The National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, is having trouble adjusting to the new political reality that has settled in throughout much of the country. Reform-minded governors and state legislators are reasserting the public’s ownership of public education, a move that will leave the special-interest unions out in the cold.
As a result, NEA leaders are threatening a national teachers strike.
In states such as Florida, Wyoming, Louisiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, New Jersey and Indiana, lawmakers are making plans to radically reform or eliminate teacher tenure, a policy that makes firing teachers extremely difficult and expensive. As a result of tenure protection, many incompetent, ineffective and, in some cases, dangerous teachers remain in the classroom.
Education reformers say that must change, and a slew of opinion polls find that the public agrees.
We suspected that this focus on education reform was causing some sleepless nights for NEA leaders and their cohorts at the American Federation of Teachers. But a recent news article makes it clear that the teacher unions are in full panic mode.
When asked in an interview if teachers would participate in a national strike should tenure protection be taken away by the states, NEA Executive Director John Wilson said, “I would not take that off the table.”
Wilson, the NEA’s executive director for the past ten years, told The Lookout, a Yahoo news blog, that “if teachers felt like politicians were doing harm to them, they would rise up and let them know that.”
Wilson’s acknowledgement that the NEA might resort to a scorched earth policy to protect their domain is revealing: the union is once again putting the interests of adults ahead of the needs of the children.
We hope such threats only strengthen the resolve of education reformers.
It’s easy to understand why the teacher unions are acting so defensively. The NEA and the AFT have presided over the decline of American public education. For decades, the unions have dominated the national discourse about how to best educate school children. The union leaders presented themselves as “education experts” who knew which policies were needed.
But the results tell a different story. Thanks in part to the hard-hitting documentary “Waiting for Superman,” there is broad agreement that the teachers unions and their political surrogates have steered our public schools into an iceberg. Not only is student academic achievement embarrassingly low, but it is clear that union members have been busily feathering their own nests with automatic pay raises (regardless of performance), lavish pension and health insurance benefits and teacher tenure.
Now, all of those things are in jeopardy as new governors and lawmakers get down to business in state capitols across the nation.
Finally, the unions’ stranglehold on our schools is about to be broken. Education reformers have the political wind at their back. 2011 will be the year that communities across the country started taking back control of their local schools. The teacher unions are in for a very bumpy ride.
