Steven Brill had a remarkable piece in the New York Times a couple weeks ago on the rise of the education reformers, folks like Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America; I’ve kept meaning to post on it in detail, and I just haven’t had the time to dig into it that deeply. It seems like a remarkably honest piece about the state of our educational system and the reasons for its problems, including the fact that
If unions are the Democratic Party’s base, then teachers’ unions are the base of the base. The two national teachers’ unions—the American Federation of Teachers and the larger National Education Association—together have more than 4.6 million members. That is roughly a quarter of all the union members in the country. Teachers are the best field troops in local elections. Ten percent of the delegates to the 2008 Democratic National Convention were teachers’ union members. In the last 30 years, the teachers’ unions have contributed nearly $57.4 million to federal campaigns, an amount that is about 30 percent higher than any single corporation or other union. And they have typically contributed many times more to state and local candidates. About 95 percent of it has gone to Democrats.
This, of course, creates powerful political inertia—and political inertia makes a virtue of incumbency and stifles change. There’s no question that the teachers’ unions did great things in the past, but in too many places, the pendulum has swung far too far in the other direction (as pendula will usually do).
Part of that, on my observation, is that the unions are at least as much about the good of the union leadership as they are about the good of their membership. Certainly, they stand up to governments and school districts to defend their members’ incomes and benefits; but do they stand up to parents and trial lawyers to defend their members’ freedom to teach? The greatest threat to our teachers, it seems to me, is the erosion of their authority driven by our individualistic and litigious culture, and by the spineless failure of principals and other bureaucrats to back teachers who seek to assert that authority by enforcing real discipline; where are the unions in that struggle?
Brill paints a hopeful picture, but this rests on his belief that “there is a new crop of Democratic politicians across the country . . . who seem willing to challenge the teachers’ unions.” I’m not so sure about that; we’ll see when push comes to shove, I suppose. There are certainly those who are willing to push the unions a bit and go beyond the “all we need is more money” paradigm, including President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan; but to really challenge them? Well, we’ll see if Mickey Kaus can win the California Senate primary next Tuesday.
Update: I don’t know about Democratic politicians, but there’s certainly one politician in this country who’s unequivocally willing to challenge the teachers’ unions: NJ Gov. Chris Christie.