Education Skeptics Should Be Critical of All Sides
Oddly, but perhaps not surprisingly, my latest handful of posts critiquing the teachers unions have been met with quite a lot of resentment. Let me be clear: while I find much to disagree with in some of the actions and methods of the teachers unions, and while I find any accumulation of power troubling and worth watching (and there are four million members in the two largest teachers unions – if that’s not power I don’t know what is) I do not think that the teachers unions should be busted up or that they should play no part in education. I think unions should reform, not disappear.
Let me echo Kevin Drum:
Every single human institution or organization of any size has its bad points. Corporations certainly do. The military does. Organized religion does. Academia does. The media does. The financial industry sure as hell does. But with the exception of a few extremists here and there, nobody uses this as an excuse to suggest that these institutions are hopelessly corrupt and should cease existing. Rather, it’s used as fodder for regulatory proposals or as an argument that every right-thinking person should fight these institutions on some particular issue. Corporations should or shouldn’t be rewarded for outsourcing jobs. Academics do or don’t deserve more state funding. The
