Mr. Terry Moe is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a member of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education, and a professor of political science at Stanford, and is the winner of this year’s Thomas B. Fordham Prize for distinguished scholarship in education.
Here’s some excerpts from an excellent article—with the sub-heading Unions don’t have children’s best interests at heart—which he wrote in OpinionJournal.com about teachers unions and how they need to be reined in. I couldn’t agree more with Terry Moe on every point.
The article is written to an American audience but applies equally in Canada.
(My bolding)
The teachers unions have more influence over the public schools than any other group in American society. They influence schools from the bottom up, through collective bargaining activities that shape virtually every aspect of school organization. And they influence schools from the top down, through political activities that shape government policy. They are the 800-pound gorillas of public education. Yet the American public is largely unaware of how influential they are—and how much they impede efforts to improve public schools.
[…]
Teachers unions have to be understood in much the same way. Their behavior is driven by fundamental interests too, except that their interests have to do with the jobs, working conditions, and material well-being of teachers. When unions negotiate with school boards, these are the interests they pursue, not those of the children who are supposed to be getting educated.
The resulting contracts often run to more than 100 pages, and are filled with provisions for higher wages, fantastic health benefits and retirement packages, generous time off, total job security, teacher transfer and assignment rights, restrictions on how teachers can be evaluated, restrictions on nonclassroom duties, and countless other rules that shackle the discretion of administrators. These contracts make the schools costly to run, heavily bureaucratic, and extremely difficult for administrators to manage. They also ensure that even the most incompetent teachers are virtually impossible to remove from the classroom. The organization of schools, as a result, is not even remotely the kind of organization one would design if the best interests of children were the guiding criterion.
[…]
When the teachers unions want government to act, the reforms they demand are invariably in their own interests: more spending, higher salaries, smaller classes, more professional development, and so on. There is no evidence that any of these is an important determinant of student learning. What the unions want above all else, however, is to block reforms that seriously threaten their interests—and these reforms, not coincidentally, are attempts to bring about fundamental changes in the system that would significantly improve student learning.
The unions are opposed to No Child Left Behind, for example, and indeed to all serious forms of school accountability, because they do not want teachers’ jobs or pay to depend on their performance. They are opposed to school choice—charter schools and vouchers—because they don’t want students or money to leave any of the schools where their members work. They are opposed to the systematic testing of veteran teachers for competence in their subjects, because they know that some portion would fail and lose their jobs. And so it goes. If the unions can’t kill these threatening reforms outright, they work behind the scenes to make them as ineffective as possible—resulting in accountability systems with no teeth, choice systems with little choice, and tests that anyone can pass.
[…] 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’Ã
Writer and Executive Editor for ProudToBeCanadian.ca.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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