Jay P. Greene's Blog

Are you union boys having some kind of local trouble?

(Guest post by Greg Forster, with profuse apologies for the pun in the caption above.)

ALELR just sent out the first new Communique in three weeks, and it’s a treasure trove of hidden gems from the recently concluded NEA national convention. Here are a few choice tidbits to convince you to go dig deeper:

1) ALELR shares Matt’s interest in the increasing level of comfort and frankness at NEA about the fact that they have changed from a professional organization to a labor union. He offers a delightful digest of that Chanin speech Matt linked to last week (“Whatever you think of Chanin, he is to be applauded for his clarity in an age where obfuscation is the norm in politics. We shall not see his like again”) and draws attention to this fascinating reflection from notorious NEA double agent Hans Moleman on the longtime internal conflict at the organization between unionists and social radicals.

2) In addition to noting that the . . . uh . . . unpleasantness in Indiana was completely hushed up at the convention, he also relates this exclusive story:

I’m reliably informed that at the NEA board of directors meeting immediately preceding the representative assembly in San Diego, the Indiana contingent was given a standing ovation.

Let’s see: They’ve driven the union into a multi-million dollar debt, failed to notice their insurance trust was being bled dry, fell under national trusteeship, threatened to kick 650 disabled teachers into the street, laid off one-quarter of the staff, put their headquarters building up for sale, watched charter school caps lifted, and failed to block a tuition tax credit for private school students.

Way to go! If only California and New Jersey would follow your lead.

3) He provides highlights from NEA coverage by Rich Gibson of the ed school at San Diego State, a radical-left critic of the unions. Quoting Gibson on Linda Darling-Hammond: She “noted that California prisons spend more per capita than the schools do. She did not say that the guards are members of the AFL-CIO.”

4) As every year, he derives endless amusement from the NBIs (“new business items”) introduced by delegates, which run the gamut from cranky to obnoxious to certifiable. “NBI 38 – a complaint that the Labor Department’s ‘Dictionary of Occupational Titles’ defines teaching as ‘light’ work. A little research shows the term refers only to strength, and how much force one exerts in a typical day. If you are exerting 20 to 50 pounds of force on the kids, you should seek another profession.”

5) Finally, I really must quibble with this – an item from before the NEA convention, but it’s included in the new Communique – making the case that union organizing will not undermine the charter school movement. Now, I prefer having charters over not having them, and I offer no predictions as to whether they are politically viable in the long term, or whether union organizing will subvert them. But the argument ALELR makes here is not sound; maybe his position is right, but his reasoning (or at least one part of it) doesn’t adequately support it.

Responding to a post by Andrew Coulson arguing that government-owned schools must eventually succumb to unionization as the charter sector grows to a larger scale, ALELR writes:

As long as charters stay true to their roots, treat their employees well and weed out failing schools, they’ll be able to resist union and bureaucratic pressures.

In other words, as long as charters don’t succumb to unionism, charters won’ t succumb to unionism!

Let’s just say we’d like to avoid any . . . imperial entanglements.

Well . . . that’s the real trick, isn’t it?

ALELR thinks you can resist “bureaucratic pressures” even while growing into a huge bureaucracy, as long as you “stay true to your roots.” The mistake here is to think that resisting “bureaucratic pressures” is exogenous from “staying true to your roots,” when in fact those are just two different ways of framing the same issue.  As the charter sector transitions from being a small, scrappy, cottage industry to being a giant, bureaucratically organized political force, whether it can continue to resist bureaucratic pressures and whether it will remain true to its roots are the same thing.

So it’s certainly true that charters will be able to resist unionization as long as they stay true to their roots. But that’s the real trick, isn’t it?

I want to add a little to my post the other day about how the teacher unions lie and so should not be treated as credible players in policy discussions. 

The unions don’t have to lie.  The NEA didn’t have to falsely claim that the DC voucher program “yielded no evidence of positive impact on student achievement.”  They could have said something about the effects not being large or that there are other harms to vouchers that are greater than the benefits.  A pattern of lying fundamentally undermines the credibility of the teacher unions so that they will increasingly be shunned in policy discussions and lose in policy debates.

You may think that the unions are so powerful that they can just lie and get away with it, but you’d be wrong.  Remember the fate of the tobacco industry.  They created the Tobacco Institute, which produced “research” claiming to be unable to find links between smoking and cancer. 

The tobacco companies didn’t have to do this.  They could have just said that people should be free to choose whether they smoke or not regardless of health risks.  They didn’t have to lie about health effects, they could have just said that it was none of the public’s business whether people chose to smoke or not.

At the time it was conventional political wisdom that the Tobacco Institute could get away with lying because the tobacco lobby was so powerful and rich that they could do almost anything.  But eventually lying destroys one’s credibility in a way that no amount of money can restore.  And the teacher unions may suffer the same fate as the Tobacco Institute.  They may seem all-powerful right now, but over time it is hard to sustain dumb ideas, especially when lying.