Sadly similar to Area Man’s earlier post about the firing of Reed Hastings from the California State Board of Education, the Progressive Policy Institute’s Eduwonk reports on pressure to fire San Diego’s superintendent of schools Alan Bersin. His sin? Allowing several underperforming schools to move toward charter status, with the support of parents and (in two cases) the affected school’s teachers. It’s a sad echo of what happened to Richard Riordan’s reform members of the Los Angeles Unified School District board — ousted by teacher’s union-supported apparatchiks after one term — and makes one wonder if there is any hope for reform unless institutional barriers are removed. A sign of the frustration many feel is Stanford political science professor Terry Moe’s recent proposal that the power of teachers unions themselves needs to be constrained by law:

If we really want to improve schools, something has to be done about the teachers unions. The idea that an enlightened “reform unionism” will somehow emerge that voluntarily puts the interests of children first–an idea in vogue among union apologists–is nothing more than a pipe dream. The unions are what they are. They have fundamental, job-related interests that are very real, and are the raison d’être of their organizations. These interests drive their behavior, and this is not going to change. Ever.

If the teachers unions won’t voluntarily give up their power, then it has to be taken away from them–through new laws that, among other things, drastically limit (or prohibit) collective bargaining in public education, link teachers’ pay to their performance, make it easy to get rid of mediocre teachers, give administrators control over the assignment of teachers to schools and classrooms, and prohibit unions from spending a member’s dues on political activities unless that member gives explicit prior consent.

Moe’s point is that we should no more expect teacher’s unions (note — the union, not individual teachers) to put the community’s educational goals first than we should expect a business to ‘care’ about issues tangential to its principal duty of maximizing return to shareholders. As institutions, they are simply doing what they have evolved to do.

He’s right on target. The first major volley in the modern educational reform movement was the “A Nation At Risk” report published in April 1983. And what has changed? A beachhead for accountability, a few forays into charter schools and vouchers, but that’s about it in a generation. Lots of interesting ideas have bubbled up, many thoughtful people across the political spectrum are engaged, and there is certainly support from communities for improvement — but unless teacher’s unions at every level can either be co-opted, marginalized, or brought into the fold, we will be bemoaning the lack of progress in public education a generation from now.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 23rd, 2005 at 11:06 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under California Schemin', Brilliant, but uncategorizable, (Un)education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.