United Teachers Los Angeles supports merit pay “on a cold day in hell”
The Detroit Federation of Teachers shut down city schools to stop 15 charter schools from being built for free
The California Teachers Association has compared school vouchers to child prostitution
The Washington Teachers Union has withheld kids’ college recommendations for parents who didn’t oppose school reform
In Illinois (outside of Chicago), two union-protected teachers out of 95,500 are terminated for incompetence annually
In Illinois (outside of Chicago), it costs $219,504.21 to fire a bad union-protected teacher
In New Jersey, five union-protected teachers out of more than 100,000 are terminated for incompetence annually
In New York State, seventeen union-protected teachers are terminated a year
In New York State, it costs $128,941 to fire a bad union-protected teacher
In New York City, only ten out of 55,000 tenured teachers were terminated in 2006-2007
In Los Angeles, only eleven out of 43,000 union-protected teachers are even considered for termination annually
The National Education Association received $50 million for shaky investment advice in 2004 alone
NEA members are suing over the union’s endorsement of “Valuebuilder,” a plan with over $1 billion of members’ money invested
New York State United Teachers received $3 million for shaky investment advice in 2005
Washington Teachers Union embezzlement tab: $5 million
United Teachers of Dade (Miami) embezzlement tab: $2.5 million
Massachusetts Teachers Association embezzlement tab: $800,000
Michigan teachers unions' embezzlement tab from one thief: $218,000 in bad checks
 
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Teachers Unions Oppose Education Reform

Regardless of one’s view of any particular method of improving America’s struggling public schools (whether it's school choice, charter schools, or rewarding better teachers with better pay), the tactics and rhetoric that teachers unions employ to block any meaningful reform is remarkable. Their motivation is simple: maintain the status quo -- and the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars in dues. Meanwhile, union leaders’ suggestions for reform are best summarized as “more money to hire more teachers,” who are then likely to become dues-paying union members.

Click here to read our New Haven Register op-ed on teachers unions’ opposition to accountability reforms.
Former top officers at the National Education Association’s Kansas and Nebraska state chapters summarized their union’s stance on reform in a 1994 issue of Educational Freedom: “The NEA has been the single biggest obstacle to education reform in this country. We know because we worked for the NEA.”

Merit Pay

Paying teachers according to how well they perform, a universal rule in the private sector, is consistently condemned by teachers unions. For example: When two-thirds of Los Angeles public schools received failing grades from the state of California in 2000, the superintendent announced his support for paying teachers according to merit. The United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) fought this proposal tooth and nail and eventually killed it. Then-UTLA President Day Higuchi announced that the union would accept the reform only on “a cold day in hell.”

Even when unions appear to be working to promote performance-based pay, their leaders may try to scuttle actual reform. When the St. Petersburg Times asked Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association executive director Jade Moore why few teachers were signing up for the merit pay program the union helped design for the school district, Moore replied, “Our goal was to make it nearly impossible.”

Charter Schools

Opposition to reform has even driven union bosses to reject hundreds of millions of dollars for public education -- when those dollars pay for kids in non-unionized charter schools. In 2002 philanthropist Robert Thompson offered the city of Detroit $200 million to establish 15 charter schools. Until the fall of 2002, according to the Detroit Free Press, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm and Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick supported Thompson’s offer. But on September 25 of that year, the Detroit Federation of Teachers led a one-day walkout that shut down the city's schools in protest of Thompson’s offer. The deal collapsed immediately thereafter.

The NEA has been the single biggest obstacle to education reform in this country. We know because we worked for the NEA.
— Billy Boyton and John Lloyd, former top officers of the Nebraska and Kansas NEA affiliates, respectively, in Educational Freedom

School Choice

Stronger teacher with kidsmedicine for public education brings even stronger anger from entrenched unions. The then-president of the California Teachers Association (CTA), the most powerful state teachers union in the country, gave an incredible rationalization for the extreme measures the union used in 1992 to prevent a school-choice measure from ever reaching Californians for a vote. “There are some proposals that are so evil that they should never even be presented to the voters,” he said. He likened the proposed reform to legalizing the Ku Klux Klan and child prostitution.

Forbes magazine reported that the CTA took such a hard-line stance against the ballot initiative in question that it used a variety of unheard-of tactics to keep the proposal off the ballot, including “blocking would-be signators’ access to the petition in shopping malls, allegedly sabotaging the petition with fake names and offering a signature-collecting firm $400,000 to decline the account.”

...blocking would-be signators’ access to the petition in shopping malls, allegedly sabotaging the petition with fake names and offering a signature-collecting firm $400,000 to decline the account

— Tactics employed by the California Teachers Association to stop a school reform petition from making it to the voters, as reported by Forbes

Scholarships for Low-Income Children

The New Jersey Education Association, the most powerful teachers union in the state, vigorously opposed in 2008 a bill to provide tax credits for scholarships to allow low-income students to escape failing public classrooms. According to a Monmouth University poll, an overwhelming 74% majority of New Jersey residents supported the measure. Union officials declared the bill too costly to implement, but an independent taxpayers group found that the project would actually save the state more than $700 million while extending a lifeline to students trapped in underperforming and dangerous schools. Nor was this the first time that the NJEA opposed private-school scholarships for kids in need, as Andrew Coulson wrote in Market Education:

In late October of 1995, officials of the Pepsi company announced at Jersey City Hall that their corporation would donate thousands of dollars in scholarships to help low-income children attend the private school of their choice. The immediate response of the local public school teachers’ union was to threaten that a statewide boycott of all Pepsi products could not be ruled out. Pepsi vending machines around the city were vandalized and jammed. Three weeks later, company officials regretfully withdrew their offer.

Holding Children’s Futures Hostage — Literally

NEA Opposition to Differential Pay for Math Teachers Doesn’t Add Up

In a November 2007 report on how teachers unions affect math and science education, National Institute for Labor Relations Research senior research associate Stan Greer pointed out -- using the union’s own words -- how the National Education Association (NEA) stifles a critical education reform:

In July 2000, the NEA Representative Assembly passed a resolution that explicitly condemns offering higher pay to math, science, and foreign language teachers for positions a school district is having trouble filling than to any other teachers: “The Association opposes providing additional compensation to attract and/or retain education employees in hard-to-recruit positions….”

According to NEA researchers, 41 states are currently experiencing a shortage of math teachers. Forty-three have shortages of science and special education teachers. Fourteen states don’t have enough foreign language teachers, while 10 don’t have enough for English as a Second Language (ESL) and/or “bilingual” education.

Meanwhile, just one state has an identified shortage of English teachers. Just one has a shortage of physical education teachers. And not one has a shortage of social studies, reading, kindergarten, or elementary school teachers.

Upset with a policy change in 1992 that converted a half-hour of preparation time to instruction time in the seven-hour workday of D.C. public school teachers, the Washington Teachers Union called on teachers to ignore the new rule. When the district didn’t budge, The Washington Post reported, teachers distributed letters to parents explaining that they would not write college recommendations for their children unless the parents and students took the union’s side in its dispute with the reform proposal.

Known as “work to rule,” this union slow-down tactic had D.C. teachers do only the work strictly required by their contracts and nothing else (such as writing recommendations, for example). With each recommendation request, parents were instructed to include union-supporting letters to three different office-holders, along with three addressed, stamped envelopes.

Keeping a Tight Grip on Policy

The control that teachers union officials can maintain over local school boards can verge on the ridiculous. Veteran education reporter Joe Williams wrote: “The United Teachers Los Angeles had such a tight grip on its school board in 2004 that union leaders actually instructed them on important policies and made no attempt to hide their hand signals to school board members during meetings.”

With its corps of UniServ directors, furthermore, the National Education Association employs a larger number of political organizers than the Republican and Democratic National Committees combined -- as Frederick Hess and Andrew Kelly point out, UniServ “has consistently been the NEA’s most expensive budget item.” UniServ directors assist local teachers unions with collective bargaining (supplying negotiation experience that often vastly outstrips the resources of a local school district), but they also serve as conduits for the union’s political messages. Thanks to its UniServ network and its “member-to-member” communications, the NEA commands a get-out-the-vote network that’s a powerful complement to its considerable political donations (and one that’s nearly invisible to government oversight, too).



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Continue Reading - The Union Contract: Bargaining Away Quality,
Wrapping Schools in Red Tape