My thoughts on Randi and the teachers unions

In my emails over the years I’ve long been quite critical of the teachers unions in general and Randi Weingarten in particular. I’ve cranked up the volume recently, so perhaps it’s worth a moment to clarify my views.

I’ve never met Randi and actually have a great deal of professional respect for her. I think she’s very smart and clever and does a very good job fighting for the interests of the union members that she represents. When she advocates something that I don’t think is in the best interests of children, I blast her for it, but it’s not personal -- she’s just doing her job!

Many school reformers become outraged when this happens, but this is an unreasonable expectation. Just like any other union, they exist to fight for the interests of their members – things like higher pay, better benefits, shorter work hours and greater job protection – and they have been extraordinarily effective at achieving these aims. Does anyone get angry when the head of the longshoreman’s union fights for work rules that create more jobs, hours, benefits, job protection and privileges for his members, at the expense of the efficient and cost-effective operation of the port? Of course not – he’s just doing his job!

There is, however, one HUGE difference: no-one thinks that the longshoreman’s union cares one iota about the efficient and cost-effective operation of the port, yet the general public, media and politicians tend to suffer from the delusion that the teachers unions represent the interests of children! There are two reasons for this misunderstanding: 1) given that teachers are the critical variable in what children learn, it’s easy to link their interests; and 2) the teachers unions have been very clever in linking these interests in their lobbying, advertising, public statements, etc. Every time someone proposes something that the teachers union opposes, they loudly proclaim that it’s an attack on children. However disingenuous, it’s no doubt a very clever and effective strategy.

It’s critical to understand that the interests of teachers are often completely contradictory to the interests of children. For example, it is obviously in the best interests of children if ineffective teachers are denied tenure and, if they already have tenure, can be removed quickly, yet the unions fight – generally very successfully – to make tenure automatic and make it extremely difficult to remove even the most ineffective teacher. Another example: among the unions’ favorite prescriptions to fix our schools is to reduce class size, which obviously benefits unions because it requires hiring many more teachers, yet the evidence shows that this is very costly yet does little to help students – and may even harm disadvantaged students.

The key for those of us in the school reform movement is to have a consistent, forceful message that WE, not the unions, are the ones who put the interests of children first. We need to fight the vast marketing of the unions with our own clever marketing – perhaps a slogan like: “Fighting for a public school system that puts children first”…