Wisconsin’s Teachers Union Faces New Political Reality
The former longtime president of the teachers union in Toledo, Ohio, a progressive leader named Dal Lawrence, considers Wisconsin’s statewide union to be among the most “retrograde” in the country. “In Wisconsin, they think they invented labor-management relations in the 1920s and they don’t want to hear about anything new since then,” Lawrence told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last fall. Last week, however, the union’s leaders showed that they are very much aware of just how much has changed not only since the 1920s but from even as recently as last year. Saying “we believe good teachers should be rewarded”, the union made a sharp turnaround from its previous position and proposed that teachers be paid more when they earn promotions, just as assistant professors get a raise when they become associate or full professors. The union also proposed a new teacher evaluation system, which would consider student