Jeff Jacoby, columnist for the Globe, uses - of all things - the Jayson Blair scandal to jump off to a pretty boisterous condemnation of teacher unions. No one asked the journalists' union for its take on the unfolding controversy at the New York Times, notes Jacoby, "and that is as it should be," because that union exists to advance its members' economic self-interest, not act as a disinterested commentator on the state of journalism. The same rules ought to apply to teacher unions, he says, but don't. "When teachers' unions demand hefty increases in education spending or mandatory reductions in class size, they get a respectful hearing.... And yet their aims are no less self-serving and their interests no less mercenary than those of any other union," he says. Drawing from Sol Stern's recent book Breaking Free, reviewed recently in the Gadfly [http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=22#120], he notes that unions are aggressive participants in the political process but escape the scrutiny received by other political players. "They're not in business 'for the children,'" Jacoby concludes, dramatically. "They're in business for themselves."
"The bottom line for teachers' unions," by Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe, May 22, 2003