Washington Examiner — April 6, 2010
“Teachers Union can’t block reform forever” By Sarah Longwell
Thirty-seven states as well as the District failed to qualify for its share of President Obama’s $4.3 billion “Race to the Top” education fund. The reason? In a contest evaluating the state’s plans for educational reform, continued opposition from teachers unions has slowed reforms like charter schools, merit pay, and firing bad teachers.
This isn’t just a D.C. problem--teachers unions are responsible for similar setbacks around the nation. But if recent developments are any guide, the unions are finally running out of allies.
Earlier this year in Rhode Island, a school superintendent made national news when she took action to fix her town’s high school. By any measure, the school was failing. In standardized tests, only one-third of the students were proficient in writing, and a shocking 7 percent were proficient in math. Despite the consistently poor performance, however, the local teachers union refused to change their contract to turn the school around. The contract changes were hardly draconian: the union turned down a proposed 7-hour workday with paid overtime. Last month the superintendent fired all 93 teachers, and Central Falls High School will start next year with a clean slate. There’s no question that an across-the-board firing is harsh. But it’s hard to find anyone outside of a teachers union who thinks that more accountability for teachers is a bad thing.
Even Barack Obama, perhaps the most pro-labor president since FDR, has spoken approvingly of the firings. In a speech shortly after the decision in Rhode Island, Obama remarked, “If a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn’t show signs of improvement, then there’s got to be a sense of accountability.”
The unions’ reaction to the President’s statement was predictable. The head of the American Federation of Teachers said she was “disappointed,” and the chief of the National Education Association called the President’s thinking “naive at best.” One of the fired teachers was caught hanging Obama in effigy inside a classroom.
The rest of America knows a few things the unions should learn. First, when you do a bad job at work, you should expect to get fired. And second, a symbolic lynching of the first African-American president is unlikely to get you much sympathy.
Firing bad teachers is such an obvious necessity that most Americans may be forgiven for assuming it’s something that actually happens. But in many school districts across the country, union-negotiated contracts have made it virtually impossible to fire a teacher for anything less than a felony conviction.
In New York City, a special task force with a $1 million annual budget has only been able to fire three underperforming teachers in two years. And in California, the Los Angeles Unified School District has spent $3.5 million to fire four teachers. It shouldn’t cost a fortune to get rid of a bad employee—but the unions have so thoroughly corrupted the firing process with endless rounds of hearings, appeals, and arbitrations, it literally takes years to purge each incompetent teacher from the payroll.
New York City, like other cities hit hard by the recession, has had to make tough decisions in recent months: cutting aid for disabled residents and the elderly, even reducing the number of cops on the street. Yet at the same time, New York is paying $30 million per year to teachers who don’t actually teach. These “teachers”, awaiting disciplinary hearings in the so-called “rubber room”, collect full pay and benefits for months and even years, all at taxpayer expense. The most egregious offenders—like a teacher who has been collecting a $94,000 salary for seven years after allegedly impregnating a 16-year-old student—have sparked public outrage against the city’s teachers union.
But the clearest sign of the unions’ dwindling base of support is found in their high-profile battle with the Washington, D.C. public school system. In a city where the Democratic mayor won 89 percent of the popular vote, the local teachers union is losing ground to the pro-reform schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee. The national unions are watching closely—they know that if Rhee is successful in introducing new accountability measures to make it easier to fire bad teachers, the reforms will spread quickly across the nation.
At a time when Republicans and Democrats seem determined to disagree on everything, common-sense education reform may be the issue that unites both parties and snaps Washington out of its partisan deadlock.