SORRY SCHOOLS: UNIONS AREN'T THE ONLY PROBLEM

 Andy Rotherham with a somewhat different take on Rod Paige's new book, blasting teacher unions.  I don't have an opinion on the book, as I've only finished the first few chapters...

-------------------------------------------

SORRY SCHOOLS

UNIONS AREN'T THE ONLY PROBLEM

By ANDREW J. ROTHERHAM

March 11, 2007 -- WAR AGAINST HOPE: HOW TEACHER UNIONS HURT CHILDREN, HINDER TEACHERS AND ENDANGER PUBLIC EDUCATION
BY ROD PAIGE
NELSON CURRENT, 336 PAGES, $25.99

http://www.nypost.com/seven/03112007/postopinion/postopbooks/sorry_schools_postopbooks_andrew_j__rotherham.htm

A DEFINITIVE book, by a high-profile public figure, explaining how kids - especially poor kids and kids of color - lose out in the political and policy debates about schools is long overdue. "War against Hope" by former Secretary of Education Rod Paige isn't that book.

Instead, Paige, who served as a school superintendent in Houston, Texas, before becoming President Bush's first secretary of Education, has launched a broadside against the teachers' unions, which he sees as the primary villain in American education. As a result, Paige again manages to make the teachers' unions look sympathetic just as when he characterized the country's largest union as a "terrorist organization" in 2004.

How ironic, given the book's goal and because teachers' unions are often anything but helpful partners in school reform. As Jane Hannaway and I showed in our book, "Collective Bargaining in Education," some common practices championed by the unions do clash with students' best interests.

Yet teachers' unions are hardly the only impediment to improving American education. Any analysis must carefully disentangle the extent to which they are the cause of problems or merely symptoms of more fundamental issues.