Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn links this article by a former union represenative over at the liberal website Counterpunch. Apparently, liberals are upset that one of their own dared to trash teachers unions:
In California, with its “powerful” teachers’ union, school administrators fire, on average, 6.91% of its probationary teachers. In non-union North Carolina, that figure is only 1.38%. California is actually tougher on prospective candidates.
So, despite Maher’s display of civic pride and self-righteous indignation (“We need to bust this union,” he declared), he was utterly mistaken. The statistics not only don’t support his argument, they contradict it.
I have no idea where the writer is getting his statistics, because the writer never cites where they came from. (That’s usually not a good sign.) The California statistics certainly don’t tell the full story of with what we know about firing teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District, which is the largest school district in the country:
During our investigation, in which we obtained hundreds of documents using the California Public Records Act, we also discovered that 32 underperforming teachers were initially recommended for firing, but then secretly paid $50,000 by the district, on average, to leave without a fight. Moreover, 66 unnamed teachers are being continually recycled through a costly mentoring and retraining program but failing to improve, and another 400 anonymous teachers have been ordered to attend the retraining.
And according to the L.A. Weekly article I just cited, a major reason why it’s so hard to fire teachers in L.A. unified is that the teacher retraining program that lets teachers with bad evaluations remain in the classroom even if they don’t improve was “engineered” in 2000 by a state assemblyman named Antonio Villaraigosa, who is now L.A.’s mayor. It would seem that teachers unions have a fair degree of political influence.
Then there’s this:
As a veteran of Oregon public schools, I don’t know what how to factually quantify what a “good public school system” is supposed to mean here. I can tell you there’s a lot of room for improvement and the cost of education in the state is out of control:
The Herald and News reported that the shortened week is one of many money-saving measures school officials are considering.
District Superintendent Greg Thede says that a $5.8 million cut to his $60 million budget and nearly 20 layoffs last year prompted the district to form a committee to study the option of cutting Fridays from the school week.
The “former labor union rep” who wrote the Counterpunch article goes on to argue that teachers unions get a bad rap because it’s societal factors that have destroyed the educational system in this country. Teachers can’t be responsible for broken homes, a lack of parental involvement et al. That’s all true to a certain extent. (Though the difficulty firing bad teachers is a monumental problem teachers unions are undoubtedly responsible for.)
But what teachers unions are responsible for is preventing any solutions that address these problems from being implemented. There’s no logical reason for opposing charter schools, school vouchers, merit pay etc. The reason they oppose these things is not because they aren’t good for kids, but rather that they are bad for unions. Even the NEA admits that the reason why they are such an effective union “is not because we care about children”:
