Teachers' unions are feeling the heat, according to a recent article in the Los Angeles Times. Its author, Mitchell Landsberg, writes, ?Teachers unions have a well-deserved reputation for exercising political clout . . . Now, that clout is in question.? The reasons??One is that?the president and his education secretary, Democrats both, clearly do not back the union agenda. ?Teachers unions donate almost exclusively to Democratic politicians and have usually been able to count on their support,? Landsberg notes. ?Obama has disappointed them?and the feeling appears to be mutual.?
I was talking this weekend to a Washington, D.C., charter school teacher. She's about as Democrat as Democrats come, but she doesn't understand the unions (having never belonged to one) and she doesn't much care for them. She's conflicted: On one hand, she knows about the history of teachers' unions?how they were founded in order to protect educators (mostly women) from on-the-job?discrimination and exploitation. On the other hand, she sees what teachers' unions have become. She, for one, does her job just fine without being unionized. ?Tenure after two years?? she said. ?I mean, that's just crazy. I've been teaching for two years and I'm only beginning to understand what being a good teacher actually means.? She told me her co-teacher during the last school-year was a mammoth underachiever?lazy, incompetent, the works. And because my new friend works in a charter school, that co-teacher could be?and was?removed from the job, and a new person, eager and ambitious, was hired in her place. ?That wouldn't have happened in a unionized public school. My awful co-teacher would've just stayed on forever, doing nothing. And the unions would've helped that scenario to play out.? Too true.
?Liam Julian, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow