mayor Bloomberg (with full mayoral control) and ratified by the NY state legislature and the Governor, so even if you got rid of elected school boards you might have a problem .
Perhaps we have to get rid of democracy altogether and have all salaries, pensions and education spending decided by a Commissariat made up of the Gates, Broad and Walton Foundations, DFER, Stand for children, the hedge fund and charter school operators, and the testing industry, with cabinet level officials selected from Fordham, AEI, CRPE, the Manhattan Institute and CAP?
Start working on it guys! I’m sure you can get funding for that one.
-Leonie Haimson
Union-dominated school boards? That doesn’t make any sense, Mike. While I am no fan of the unions in terms of school reform, that comment is a stretch. Unions often have a lot of power at the ballot box, especially in urban areas, but as a rule Board elections are rarely decided by what union reps. say NJ is a good example: powerful union, independent school boards in many of the 600 districts. (Yes, over 600 in tiny NJ – another article for another day).
All you have to do is work in every state, as I have over 30 years, to see that this union-bashing is utterly off the point. In most southern states there are right to work rules, weak unions – and the lowest salaries and poorest achievement results in America. Unions do well what they were set up to do: fight for salary, benefits, and working conditions. They do a relatively poor job of advocating for school reform because reform is often at odds with protecting all members of the union; and its not their job. But that resistance to change doesn’t justify the constant right-wish bashing of and seeking to destroy unions. Because the pay is good in places like NJ and NY, great people to into teaching that would otherwise not do so.
The challenge therefore is to work with unions, not destroy them. That’s what happens in every district I have ever worked in that was a successful district – a collaboration between management and labor. Crushing the unions is an ideological response, not an educational one.
Seriously,what problem are you solving for?
Helping kids succeed?
Dealing with an economic recession American workers didn’t create?
Getting rid of any ability for workers to have a voice?
Getting rid of democratic principles?
In reading this blog post, you still believe that American workers, in this case teachers through their unions are the basis of the ills afflicting America now. And if you can’t get rid of them using an economic argument, then try to go after another institution, school boards.
As someone who actually advocated initially for mayoral control in NYC, I have seen a lot of problems with that approach as well, principally it didn’t achieve the desired results (significantly helping students) even though the Mayor had huge power, and this was significantly less democracy for parents, voice for teachers and transparency for the public?
As to sacrifice, I have witnessed my members throughout the country negotiate wage freezes and reductions,furlough s,health care and pension changes amounting to millions of dollars.
In Ohio, take Toledo, Cincy and Cleveland- Toledo for example is taking a salary cut this year to ensure that students had the “specialty” courses they want and need.
And finally, as I said at the debate with Rick Hess this summer-read this summer’s Harvard Business Review’s front page story about collaboration. If business now sees that collaborative practice is so essential in moving business’ forward in this economy, why don’t you, who believe we must follow a “business model” see its importance for schooling?
Just saying.
Of course you and your ilk want to destroy the institution of local, democratically-elected school boards. It makes it that much easier for you to siphon public dollars into private profits at the expense of children and our future.
You talk big about accountability, then you push policies that would remove as much accountability (= answering to the voters) as possible. Yep, that sure would make it easier to take advantage of the taxpayers, wouldn’t it?
You ignore the fact that the highest-performing states (and nations, for that matter) are those with strong, active teachers’ unions. You ignore the fact that the states with the weakest teachers’ unions also have the lowest academic performance.
You ignore these facts, of course, because they don’t fit with the fallacy you’re selling here: that unions create poor student performance and bankrupt state budgets. Why sell this fallacy? To promote your for-profit agenda, of course.
I guess I have just one question for you, Mike. How do you sleep at night?
Mike,
I’m a teacher in a suburban public school in Ohio and I started my career in a charter school. I’ve been a Republican all of my life and even made the mistake of voting for John Kasich. As such, I’ve been a supporter of charter schools, vouchers, and have never been a big supporter of unions…until now. The radical, ill-informed Republican politicians in Ohio have made me realize just how necessary teachers unions are. Mind you, this is coming from someone who is rather supportive of the Tea Party movement. Some of the best teachers in my school have either left or are seriously contemplating leaving the profession because of the uncertainty now surrounding our careers, disrespect for our profession, and the ability to make more money in the private sector without being made to feel guilty for “stealing” from taxpayers. My union agreed to wage freezes and increasing our share of health-care insurance costs recently. Apparently measures like that won’t satisfy many politicians in my state. I’m disgusted with “Republicans” who have turned their backs on conservative principles such as local control, making gradual and measured change based on real evidence, welcoming the national government to influence in education in our state, and so forth. I don’t think that Republican politicians yet understand just how many former supporters they’ve lost.
Regarding merit, the only reform that needs to be made is getting rid of a very small number of poor teachers. Speaking only for my building, I can say that the reason any are there (and there aren’t many) is because the ADMINISTRATION did not fire them early in their careers and won’t go through the proper channels now. Our union has never fought to save a poor teacher in their first few years of teaching and doesn’t stand in the way of removing experienced teachers IF administrators have followed proper procedures.
@Rob, thank you for your real world, on the ground perspective.
@Stuart Are you kidding? A 15 year old analysis showing that union support had some effect on some candidates in fewer than a quarter of CA school districts and the conclusion is that we have a nation of union controlled local school boards? Formats often as that “fact” is tossed around, if this is the basis, it’s a mighty weak case.
Randi, it turns out the collaboration has been all on your side, doesn’t it? And look where it’s gotten NYC and American public education, under your tenure.
The corporatists are interested in conquering centralized control of the public education funding stream, as we see here. That’s the agenda you collaborated with, when you shut out the actual members and embraced Bill Gates.
You’ve had long enough working to cripple effective union response to the corporatists. Time for new leadership.
Beatrice — you can believe whatever you want, but Randi Weingarten and Diane Ravitch, both of whom are in positions to know, don’t dispute the assertion that unions do exercise political power over local school boards.
When I was on the LAUSD board, we had one board member who would literally flip open her cell phone and talk with union staff while we were in closed session, disclosing our private dialog and getting direction. Three of us tried to move to censure her, but four didn’t want to anger the union by identifying the illegal behavior during negotiations. Such is urban big city union negotiations.
This reeks of desperation. It’s what I’ve heard reformers call taking a “deeper dive” into reform.
Let’s see, merit pay didn’t work, Recent NAEP results don’t look good for NCLB, Fordham’s own research on charter schools was disappointing, and now voters are actively supporting union protections. So — of course — let’s go after school boards!
What becomes of prominent school reformers when the evidence doesn’t support their bold, innovative reforms or their inculcated beliefs?
Do they do what’s best for kids and change their course of action, or do they react the way they’ve accused “status-quo” educators of reacting, by digging in to protect their paychecks and their way of life?
I don’t know about Ohio, but in Wisconsin Revenue Limits keep Boards from”giving away the store” and until very recently the Qualified Economic Offer law specifically limited educator compensation.
At least part of what Walker wanted to do was to weaken the influence of organized labor in politics and policy, for reasons that are only indirectly about employee compensation and have everything to do with sweetheart deals and low taxes for the 1%.
Victory over this in Ohio and the recall of Scott Walker started here today. The writing is on the wall.
Hi everyone. Here’s my (long) response to many of these points here: http://www.educationgadfly.net/flypaper/2011/11/responding-to-diane-ravitch-randi-weingarten-others-on-education-democracy-and-unions/. Thanks for the great dialogue.
FYI, on 11/15, the NJLeftBehind blog http://njleftbehind.blogspot.com/2011/11/quotes-of-day-speaking-of-local-control.html posted Ravitch’s comment here as an email sent to Petrilli and numerous others on the morning of the 14th.
If it was meant as a scoop, it didn’t work. NJLeftBehind linked to this blog, where Ravitch also posted the same info publicly a few hours after the email went out and a day before the NJLetBehind piece was written.
I was intrigued to see the democracy defense offered by the Establishment Reactionary Dynamic Duo of Ravitch & Weingarten, as if to say it’s okay to sentence children to chronically failing and dangerous schools, as long as unions succeed in getting the vote out on off-peak election days.
Apart from the underpinnings of their logic, can we at least hope that they’ll remain consistent in applying this “Democracy First” philosophy no matter where the chips fall? Not so much.
When the elected legislature in Georgia authorized the state’s chartering of schools, the Georgia Association of Educators union wasn’t so happy with the voice of the people. They later filed a brief in support of a lawsuit to strike down the law — and that suit prevailed. Democracy be damned.
When elected leaders in Douglas County Colorado passed a voucher plan this year, the Colorado Education Association union publicly opposed the wishes of the local voters, with no apparent bout of misgivings over democratic values.
When the Indiana legislature and governor passed a statewide voucher law this year, the Indiana State Teachers Association financed a suit to stop it. Why persuade when you can sue?
And when the elected Mayor of New York City decided that empty floors in district schools should be offered to the charter school kids, did the UFT union propose a city council vote on the matter, in a flourish of democratic principles? Nah, they chose a lawsuit instead.
In short, teachers unions and their defenders give us lectures about how “the people have spoken” quite economically, i.e. when it suits them. They’re all for honoring the voice of the people, except when they’re not.
The simple fact is that there have been many times in American history when democratic institutions were undermined by bubbles of power and corruption. New York City’s Tammany Hall, Al Capone’s Chicago, Huey Long’s Louisiana… and Frank “I Am the Law” Hague’s Jersey City, all illustrate this point.
So it’s not that Ed Reformers are against democracy. It’s that when millions of union dollars are shoveled into the campaign coffers of politicians — politicians who swear their allegiances to union bidding at the expense of children — that’s a perversion of democracy, not a manifestation of it.
The good news is that democracy does self-correct; these corrupt institutions eventually metastasize to the point of their own destruction. Tammany Hall didn’t die for lack of cash; it began to lose the contest of hearts and minds. That’s already begun with the teachers unions.
In any large war, there are always many battles won by each side. But despite their war chests, despite their ad campaigns, and despite their profligate use of words like “corporate” and “greed” to brand charter and private school operators as collections of Bernie Madoff’s — in the aggregate, we education reformers are winning. We might have lost in Ohio, but we won in Indiana and Wisconsin. And we’ll soon win reforms in New Jersey. The public is starting to sour on the insular, corrupt, job-protecting monopolies of teachers unions. We reformers are simply on the right side of history.
We’re not at the tipping point yet, but how will we know when we get there? Weingarten & Ravitch will go from selectively invoking the democracy argument, to opposing it entirely. Stand by. It won’t be long.
My response to Bowdon’s absurd and misinformed rant is posted here: http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/logic-not-democracy-be-damned/
Bruce, however one characterizes the situation in Georgia, the fact remains that teachers’ unions — like everyone else — praise democracy mostly when it’s going their way.
It seem pretty simple, really. First, end the government’s monopoly on education. Close the Dept of Education, which exists simply to pick winners and losers and promote the Federal government’s agenda on education (by using education funding as a club to beat local boards into submission). Let states be the gatekeepers of education funding, and work together to build a system that allows credits to be transferred among the states. Next, allow more charter, private, and parochial schools to operate, thereby creating competition for the state schools. Teachers would learn that joining a union and working under that system risks the longevity of their careers. Eventually, unions wouldn’t be an issue.
to Bob Bowdon — the only problem is that your reforms aren’t helping kids. That was the point, right? They’re not working and by now you’ve got to know it. About this time reformers expected to be celebrating Michelle Rhee’s grand transformation in DC, but turns out nothing much happened there, from a student achievement point of view. Reformers are pretty quiet about that.
Now it seems like it’s all about reformers keeping their jobs.
Reformers came in with a set of beliefs and a shake-things-up strategy that are failing according to their own data-driven results.
What happens to all the righteous reformers who wouldn’t become teachers to save their lives but have now spent most of their careers in school reform?
Using your own language, perhaps it won’t be long until reformers “metastasize to the point of your their destruction.”
“metastasize to the point of their destruction.”
‘Disingenuous’ teachers’ unions? Of course Mr. Petrilli can cite no evidence for his claim about his favorite villains. His argument rests on a single piece of evidence he cites, “the survey of big-city school district leaders published by the National Council on Teacher Quality a few weeks ago.”
Low and behold, if you follow his link to the study, you can read the NCTQ’s disclaimer:
“We decided to survey school districts around the country to find out what happened. We sent surveys to 78 large urban districts, located in 42 states. While not a representative sample, it’s usually the large urbans who feel the pain of financial cuts most acutely. Our group includes 61 of the 65 districts that are members of the Council of Great City Schools.”
Not a representative sample?
Anyone who has even the most modest training in research methods knows that means the “findings” are not generalizable to larger populations, such as all public school districts or the unions they bargain with. In other words, Mr. Petrilli’s evidence is little more than his opinion about what is actually occurring at the bargaining tables across the country. So who is being disingenuous?
According to the NCES there were over 13,800 regular public school districts in 2008-09. I cannot find a count of the number that are covered by collective bargaining agreements, but it is safe to say that there are thousands of them. It is also safe to say that the overwhelming majority are not large urban districts; so much for the NCTQ sample representing anything more than the 61 districts that responded. It’s hard to see how the NCTQ sample could capture the heterogeneity of teachers’ unions or school boards.
As for the failure to find union concessions in the NCTQ survey, given the multiyear length of many collective bargaining agreements, and the lagged impact of the recession on the public sector, one would not expect to see the full impact of the recession on collective bargaining agreements yet.
As for the claim that unions dominate school boards, Mr. Petrilli offers little more than the assertion, although Mr. Buck helpfully provides a link to a Terry Moe study (about as unbiased a source as the NCTQ.) However, Moe’s study also is based on a small, unrepresentative sample (drawn from one state). That evidence hardly sustains the suggestion that teachers’ unions generally dominate school boards. I’m sure some do. But I also have seen many “taxpayer” boards that are openly hostile to teachers’ unions. In the end, the voters do get to choose. At least up to now.
If one is going to radically overhaul the governance of education, it would seem to me that the radical (anti-democratic) reformers need to provide better evidence. And they need to provide better evidence that their proposed reforms would improve education, not just in urban school districts, but also in the bulk of districts which comprise the overwhelming majority.
This could be the most important thread of the past half-century. School boards are the key to laundering teacher union power. Every vote in a school board election is buy-in to a system teacher unions (or associations in RTW states) control. The fact that Ravitch and Weingarten have weighed in together is a clear indication that you’ve hit a nerve. They really don’t want you poking around.
In a system juiced by collective bargaining (which strongly influences what happens in RTW states also), government schools mean union rule. If the public knew that school boards do not represent public accountability, but rather are just a fig leaf over union rule, they would be justly outraged. Friendly school boards are they key to maintaining this deception.
Where school boards are pro-child and pro-excellence, teacher union villainy can be seen openly. Here in Los Angeles, a representational AFT/NEA local, the teacher unions have pulled out the stops to pervert school board elections. Remember that LAUSD writes the UTLA $30 million in dues checks every year and they use this money to train an army. Reform candidates cannot count on a trained and highly motivate constituency (parents work and charter school operators are by law forced to the political sidelines) and they must scrounge for campaign funds from whom other than wealthy do-gooders.
The UTLA campaign in the last school board election was calculated and despicable. It included misleading and libelous mailers designed to confuse voters (Republicans for Lamotte!) and suppress Latino turn-out (Sanchez is a “big wig” responsible for failing schools), a massive get out the vote effort internally (which heavily targeted parents), and careful choreography before the election that resulted in maximum public awareness of funding cut-backs and minimum awareness of the election itself. Reform candidate Sanchez needed around 40% more non-teacher votes to win the race – this strategy was all spelled out in the unions own newsletter in months prior.
The so-called “Coalition for Education Reform” which was the independent campaign for reformers wasted millions of dollars NOT attacking teacher unions or promoting what we would consider common-sense reforms. This too was a colossal mistake which can only be understood in the context of decades of teacher union propaganda. Los Angeles voters are now unreceptive to reform messaging. This was clearly a first-time rodeo for certain leaders of the “coalition,” not so for the UTLA.
Here are some of my observations:
Another Sham School Board Election: http://edobserver.blogspot.com/2011/05/another-sham-school-board-election.html
School board elections: this game is rigged
http://edobserver.blogspot.com/2011/02/school-board-elections-this-game-is.html
District 5 LAUSD School Board Election: UTLA Demonstrates Villainy http://edobserver.blogspot.com/2011/04/weingarten-teacher-unions-partner-in.html
Stop the UTLA Wrecking Ball
http://edobserver.blogspot.com/2011/05/stop-utla-wrecking-ball.html
UTLA Declares “Public” Mandate
http://edobserver.blogspot.com/2011/05/utla-declares-sham-mandate.html
Media Ignores UTLA Scheming in SB5 Election http://edobserver.blogspot.com/2011/05/media-ignores-utla-scheming-in-sb5.html
Where is the California Charter School Association (CCSA)?
http://edobserver.blogspot.com/2011/05/where-is-california-charter-school.html
The School Board Charade
http://edobserver.blogspot.com/2010/06/school-board-charade.html
Teacher Union Collective Bargaining Explained
http://edobserver.blogspot.com/2011/11/teacher-union-collective-bargaining.html
Their hand-picked candidate in the District 5 race was teacher activist Bennett Kayser. The UTLA’s substantial disinformation campaign appealed to his virtue, on the merits of his former occupation. We should respect our teachers, right?
Teacher activists have always been the front-lines weapon of choice simply because we the public, widely and readily confuse them with teacher/mentors we have all had and love. They are natural “human shields.” But when teachers take up arms against reform they are no longer innocents; they are combatants. If education reformers have made one mistake over the past 50 years, it is that they have not helped the public distinguish teachers who fight excellent from those who support an excellent system.
What do you think is the primary product of the $2.5 billion in dues that teacher unions collect and spend annually? According to their filings it is not direct political activity and it’s not “bargaining”… so what is it? This money is spent to organize, indoctrinate, and keep on hair-trigger alert an army of teacher activists ready to wage war on reformers. This infantry is the front-line behind which their lobbyists and officials launch legislative and contract mayhem.
Keep digging here: the school board charade is critical to the continuance of their domination.
Thank you!
Anthony Krinsky
http://edobserver.blogspot.com
As someone who supports the questioning, and the eventual dismantlement of the “district” as a government entity, I would caution my free-market friends in their “union bashing.”
As an unapologetic critic of teacher union clout and actions, I’ve come to the realization that unions are only a portion of the problem, and maybe not the biggest one. 3.1 million (of 6.3 million) people employed in the massive blob of public ed. are “administration and support.” These folks are allies of the “jobs program” nature of the bureaucracy, and we ignore their clout and mendacity at our peril.
They make up powerful lobbying entities (school boards and administrative associations) that are just as vehemently opposed to competition and accountability as any teacher I’ve ever met.
Teachers, at the very least, do something. They teach kids. We need teachers (good ones), accountable and empowered principals, and some loose oversight to see if a given education option is performing up to high standard.
Everything else connected to the “school district” concept should go the way of the buggy whip and pay phone.
Union meddling in low-turnout, non-partisan, school board elections stacks the deck against reformers, that much is certain.
But this thread would be incomplete without mentioning the fact that even union-friendly school boards don’t even have to give away policies like seniority-based pay and layoffs; the unions have already written them into state laws.
Emily Cohen, Kate Walsh and RiShawn Biddle have discussed this extensively in their paper “Invisible Ink in Collective Bargaining: Why Key Issues Are Not Addressed”
(http://www.nctq.org/p/publications/docs/nctq_invisible_ink_20080801115950.pdf)
In Los Angeles, the last NCTQ report on district staffing policies speaks to this issue as well: (http://www.nctq.org/tr3/consulting/docs/nctq_tr3_lausd_06-2011.pdf)
The process of neutering school boards and moving key decisions out of their purview has been long in the making. Myron Lieberman, previously a champion of collective bargaining, discussed the strategy in 1958 when he supported the coming “revolution” in teacher unionism (http://edobserver.blogspot.com/2011/11/local-control-of-education-by-laymen.html).
Here were some ideas from “The Future of Public Education:”
Laymen should not be setting education policy; that should be done by professionals:
“Laymen ‘participate’ in helping to solve the medical problems of their children, but the nature and limits of this participation are well understood. Everyone has a stake in a clear-cut delineation of parental, public, and professional authority in public education. ..” (p. 283)
State and national laws have a much bigger impact:
“Insofar as elected officials are concerned, the rule is clear: for short-run, relatively minor, but more immediate improvements, concentrate upon local school board elections; for long-range major improvements, concentrate upon the state and national election of education-minded legislators and executives who have the power to shape the context and limits of local action…” (p. 283)
There are limits to the power of persuasion vs. the persuasion of power:
“NEA leaders continually proclaim the virtues of negotiation and persuasion, apparently in complete ignorance of the fact that these are not substitutes for a position of strength. The teachers will be persuasive only when they have enough power to command the respect of school boards.” (p. 244)
Teachers need to learn to be political activists:
The teachers might begin by demonstrating to politicians that opposition to the sound professional recommendations of teachers is an invitation to political disaster. The best way to conduct this kind of invitation is to deliver the votes. Teachers might try to educate the public to the importance of academic freedom by withholding their services where there are serious violations of it. These techniques have not been tried on a large scale, but they may be more effective than the techniques currently in use. The mass distribution of movies or literature cannot be effective while the everyday performance of teachers demonstrates that they are weak and inconsequential group.” (p. 238)
“I believe that within the next few decades, education in the United States will undergo changes of tremendous shape and magnitude… These changes will be so basic that we will be fully justified in using the term “revolutionary” to describe them….“ (p. 2)
School boards will be cut down at the knees:
“The power of national and state professional organizations must be utilized to affect the outcome of negotiations between teachers and school boards at the local level.” (p. 274)
“It is one thing for the local board to carry public opinion when the teachers have neither the funds nor the facilities for making a sustained appeal; it is quite another matter when the resources available to the teachers far outweigh those available to the board.” (p. 240)
“A school board which knows that its actions are leading straight to an all-out contest with a national organization of teachers is not likely to invite such a contest.” (p. 240)
“A powerful national organization ready to step into local situations when a matter of principle is involved would serve a preventative function.” (p. 241)
Once managerial discretion is removed through contracts, state and federal statutes, school boards shall be demoted to ceremonial roles:
“Local control of education by laymen should be limited to peripheral and ceremonial functions of education… Laymen can make their most valuable contribution to public education in their non-educational organizations… Citizens should support school boards which are willing to negotiate conditions of employment with representatives of the majority organizations of teachers, provided such organizations have adequate safeguards against administrator domination… “ (p. 281)
So what do we make of it? Teachers don’t think so highly of lay school board leadership and teacher unions took away most of their power long ago. So why keep them around? Why don’t teacher unions favor abolishing them and simply focusing their lobbying activities at the state level?
Teacher unions don’t talk about this stuff which is an invitation to investigate. The answer is clearly that teacher unions find school boards useful. There’s really been no research on this important question. The teacher unions know. Here’s a short list based on my understanding of teacher union priorities:
1) As discussed previously, every school board election legitimizes the system that teacher unions control. It gives members of the public the impression that the results are deserved because they are in charge, they have the opportunity to affect the outcome through a “fair” democratic process. This is a cruel hoax, a charade.
2) School boards are the largest single employer in most communities, which comes with real explicit and implicit influence. In both “strong” and “weak” union states, teacher unions face little and often no political opposition. As Terry Moe discusses in Special Interest, union candidates win 4/5 of the time and despite legends to the contrary, the business community is no counter-balance. The rule (not the exception) is that school boards and the superintendents in America owe their offices to teacher activists.
3) If you want to see a bunch of well-intentioned people wasting their time, go to a school board meeting. Matters that would profoundly influence learning in schools are buried in state laws and union contracts: they’re off-limits. So why don’t school board members break their silence? Why don’t they spill the beans? Serving on school board is a well-known power trip and stepping stone to higher office. Why admit impotence and sully the institution they swore to uphold? We need a witness protection program for former school board members.
4) Union-controlled schools amplify union propaganda. Teacher unions drive up spending continually so there’s always a funding shortage. Every time a school board remind community-members of the importance of public education, raises taxes, declares a funding crisis or floats a bond, they are reinforcing union messaging that teachers are victims and more money is required – and distracting community-members from what really matters: quality teaching.
5) School boards are the bogey-men that teacher unions need to keep their troops motivated and politically involved. The importance of having a plausibly villainous boss cannot be under-estimated. The short-math on activism is that you will not have action without outrage, and you will not have outrage without a villain. Teacher unions need villains to keep their members active. Often all it takes is just single tax-cutting board member to enervate teacher activists. Sometimes I wonder why teacher unions don’t go all out in each and every school board election. A board that is too friendly makes the troops soft; a little but not too much resistance is the best combination. Teacher unions both love and hate school boards: this is why.
6) Finally, where most schools are government managed, they are unionized. Privately run schools are not subject to the same open meeting laws (charter school associations naively cave on this one), civil service laws (like tenure), and state statutes like LIFO. More importantly, privately run schools are small and have a family-like environment. Benevolent managers give teachers no reason to unionize and there are no economies of scale for unionization campaigns designed to trick teachers into thinking they will be better off letting the AFL-CIO broker relationships with principals. Even in RTW states where teachers are not required to join, half or more teachers do and that’s all they need: RTW teacher unions outspend their opponents by similar margins and their teacher activist armies are materially as powerful.
Teacher union meddling in low-turnout, non-partisan, school board elections definitely stacks the deck against reformers. But at the same time, school boards have their hands tied by laws unions enact at the state level as planned in the late 1950s. Why keep them around at all? I’ve provided five reasons which is a good place to start. School board elections legitimize the charade of union rule. Controlling school boards means controlling jobs. Captured public schools amplify union propaganda. School board members can be counted on to bless the office. Oppositional school boards (or members) energize activists and keep the teacher army fit. And school boards ensure that schools are unionized, or partially unionized.