Late last week, NEA boss Dennis Van Roekel went off on education reformers following a story that appeared in Politico under the ominous-sounding headline “The Fall of Teacher Unions.”
Since DFER was featured in the piece as on occasional political counter-voice to the unions, and because we’ve got some folks on our staff who are former teacher union staffers and members, we felt it important to re-state a couple of things for the record:
1. We don’t think teacher unions are going anywhere. Nor should they.
2. Our work has never been about eliminating teachers unions. From coast to coast we have seen so many poorly-run public school systems with obnoxious, buzz-kill bureaucracies that we are often thankful that someone is on the ground making sure teachers don’t get screwed by the public education machinery. (To those who have told us they would rather see teacher unions become extinct, our advice has been to fight to make sure that public education systems are so well run that teachers don’t feel they need a union. We also aren’t holding our breath waiting for that to happen.)
3. We not only believe that teachers should have a voice in education policy, we think that when they are at their best, spokesmen and spokeswomen for teachers play an important role in actually improving education policy and the internal politics surrounding policy implementation. (When teacher union leaders say ‘no’ to every idea coming down the pike, they inevitably leave teachers out of very important discussions and decisions which are going to happen anyway.) Teacher voice is essential. But that doesn’t mean they should have the only voice in the choir. Public education is too big and too important for one interest and One Voice to stand above all of the others.
4. The Democratic Party, in particular, has been too willing over the years to allow one voice to dominate its education thinking. This has been bad for public education and just as bad for the Democratic Party. People in the real world live in, well, the real world. They are having these discussions about public education whether the One Voice wants it to or not. They don’t believe that hoping things could be better for kids represents a “corporate attack on public education.” They think some of the things they hear about in their schools are stupid and they wonder if there aren’t better ways to do them. They aren’t anti-teacher and, if anything, they are really talking about saving the institution of public education from itself.
5. When the Democratic Party outsources its education policy to the One Voice, it reinforces two concepts that swing voters fear most about Democrats: that we’re all talk and no action when it comes to actually helping people; and that we’re an inflexible party that is held hostage by special interests. Indeed, today’s teacher union leaders put elected Democrats in extremely untenable positions when they bully them to support the indefensible, like granting near-automatic tenure to anyone who is able to maintain a pulse for two school years. Good teachers deserve better than that.
6. We’ve talked many times about the importance of ‘means’ and ‘ends’ in our work. A world without teachers unions is simply not what seek. We fight for a Party where Democrats are allowed to acknowledge there is a problem, so that Democrats can lead when seeking solutions.
We understand that critics would just as soon see maintain the political status quo which has hurt both school children and Democratic Party candidates for office.
We agree with those who viewed the importance of Vergara v. California in terms of kicking some serious problems in public education back to the public (and its elected representatives) so that we can all recapture the promise of public education. And yes, unless teacher union leaders can’t handle sharing the microphone, teachers ought to be front and center in that discussion. This doesn’t have to be so complicated.