So why and how are Republicans trying to do away with collective bargaining within our educational system?
The “why” I’ll leave alone for now and let others answer. The “how”, is far more interesting….
I will now try to put myself in their shoes and argue like a Republican.
“An honest examination of the facts proves that collective bargaining between the school systems and unions has created a climate of antagonism between those who should be working together to advance a positive agenda for our children and preparing them for a bright future.”
“The process itself is adversarial and confrontational and does not lend itself to cooperation. Due to the mandatory negotiating privilege given to the unions by their State, a school system will often agree to unreasonable demands in a contract simply to prevent an expensive lawsuit. Ultimately, this impacts the taxpayers—the very people whom the teachers, the school board, and the Legislature work for and from whom they expect positive results in the classroom”
“In the poisonous atmosphere that has been created through collective bargaining, do we really have to ask why this nation is ranked so low in education results?”
“I do not want teachers to suffer. I want to reward excellent teachers for doing a great job and producing students who are prepared for the challenges of the 21st century. I believe effective teachers are the greatest resource we have in providing a quality education to our students. Good teachers deserve to be rewarded for their excellence. Unfortunately, collective bargaining preserves the status quo and prevents merit pay for highly effective teachers and teacher bonuses and incentives for those who will rescue a failing school.”
“There are schools that do not collective bargain. These school systems use “collaborative bargaining” where the teacher association representatives sit down with the school board to negotiate. Teachers in those school systems have the ability to directly negotiate their contracts while continuing their ability to remain in an association and attend board meetings.
It should be pointed out that, on average in these systems, teacher pay is increased more rapidly and students achieve at a higher rate.”
“Collaborative bargaining” empowers our teachers and allows the State to bring willing partners to the table to advance the interests of its children. Under collective bargaining, the non-union teachers in are prohibited from taking their concerns directly to the school board. With these current conditions, these non-union teachers must adhere to contract negotiations, whether they like the terms or not. If they want their “voice” heard, their only option is to pay the union so they can go through the union representatives.”
“The truth is that the bill to remove collective bargaining, is a pro-teacher bill that rewards achievement in the classroom and helps promote the best and the brightest in the educational field. By eliminating the collectivist authority of the unions that are trying to dominate the conversation, this bill serves the best interests of students.”
“For years in this great nation, unions have stymied education reforms. If you don’t believe me, just do the research. I recommend you read “Collective Bargaining in Education,” a study by the Harvard Education Press. This is an examination of the history of collective bargaining and how unions motivate their members. For decades, the union has promoted the idea that the “working conditions of our teachers are the learning conditions of our students” while blocking vital reforms and favoring existing arrangements that protect jobs and restrict accountability for student performance and achievement.”
The study “A Better Bargain: Overhauling Teacher Collective Bargaining for the 21st Century” by Frederick M. Hess, American Enterprise Institute, and Martin R. West, the Brookings Institute reveals:
“Collective bargaining contracts are especially problematic on three fronts:
• They restrict efforts to use compensation as a tool to recruit, reward, and retain the most essential and effective leaders.
• They impede attempts to assign or remove teachers on the basis of fit or performance.
• They over-regulate school life with work rules that stifle creative problem solving without demonstrably improving teachers’ ability to serve students.
“Union leaders typically greet this diagnosis with a reflexive refrain: “What is good for teachers is good for students.” While superficially appealing, that sentiment is simply untrue. In fact, the results of the collective bargaining process are too often incompatible with providing a high-quality education for all students.”
“Collective bargaining is about what is best for the union and its ability to retain power, not the children. That is the union’s mission and you can hear it for yourself by going to <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyGiuoKr-ew" here. Collective bargaining prohibits performance pay for teachers. All teachers are treated the same—the excellent ones are paid the same as the poor performers. In a nation where we try to motivate students to achieve more and aspire to be more, what kind of message does this send?”
“It is fundamentally unfair. Collective bargaining makes it almost impossible to dismiss teachers for poor performance or misconduct, which means less pay and lower benefits for high performing teachers”.
“The good teachers know exactly who is getting the job done and who is not, yet the union blocks the solution and ultimately our children suffer. The union is focused solely on protecting its self-interests, not educating students and this one-size fits all approach denigrates good teachers and good students alike.”
“The sweeping reforms contained in Race to the Top (RTTT) would have never passed if they would have had to occur on the local level through negotiations. Ask yourself, “Why did we have to get the union to sign off on RTTT? Why were they blocking the reforms in the first place?” More alarmingly (and perhaps unsurprisingly) reports are already coming in from school systems that the local unions are throwing up roadblocks to these reforms the State agreed to in order to participate in RTTT.
I hope that all conservative teachers do their research to fully understand what the NEA is all about and that by being a part of that organization and investing your hard earned money, you are promoting their mission. This is a mission that I know the people of Sussex County do not agree with at all.
Here is the NEA’s 2010 legislative program (which is in direct opposition to what conservatives and Republicans believe).
* Mandatory full-day kindergarten attendance for all children, with federal money if the state can’t afford it.
* Substantial increases in federal education funding.
* Repeal of the right-to-work provision of federal labor law.
* A tax-supported, single-payer health care plan for all residents of the U.S., its territories and Puerto Rico.
* Federal funding for the education of illegal aliens.
* Federal programs to teach schoolchildren about different sexual orientations.
* Legislation to prohibit religious organizations that accept federal funding from basing hiring decisions on religion, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, or HIV/AIDS status.
* Affirmative action to redress historical patterns of discrimination.
* Legislation to study possible reparations to African-Americans to address residual effects of slavery.
* Statehood for the District of Columbia.
* Opposition to tuition tax credits, vouchers and parental option or “choice” in education programs.
* Opposition to denying student aid to illegal alien college students.
* Opposition to using draft registration as an eligibility criterion for financial aid.
* Opposition to the testing of teachers as a criterion for job retention, promotion, tenure or salary increases.
* Opposition to legislation that denies illegal aliens’ access to public schools.
* Opposition to designating English as the official language of the United States.
* Opposition to the use of voter ID cards for voting in local, state and national elections.
* Opposition to privatization of Social Security.
* Opposition to any constitutional amendment limiting taxes or the federal budget.
“Finally I want all to keep in mind. Not only do our representatives represent this state’s teachers but they also represent the students, the parents and the taxpayers who grudging give over their hard earned cash, to publicly fund each and every school system…. They have rights too, and one of those rights… is to demand quality education for their children.”
“And the easiest and quickest way to do that, ….. is to reward good teachers and punish bad ones. Collective bargaining currently makes that impossible…”
And there you have it. That is the best case I could come up for busting up the unions and making them powerless to impact anything.
I’ll be back to rebut myself sometime later……..
2 comments
Comments feed for this article
February 28, 2011 at 11:47 am
tom beebe st louis
Let the teachers have their union and bargaining rights. Our problem is the politicians across the table from them. Let us resolve the issue by giving the power to deal with the unions to we, the “customers” of those teachers, rather than weak and often corrupted politicians. Set the contracts to expire shortly after elections, and place the union demands, and politicians counter-offers, on the ballot in the form of a referendum, for voters/taxpayers to choose. And if the politicians’ offer is too costly, remember that their names will be on that ballot too.
February 28, 2011 at 2:05 pm
kavips
I like your idea.
However even though it sounds good, getting there has some problems; ones probably prohibitive.
One, unions don’t bargain with politicians. They bargain with employers. Even if the employer is connected to the state, they are not bargaining with politicians ( those actually elected) but, with people hired, on state tax money mind you, to administrate whatever department it is they are running.
Those administrators have the difficult position to run their department as best they can, without pissing off people enough to vote out the person who put them in. If they cater too much, so massive amounts of money get spent, they lose their job as well… There’s is not an easy task. They have to do what’s right, and be politically savvy enough, to keep their job through it all.
Another problem, is that “we” the customers of education, don’t vote as much as we should. And the reason we “don’t vote” is because we are rather ill informed, mostly by our own choice. You can see that by how few people show up at a school board meeting, unless whipped up by a frenzy of news activity.
Politicians have the right to self survival. They have the right to be re-elected. The problems you speak of are not with politicians. Oh, no. Politicians are not a dirty race. All the problems we face lie with the citizenry themselves.
You sound like you are bright and informed. But if you were honest, and if you went to the four neighbors bordering your property and found out whether any of them were following this with your intensity, you would probably find that you would be the only one.
If you found one, lucky you, you would have already beaten the odds….
Today we talk and talk about how politicians ought to be beholden to “the people”.. But at those points when they need us most, we’ re not there watching their backs… Instead, we’re in our own little worlds.
Corruption has always been rampant in government, and will always be, sad to say. It is easy to see its influence down low on the level of local politics. There, people unabashedly work for some particular interest. It may be for the railroad. It may be for the iron mine. It may be for the developers. But they are there for an agenda, and the other little things they do because they have to, like show up at a ladies guild, or snip the ribbons at a grand opening, or walk around kissing babies at election time… All these are trinkets. The bottom line is that these people are hired guns by someone on their local playing field and use that wealthy person’s resources to keep themselves receiving a paycheck.
It used to be that state and federal politics were too big for corruption to make too much of a dent. Perhaps in a poor state, one giant business may have a little influence, but as for the Federal Government, well, this nation was too wide, too broad, for one person, one influence to gain enough of a foothold for corruption or influence to make any inroads….
I stress: “used to be.”
That was before television. 4 billion was spent the last congressional election… It wasn’t a presidential election…. The greatest amount of money ever spent in a democracy since recorded history, was spent on names, not even I, can remember… I think besides my own state race, I know of two others? And I am one of the informed ones..
No, the problem is that with gigantic amounts of money at peoples disposal, because we stopped taxing them fairly, they have tremendous pools of cash on hand, doing nothing which they funnel into politics.
Now, lets assume you’re the good guy: you could be a congressman, devoted to your constituents, loved by all, hated by none, and still lose an election to money… just money that went to the other side. To prove it, a candidate who never existed, was just elected this past year!… That is just sad.
So, you have “We, the people,” who only rise up whenever it is too late, versus the money, who is right there the second you lift their hand off the bible from the swearing in ceremony…. and we, the people, have the nerve to call them corrupt politicians?
When “The Money” says “hey, help a brother out,” and we, fail to rise up and say “don’t listen to him, listen to us instead.” can you blame them for listening to the only sound they hear?
“But they should be worthy of seeing the difference is our claim”, we argue….What if you only hear one side? … Imagine the parent who hears one child tell him the other is up to no good, is out to squander his inheritance, and the other child who knows nothing of this, finally decides to buy a car, and the parent sadly says, “yes, I guess my first child was right?”
Believe me, most politicians do not take money gleefully; they’d rather say ‘no,’ and have all their constituents stand up and cheer loudly and swear allegiance to vote each and every time for that person saying no…
It doesn’t work that way… People elected only listen to “the money” because they have to, if they want to survive. And by ignoring them (the money), they can’t…”
So, where does that leave this nation… We, the people, need to involve ourselves politically. People need to wear their politics on their sleeves again., Not hide behind some veneer of “politics are too ugly” and remain silent because they might get cut off from sex of something like that…..
We need to go to open meetings. Not necessarily to speak out, unless we feel the urge ( most of those speaking out are doing so to influence, not to tell how they’re honestly feeling) But we need to go in order to listen to both sides… Most people are smart. They’ve survived so far in this world, haven’t they? They may not agree with our opinion, but they are not dumb… In truth, I have found very few dumb people as I’ve gone through life on a personal level, as that movie Forrest Gump so ably portrays. People for the most part, do what’s best for themselves…
Most people will hear both sides and take the best of both…
That is what is not happening today in our society….
Therefore, your idea, of skipping negotiations, and bringing the ideas before the people on the ballot, is, if impossible to achieve, a metaphor behind the very idea that people need to gather and talk about politics again, without worry about whether their side will win or lose…
Remember, the whole goal of democracy is the take the best of both opposing sides, put them together, and make a stronger union than either side would accomplish by themselves….