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Bring Fenty Back
July 11, 2012 | 63 comments
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Mitt W. Bush
May 7, 2012 | 29 comments
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Education’s Medicaid Problem
January 11, 2012 | 39 comments
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The NEA’s Progressive Turn
December 9, 2011 | 13 comments
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Taking Over Lousy Schools
December 2, 2011 | 29 comments
The Public Policy
Beyond Collective Bargaining
Regardless of Wisconsin, the NEA and AFT still have many cards to play.
One would think that Alabama, a state in which teachers unions don’t have the power to force school districts into collective bargaining, would be a bastion of school reform. But within the past year or so, the National Education Association’s Cotton State affiliate has shown there’s more to wielding influence than sitting at negotiating tables.
In November 2009, then-Gov. Bob Riley and school reformers, looking to push for school choice (and to get a share of the $4.3 billion in federal money provided by President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top school reform effort) attempted to advance school choice by ending the Cotton State’s status as one of the few states that don’t allow public charter schools. At the time, Riley declared: “This gives us an opportunity to do something that 40 states say has made a tremendous difference in the quality of education.”
Three months later, Riley’s effort went to seed as the NEA affiliate and local school districts convinced committees in both houses of the legislature to kill the charter school bill. By mid-year, the union all but assured that charter schools would never be a part of any governor’s plans in the near future by backing both winners of the state’s Democratic and Republican primaries, including Robert Bentley, the eventual winner.
This should give pause to both school reformers and those looking to clip the wings of other public sector unions by rooting for efforts by governors such as Wisconsin’s Scott Walker and legislatures in Ohio and other states to abolish collective bargaining requirements. Ending forced labor negotiations can weaken the influence of teachers unions. But through the sheer force of campaign war chests, armies of rank-and-file teachers, and strong alliances with other defenders of traditional public education, the NEA and its sister union, the American Federation of Teachers, still retain more than enough influence to thwart efforts to end the compensation deals that has made teaching even more lucrative than other professions in the public sector.
School reformers and foes of public sector unions will need to take on all aspects of union influence in order to achieve their respective goals — including taking on the other ways the NEA and the AFT, along with their allies, influence education policy and even control school spending.
The battles over collective bargaining come as state governments struggle to close $260 billion in budget shortfalls in this fiscal year and 2011-2012, and wrestle with the long-term costs of traditional teacher compensation — including at least $1 trillion in teachers’ pension deficits and another $400 billion or so in unfunded retired teacher healthcare costs. The recognition that traditional teacher compensation is ineffective at rewarding high-quality teachers and spurring student achievement has also given impetus to restricting collective bargaining (and the pay raises that teachers unions tend to win at the negotiating table).
At the same time, the nation’s school reform movement has succeeded in fully exposing the low quality of America’s public schools. For taxpayers and legislators, the steady evidence of academic failure — including yesterday’s news that 44 percent of fourth-graders in the nation’s 14-largest cities (and 29 percent of all American students) scored Below Basic on the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress — and efforts by teachers union locals to protect poor-performing teachers (including the push by the AFT’s Beltway local to reinstate 75 teachers tossed out last year by D.C. Public Schools) are proof enough that the defenders of traditional public education can no longer be trusted with schools or children.
There is plenty that is appealing to many school reformers and to those generally opposed to organized labor about abolishing collective bargaining. For states and districts, it would weaken the clout of the NEA and AFT in structuring work rules, compensation deals, and layoff policies that have made it difficult for them to move toward private sector-style performance management and to ditch degree- and seniority-based pay scales, which have long ago been proven ineffective in improving student achievement. More importantly, it would also allow for school reformers, especially those in big-city districts, to move more aggressively on reform. This is because NEA and AFT locals tend to use their campaign cash essentially to pick the winners in school board elections, thus ending up on both sides of the negotiating table.
But the clout of the NEA and AFT doesn’t rest on collective bargaining and school board races alone. Despite their weakened status, the two unions remain the biggest players in federal and state elections; they ladled out $59 million in campaign donations during the 2009-2010 election cycle and $277 million over the past 11 years, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics. Although last year’s spending spree was largely a bust, the unions managed to throw their weight around for high impact, including spending $1 million on an ad blitz that helped defeat D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty in his bid for re-election.
This spending, along with the rank-and-file members they deploy, also allow the NEA and AFT (along with smaller unions) to wield tremendous clout in state legislatures even in the few states in which they cannot technically conduct collective bargaining or where union influence is at first glance rather weak — and structure state laws and policies that restrict what school districts can actually do. In South Carolina, the otherwise-floundering NEA affiliate there, along with other unions and professional associations, have successfully opposed school reform efforts and have continued to make it one of the easiest states for teachers to gain near-lifetime employment through tenure. Virginia’s NEA local also wields significant influence, including helping to weaken the effort by Gov. Bob McDonnell’s last year to ease the rules restricting the expansion of charter schools.
As I noted in a 2008 study I co-wrote for the National Council on Teacher Quality, the NEA and AFT long ago mastered the art of using their war chests and lobbying heft to enact state laws governing many of the key aspects of teachers’ contracts. Near-lifetime employment in the form of tenure, for example, is covered in the contracts of just a third of the nation’s 100 largest districts. Rules for dismissing teachers are often not even covered in contracts. If anything, lobbying and campaigning actually works better for their cause than collective bargaining because they no longer have to slog through negotiations with hundreds of districts. Through their influence on legislators, they can simply have state laws crafted that are more to their liking.
Meanwhile the NEA and AFT share common cause with allies who are just as opposed to the school reform movement. Suburban school districts have spent the past two decades opposing expansion of charter schools, and have been among the loudest foes of standards-and-accountability moves such as the No Child Left Behind Act. The two unions have also spent millions of member dues on subsidizing like-minded groups. The National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education, which lobbies on behalf of the nation’s university colleges of education, has benefitted from more than $1.5 million in NEA funding between 2005-2006 and 2009-2010, according to the union’s disclosures to the U.S. Department of Labor. Another beneficiary, the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (whose studies always manage to support NEA positions), has received $1.3 million in union largesse.
What school reformers and foes of public sector unions must do is attack the very pools of money that help sustain NEA and AFT coffers. Most of the $622 million in dues collected by the two unions is forcibly collected; ending automatic deductions, as Wisconsin’s Gov. Walker seeks to do, would go a long way in reducing the financial clout. So would restricting the use of school funding for subsidizing teachers union activity; in New York State, for example, the AFT affiliate there is allowed to provide teacher training in school districts through its Education & Learning Trust.
So long as the NEA and AFT have the dollars and the bodies to push for their cause, they will remain a key (if increasingly less-relevant) influence in education policy. School reformers and those seeking to end the drag of public sector unions on taxpayers altogether need to focus more on mounting the kind of lobbying and campaigning that will end this influence (and overhaul the teaching profession) in the long run. That’s if the bipartisan coalition of centrist Democrats and conservatives that have long fought for reform can hold.
About the Author
RiShawn Biddle the editor of Dropout Nation , is co-author of A Byte at the Apple: Rethinking Education Data for the Post-NCLB Era. He can be followed at Twitter.com/dropoutnation.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (35) | Leave a comment
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C S Lewis| 2.25.11 @ 6:37AM
Wisconsin Assembly passes bill stripping
public workers of collective bargaining rights
(CNN)
Doorgunner| 2.25.11 @ 7:18AM
"Wisconsin Assembly passes [the same] bill [we've all been talking about for more than a week] stripping [some] public workers of collective bargaining rights [to negotiate benefits and pensions such as those types of obligations that have destroyed California financially]
(C[ollectivist]N[ightmare]N[ews])"
fify
jawin| 2.25.11 @ 2:44PM
Awesome!
ENOUGH ROPE| 2.25.11 @ 4:21PM
Here is strong evidence that Obama is a Marxist. Search for the site American Thinker and then search for Meeting Young Obama.
Obama is a SMILING COBRA.
scythe| 2.25.11 @ 7:30AM
How about a class action lawsuit by taxpayers suing the unions for using OUR MONEY to support forced political speech? WHY SHOULD OUR MONEY BE CONSCRIPTED TO PAY FOR LEFTIES? They should NOT be allowed to have a political operation since it is public money. If you want to contribute private money, fine. Do so. But drop the political operation BECAUSE IT IS A VIOLATION OF FREE SPEECH.
gearjammer| 2.25.11 @ 8:40AM
Yes, sue them. Take action against them. All these decades they been able to play offense alone. If they needed cover the old mainstream media was enough. Now, they are playing defense and are not able to advance. So attack and attack get them on the run and destroy them.
Rick Cross| 2.25.11 @ 8:46AM
The only long term solution to the problems of cost and outcome is to privatize public education.
ENOUGH ROPE| 2.25.11 @ 4:34PM
The NEA and the AFT should be known as the Communist Party of the U.S.A.
FTM| 2.26.11 @ 5:46AM
Hear, hear!!! Private sector competition would be the end of the public school monopoly. Listen to these people, they will tell you what they fear the most. Mention vouchers and the like and the NEA goes into full blown fit mode complete with drooling, eye-rolling and loss of bowel control. Hit these people where they live and allow vouchers.
Brian Mc| 2.25.11 @ 9:22AM
I wonder how closely the three graphs would coincide with one another? The reading rate of 8th graders, the dropout rate of high schoolers and the amount of 'funds' collected by the teacher's unions. I know, I know, it's all the parent's fault. This argument does not hold water with me. One of my daughters is a honor role student shooting for her doctorate in psychology while one of the others struggles with properly constructed sentences. I guess I take credit for the latter while the teachers...
Chalkdust| 2.25.11 @ 9:39AM
Ah yes Brian Mc. Tounge in cheek but still the curse of parenthood. I console myself with a bon mot that goes; "The only thing we inherit from our parents are looks and manners."
Brian Mc| 2.25.11 @ 10:15AM
Good point, CD. Every classroom I ever attended scorned 'foureyes'. The nerd who excelled and in the process made everyone else look bad. It's a teacher's responsibility to encourage the best from each of their students, top to bottom. In failing this, they quickly ensure that their dues are up to date!
Liberal Reader| 2.26.11 @ 10:27PM
Brian --
The difficulties your daughter has with forming proper sentences are not necessarily -- indeed, they probably are not -- the fault of your or her teachers. Young people learn different kinds of skills at different rates.
You sound like a concerned parent, and I'm sure her teachers are doing fine. While you may want to consider a little tutoring (this would depend where she is in her education -- some students still need it as college freshman), it may be something that will work itself out as she discovers things she is interested in studying.
Sometimes the scapegoating that goes on when people begin to talk about education is more of a problem than anything else.
"Blaming the parents" is absurd. No adults care about a child's education more than his or her parents. But parents can do things that greatly improve a student's chance of doing well. READING to young children is especially important, as is keeping them away from television. Encouraging them to play sports, join clubs, participate at church, etc. -- all the stuff that concerned parents do anyway, really -- is very important to helping young people do well at school.
Chalkdust| 2.25.11 @ 9:28AM
If you were starting a new country would you choose to have labor unions educate your children? Of course not, it's little wonder our children's test scores rank so low against children of other countries.
The core of these various state budget problems, poor education results, dumbing down of our education system and a voting public dumb enough to elect politicians like Obama/Biden. Can be laid at the doorstep of that vile, ignoramus Jimmy Carter and his pay-off to the teacher's union for their support. I'm referring to the Department of Education, a vipers pit of liberals that account for many of America's problem.
FTM| 2.26.11 @ 5:55AM
I have to argue against you in this case Chalkdust. First you can't compare the performance of American students against students in foreign countries because you're not comparing apples with apples. For example, in Japan they have two public high school systems the one for kids destined for a blue collar factory job and one for kids going to college. All of the kids in this country are lumped in together. If you attempt to compare the Japanese college bound kids with the American norm, the American norm appears to be defficient. This comparision is a lie that the NEA has been telling for decades and nobody ever calls them on it. It reverts back to the old adage that "figures don't lie but liars figure."
In compiling any statistical comparison of data the first and foremost thing that you have to do is to assure that you are making similar observations between sample populations. In this case the observations are differnent because the composition of the sample populations is different. Who gets to do the counting is very important. It's a basic conflict of interest to let the people that propose budget expenditures do the counting.
Basically the NEA and the Department of Education is lying through their teeth. Again.
J.C.Eaton| 2.25.11 @ 10:39AM
Chalk and Brian[, two of my favorite names]. I like the way you thinkThe continual cop-out is:"If the parents aren't invested...." Great, if they aren't invested, what exactly? The rejoinder is:at what point do YOU assume some resposibility? Parents divorced? Parents have always gotten divorced. Class size too large? My nuns and lay people had 35 kid classes as a matter of course.The threshold of success has gotten to be:Can the little nipper READ.....by the 8th grade for heaven's sake! Drive on!
Chalkdust| 2.25.11 @ 3:12PM
The real crux of the matter is; Who's afraid they'll fail? the answer is..... NOBODY? Why even bother to keep score is my question? Equal outcomes, nobodies feeling are hurt and everybody can go to university are the practice of today's Department of Education, union led, county ignored education system. With that system everybody (board of education, NEA, teachers, principles, universities) but the student is a winner.
My wife is a school teacher and a liberal (pray for me) to boot, but some days, what passes for common sense in her school system is even more than she can cope with and she gives off what is unmistakably conservative grunts, groans and head shakes.
Petronius| 2.25.11 @ 11:05AM
Pat Buchanan said "education in this country is a RACKET". He must have read my posts on the subject here. And the situation will not change until the despots among us are gone. Those who wield real power enjoy it because the populace doesn't care how heavily their wallets are taxed, so long as their minds are not. This government gets exactly the product it wants at college level: a docile work force that is void of any independent thought. Any motivation towards reality in learning comes in spite of the academic establishment; not because of it.
ENOUGH ROPE| 2.25.11 @ 4:21PM
Here is strong evidence that Obama is a Marxist. Search for the site American Thinker and then search for Meeting Young Obama.
Obama is a SMILING COBRA.
Clint| 2.25.11 @ 12:56PM
The Teachers Union Parasite Leeches are sucking up the confiscated American Taxpayers Money.
Griff| 2.25.11 @ 1:34PM
I seem to recall that when I was in college, a Bachelor's degree in Education was considered the easiest major on campus. Evidently, it still is.
JShizzle| 2.25.11 @ 2:34PM
Griff, when I was in college (at a Big 10 school)...one section in the curriculum was....PLAYING THE RECORDER! College students being graded on playing a plastic instrument. Really.
Fred| 2.25.11 @ 3:19PM
I say this as someone with a masters in Ed. (I also have a PhD in a real discipline): One of the great tragedies of American education is that our children are being taught by education majors.
Chalkdust| 2.25.11 @ 6:04PM
Thanks Fred.....That took a certain amount of guts. You can share my foxhole anytime.
FTM| 2.26.11 @ 5:58AM
Yup, when I was in engineering school and you flunked out of the math and physics classes you changed your major to education and became a teacher.
Houston Rao| 2.25.11 @ 2:51PM
Government and unions derive their power from the acquiescence of the people, not their consent. Take away the acquiescence and they lose their power.
Until the people stop sending their kids to public schools, change will be at the margins. People should pull their kids out of schools en masse and home school them in protest, until the laws are changed to allow parents to send their kids to schools of their choice and the money follows the kid. Parents can form neighborhood associations to support each other in home-schooling. What will the teachers/administrators do if no kid shows up?
jawin| 2.25.11 @ 3:01PM
What a lot of people don't realize is that public employees' unions have essentially set themselves up as non-competitive contractors with the ability to determine whether or not taxes will need to be raised, and governments have allowed them to do so to taxpayers' detriment (typically, the more liberal the government, the more detrimental to the taxpayers). The general public is only barely coming to realize it and we must keep the pedal to the metal so more taxpaying Americans become fully aware of the very real damage public unions wreak on our society.
Unions don't have contracts, they have collective bargaining agreements (CBAs). As those CBAs expire, the unions and the government enter into negotiations -- very much like professional sports unions do with their respective ownerships. This is done about every three years or so. The government employees' unions have the upper hand since they have the power to strike coupled with the governments' need to maintain services of all sorts. As an example, one of those services is education. Since every state has some sort of mandate requiring parents ensure their kids go to school, theirs is a special double control that education unions have over the taxpayers. Another example is trash collection. Ever seen an American city without trash pickup? Yes, we all have.
It is a conflict of interest that should not be allowed to stand. AND, to top it off, it's a conflict of interest with no competition allowed!! So then this really is a type of extortion, as neither the government nor the people have any other recourse except what the unions will accept. Afterall, the government, by law instituting the CBA process, isn't allowed to turn to other contractors. Likewise, citizens don't have another government responsible for repairing roads.
Yet, many private companies can do the same job for far less money and with much less waste and in far less time, thereby reducing the need to tax at such high rates. But, those private companies don't even get a chance to write a proposal to win the contract, because the governments don't even consider negotiating with anyone else but the current contract holders -- unions.
Another aspect of the current arrangement between public sector unions and governments is that the sole contractor (unions) is allowed to donate to politicians. Usually those donations are given during campaigns; sometimes they're not. Either way and no matter when, those donations amount to being bribes from the contractor to the contractee (or potential contractee). Politicians then decide what pay and benefits the unions get. This is clearly a quid pro quo. In private business, this practice is specifically outlawed. Every respectable American business finds it contemptible behavior and goes to great lengths to prevent it from occurring. Should a megacorporation based in the US be caught in the act, liberals of every stripe will make a public outcry, as they ought. Yet, with public employees unions, those same liberals will use every political ploy and strategy to keep the practice alive and well as most of those donations go to liberal politicians.
Make no mistake, in Wisconsin (and soon to be in other states), the fight is over who controls the power to tax. The power to tax should remain with government, without any form of corollary systems allowed or any undue influence from government employees themselves. In other words, public employees unions' should be outlawed.
ENOUGH ROPE| 2.25.11 @ 4:22PM
Here is strong evidence that Obama is a Marxist. Search for the site American Thinker and then search for Meeting Young Obama.
Obama is a SMILING COBRA.
ENOUGH ROPE| 2.25.11 @ 4:25PM
House Republicans should pass a resolution that urges states, especially states with Republican governors, to end the public school system and replace it with private school vouchers funded by current school taxes. States should limit cities to governmental departments that are essential, such as police, fire, water, streets, and a very few other essential services; public schools should not be one of them.
Government control of the monopolistic public schools systems enables the government to brainwash students with the government party line which opposes Judeo-Christian values, U.S. political, economic and cultural history, the U.S. Constitution, and the idea that our individual rights come from God--not from the state.
I am persuaded that the leftists who control the schools of education and public schools work to make our students, and thus our citizenry, ignorant and incompetent. Why? Ignorant and incompetent citizens can be duped easily.
It will take generations for the permanent underclass created by Liberals and Progressives to be educated about the truth that there is no free lunch, because socialism works until there is no one left with money to confiscate for redistribution.
Until the victims in the underclass learn that they have been duped by the Liberals and Progressives, the public school system monopoly must be replaced by private schools that teach truth, goodness, beauty, virtue, wisdom, love of God, and love of neighbor. Starve the public schools of school taxes that should fund the private schools.
When the current thugs who rule the Senate and the Executive Branch are replaced by Conservatives and Republicans, then a law should be passed that grants the states the CHOICE to do all of the above. I say choice, because we must limit the Federal Government to the powers stated in the U.S. Constitution.
Do the above, and America will become once again a nation under God.
Ken (Old Texican)| 2.25.11 @ 5:44PM
Mr. Biddle..............sorry.
Your articles are muddy as hell.
I am a number one bestseller.
I learned to write clearly.
You have not, yet.
Mr. Regnery,
Please replace this knothead.
martin j smith| 2.26.11 @ 8:25AM
If the NEA and the UFT are essentially allies of the Socialist Democrat Party then two thing must be done: One educate parents of children in districts that are Red or purple( Lefties do not give a damn ) what is going on with their tax dollars.
Two if republicans gain control limit Union power as much as possible.
If I were living in a school district where teachers were getting a deal that is unsustainable except thru squeezing taxes out of citizens then I should opposed to paying large goodies at my expense.
I could also be unemployed as well btw.
In addition: I would reccommend to parents who have children attending public schools to monitor the work given their kids closely. Especially look out for propaganda being taught in schools as academic work. This could include such subjects as social studies,science( global worming ) etc. Watch out for Anti-Americanism and also PC behavior towards terrorism etc. In fact look out for anything that smacks of socialist Marxist ideology. There is a lot of work to be done. --not the least of which is to make sure are teachers are teaching not preaching.
Liberal Reader| 2.26.11 @ 10:11PM
One such card is the 80,000 people who showed up in Madison WI today, following the historic protests all over the state on Thursday. That's a card. That is being played.
Reebok | 8.11.11 @ 2:48AM
is good
العاب | 4.11.12 @ 5:21PM
thayou .... good