Report on teachers' unions: Implacable foes of reform

A civil rights watchdog organization, the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights (CCCR), has issued a report identifying national teachers' unions as a major obstacle to equality of educational opportunity in America. It's a strong indictment.

The 36-page report, National Teachers’ Unions and the Struggle Over School Reform (PDF), "seeks to set forth a full and fair explication of the words and actions of national unions over the last several years," with respect to educational reforms at the federal level. The report identifies three reforms that have been the primary targets of national teacher unions: accountability and assessment systems, teacher assessment and merit pay, and "equalization in the distribution of qualified teachers."

Over the last decade, the national leaders of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers have made their unions implacable foes of laws and policies designed to improve public education for disadvantaged children.

The unions have battled against the principle that schools and education agencies should be held accountable for the academic progress of their students. They have sought to water down the standards adopted by states to reflect what students should know and be able to do. They have attacked assessments designed to measure the progress of schools, seeking to localize decisions about test content so that the performance of students in one school or community cannot be compared with others. They have resisted innovative ways--such as growth models--to assess student performance.

In their attack on education reform, the national unions have often been unconstrained by considerations of propriety and fairness. They have sought to inject weakening amendments in appropriations bills, hoping that they would prevail if no hearings were held and the public was unaware of their efforts. They have used the courts to launch an attack on education reform, employing arguments that could imperil many federal assistance programs going back to the New Deal. They have failed to inform their own members of the content of federal reform laws.

Worse yet, the NEA has on more than one occasion counseled disobedience to the law.

The report cites many examples of the unions' putting union interests above the education of disadvantaged children, including student loan forgiveness to encourage new teachers to go where they are most needed:

...[T]he national teachers unions opposed [forgiveness for teachers in high-poverty areas]. They wanted loan forgiveness for all teachers or nothing. When subsequent proposals were made to target such assistance on teachers in high-need subjects and specialties, the unions again opposed such targeting as unfair, even though these amendments were intended to address severe shortages in subjects like math and science and specialties like special education or English as a second language.

The introduction notes that unions' opposition to reform has led to "calcified systems in which talented people are deterred from applying or staying as teachers because they believe their skills will not be recognized or rewarded."

The CCCR can't be dismissed as "conservative and right-wing bastards picking on the NEA," to borrow a phrase from National Education Association general counsel Bob Chanin. A look at the CCCR's list of commissioners reveals a long list of Democratic elected and appointed officials, including two former Democratic senators (Birch Bayh and Bill Bradley), the Democratic delegate to the U. S. House from the District of Columbia (Eleanor Holmes Norton), and members of the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR) and Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) appointed by Democratic presidents. Their Republican colleagues were Nixon-Ford era appointees.

Unfortunately, the CCCR report is focused on federal education programs like "No Child Left Behind." CCCR has a blind spot when it comes to the obvious way to make quality education accessible to the neediest children: school choice that allows them to opt out of union-calcified public school districts.

For the children grown-ups

Well, you gotta admire the candor.

Educating the children (bless their little non-dues-paying hearts) is important, NEA general counsel Bob Chanin acknowledged last week. But educational goals "need not and must not be achieved at the expense of due process, employee rights, and collective bargaining. That simply is too high a price to pay."

I beg your pardon, kind sir, but my paternity is impeccable

National Education Association general counsel Bob Chanin addressed the NEA Representative Assembly last week. He asked, to raucous applause from your children's schoolteachers, "Why are these conservative and right-wing bastards picking on NEA and its affiliates?"

The union label

Nowhere on the "About OEA" page of the Oklahoma Education Association website will you find the word "labor" or the word "union." Which is interesting, because Mike Antonucci reports that in his keynote speech to this year's NEA Representative Assembly, NEA president Dennis Van Roekel used the words "union" or "labor" 14 times.

"Our efforts were built on the successes of unions in the private sector," he said. "The union movement created the middle class, ended child labor, championed public education, and gave working men and women a strong voice. Plain and simple, you can't have a middle class without unions! We need unions."

Indeed, Antonucci reports, "this year NEA finally embraced the labor union label it has downplayed for 25 years. Delegate after delegate touted unionism and identified themselves proudly as part of the broader labor movement. [Retiring NEA general counsel Bob] Chanin told the crowd that while professional issues were important, 'NEA and its affiliates should never lose sight of the fact that they are unions.'"

Edmond Sun reports on school choice for special-needs children

Patty Miller of The Edmond Sun reports on the special-needs tax credit idea recently unveiled by the Friedman Foundation and OCPA.

Choice for special-needs children 'worth a look'

"The process of getting schools and parents on the same page with regard to the education plans required for special-needs students can be painful," the state's largest newspaper editorializes today. "Some schools do a much better job than others of meeting the needs of special education students. Whether a scholarship tax-credit program and private schools are what's best for a particular student group is worthy of a fair hearing, even as the union cries foul."

'Interchangeable widgets'

Mike Antonucci reports that in his address to the National Education Association Representative Assembly last week, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan reminded his unionized listeners that teacher unions were set up on an industrial model that treated teachers as "interchangeable widgets." Ouch.

But of course he's right. As I wrote a couple of years ago, teacher unions need to tell us whether their members are "professionals" or "interchangeable automatons."

OETA reports on special-needs scholarship plan

'Looking for Advil in all the wrong places'

Jacob Sullum is encouraged that apparently "there are still limits on what government agents can do to our children."

The real cost of education

"This public school emperor isn't just naked," Andrew J. Coulson writes, "he's mincing about flamboyantly and daring onlookers to call him sartorially challenged."

Not a care in the World

Borrowing verbatim ('Voucher scheme') from the talking points of the state's most powerful labor union, the Tulsa World today editorialized against school choice for special-needs children. Key sentence:

Hidden behind the charitable veneer is the real purpose -- establishing the pattern of public funding (after being washed through the hands of the so-called donors) going into private school bank accounts.

It would be hard to overstate how incorrect that sentence is. There is no "public funding" involved. Referring to donors as "so-called donors" is nonsensical. And one cannot "establish" a pattern that is already firmly established. I realize the World is more devoted to left-wing ideology than to actual children, but they're going to have to do better than this.

It's a good thing for Lexie that the World's editorial writers aren't in charge of Arizona's government.

Creative budget options needed

Oklahoma may or may not finish this fiscal year in the black, and the consensus seems to be that next year's budget situation will be worse.

Oklahoma's share of "stimulus" money could help, but then again it could serve to lock in higher levels of spending, thus exacerbating our problems.

And there's one proposal -- an item on next year's crowded ballot -- that is certain to cause headaches. Leaders of the state's most powerful labor union, the Oklahoma Education Association, are asking taxpayers for an additional $850 million annual bailout. It's called the HOPE initiative, a proposed constitutional amendment that would require the Legislature to increase per-pupil spending to the regional average.

This is extremely irresponsible public policy, which is why even some of public education's biggest boosters are hoping against HOPE. Esteemed Oklahoma economist Larkin Warner, an unwavering supporter of increased funding for education, says reaching the regional average will require other areas of government -- such as roads and bridges, corrections, higher education and health care -- to take a hit.

"Expenditure cuts on non-K-12 education functions will be a mathematical certainty," says Warner, regents professor emeritus of economics at Oklahoma State University. "The backlash to such a reallocation from other needed functions of state government would be profound and lasting."

Ed Allen, president of the Oklahoma City affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO, wrote in The Oklahoman that "unless the state receives a windfall in additional revenue, 12 percent across-the-board budget cuts for every agency will need to occur."

So with these fiscal storm clouds gathering over the dome, what's a policymaker to do? David Blatt of the left-of-center Oklahoma Policy Institute correctly suggests that "state policymakers will need to display a great deal of flexibility and willingness to utilize all the policy options at their disposal to keep the state budget afloat during the upcoming years."

I agree. And though this is not what Blatt had in mind, there is one creative option that would take some of the pressure off budget writers while increasing per-pupil spending in the public schools: a school choice tax credit.

Numerous studies have shown that school choice can save money. Just two months ago, in a report prepared for the Florida State Board of Education, Paul Peterson and Martin West of Harvard's Kennedy School and Eric Hanushek of the Hoover Institution wrote, "There is no fiscal reason to eliminate any school choice options currently available to students and families. On the contrary, an expansion of those options would very likely yield savings to state and local taxpayers."

The Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs has repeatedly demonstrated, and will do so again in a fiscal-impact study to be published next month, how school choice saves money.

"Whoever digs a pit will fall into it," the proverb says, "and he who rolls a stone will have it roll back on him." Wouldn't it be ironic if the teacher union's irresponsible ploy forced legislators to save money via school choice?

School choice marches on

Indiana joins the club.