Last week, the Central Falls School District in Rhode Island decided to fire its entire high school teaching staff of 93 people. The decision was made under pressure from state and federal to turn around failing schools, and after the District failed to come to terms with the teachers’ union over compensation for extra duties the District demanded. The move received an enthusiastic endorsement from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and a more subdued endorsement from the President (which, in turn, provoked a sharp rebuke from American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten).
The action of the Central Falls school board is the most extreme manifestation of the growing trend toward scapegoating teachers generally and teachers’ unions specifically for the problems of failing schools. It is generally easy to predict from the demographics of a school district how successful it will be on certain measures. Central Falls is a good example: according the Associated Press, “More children live in poverty in Central Falls, a city of just 1 square mile, than anywhere else in Rhode Island. Until recently, one of the city’s few growth industries was a quasi-public jail.” The school also a high percentage of students who speak English as a second language. Yet it’s an article of faith that the reason schools fail is that unions make it impossible to fire bad teachers.
There seems to be a belief that we can eliminate the flaws in the system supposedly caused by teachers’ unions without getting rid of the benefits the unions provide. The benefits of good pay and job stability provided by unions are most important in the most difficult and stressful positions. Put another way, it’s unclear to me, after we fire all the teachers in struggling schools, how we attract people into these high-stress, difficult jobs without the wages and job security teachers’ unions protect.
While my general support for unions no doubt motivates my defense of teachers’ unions, there’s a broader public policy concern at play. Somewhere along the line, we decided that improving schools was the only anti-poverty measure we are willing to consider. This decision has led us to reverse the relationship between poverty and education quality: we believe that improving schools will eliminate poverty, rather than that attacking poverty is the only way to improve failing schools. Since we have decided, against all evidence, that poverty is not the problem with our failing schools, the problem must be that our lazy, union-protected teachers just aren’t trying hard enough. Bust the unions, and we don’t have to lift a finger to create jobs in the inner city, improve public housing, or reform our criminal justice system.
There is thus a cruel irony in the rhetoric used against teachers’ unions. Teachers are assailed for putting their own self-interest ahead of that of students. But they are the only ones being asked to sacrifice anything in this equation. Because we unwilling to spend any additional public resources on attacking the root causes of poverty, we demand more from those who have already decided to dedicate their lives to the difficult task of teaching our most disadvantaged children.
-AR
If the problem is with teachers’ unions, why is there no hue and cry about the poor job that unionized teachers are doing at financially stable districts, whether they be urban, suburban or rural? Could it be that those teachers, who were most likely educated at the same institutions as the teachers at impoverished districts with impoverished students, are successful at their jobs because there are only level “standards” to meet, but nowhere near level playing fields? This would be amusing absurdist theater if only it were funny and not real.