In Wisconsin, about 1,000 teachers called in sick Wednesday to protest Gov. Scott Walker’s attempt to strip their union bargaining rights.
In Washington, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie recounted his battle with his state’s teachers unions Wednesday, calling their leaders “greedy” and “selfish.”
And in Nevada, Indiana and Florida, Republican governors are targeting teachers contracts and work rules to fix a system they say is broken. “The status quo has put us at the bottom of the heap,” Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval told POLITICO.
The events point to a convergence that is remaking the politics of education. Teachers unions, historically one of the most powerful interest groups in American politics, are being besieged like never before — under attack from conservative GOP governors with a zeal for budget-cutting even while taking fire from some Democrats, including President Barack Obama, who has suggested he agrees that unions can be an impediment to better schools.
Obama’s education secretary Arne Duncan sounded surprisingly like the Republican governors when he told teachers unions and administrators at a conference Tuesday in Denver, “Clearly, the status quo isn’t working for children.”
The backlash threatens to undercut one of the Democratic Party’s most stalwart backers — and upset a mutually beneficial relationship where the unions provided financial support and foot soldiers for Democratic campaigns, in return for political cover to protect their prerogatives in the U.S. Congress and state capitols across the nation.
The National Education Association, the largest teachers union, spent $40 million on the 2010 elections alone, making the union one of the largest outside funders of Democratic campaigns.
But things are changing.
On both sides of the aisle, politicians are unhappy with how teachers are compensated, hired and fired, and are eager to introduce reforms. The fiercest opposition to the status quo is coming from fiscally conservative Republicans, who are mixing concerns about their states’ children with the desire to cut spending and shrink the size of government.
They’re pushing against the power that the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers and their affiliates have amassed over the course of many decades of political activism and stubborn negotiations in a way that hasn’t been seen since the rise of organized labor in the first half of the 20th century.
What’s remarkable now, however, is how closely some of the Republicans’ complaints mirror those of the Obama administration, whose Race to the Top education initiative includes programs that have long been anathema to the unions, such as merit pay for teachers and giving districts the ability to fire bad teachers.
Obama and Duncan have made clear that their vision for the country’s teachers includes getting tougher on them. “It is time to start rewarding good teachers and stop making excuses for bad ones,” the president said shortly after taking office.
Republican governors and legislators, though, are going much further. In Wisconsin, Walker is pushing a bill through the state Legislature that would limit collective bargaining rights for teachers unions and most other unions representing public sector employees. Other governors, including Mitch Daniels in Indiana, and Rick Scott in Florida, are taking similar steps.
To be sure, the White House isn’t going that far. Duncan, at his appearance at the Denver education conference this week, made clear the White House would stick up for teachers unions and others in states where those collective bargaining rights are under attack.
Still, at least one governor has come to national prominence for taking on teachers unions — Chris Christie, who has battled with the New Jersey Education Association, the state’s 200,000-member teachers union.
Christie said in a Wednesday speech at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington that he is “reforming an education system that costs too much and does too little for our society today and our children’s future.”
The state’s unions “think I’m attacking them,” Christie said. But he said he’s not targeting their rank-and-file members. “I’m attacking the leadership of the unions because they’re greedy, they’re selfish.”
“It’s time to honestly say that we can separate the teachers from the union,” he later added.
AFT President Randi Weingarten said that Christie and other Republican governors want to break unions that represent public sector workers. “They don’t want teachers or bus drivers or firefighters to have a voice,” she told POLITICO on Wednesday.
Steve Wallmer, spokesman for the NJEA, said he sees Christie’s focus on education not as an effort to help children but a means to cut state spending and reduce the size of government. “What is going on in this country right now is an unprecedented assault on public employees and their unions by a handful of Republican governors,” he said. “Gov. Christie is a key player in that endeavor.”
While Christie “talks about caring about public schools and caring about students, students are just pawns in this game he’s playing,” Wallmer said. Ultimately, he said, Christie’s goal is to hand over most of the state’s education system to the private sector by weakening the union and introducing vouchers. “He wants to privatize public education, and fighting with us is just the first step.”
Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, said he thinks the newfound zeal for reforming education by Walker, Christie and Daniels stems mainly from their desire to rein in state budgets.
“The largest commitments and therefore your largest dollars are for your K-12 educators, so that’s where they’re turning their attention,” Hess said.
Weingarten put it more bluntly. “It’s all about politics,” she said. “It’s not about schools.”
But one factor working against the teachers unions is public disillusionment with the labor movement in general. In a Pew Research Center poll last February, Americans’ support for unions dropped to the lowest levels since 1985, with just 42 percent of Americans saying they had favorable views of unions.
One of the biggest union critics in the education reform movement is Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of District of Columbia Public Schools, who launched a nonprofit called Students First late last year. She is already advising Christie, Scott and Sandoval.
Rhee’s alliances with Republicans, despite being a Democrat herself, are something that many people find “sort of interesting,” she told POLITICO, but it works to her advantage. “We’re not focused on partisan politics. We’re focused on what’s right for our kids,” she said.
Rhee said that Scott and Christie share a willingness to “anger or disrupt lots of entrenched interests and lots of defenders of the status quo,” including the unions.
“Right now, there is an alliance of convenience between ed reformers and conservative governors who have more fundamental concerns with state budgets,” said Hess, of AEI. At some point, the alliance may crack, but it hasn’t yet. For now, it continues to expand. Rhee said she is planning to announce more state partnerships in the coming weeks.
In Nevada, meanwhile, Sandoval insists that his efforts are at once about improving the state’s education system and reducing spending. “There has to be a way that we can do better in our classrooms, to have teachers that are good,” he told POLITICO.
Sandoval is pushing the reform of teacher tenure and the end of social promotions, while the state legislature may move forward on measures to change collective bargaining. “There’s a recognition here by the Democrats that there have to be some systemic changes,” he said.
Republican states are looking to labor practices — particularly collective bargaining agreements — that they see costing big money but not bringing in big results.
Republicans in Indiana and Idaho have proposed bills that would limit the reach of collective bargaining agreements for teachers unions to wages and benefits. In Tennessee, proposed legislation would block teachers’ unions from negotiating with local school boards.
“Collective bargaining is all about making sure employees have a voice in their workplace,” said Kim Anderson, the NEA’s director of government affairs. “We have an all-out effort in each state and great solidarity nationally against the governors who are trying to eliminate collective bargaining rights.”
In Indiana, Daniels, the potential GOP presidential candidate, is backing bills in both chambers of the state’s general assembly that would remove teacher evaluation and dismissal procedures from the issues that could be negotiated in collective bargaining. The state Senate’s bill would limit contracts to two years and permit districts to impose their own employment terms if an agreement on a new contract could not be reached before the end of the current contract.
In his State of the State address last month, Daniels said that “while unions and collective bargaining are the right of those teachers who wish to engage in them, they go too far when they dictate the color of the teachers’ lounge, who can monitor recess, or on what days the principal is allowed to hold a staff meeting.”
School administrators and districts, he said, must be freed “from all the handcuffs that reduce their ability to meet the higher expectations we now have for student achievement” and limiting how collective bargaining can be used would be part of that.
Daniels and state Republicans are also working on bills that would introduce merit pay and create a school voucher program — both policies that teachers unions oppose. Final bills on those two issues and collective bargaining are still being negotiated, but are expected to pass the Republican-dominated legislature.
Idaho’s schools superintendent Tom Luna, a Republican, has proposed legislation that would limit the reach of collective bargaining agreements for teachers unions to wages and benefits. It’s all part of “an overall comprehensive reform process for education,” he said. “Changing collective bargaining restores power to our local school boards.”
But in Wisconsin, where Walker is pushing one of the toughest anti-union measures in the country, there are no illusions about linking changes in union laws to a broader education platform. “We are definitely not singling out teachers,” said Cullen Werwie, Walker’s spokesman. “Our budget needs to be repaired, and teachers are part of that.”
Nonetheless, Dan Burkhalter, executive director of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, said the state’s teachers see the bill as an all-out assault on their rights.
“It’s a very clever push because it makes it more difficult for unions to exist and to have rights all by stressing that Wisconsin is facing a fiscal crisis that we need to deal with now,” said Burkhalter, whose group is a state affiliate of the NEA. “They’ve made a move to advance an ideological agenda in the name of a fiscal crisis.”
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Thursday, February 17th 2011 at 10:50AM
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