Teachers

How Tolerating Misbehavior Hurts Students

November 26, 2022 By Garion Frankel and David Buck 1 Comment

Students need order — not loosely managed pandemonium — to learn effectively. Without it, pandemic-era learning loss will continue to accelerate.

A letter from a teacher to the Milwaukee School Board begins with the line: “Coming to work each day has always brought me excitement” but “those feelings are quickly turning to fear; fear of how my colleagues and I will be abused for yet another day.” The letter continues: “Teachers are trying to put out the ‘bigger fires;’ the fights, the furniture being flailed, protecting their students from bodily harm.” Another letter writer tells of being punched by a student who received “no consequences.”

While woke curricula might be turning math classes into mediocre seminars on critical race theory, the intrusion of progressive discipline policies into schools are changing entire buildings into Lord of the Flies. Among other misbehaviors, America’s children are serially vandalizing school property, challenging other students to slap teachers, and engaging in open sexual harassment against adults.

More worryingly, there are few, if any, signs of improvement. Data collected by the Institute of Education Sciences found that, in a survey of 850 school leaders, one in three reported an increase in student violence and fights. Over half reported an increase in classroom disruptions.

While the pandemic likely worsened the problem, this trend toward pandemonium began earlier. In 2014, President Barack Obama signed a dear colleague letter threatening legal action against schools that doled out consequences disproportionately between white and black students.

Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) reacted accordingly. In place of disciplinary measures, they shifted toward soft-on-consequences approaches such as restorative justice and Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), quickly reducing suspension rates throughout the district.

A similar story played out across the country. In New York City, for example, suspension rates fell by half. The George Floyd riots only accelerated its progression. Leading charter networks such as KIPP and Uncommon implemented further steps before suspensions and eliminated detentions for “minor infractions.” In 2021, the Dallas Independent School District announced that it would eliminate in- and out-of-school suspensions altogether, replacing them with social-emotional “Reset Centers.”

But then reality set in. Although total suspensions declined precipitously in MPS, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty found that the proportion of students who felt unsafe in school increased. Schools where a higher proportion of students felt unsafe reported more disciplinary incidents. In other words, lax disciplinary policies did nothing to reduce racial discrimination, and did nothing to improve school safety. But that didn’t stop one Milwaukee principal from proclaiming that, “We are proud to say that we are making strides in the right direction.”

These policy changes are not without precedent. In the 2012-2013 school year, Philadelphia limited suspensions for non-violent behavior. One academic review found that “serious incidents of student misconduct increased,” student truancy worsened, and academic achievement declined. It’s hard to focus on academics in a chaotic school setting.

Once again, the rest of the country has not fared much better. In New York, chronic absenteeism has reached a mind-boggling 37 percent, while weapons confiscations have increased by 80 percent, including 14 firearms and 325 tasers or stun guns. Dallas cut punishments by 80 percent, but teachers continue to report behavioral concerns, and the “Reset Centers” have done little to reduce racial disparities in student punishment. KIPP employees are complaining about student behavior in an institution in which student misbehavior had been previously unthinkable.

Crime spikes and policing reform dominate headlines and societal debates. All the while, a similar scenario is playing out in America’s public schools with little public awareness or controversy. What’s more, as behavior worsens, soft-on-consequences approaches to discipline like Restorative Justice and PBIS are growing in popularity. These approaches cannot account for all of the worsening trends, but they do represent a fundamental shift to how schools respond to misbehavior that’s likely to only worsen the problem.

Yet another letter to Milwaukee Public Schools told how students know that, “They won’t receive any effective consequences,” and so “more students realize that they can come to school” but they don’t “actually have to follow any rules.” If students are permitted to run roughshod over any adult who gets in their way, statistical reductions in school suspensions are meaningless. If data is to be believed, these few letters in Milwaukee represent the learning conditions — if we could call them that — of countless schools across the country.

Click here to read the full article in the National Review

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: California Politics, education, Teachers

Chicago Teachers Strike Out

January 19, 2022 By Larry Sand 2 Comments

If teachers won’t teach, they should be fired.

In December, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona urged school leaders “not to retreat from in-person learning,” and said schools should not be considering remote options. Just last week, President Biden echoed the sentiment, stating that “schools should remain open despite the ongoing nationwide surge of COVID-19 cases due to the omicron variant.” Even the ultimate doom and gloom purveyor Anthony Fauci insists that despite the rising cases of the omicron variant, “reopening schools for in-person learning is the right call given widespread vaccinations among teachers and the negative effects on students of not attending in-person.” Additionally, Allison Arwady, Chicago Department of Public Health commissioner, notes that her public health team “compared data on public school children who were attending school remotely to data on private school children who were attending school in-person and found that the children, as well as staff, going in-person with coronavirus protocols in place were actually at lower risk of contracting the virus.” Arwady’s sentiments are borne out by that fact that while public schools suffered through union-driven closures, Catholic schools in major cities have been continually open for in-person instruction since September 2020 with no harmful effects to teachers or students.

It’s no secret that transmission rates from minors are low, particularly among younger children. The BMJ, a peer-reviewed medical trade journal published by the British Medical Association, is skeptical that school closures reduced COVID-19 cases at all. Looking at the big picture, there’s more risk of death to children riding in a car than there is from catching COVID-19. Evidence also suggests the omicron variant is no worse for kids than catching the common cold. The same holds true for vaccinated teachers. And with schools nationwide having received $190 billion specifically to deal with Covid-related issues, you’d think when schools were set to open after Christmas break, all would be good, right? Well, no.

Ignoring reality, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten explained in a recent tweet, “We need adequate staff & the safety measures in place including testing, masking, ventilation. There is a lot of stress.”

Stress?!

Other “essential” workers are expected to continue to provide service during this trying time. Cops, sanitation workers and firemen don’t get to stay home with no repercussions. Why should teachers? Also, when teachers go to a supermarket, they expect to get service. They wouldn’t like it one bit if the guy who stocks the produce shelves decided he was too “stressed” to come to work.

No matter. The Chicago Teachers Union, one of the most rabid in the country, decided to poll its teachers on reopening, and on January 4^th, 73% of them decided to nix in-person instruction, insisting they would only teach online. In addition to 350,000 children who were yet again barred from going to school, the lives of thousands of parents were disrupted with no warning. (Though school was cancelled, the school buildings did remain open for other services, including meals and vaccination clinics.)

The response to the walkout was fast and furious. Mincing no words, Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot called the strike illegal and said, “If you care about our students, if you care about our families, as we do, we will not relent. Enough is enough. We are standing firm and we are going to fight to get our kids back to in-person learning. Period. Full stop.” And for good measure, she added, “I will not allow them to take our children hostage…. Why are we here again when we know that the safest place for our children is in school? Why are we here again when we know that our schools are safe?”

Then came the kicker. Lightfoot locked teachers out of online classrooms, and said the no-show educators would not be paid for the time they were not in the classroom.

The aforementioned Randi Weingarten, who never misses an opportunity to comment on, well, anything, beclowned herself yet again, asserting in a tweet, “Let’s be clear here regarding Chicago schools – No one wants schools closed.” She also praised educators, whom she laughably insists “have been herculean.”

Back in the real world, in addition to Lightfoot, Chicago Public School system officials claimed that the strike by the city’s teachers is illegal. (All teacher strikes should be illegal, but I will tackle that issue another day.) Labor lawyer Burt Odelson, who represents several suburban school boards, agrees. He asserts that the union failed to go through the proper channels, which is laid out in the collective bargaining agreement. “It’s an unauthorized wildcat strike. It’s the employees telling the boss, ‘we’re doing what we want! Pay us anyway. And, if you don’t succumb to what our terms of employment are, too bad!’ That’s exactly what it is. It’s a wildcat strike.”

Well, after much wrangling the Chicago Teachers Union’s House of Delegates and the school district have reached a tentative agreement, pending acceptance by the rank-and-file. As reported by Fox News, the agreement, which still requires a rank-and-file vote, “will allow schools to return to remote learning if 25% of staff test positive for COVID-19. It also secures access to increased testing and personal protective equipment, and enhances contact-tracing measures at all public schools.”

The union honchos are not happy with the settlement. CTU Vice President Stacey Davis Gates groused during a press conference Monday, “This mayor is unfit to lead this city, and she is on a one-woman kamikaze mission to destroy our public schools.” Gates added that union once again has “had to create infrastructure for safety and accountability in Chicago schools, saying members have been held in hostage negotiations.”

One can only assume that Lightfoot’s strong words and actions were a big factor in ending the work stoppage.

Click here to read the full article at Frontpagemag.com

Filed Under: Trending News Tagged With: covid, Teachers, unions

Threat of Sacramento Teacher Strike Spurs Criticism

March 24, 2019 By Chris Reed 2 Comments

Teachers in the Sacramento City Unified School District have authorized a strike, hoping to follow in the footsteps of teachers in Los Angeles Unified and Oakland Unified and secure substantial raises after a brief walkout.

But in key ways, the dynamics appear different. In Los Angeles and Oakland, the public and the local media were clearly sympathetic. Teachers had not had significant raises in years, and with the cost of housing going up arguably have lost purchasing power in recent years.

In Sacramento, however, the argument that the local school district simply can’t afford raises because of the huge long-term increase in pension costs and loss in state funding because of declining enrollment has resonated far more than similar warnings did in Los Angeles and Oakland. Coverage in regular and social media has repeatedly emphasized three points:

The Sacramento City Teachers Association secured an 11 percent raise for most members in September 2017 after threatening a strike. The Sacramento County Office of Education warned at the time that without significant cuts, the district faced fiscal disaster. But the local teachers union has rejected calls to reduce the cost of health benefits that the state Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) says are the most generous in the Sacramento region.

The warning from school officials that even without having to provide new raises, the district faces a $35 million hole in a nearly $400 million annual budget and is on track to run out of money in November. At that point, under state law, the district could seek an emergency loan from the state Legislature, but on the condition that it accept an appointed administrator to make key financial decisions going forward, taking away most of the school board’s and Superintendent Jorge Aguilar’s powers. The primary goal of hose decisions would be ensuring the district pays back the state loan.

The fact that the four other employee unions in Sacramento City Unified have sided with Aguilar’s warning that a raise could seal state control of the school district for a decade or more, as has happened in other California districts that have been unable to pay their bills. They don’t buy the teachers union claim that the district has failed to honor the contract it signed in 2017, thus making a strike necessary even though state law says such a strike would be illegal since the teachers are still under contract.

Writing Monday, Sacramento Bee columnist Marcos Breton warned the teachers union that it risked disaster not just for the district and its 42,000 students but for a city that has built up civic momentum in recent years under Mayor Darrell Steinberg.

“Sacramento’s efforts to sell itself as a place for companies to invest would be damaged because a major selling point is good schools,” Breton wrote. “How many investment opportunities would be lost if Sacramento became known as the city whose schools were bankrupt?”

Aguilar arrived in 2017 at the district and is given good marks in most circles for his determination to avoid financial disaster. But a FCMAT audit released in December pointed out a vast array of problems in Sacramento City’s management that dated back many years. It cited incompetence and poor communications by the district’s business team and a failure to properly analyze budget data that indicated the headaches to come.

Union leaders say these management failings are not their responsibility and should not be held against their push for better pay.

The union’s hope that a strike authorization vote would lead to new concessions hasn’t happened so far. A union statement said the strike was coming “at a date likely in the next month.”

This article was originally published by CalWatchdog.com

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: education, Sacramento, strike, Teachers

L.A. Teachers Strike To Preserve Their Ruinous Monopoly

January 21, 2019 By Lee E. Ohanian 5 Comments

Last week, 31,000 Los Angeles Unified School District teachers represented by the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) union went on strike for the first time in 30 years.

Substitute teachers and administrators make up a skeleton crew that is keeping schools open, and about one-third of the 640,000 district students are attending class.

The strike is exacting a tremendous toll on parents, many of whom are poor and who must decide whether to take time off of work to care for their children or send their children to grossly understaffed schools.

The issues underlying the strike highlight the challenges facing public school administration, teacher unions and school funding, and shows what must change if U.S. public schools are to increase student achievement.

The strike is about teacher pay, classroom size and increasing the number of school support staff, including counselors, librarians and nurses. But at a deeper level, the strike is really about suppressing the state’s charter schools, which are the major competition facing traditional schools.

Charter schools, which grew out of interest in having public alternatives to traditional schools, began in 1992 and now enroll over 600,000 students within California. Charters have become increasingly popular, and their number has doubled over the last decade. …

Click here to read the full article from The Hill

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: LAUSD, strike, Teachers, UTLA

Are LAUSD Teachers Underpaid, or Does it Cost Too Much to Live in California?

January 18, 2019 By Edward Ring 19 Comments

In California, public sector unions pretty much run the state government. Government unions collect and spend over $800 million per year in California. There is no special interest in California both willing and able to mount a sustained challenge to public sector union power. They simply have too much money, too many people on their payroll, too many politicians they can make or break, and too much support from a biased and naive media.

The teachers strike in Los Angeles Unified School District cannot be fully appreciated outside of this overall context: Public sector unions are the most powerful political actor in California, at the state level, in the counties and cities, and on most school boards, certainly including the Los Angeles Unified School District. With all this control and influence, have these unions created the conditions that feed their current grievances?

The grievances leading the United Teachers of Los Angeles to strike center around salary, class sizes, and charter schools. But when the cost of benefits are taken into account, it is hard to argue that LAUSD teachers are underpaid.

According to the Los Angeles County Office of Education, the median salary of a LAUSD teacher is $75,000, but that’s just base pay. A statement by LAUSDin response to a 2014 report on LAUSD salaries challenged the $75,000 figure, claiming it was only around $70,000. They then acknowledged, however, that the district paid $16,432 for each employee’s healthcare in 2013-14, and paid 13.92 percent of each teachers salary to cover pension contributions, workers comp, and Medicare. That came up to $96,176 per year.

The Cost of Benefits is Breaking Education Budgets

This average total pay of nearly $100K per year back in 2013-14 is certainly higher today – even if salaries were not raised, payments for retirement benefits have grown. For their 35,000 employees, LAUSD now carries an unfunded pension liability of $6.8 billion, and their OBEB unfunded liability (OPEB stands for “other post employment benefits,” primarily retirement health insurance) has now reached a staggering $14.9 billion. CalSTRS, the pension system that collects and funds pension benefits for most LAUSD employees, receives funds directly from the state that, in a complete accounting, need to also count towards their total compensation. And CalSTRS, as of June 30, 2017 (the next update, through 6/30/2018, will be available May 2019), was only 62 percent funded. Sixty-two percent!

The reason to belabor these unfunded retirement benefits is to make it very clear: LAUSD paying an amount equivalent to 13.92 percent of each employees salary into the pension funds isn’t enough. What LAUSD teachers have been promised in terms of retirement pensions and health insurance benefits requires pre-funding far in excess of 13.92 percent. To accurately estimate how much they really make, you have to add the true amount necessary to pay for these pensions and OPEB. This real total compensation average is well over $100K per year.

To put LAUSD teacher compensation in even more accurate context, consider how many days per year they actually work. This isn’t to dispute or disparage the long hours many (but not all) teachers put in. A conscientious teacher’s work day doesn’t begin when the students arrive in the classroom, or end when they leave. They prepare lesson plans and grade homework, and many stay after regular school hours to assist individual students or coordinate extracurricular activities. But teachers working for LAUSD only work 182 days per year. The average private sector professional, who also tends to put in long hours, assuming four weeks of either vacation or holidays, works 240 days per year – 32 percent more. The value of all this time off is incalculable, but simply normalizing pay for a 182 day year to a 240 day year yields an average annual pay of not $100K, but $132K. Taking into account the true cost of pensions and retirement healthcare benefits, much more than $132K.

This is what the LAUSD teachers union considers inadequate. If that figure appears concocted, just become an independent contractor. Suddenly the value of employer paid benefits becomes real, because you have to pay for them yourself.

California’s Ridiculously High Cost-of-Living

If a base salary of over $70,000 per year, plus benefits (far more time off each year, pensions far better than Social Security, and excellent health insurance) worth nearly as much, isn’t enough for someone to financially survive in Los Angeles, maybe the union should examine the role it played, along with other public sector unions, in raising the cost-of-living in California.

Where was the California Teachers Association when restrictive laws such as CEQA, AB 32, SB 375 were passed, making housing unaffordable by restricting supply? What was the California Teachers Association stance on health coverage for undocumented immigrants, or sanctuary state laws? What did they expect, if laws were passed to make California a magnet for the world’s poor? Don’t they see the connection between 2.6 million undocumented immigrants living in California, and a housing shortage, or crowded classrooms? Don’t they see the connection between this migration of largely destitute immigrants who don’t speak English, and the burgeoning costs to LAUSD to provide special instruction and care to these students?

From a moral standpoint, how, exactly, does it make the world a better place, when for every high-needs immigrant student entering LAUSD schools, there are ten thousand high-needs children left behind in the countries they came from, as well as less resources for high-needs children whose parents have lived in California for generations?

When you make it nearly impossible to build anything in California, from housing to energy and water infrastructure, and at the same time invite the world to move in, you create an unaffordable state. When California’s state legislature passed laws creating this situation, what was the position of California Teachers Association? Need we ask?

The Union War Against Education Reform

Charter schools, another primary grievance of the UTLA, is one of the few areas where politicians in California’s state legislature – nearly all of them Democrats by now – occasionally stand up to the teachers unions. But why are charter schools so popular? Could it be that the union controlled traditional public schools are failing students, making charter schools a popular option for parents who want their children to have a better chance at a good education?

Maybe if traditional public schools weren’t held back by union work rules, they would deliver better educational results. The disappointing result in the 2014 Vergara vs. California case provides an example. The plaintiffs sued to modify three work rules, (1) a longer period before granting tenure, (2) changing layoff criteria from seniority to merit, and (3) streamlined dismissal policies for incompetent teachers. These plaintiffs argued the existing work rules had a disproportionate negative impact on minority communities, and proved it – view the closing arguments by the plaintiff’s attorney in this case to see for yourself. But California’s State Supreme Court did not agree, and California’s public schools continue to suffer as a result.

But instead of embracing reforms such as proposed in the Vergara case, which might reduce the demand by parents for charter schools, the teachers union is trying to unionize charter schools. And instead of agreeing to benefits reform – such as contributing more to the costs for their health insurance and retirement pensions – the teachers union has gone on strike.

Financial reality will eventually compel financial reform at LAUSD. But no amount of money will improve the quality of LAUSD’s K-12 education, if union work rules aren’t changed. The saddest thing in this whole imbroglio is the fate of the excellent teacher, who works hard and successfully instructs and inspires their students. Those teachers are not overpaid at all. But the system does not nurture such excellence. How on earth did it come to this, that unions would take over public education, along with virtually every other state and local government agency in California?

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: LAUSD, strike, Teachers, unions, UTLA

L.A. Teachers Proceeding With Monday Strike Plan

January 14, 2019 By David Rosenfeld 2 Comments

Without any new proposals from Los Angeles Unified School District officials coming over the weekend, the union representing 34,000 district educators is moving forward with a strike set for Monday morning, Jan. 14.

Calling the offer on Friday by district officials unacceptable, Alex Caputo-Pearl, United Teachers Los Angeles president, said the union was engaged in a “battle for the soul of education” at a news conference Sunday afternoon at union headquarters near downtown Los Angeles.

“We are more convinced than ever that the district won’t move without a strike,” Caputo-Pearl said as he was flanked by roughly two dozen teachers, parents and students.

“Let’s be clear, teachers do not want a strike. Teachers strike when they have no other recourse,” he said.

Union leaders illustrated four demands that remained unresolved Sunday. They included a cap on class sizes, providing a full-time nurse in every school, reforming co-location policies and improving special education. …

Click here to read the full article from the L.A. Daily News

Filed Under: Trending News Tagged With: LAUSD, Los Angeles, strike, Teachers, unions, UTLA

Teachers’ Unions Appalled at Idea of Paying Teachers Like Rock Stars

October 26, 2018 By Steven Greenhut 10 Comments

If you’re looking for a stellar example of teachers’ unions ongoing commitment to mediocrity or worse, then you need only look at their reaction to California GOP gubernatorial candidate John Cox’s idea of paying top-notch teachers much higher salaries – perhaps even rivalling those earned by ballplayers and rock stars. The unions, of course, pan the idea. One union official told the Sacramento Bee that “education should not be a competitive endeavor.”

Cox seemed to suggest in a statement to the newspaper that he engaged in some hyperbole: “Of course our teachers will never approach the pay of a Beyonce or a Lebron, but quite frankly, our classroom teachers influence, inspire and change the arc of more lives than even these music and athletic superstars.” But his idea of instituting a form of merit pay makes a lot of sense. Despite the naysaying, every successful enterprise is, to some degree, competitive.

Merit pay is a simple concept. It allows school administrators to pay good, effective teachers more than mediocre or poor-performing teachers. It allows signing bonuses and performance-based rewards. The obvious corollary is that it also allows them to pay bad or incompetent teachers lower salaries. In a truly competitive educational model that goes beyond this simple idea, school officials could even – get this – demote, discipline or fire teachers who aren’t making the grade. That’s how it works in almost any private business, and even private schools.

In the current public-school system, however, pay is based on seniority. A school teacher who has been just occupying a chair for decades, must be paid better than a young go-getter. A teacher who is willing to ply his or her skills in a tough, low-performing urban school must be paid the same as a teacher on autopilot in a wealthy suburban district, where the challenges are less severe and the stakes not as high. In times of layoffs, that energetic tough student working a hard gig must be laid off first, thanks to something known as LIFO, or “Last In, First Out.”

In the current, union-controlled monopoly system school administrators are not free to recruit the best and brightest talent from other industries because, well, they can’t pay enough to lure them out of more lucrative fields. And anyone who wants to be a regular, full-time teacher in California’s public schools must go through the long, expensive and mind-numbing process of getting an education degree. (Did I mention that those who receive such degrees tend to come from the bottom rungs of the academic ladder, according to numerous studies?)

To make matters worse, it’s nearly impossible to fire public-school teachers provided they show up for the job. School districts have “rubber rooms,” where teachers deemed unfit for the classroom twiddle their thumbs and collect full pay and benefits while their cases are adjudicated for months and even years given all the union protections against firing. It can cost school districts hundreds of thousands of dollars to go through the firing process, so most don’t bother.

That leads to an annual, cynical process called the “dance of the lemons.” As Peter Schweizer explained for the Hoover Institution, “Often, as a way to save time and money, an administrator will cut a deal with the union in which he agrees to give a bad teacher a satisfactory rating in return for union help in transferring the teacher to another district. The problem teacher gets quietly passed along to someone else. Administrators call it ‘the dance of the lemons’ or ‘passing the trash.’” These cases usually involve teachers accused of some terrible action, but it’s functionally impossible to get rid of or pass along teachers who are merely incompetent. I recall when John Stossel showed a long flow chart of how to fire a teacher in New York City. The audience was stunned. Then Stossel, held up more pages of the chart. It’s crazy and the results are insane.

In 2012, nine California public-school students filed a lawsuit against California and the CTA arguing that the state’s system of teacher protections violates the state constitution’s promise of an “effective” education. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu ruled on behalf of the students. He invalidated teacher tenure and other work rules because they assured that a percentage of “grossly ineffective” teachers would be left in the classroom, wreaking havoc on the future of many thousands of students, especially those in poor school districts.

In his decision, Treu noted that “an expert called by (California school administrators), testified that 1 – 3 percent of teachers in California are grossly ineffective. Given that the evidence showed roughly 275,000 active teachers in this state, the extrapolated number of grossly ineffective teachers ranges from 2,750 to 8,250.” That’s a lot of bad teachers, and a depressing number of students who suffer in their classrooms. But Treu’s decision was overturned on appeal, and the appeal was upheld by the California Supreme Court. But the facts are the facts, even if the court was unwilling to back a decision to shake up the state’s public-education system.

This is what happens when the educational system is not a “competitive endeavor,” but rather a union-controlled, government monopoly. It means that good teachers cannot be rewarded. Great teachers cannot easily be recruited. Grossly ineffective teachers cannot easily be removed. And mediocre ones have few incentives to improve. Imagine how this system would work in your particular profession or business. How well would it do if the worst are protected, the best are neglected and the so-so ones are rewarded?

In the news story, candidate Cox didn’t get into the details of the hiring/firing process, but his merit-pay idea should be widely applauded. Yet on its website, the California Teachers’ Association says that “merit pay is flawed in concept. Where it has been tried, it has proved to be a detriment rather than a stimulus to better education. CTA is open to consideration of alternative pay plans as determined by the local associations through the collective bargaining process.”

As a final note, the debate over merit pay reinforces the wisdom of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent Janus decision, which declared that teachers and other public employees are not required to pay union dues even to support collective-bargaining purposes. Justice Samuel Alito, wrote for the majority that such bargaining often involved “fundamental questions of education policy,” so it’s antithetical to the First Amendment to compel people to support ideas to which they don’t agree.

“Should teacher pay be based on seniority, the better to retain experienced teachers?” Justice Alito asked. “Or should schools adopt merit-pay systems to encourage teachers to get the best results out of their students?” Public-school teachers no longer are forced to subsidize the opposition to merit pay and to reforms to the current tenure and seniority based system, but there’s still a long process ahead to move toward the idea that Cox touted.

Steven Greenhut is a contributing editor for the California Policy Center. He is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.

This article was originally published by the CA Policy Center

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: education, education reform, John Cox, Steven Greenhut, Teachers

Why Teachers Unions are the Worst of the Worst

August 6, 2018 By Ed Ring 3 Comments

When considering the influence of unions on American society, there are vast differences depending on what type of union one considers.

Private sector unions, for all the criticisms they may deserve, have nonetheless played a vital role in securing rights for the American worker. Subject to appropriate regulations, private sector unions have the opportunity to continue to play a vital role in American society. If they would bother to embrace the aspirations of their members, instead of the multinational corporations their leaders now apparently collude with, they might even support immigration reform. That would elevate the wages and benefits of all American workers, especially those doing low paying jobs.

Public sector unions, on the other hand, should be illegal. They negotiate with elected officials who they help elect. They negotiate for a share of coerced tax revenue, rather than for a share of profits, meaning there are no competitive checks on how much they can demand. The agenda of public sector unions is inherently in conflict with the public interest. But given the reality of public sector unions, it is important to recognize that some public sector unions are worse than others.

Public safety unions, for example, have successfully lobbied for pension benefits that are not sustainable. This calls for a difficult but necessary economic discussion that can only end two ways – either these pension benefits are going to be reduced, or cities and counties across California and elsewhere will go bankrupt in the next major recession. But public safety unions have not undermined their profession the way the teachers unions have.

The teachers unions are guilty of all the problems common to all public sector unions. They, too, have negotiated unsustainable rates of pay and benefits. They, too, elect their own bosses, negotiate inefficient work rules, have an insatiable need for more public funds, and protect incompetent members. But the teachers union is worse than all other public sector unions for one reason that eclipses all others: Their agenda is negatively affecting how we socialize and educate our children, the next generation of Americans.

Work Rules Harm Public Schools

One of the most compelling examples of just how much harm the teachers union has done to California’s schools was the 2014 case Vergara vs. the State of California. In this case, attorneys representing public school students argued that union negotiated work rules harmed their ability to receive a quality education. In particular, they questioned rules governing tenure (too soon), dismissals (too hard), and layoffs (based on seniority instead of merit). In the closing arguments, the plaintiff’s lead attorney referenced testimony from the defendant’s expert witnesses to show that these and other rules had a negative disproportionate impact on students in disadvantaged communities.

Despite winning in the lower courts, the Vergara case was eventually dismissed by the California Supreme Court. Teachers still get tenure after less than two years of classroom observation. Incompetent teachers are still nearly impossible to fire. And whenever it is necessary to reduce teacher headcount in a district, the senior teachers stay and the new teachers go, regardless of how well or poorly these teachers were doing their jobs. The consequences of these self-serving work rules are more than academic.

The evidence that California’s public schools are failing is everywhere. Los Angeles, a city whose residents are – perhaps more than anywhere else – representative of America’s future, is home to the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), with 640,000 K-12 students. And as reported earlier this year in the LA School Report, according to the new “California School Dashboard,” a ratings system that replaced the Academic Performance Index, LAUSD is failing to educate hundreds of thousands of students. In the most recent year of results, 52 percent of LAUSD’s schools earned a D or F in English language arts, and 50 percent earned a D or F in math. Fifty percent of LAUSD’s schools are failing or nearly failing to teach their students English or math.

Attack Innovative Charter Schools

In the face of failure, you would think LAUSD and other failing school districts would embrace bipartisan, obvious reforms such as those highlighted in the Vergara case. But instead, these unions are relentlessly trying to unionize charter schools, which would force those schools to adhere to the same union work rules. In Los Angeles, the Alliance Network of charter schools has delivered demonstrably better educational outcomes for less money, while serving nearly identical student populations.

How does it help to impose union work rules on charter schools that are succeeding academically? How does that help the children who are America’s future?

A Left-Wing Political Agenda

The other way the teachers union is unique among public sector unions is their hyper-partisanship. Despite and often in defiance of their memberships, nearly all unions are left-wing partisan organizations. Nearly all of them support left-wing causes and Democratic political candidates. But the teachers unions do so with a zeal that dwarfs their counterparts. Larry Sand, a former LAUSD teacher and prolific observer of teachers union antics, has spent years documenting their left wing agenda.

For example, reporting on the annual conventions of the two largest national teachers unions, Sand writes: “The National Education Association convention at the beginning of the month gave us a clue which theory would become reality when the union passed quite a few über liberal New Business Items, maintained its lopsided leftward political spending, and gave rogue quarterback Colin Kaepernick a human rights award. And here in the Golden State, the California Teachers Association continues its one-way spending on progressive initiatives and endorsed 35 state legislators in the June primary – all Democrats.

A week after the NEA convention, the other national teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers held its yearly wingding and left absolutely no doubt as to its future political direction. The resolutions passed by the union at the convention would make any socialist proud. Universal health care – whether single-payer or MediCare for All, full public funding for, and free tuition at all public colleges and universities, and universal, full-day, and cost-free child care are what AFT wants for the country. Additionally, the union resolved to double per-pupil expenditures for low-income K-12 districts and to ‘tax the rich’ to fully fund ‘IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act), Title I and state allocations to public colleges and universities.’”

Left-Wing Student Indoctrination

This left-wing political agenda finds its way into the classroom, of course. At the same time as California’s K-12 public school students are not being effectively taught English or math skills, they are being exposed to agenda-driven political and cultural indoctrination.

Again, as documented by Larry Sand: “Nor are textbooks safe. Communist and notorious America-hater Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” is assigned in many high school history classes. Zinn felt that the teaching of history “should serve society in some way” and that “objectivity is impossible and it is also undesirable.” As a Marxist, he’d prefer a society that resembles Stalin’s Russia. Additionally, Pacific Research Institute’s Lance Izumi notes that pages and pages of the latest California History, Social Science Framework ‘are devoted to identity politics, and the environmentalist, sexual, and anti-Vietnam War movements, with detailed and extensive bibliographical references. In contrast, the contemporaneous conservative movement, which succeeded in electing Californian Ronald Reagan as president, with its complex mixture of social, economic and national security sub-movements, is given cursory and passing mention, with no references provided.’”

Public sector unions are going to be with us for a long time. But in the wake of the Janus ruling, members who don’t agree with the political agenda of these unions can quit, depriving them of the dues that – to the tune of nearly a billion per year just in California – make them so powerful.

Teachers, in particular, should carefully consider this option. America’s future depends on it.

Ed Ring is the co-founder of the California Policy Center and served as its first president.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Ed Ring, Public Sector Unions, Teachers, Teachers Unions, unions, Vergara