By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
There have been times in the past where I have written something about teacher unions in this space that disappointed a number of readers. It is not that I championed the unions. I agree with almost all of the criticisms of the unions that you hear in conservative circles: about how they lobby for liberal Democratic causes, including legalized abortion, protect incompetent and shiftless teachers and, often enough to matter, resort to illegal strikes to gain their financial ends.
What I have written in the past is that, in spite of these things, I think there is a need for some agency to conduct collective bargaining for teachers. I became convinced of that shortly after I began teaching in a public high school in the suburbs of New York City in the late 1960s. I came to the conclusion at that time that local school boards would have fired large numbers of veteran teachers — regardless of their level of dedication and competence — and replaced them with young and inexperienced teachers, solely for the purpose of keeping taxes as low as possible.
It is not that I think that school board members tend to be particularly ruthless in this matter, or unconcerned about the wellbeing of the children in the district they represent, only that the pressure to hold down taxes can be so great that it can become difficult for them to resist, regardless of the educational damage that would result from massive layoffs. Teachers need some way to counterbalance that pressure, some organization to protect their rights.
That said, it cannot be denied that teachers unions often go overboard and display an indifference to the needs of children. I offer as evidence a story by Sol Stern in the autumn online edition of City Journal (city-journal.org), a publication of the Manhattan Institute, a New York City think tank that promotes free-market solutions to urban problems.
Stern is not a right-wing extremist. He was a high-level staffer for onetime New York City Council President Andrew Stein. And he is not an enemy of the public school system. He sent his own children to New York City’s public schools, unlike Democratic politicians such as the Clintons and the Obamas.
Stern writes of a day back in 1991: “I can still recall the shock I experienced one morning after dropping my boys off at P.S. 87’s schoolyard. I lingered for a few minutes, chatting with some other parents, when I noticed a bent man in dirty, tattered clothes, wandering around the yard as if in a stupor. Wondering if a derelict had gotten into the schoolyard, I asked one of the parents if she recognized him.”
She did. Stern tells us she responded with an ironic grin: “Don’t you know? That’s Malcolm, one of our new teachers.”
Stern headed off to Principal Jane Hand’s office to see about the situation. It was all true, Hand confirmed. “Malcolm was now a teacher in good standing at our K-5 school. She had to hire this deeply troubled person because of the seniority-transfer clause in the labor agreement between the city and the United Federation of Teachers. The contract required principals to post half of their schools’ teacher vacancies at the end of each year and offer the positions to applicants with the greatest seniority in the system. Hand didn’t even have the right to interview Malcolm (who had transferred from a Bronx elementary school) before he showed up on the first day of school.”
Stern was no stranger to union featherbedding. During his time working for Andrew Stein, he had written articles exposing what he calls the “sweetheart contract” between the city and the union representing school custodians. But the presence of Malcolm roaming around his children’s schoolyard in dirty clothes and in a stupor took him aback: There is “a big difference,” he writes, “between the damage done to the schools’ physical infrastructure by the small custodians’ union and the damage done to kids because of the UFT contract” that permitted Malcolm work in their school.
Not that Malcolm was teaching a class at the school. Stern writes, “Principal Hand said that she didn’t dare give Malcolm a classroom assignment — the parents would have rioted. So she relegated him to yard duty and patrolling the lunchroom, where he joined several other dysfunctional but fully salaried teachers in make-work. The abuses went far beyond seniority transfers, as I soon learned after immersing myself in the contract’s bizarre work rules.
“The 200-page agreement governed every aspect of the daily management of schools, making it nearly impossible for principals to remove grossly incompetent teachers and erecting other obstacles to improving classroom instruction.”
My first impression was that the article by Katherine Timpf in the online edition of National Review on October 20 of last year had no direct connection to Stern’s column on New York City’s teachers unions. Then I had second thoughts. Timpf’s column also deals with the crazy lengths to which leftists in the academic world will go to pursue their notions of social justice.
Timpf reports on the student council elections at the Everett Middle School in San Francisco. The principal at the school, reports Timpf, has decided to withhold the elections results “because the group of students elected wasn’t diverse enough.”
The school’s principal, Lena Van Haren, sent an email to the parents of the students at the school informing them of her decision. She wanted to “make sure all voices are heard from all backgrounds.” Which, of course, they were when they voted in the election. It is just that Principal Van Haren didn’t like the results. Timpf reports that the student body is made up of approximately 20 percent white students and 80 percent students of color.
Since the results of the election are being kept secret, we can’t be sure what percentage of whites were elected to the student council. But it seems safe to say it was too high for Principal Van Haren. She proposed that the school should consider adding positions to the council, in the hope, writes Timpf, “that the student council looks more like what she would like it to look like.”
Timpf closes with the observation, “I guess it is not really all that important that we show students exactly how elections work.” I couldn’t help thinking of the trial scene from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the one with the banner “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford CT 06492.
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