This week marks my second week being in Washington, DC and the first week of my senior year of college. After being at Arizona State University for three years, this cross-country trip to the nation’s capitol marks the first semester I will not be returning to Arizona. As part of ASU’s McCain Institute Policy & Design program, I am to be in Washington, DC, participating in a course that is designed to give the students real world knowledge and experience on the challenges that come with national and global policy in a number of areas. Along with this course, the students are to obtain an internship in the area with an organization of their choice that generally revolves around their interests.
This leads me to how I ended up with Center for Education Reform. As a Public Service and Public Policy student in the W.P. Carey School of Business at ASU, my main interests lie with education reform and CER turned out to be my top choice when applying to a numerous amount of internships over this past summer. This week also marks only my first week with CER, which means learning about the organization’s ins and outs and what my daily tasks will be.
During my time here in Washington, DC, I hope to gain extensive knowledge in many areas, including policy design, education reform as a whole, and even the DC metro lines. I have been to DC, parts of Maryland and northern Virginia multiple times in my life as I have the majority of my family living in these areas. I hope to familiarize myself with this region of the East Coast just as I have with the West. I could quite possibly be calling this area ‘home’ in the near future.
An Abbreviated Story of Labor: What Once Was but Is No More
Once upon a time, in this country, early in the last century hoards of Italians, (like me!), Irish, German, Jewish peoples and more descended on this land in search of something better. From the schools to the sweatshops, they took jobs that paid little and demanded much. Haste, greed and neglect soon became the norm in the American workforce. Labor unions stepped, to collectively support and advance the rights of people to work and be given adequate wages, benefits and a quality environment. It was great, when it was needed.
Today those same unions — in this case in education — no longer protect people who are being abused, neglected, forced to work 15-hour days with no break for food or bathroom. Because of enlightened leaders, workers and yes, labor’s past contributions, today we and our institutions are protected. Those protections however, may have swung too far past the original intentions. For when it comes to teachers unions, protections now are all about labor not product.
Consider this program is overwhelmingly popular ongoing legal attack by the Louisiana Federation of Teachers and their allies in successfully impeding the Louisiana scholarship program. This program is overwhelmingly popular with parents and allows income-eligible students educational opportunities they would not have had otherwise.
Or how about just hours after North Carolina passes an opportunity scholarship program of their own this past July, the NC Association of Educators begins to mount a legal challenge.
The national unions have been fighting efforts to allow parents to turnaround failing schools. They oppose California’s parent trigger law and have well-documented tools for members who succeeded in squashing a similar proposal in Connecticut. The unions not only oppose real performance evaluations and parent choice but even standards and testing, funding teachers to rally in Washington over efforts to hold schools accountable.
This is what labor unions have become?
Movies have been done, books written, and hundreds of thousands of blogs, tweets, and news articles on the same subject.
This Labor day — which most Americans simply use as a needed day off before the annual renewal of the post-summer work period and back to school season, let’s resolve to change the system that once was needed but is no more. All of our great labors day in and day out aside, our schools and public institutions need the right to put results and effort first