One point I’m happy to see people — specifically Ezra Klein and Kevin Drum — making is that unions are held to an absurdly high standard that no other institution is held to.  When I was a door-to-door organizer for the AFL-CIO, or just in casual conversations with friends, I’ve been disheartened by how quick people are to dismiss unions as being corrupt or write them off because of one bad experience someone they know had with their union.  Of course the labor movement has warts, but, as Drum points out, so does every institution comprised of, you know, human beings.

The analogy I use on this point is police.  Everyone recognizes that abuse of authority by police officers is a widespread problem, whether it’s Rodney King level brutality or just someone throwing his weight around and showing a little too much attitude while writing a speeding ticket.  But almost nobody would use this as an excuse to do away with having police.  I contend that the labor movement plays as important a role in protecting our economic security as police forces do in protecting our physical security.  Obviously, not everyone agrees on this point, but the fact that there are and have been corrupt union leaders doesn’t settle the argument.

-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