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CER and Education Reform In The News
California's Schools: Will AB2160 Improve Them? New Bill Won't Help
Teachers
By Jeanne Allen
San
Francisco Chronicle, March 20, 2002
The move by California's largest labor union to get more control over a child's education is an outrageous power grab destined to hurt schools.
United against a bill that would put the union in charge of the classroom is a diverse array of school boards, charter schools, administrators, business and technology leaders and, most importantly, parents.
To hear union boss Wayne Johnson, one would think that this bill was an attempt to elevate the status of teachers and treat them as professionals. The truth is that the bill has nothing to do with teachers and everything to do with special interests.
School performance for the California Teachers Association is akin to the energy crisis for Enron. The public is demanding higher performance at all schools, requiring teachers to account for much higher levels of progress. And with new federal testing requirements, the sun will shine greater on all of the results.
That should make a group claiming to represent teachers all the more concerned about ensuring higher expectations for new teachers and giving them more authority in their classrooms. More union involvement will not empower individual teachers, but will give an elite group of bargaining agents the ability to dictate how schools should run.
The motive is clear -- CTA believes that it must protect teachers from external efforts to hold them accountable. If unions are able to dictate through the bargaining process everything from textbook selection to curriculum to assessment, they will seek the least challenging of programs so that all will do well.
Rank-and-file teachers believe that the union has little confidence that they will excel in an environment that requires them to perform. What comfort is that to Golden State parents, who have entrusted their children to schools where the CTA already governs a large segment of the population?
Parents are horrified that union contracts already dictate basic policies and spending levels, giving administrators little flexibility to make necessary changes to boost achievement. Johnson would take away what little power parents have to influence their schools. Union negotiations are typically secret, and they would remain closed to parents under AB2160 unless the parents could demonstrate some "expertise."
Recently, a study by a Bay Area think-tank found that the more control the union has, the lower the district's test scores.
If the union really wanted to influence better schools, its leaders would offer results in exchange for the desired control rather than demand control without accountability. Late last decade, there was praise from pundits that "new unionism" had reached the teacher unions. But Johnson is considered among the least progressive teacher union leaders in the land.
California needs a real debate about teacher quality. The research is incontrovertible. Teachers perform well when they have daily flexibility, authority to manage their classrooms and programs, and benefits that are largely tied to their level of responsibility and ability to perform.
As the nation moves more toward arrangements that make this kind of real local control possible, California seems anchored on proposals doomed to bring schools down.
When a majority of children are still way behind, policymakers should shut out proposals like this one and expand upon choice and accountability efforts that raise student achievement and give parents more, not less, control in the schools they fund.
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Jeanne Allen is president of the Center for Education Reform in Washington, D.C.