Evil L.A. Teacher Unions

The Center for Education Reform is a charter promotion group, perhaps one of the most cynical and self-serving of the reformster groups. Search their website for information or ideas about education-- the actual pedagogy and instruction in a classroom-- and you will find nothing, because the Center has no actual interest in education.

Check out their board of directors-- you will find a combination of money managers and charter school operators. That is where the Center's interest lies-- in getting more money into more charters.

And what stands in the way of these corporate interests making a better, bigger buck? Well, those damn unions, of course. The Center may not have any section devoted to actually educating children, but they have a whole tab devoted to those damn unions, and here's What They Believe:

We believe that the special interests that draw funds from the tax dollars funding public education, and that have become an intransient [sic-- pretty sure they mean "intransigent," though "intransient" as in "won't move away to some other place" might suit them as well] force in political and policy circles, have outlived the usefulness of the associations they once had and have become obstacles to programs and activities that can best and most judiciously serve children. Such groups—from teachers unions, to the associations of administrators, principals, school boards and hybrids of all (e.g., “The Blob”)—should be free to organize but without access to the dollars that are spent to fund schools and should be free to recruit but not mandate members, but they should not have a public stream of money that permits the dues of members to subsidize their defense of the status quo.

The Center is currently excited with itself because it placed a quote in a Wall Street Journal article. The piece (behind a paywall) discusses the desire of some charter teachers to unionize. Or, as the Center headlined it in their regular email, "Teachers at Successful Los Angeles Charter School Organization Being Manipulated by Union Leaders."

The charter in question is the Alliance charter, a chain run by rich folks like a former mayor of LA and the owner of the Atlanta Hawks. Alliance is a big gun in the LA charter scene, and seventy of its 500-person teacher workforce started pushing for a union last spring.

"We believe that when teachers have a respected voice in policymaking it leads to school sustainability and teacher retention," said Elana Goldbaum, who teaches history at Gertz-Ressler High School, a member of the Alliance group. "We have a lot of talent and we want to see that stay. We want to see our teachers be a part of the decision-making and we want to advocate for our students and ourselves."

The union movement has sparked controversy, with the LA union claiming interference on the part of charter management and Alliance saying the teachers feel harassed by the union. The struggle escalated at the end of October when the California Public Employment Relations Board sued Alliance for engaging in anti-union activity.

All of this, somehow, is the evil union pulling the wool over the eyes of the poor, hapless teachers.

Look, the big unions are no angels, and the big-city unions are probably the least angelic of all. But you know that teachers need some kind of union when the charters are letting loose with baloney like this, the quote from the WSJ of which the Center is so proud:

“It’s not surprising that teachers that work at charter schools would not want to join a union,” said Alison Zgainer, executive vice president of the Center for Education Reform, a pro-charter organization in Washington, D.C. “They want more autonomy in the classroom, and being part of a union you lose that autonomy.”

I guess Zgainer is referring to "autonomy" as defined by charter operators-- the autonomy to be told you must work long hours over a long week. The autonomy to have instruction strictly dictated. The autonomy to be paid as little as the charter wants to pay you. The autonomy to be fired any time the charter feels like it. The autonomy to be trained in "no excuse" techniques that are just as prescriptive of teacher behavior as they are of student behavior. That autonomy.

The autonomy that business-driven charters care about is the autonomy of management. Their dream is the same dream as that of the 19th century robber barons who fought unions tooth and nail. It's a dream where a CEO sits in his office and runs his company with complete freedom to hire and fire, raise and lower salaries, and change the work hours (or any other terms of employment) at will. It's a dream of a business where the CEO is a visionary free to seek his vision (and profit from it) without having anyone ever say "no" to him.

That's the autonomy that folks like the Center for Education Reform are interested in.

In the CEO-centered vision of school, unions are bad. Unions are evil obstacles that dare to make rules by which the CEO must abide (they are often aided by Big Government, which also dares to interfere with the CEO). I think these folks believe in the myth of the Hero Teacher because it echoes the myth of the Hero CEO-- a bold genius who makes the world a better place by pushing aside all obstacles, including the people who don't recognize his genius, until he arrives at the mountain top, loved and praised by all the Little People who are grateful that he saved them. Compromise and collaboration are for the weak, and unions are just weaklings who want to drag down the Hero CEO because they are jealous of his awesomeness and afraid that their undeserved power will be stripped from them by his deserving might.

In this topsy-turvy world, unions must be crushed not just because they set up rules to thwart the Hero CEO, but because they are holding captive all the teachers who really want to give themselves body and soul to the Hero CEO's genius vision, but the union won't let them. Damn you, evil unions.

This does not explain all charter supporters (it does not, for instance, reflect the motivations of the social justice warrior school of charter support). But it sure does explain some, even as it is oddly reminiscent of "We'll be greeted as liberators" and the tantrums of any three-year-old. But I hope that the Center for Education Reform has to live impotently with the threat of evil unions for years to come.

Flying First Class

Traveling always gives me time to think, and I spent yesterday making my way to the West Coast, where my wife and I are spending some time in LA hanging out with my son and daughter, their partners, and my grandson (my in-laws are tending to the house and the dog, who cannot even successfully manage a car trip across town).

On one leg of the journey yesterday, we ended up sitting just behind the bulkhead that separated we Mere Mortals from the folks in First Class.

I've never traveled first class, in fact have never traveled sitting far enough forward to see the wonders that occur there.

I marveled at how those twenty-four travelers, of all of us cattle-jammed into the plane, had essentially their own personal staff of attendants to provide them with a steady stream of amenities, from taking their lunch orders to delivering via tongs some nicely warmed towels. One business traveler's seat would not recline, and after contortions worthy of Godzilla's chiropractor, the flight attendant promised a financial compensation for the travelers emotional pain and suffering from being forced to do without his six degrees of inclination.

I reflected that it made a certain amount of sense-- those folks had likely forked over (sans tongs) a ton of money to sit in airplane nirvana, and so had personally generated a great deal of the plane's profit (I'm pretty sure their extra charges more than covered the expense of the tongs). And to give full disclosure, I was only at the bulkhead where I could watch because I had sprung some extra money to pay for the extra luxury of sitting next to my wife on the trip (she is way better than a warm towelette). So I, too, was a traveler who had the financial means to make my travels a little better.

We all made the exact same trip to the same destination. And we all the opportunity, the access, to the seats in first class. The airline made that section available to everyone, but only some were willing and able to take advantage of it. Could they have provided tongs (and seats with enough space for grown humans) to everybody? Not really, because that wouldn't be economically viable. What works economically, business-model-wise, is to sort passengers out so that folks with more money get more service and folks without money just get where they're going in one (uncomfortable) piece. Occasionally folks are "upgraded" to first class, but that changes nothing about how the system fundamentally works. The airline still retains the ability to sort people based on how much profit those people deliver.

This is what treating education as a business promises us (it is, in fact, exactly what it has delivered to us on the college level) -- sorting out customers with levels of service provided to those customers based on how much revenue they can generate. People who are insisting that a charter-choice system would provide greater educational equality are just plain wrong. A free market charter-choice business-style approach to education gets us more inequality, with some folks up in first class and some folks stuck sitting in the back of the bus plane.