Unions, Educators, and the Community

In trying to understand the role of union leaders and their priorities within education, it’s useful to hear directly from the source.   One such example is that of the National Education Association’s top attorney, Bob Chanin – now retired – who addressed the NEA at its annual meeting in July, 2009.  Below are excerpts from that speech.

“Despite what some among us would like to believe it is not because of our creative ideas. It is not because of the merit of our positions. It is not because we care about children and it is not because we have a vision of a great public school for every child. NEA and its affiliates are effective advocates because we have power.”

“And we have power because there are more than 3.2 million people who are willing to pay us hundreds of millions of dollars in dues each year, because they believe that we are the unions that can most effectively represent them, the unions that can protect their rights and advance their interests as education employees.”

“This is not to say that the concern of NEA and its affiliates with closing achievement gaps, reducing dropout rates, improving teacher quality and the like are unimportant or inappropriate. To the contrary. These are the goals that guide the work we do. But they need not and must not be achieved at the expense of due process, employee rights and collective bargaining. That simply is too high a price to pay."

Those comments should not come as a surprise – they don’t to me.   Nor should they serve to drive a wedge between the educators of the Bridgewater-Raritan School District, its school board, and the community at large. 

Chanin’s words are a recognition that he was part of an overwhelmingly effective power group of influencers, in his own words, the “NEA and its affiliates”.

Educators’ unions are extraordinarily strong, and there have been few governmental entities or other countervailing forces, including school boards, which have been willing and able to effectively push back. 

Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of the Washington, D.C. school system who served under Mayor Adrian Fenty and who was his protégé, understood that very well.  Writing in Newsweek last December, she said, “Things . . . happen through the exertion of influence . . . and that “education is no different” than other sectors of our economy. 

She further stated that “There is no big organized interest group that defends and promotes the interest of children.”  She added that there is “a bureaucracy that is focused on the adults instead of the students,” claiming that  “the focus remains on what jobs, contracts and departments are getting which cuts, additions, or changes.” 

“The rationale for the decisions mostly rests on which grown-ups will be affected, instead of what will benefit or harm children.”  Rhee is wary of “Policymakers, school-district administrators, and school boards who are beholden to special interests” that have created the bureaucracy which she criticizes.

Last year in mid-winter, when I attended a Bridgewater-Raritan School Board meeting where reductions to the proposed 2010-2011 school budget were being discussed, several teachers walked up to the mike to express their views. 

Individually, they each stated that they were willing to take a one-year freeze in pay, if it would mean saving the jobs of their lower-seniority colleagues.  It was the first and last time that they appeared in public at a board meeting to support sharing the load through an implementation of educational collegiality.  Most likely, pressure had been applied within their ranks.

I strongly believe in, and support good teachers.  I also feel that, at the moment, the leaders of the three bargaining units of this district are not supporting the best interests of the Bridgewater-Raritan teaching staff and those of the community at large. 

You can’t have one without the other.