‘If you truly cared’ — angry president of largest teachers union sends message to school reformers
Teachers’ unions are under siege nationwide. Criticism by political leaders and education reformers has snowballed. In recent years, government and unions have battled over tenure, teacher assessment, testing, the length of the school day, class size, school closures, and pay for performance.
A 2013 headline in the Hechinger Report said, “Under siege—and in bid to stay relevant—teacher unions evolve.”
A 2012 story in The New York Times about a teachers strike in Chicago (which, incidentally, didn’t turn out terribly for the teachers) says, “In Standoff, Latest Sign of Unions Under Siege.”
Indeed, teachers unions are facing unprecedented stress as the teaching profession has come under assault from those who want to take away their job protections and cast them as the biggest problems in student underachievement, but all unions in general face stresses for a variety of reasons. In fact, union membership in this country has been falling since 1947, when the Taft-Hartley Act, an anti-union law, was passed. While it is certainly true that unions were very late in recognizing that they needed to make changes in their views on issues such as teacher evaluation, it would be simplistic to say that unions are doing themselves in all on their own. A shift in the base of the Democratic Party — traditionally a friend to the labor movement — toward Wall Street hasn’t helped.
The ruling earlier this week by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Rolf M. Treu revealed as much about Treu’s views of the facts as the facts themselves. He accepted what is really a specious argument offered in the “Vergara trial” that state laws giving job protections to public school teachers deprive students of their constitutional right to an adequate education. The statutes themselves don’t do that. How those statutes are implemented is a different story, but that’s not the fault of the statutes. In any case, Treu’s ruling, which he stayed pending an appeal, sparked victory parties among reformers and promises of more lawsuits against teachers unions around the country.
USA Today ran a full-page ad by an anti-union group urging people to sue teachers and their unions (not a new call by this group) and Politico ran its story, which got a lot of Twitter attention. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers union, sent a letter to Education Secretary Arne Duncan criticizing his praise for the Treu ruling (which you can read here), and Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union, made a video, which you can watch (above) or read (see transcript below), expressing unusual public anger for the labor leader.
Of course teachers unions’ leaders are upset and responding publicly to the bad news. There is dissension in the unions, and their leaders are being ‘If you truly cared’ — angry president of largest teachers union sends message to school reformers - The Washington Post: