Goldstein argues that, by focusing narrowly on a story where unions are the villains and charter schools the heroes, the film misses the ways in which unions are engaged in reform, the limitations of charter schools, and the types of reforms that are not directly related to education but are necessary to fix our schools.  For instance, Goldstein points out that Finland, which is considered to have the world’s best school system, has a teaching force the is over 95% unionized, but also an extensive social welfare system that ensures the needs of all children are met outside the classroom and that parents can be more involved in their children’s lives.  (Goldstein addresses the importance of parental involvement in greater detail in a post on her blog).

Whether one ultimately comes down on the side of teachers’ unions or the anti-union crowd, Goldstein at least shows that the debate is more complicated than it’s portrayed.  Goldstein discusses Stephen Brill’s famous New Yorker piece on the “rubber rooms” in the New York public schools.  Brill’s piece discussed the New York public schools’ practice (since abandoned) of placing teachers who had been accused of misconduct or incompetence, but were entitled by their union contract to full pay pending a hearing before an arbitrator, together in a room where they simply hung around during the school day.  Brill’s piece generated significant controversy, and justifiably so.  But as Goldstein points out, the teachers placed in rubber rooms represent one twentieth of one percent of New York’s 80,000 public school teachers.  A meaningful conversation about tenure must also include the thousands, perhaps millions, of talented, dedicated teachers who never would have entered or remained in the profession with the security that tenure, and unions in general, provide.

-AR

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