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Education Reform and the Fallacy of Blaming Unions; Or Why Mikey Kaus is an Over Privileged Asshole
Posted by Kevin

School reform supposedly founders upon the shoals of union rules. If only the schools were allowed to treat teachers they way Nike and its sub-contractors treated the people who make shoes, creativity and ponies would flourish on all of the nation’s schools. Never mind that education results are lowest in states with the least powerful teacher’s unions, and never mind that the vast majority of the best performing schools have teachers who are –gasp — union members. No, just read this heartbreaking series (part one, part two, part three on Tuesday) on one troubled school and a true hero of a teacher in Chicago. What you wont find is any hint that union rules have gotten in the way of anything. What you will here are plenty of stories like this:

A baby-faced 8th-grade boy stood at a lectern analyzing a poem. In a squeaky voice, he talked about feeling alone and neglected, like the narrator. And, matter-of-factly, he ticked off events that brought him there.

He had been taken away from his crack-addicted mother. His brother had been shot in the heart and head during a gang fight. His young cousin had died of neglect.

… One boy was removed from the classroom because Apostolos suspected he was high on marijuana. A girl kept falling asleep; she had been staying up late doing laundry for the family.

… On an unseasonably warm morning the day before Halloween, Apostolos sat in the hallway just outside her closed classroom door. … Apostolos knew that reading is the avenue to all other learning. She was following research that shows small-group, focused lessons are the best way to propel the slowest readers forward. But as she tried to nudge this group toward an answer, they heard a chair screech across the floor. Inside the classroom a boy shouted, “I’m gonna steal on you.” … She tried to sort out the disagreement, but by the time she got the kids settled down, she had lost her teaching moment.

… If there was a child in danger of being left behind in Room 301, it might have been Kyesha.

With 34 children in the orchestrated frenzy, there was little one-on-one time for the quiet and studious teenager, who, academically, was far ahead of most of her classmates. Apostolos spent much of her time teaching to the middle.

…The testing period had been disrupted early on. Half the girls in Apostolos’ class had a running feud with some 7th-grade girls and it had grown violent.

During testing week, a group was hit with chemical spray outside the school. A girl opened her front door late one night to find three dozen girls threatening to beat her up. And two girls were chased home from school with threats of razor blades.

Unions didn’t cause any of those problems. In fact, the “blame the unions!” cry is just a clever bit of propaganda, a way for over-privileged assholes like Mikey Kaus to excuse their refusla to put education first in public policy. Schools — especially schools in neighborhoods like the one in this report — should be fucking palaces. They should be absolutely secure, teachers should be paid like rock stars, and each class should have a half a dozen full time tutors/assistants to assist the teachers. But all of that would cost money — a lot of money in some cases — and spending that money on education might get in the way of the shiny new sports stadium, or the fancy new war, or the next huge tax cut for people like Mikey Kaus. So money must not matter to education — education must be unlike any other human endevour in the age of capitalism — it must be the fault of all those no good unions that are the cause of the problem.

Whining about unions is perhaps the greatest piece of modern doublespeak. It allows people to ignore the real problems - -of class, of poverty, of facilities, of the effects of white flight, of resource allocation — while at the same time making themselves feel good by stridently demanding a slolution that costs them nothing. It allows people to look themselves in the mirror and say that children are our future but lack of money is not the problem in education without vomiting all over their smug little reflections.

September 3rd, 2007 Education | 3 comments