Teacher Unions

Yesterday, there was a piece, actually the cover story, in the Times Sunday Magazine about education reform and teachers' unions which I think provides a pretty good look at the need for educational reform and the role the teachers’ unions have in blocking truly meaningful reform. What I come away from the article with is that the major impediments for the unions are accountability, teacher evaluation and tenure.

The unions fight tooth and nail to preserve tenure, seniority and the lack of accountability on the part of teachers for student progress. In effect, the unions are working hard to protect the jobs of poor and mediocre teachers. The problem is that there are too many of those in the unions to make it easy to get around them. Remember the old saw, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” or, “If you can’t get a real job, you can always teach.” Teaching was always considered a fall-back option for new college graduates looking for work. In the past, too many positions in the public schools have been filled by…well, let’s just say that they were/are not our best.

The thing is, if you are a good teacher, if you are one of those people who former students remember fondly as being agents of change in their lives, then you shouldn’t have to worry about any of this. And, from what I can see of all the reform efforts, if you are a good teacher, you will end up being paid well; at least better than you are being paid now.

So, what is needed is a new type of teacher’s union. This union should be limited to good teachers. And don’t kid yourselves, the teachers out there know which among them are good and which are mediocre, or worse. Give the teachers in these unions grievance mediation tools, protection from abuse, of any kind, from supervisors and the ability to bargain for anything not connected to tenure. Set up an evaluation process which utilizes independent evaluators who have no connection to the teachers/school district being evaluated. Then let’s see what kind of data we get from tracking teachers who are considered “good” to “excellent.” I’ll bet that a few years of headlines detailing the progress and benefits to the kids this arrangement brings will be enough to sound the death knell to the unions which protected the incompetent teachers.