The War Against Hope: How Teachers' Unions Hurt Children, Hinder Teachers, and Endanger Public Education

By Rod Paige

A former US Secretary of Education addresses the crisis in public schooling and the role teachers’ unions have played in its decline.

Something is terribly wrong with America’s public-school system. For decades, we have seen test scores slide or stagnate—today, fewer than twenty percent of our nation’s twelfth graders are proficient in math, and our students rank near the bottom in science and math among the industrialized nations of the world—and achievement gaps persist or widen.

So who’s responsible for the ongoing failure of our education system? In The War Against Hope, former Secretary of Education Rod Paige pulls no punches in his critical analysis of America’s crisis in the classroom. Without question, the greatest impediment to meaningful school reform is the enormous, self-aggrandizing power wielded by the teachers’ unions.

In this vital, well-documented book, Paige takes an unflinching look at the power-hungry union leaders who have consistently placed their ambitions ahead of the needs of the teachers and the students whom they claim to serve. He also traces the history of the National Education Association (NEA) from its humble beginnings as an advocate of education excellence to its early radicalization by left-wing ideology.

The War Against Hope is a disturbing account of the corruption, greed, and skewed values that have assaulted our schools, betrayed our teachers, and forsaken our children for far too long.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 16, 2009
• ISBN: 9781418551889

Book preview

THE WAR

AGAINST

HOPE

THE WAR

AGAINST

HOPE

HOW TEACHERS’ UNIONS HURT CHILDREN,

HINDER TEACHERS,

AND ENDANGER PUBLIC EDUCATION

ROD PAIGE

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Copyright © 2006 by Rod Paige

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data

Paige, Rod.

    The war against hope : how teachers’ unions hurt children, hinder teachers, and endanger public education / Rod Paige.

      p. cm.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN-10: 1-59555-002-X

    ISBN-13: 978-1-59555-002-6

    1. Teachers’ unions—United States. 2. Educational change—United States. I. Title.

  LB2844.53.U6P34 2007 .

  331.88'11371100973—dc22

  2006039112

Printed in the United States of America

07 08 09 10 QW 5 4 3 2 1

I dedicate this book to all of the children

in this country whose education

has been compromised over the years

by the actions of teachers’ unions

acting in their own self interest rather than

the best interests of their students.

It’s time to admit that public education operates

like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system

in which everybody’s role is spelled out in advance

and there are few incentives for innovation and

productivity. It’s no surprise that our school

system doesn’t improve: It more resembles the

communist economy than our own market economy.

—ALBERT SHANKER

Former President, American Federation of Teachers¹

CONTENTS

Preface: The Elephant in the Room

1: The Firestorm

2: Competing Visions for American Education

3: Teachers’ Unions—What They Are and How They Got That Way

4: Cutting Down Our Best Teachers and Slashing Their Pay

5: A Seat at Both Sides of the Negotiating Table

6: Union Corruption—Betraying Teachers

7: The Threat of Charter School Success

8: Vision for the Future

9: What We Must Do

10: Reasons for Hope

Appendix A: Maxims of American Education (Lessons from Life in the Public Arena)

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

PREFACE

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

An overflow crowd packed the grand ballroom of Washington DC’s Renaissance Hotel for the opening plenary session of the 17th Annual Milken Family Foundation’s National Education Conference. Foundation chairman Lowell Milken kicked off the conference with a fiery keynote address calling the audience’s attention to America’s education challenges and admonishing the crowd about the national need for new developments in teacher education.

The place was filled with excitement when Mr. Milken finished his remarks. Having brought his address to a potent ending, he bowed several times to the appreciative audience and then turned to intro-duce us, the five panelists who were up next to discuss The Role of the Private Sector in Enhancing Teacher Quality. Like an announcer presenting the contestants in a championship sporting event, Mr. Milken proudly introduced the members of our outstanding panel:

• Mr. Sandy Kress, Partner, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer and Field, LLP;

• Mr. Richard Lee Colvin, Director, Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media;

• Ms. Russlyn Ali, Executive Director, The Education Trust-West;

• Mr. Dan Katzir,Managing Director, The Broad Foundation; and

• Dr. Rod Paige, Senior Advisor, Higher Ed. Holdings, LLC; and Chairman, Chartwell Education Group LLC.

This is a heavy-duty group, I thought to myself. And I was right: the panelists were outstanding. Inspired by their passionate presentations, the audience joined in for a spirited question-and-answer session. The group—made up of educators from across the nation, the Milken Teachers of the Year winners, education researchers, education journalists, business leaders, and others—posed a variety of questions. They asked about strategies to improve teacher quality, the effects of school culture, issues related to teacher compensation, the role of parents, and other such topics.

After about forty minutes of lively discussion,Mr. Milken instructed, There is time for only one more question. Pointing to the back of the room, he decreed, Last question, the lady in the back.

I noticed a distinguished-looking woman reaching for the mike. Turning to face the stage, she said in a confident voice:

I am [Jeanne Allen] from the Center for Education Reform. You’ve all provided an incredible amount of depth and breadth to both the problems and the solutions, and I commend you for doing it really comprehensively. But with all due respect, Lowell, there’s an elephant in the room that hasn’t been mentioned.

Before the 1960s, there were associations that supported, defended, and held to high expectations educators all across the country. Somewhere in the 1960s there was a transition where those associations stopped coming to the fore and actually became professional unions. Now they’re just unions, not even professional, as some would argue.

What happened? Where is that in the discussion? Most people don’t really comprehend and think about some of those root causes. Are they causes? Are they problems we need to think about? Does the public need to know about it? What happened in that transition that we can learn from?¹

The audience seemed stunned. For a moment, it was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop. Then, almost in unison, the people in the room turned their attention to the stage to see which of the panelists was going to tackle the question. The other panelists, two on either side of me, were staring at me. On the spot, I snapped, Why is every-one looking at me? One of the panelists answered, You know why.

Yes, I did know why. But the more important why question was still on the table, untouched and unanswered. Why hadn’t this group of esteemed scholars talked about the elephant in the room? Jeanne Allen’s words were still echoing in my ears.

The behavior of the big, all-powerful teachers’ unions is unquestionably the most significant determinant of the success or failure of most education reform efforts. But we had just spent two hours dis-cussing education reform without even mentioning them. That in itself is a major statement about where we are in terms of improving America’s system of education.

Why don’t we talk more openly about teachers’ unions and their influence? Why do we avoid speaking honestly about what they do (or don’t do) to influence school reform efforts, and what they need to do differently? One possible explanation is that we have come to accept their actions against reform as inevitable—as a fact of life. But another logical reason for this absence of discussion is that the nation isn’t fully aware of the destructive impact that many teachers’ unions are having on the education of America’s children.

The conversation that day made me realize more than ever just how urgently this book is needed, and I redoubled my efforts to finish writing it. I wanted to shine a bright light on teachers’ union behavior and increase the probability that, in conferences such as the one I just described, we can begin to openly discuss and debate the influence of these massive organizations and consider how they must change in order to support and spur reform in our public education system.

THE URGENT NEED FOR CHANGE

Since 1965, Americans have spent hundreds of billions of dollars, millions of hours, and an immense amount of political capital trying to improve our underperforming public school system. Charles M. Payne sums up the payoff for this gargantuan effort in a sermonizing paper entitled So Much Reform, So Little Change.²

Why are the results so limited? There are multiple reasons, of course. But the biggest one is that America has yet to muster the courage, and the political will, to confront the major barrier to authentic public education system reform: the National Education Association (NEA) and other self-aggrandizing teachers’ unions. Until we as a nation face up to their systematic efforts to thwart meaningful change, all the billions of dollars, millions of man hours, and immense political capital spent on public education reform will be—to borrow from Shakespeare— but a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.³

To fix our public education system,we have to significantly change the way schools and school systems currently operate. This requires changes in behavior for school boards, superintendents, school administrators, teachers, and parents—everyone involved in the education enterprise. This means that teachers’ unions, too,must change. Some local affiliates have, in fact, done so. Recognizing the urgency of change and their shared responsibility for making it happen, these groups have decided to be productive partners in the fight for reform. But sadly, they are the exception rather than the rule. And their national leadership remains tenaciously insistent on preserving and protecting the status quo.

The problem is, big teachers’ unions like the NEA don’t want the current system to change. In fact, they are deeply threatened by the idea. Why? Because the status quo is working extraordinarily well for them. They experience no consequences for school failure, and they have no incentive to improve student performance. Their major goal is to collect union dues. They don’t collect more union dues if student achievement improves. They may even be better off if student achievement does not improve, because such an environment creates the kinds of tensions that cause more teachers to seek the protection of the union’s legal assets. In many states, teachers are forced to pay union dues whether they want to or not. So, why should the unions change?

Given this reality, it’s quite unproductive to sit around idly, being upset with the aggressive, outrageous actions of many teachers’ union leaders, hoping they will, out of the goodness of their hearts, change. They will not. They are simply doing their job, taking care of their organizational goals. Admittedly, their tactics often extend beyond the boundaries of decency, but nonetheless, they are still doing their job: taking care of their own interests.

The problem is not their behavior but our behavior: the public’s behavior, us. While they are doing their job, taking care of their needs, we—the public—are not doing our job, taking care of the children’s interests. Our inaction, standing by and putting up with excessive union intrusion in school operations, provides fertile ground for their resistance to reform. Thus, the public is both the villain and the victim in this story.

The tragic thing is that our unchallenged acceptance of excessive union intrusion in school operations is a strong accelerant of school failure. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the decline in our education system over the past several decades parallels the rise in influence of teachers’ unions.

It is remarkable to me that, even in the face of massive student underperformance and failure, we, the public, passively take in stride teachers’ unions’ explanations for the deplorable performance of our education system. We are all too willing to accept, without careful scrutiny, their proposed solutions to the problems in our schools and sit back comfortably while they turn a system intended to advance children into a system operated to assure employment sanctity for adults.

Lest the reader be left with the wrong conclusion, let’s stop now and make a few things clear. My concern here is not with the existence of teachers’ unions, or unions in general. History provides many examples of situations where union support was appropriate, essential, and sometimes even noble. An excellent example is the virtuous work of a union called the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. During the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, it rescued thousands of black men who were serving as sleeping car porters from the inhumane working conditions imposed by the Pullman Company.⁴

Teachers too, unfortunately, are sometimes subjected to conditions that require the assistance of appropriate union support. It’s a sad reality of our noble profession. Furthermore, some of what the teachers’ unions have achieved historically has been not just productive, but at times even praiseworthy. No,my concern is not with unions per se, but rather with their leaders’ behavior in blocking meaningful and urgently needed change. I firmly believe that teachers’ union activity has gone well beyond the boundaries of appropriateness and far into the realm of excessiveness. This book is filled with examples.

How do they get away with this, one may ask? First, teachers’ unions are extremely skillful at hiding behind America’s love for teachers. They carefully refer to themselves as the teachers, being vigilant never to classify themselves as the union. Even in union contracts, they cautiously often avoid the term union, preferring most times to use a more benign term such as the association.

Admittedly, teachers’ union members are teachers. But there is a major difference between the term teacher and the term union. A teacher is an individual—a person with unique views, aspirations, qualities. The union is an organization, an association, an establishment to which many, many teachers belong. Teachers have interests. Likewise, organizations and associations have interests. Ideally, the organization or association and its members have the same interests. But there are situations where the organization or association and their members may have widely different interests, and widely different views.

The union establishment is also very careful to use rhetoric designed to convince an unquestioning public that they act on behalf of children. But the reality is that unions exist to advocate on behalf of the unions’ interests, not the children’s.

This does not mean that teachers’ unions don’t care about the children. Of course, their individual members do (the vast majority of them, anyway). But teachers’ unions taken as a whole almost never put children’s interests ahead of the interests of the union establishment. First and foremost, their primary goal is to strengthen the union as an organization and to protect and enhance their constituents’ well-being. That’s their purpose. That’s what they do. That’s why they do as they do, and it would be quite naïve to expect them to do otherwise. Behavior is goal directed—this is a psychological truism.⁵ To under-stand their goal is to understand their behavior.

Consider the following statement that appeared in a bulletin from the Oregon Education Association, a NEA affiliate: The major purpose of our association is not education, rather it ought to be the extension and/or preservation of our members’ rights. We earnestly care about kids and learning, but that is secondary to other goals.⁶ I rest my case.

Throughout this book, I present examples of the ways in which teachers’ unions’ actions reveal their real purpose, which is to enhance the power of the union establishment. In analyzing these examples, I consider the many ways in which this purpose directly conflicts with and undermines the goals and purposes of school reform that are underway in schools and school districts across the country.

So, this book is not about bashing teachers’ unions. It’s about explaining them. To return to the metaphor that Ms. Allen introduced, it’s about seeing the elephant for what it is and characterizing how it behaves. It’s about making the teachers’ unions’ goals and actions more transparent, so that we—the public—can know them better and understand what they are doing more clearly. By providing information about teachers’ unions,my hope is that we, the public, will decide to pay more attention to their activity in our schools, and rise up and challenge them when their actions threaten to keep our children from getting the education they deserve.

1

THE FIRESTORM

It began as just another quiet meeting at the White House on a cold, gray day in late February 2004. Inside, the National Governors Association (NGA) had convened to hear about a variety of issues from President Bush’s cabinet officers. The NGA, typically a bipartisan, strictly nuts-and-bolts affair, mostly focused on issues of the state and federal relationship.

When the members of the NGA get together, they represent some of the best minds and boldest reformers in America. James Madison called the states laboratories of democracy¹—places where new ideas could be launched and the voice of the people could be heard. And so it was an honor for me to address this group. Many of the most promising ideas in education were the result of hard work by the men and women seated in that White House dining room.

As secretary of education, I spoke about all the promising reforms underway in education, at both the national and state levels. But at the same time, I could not help but reflect on my increasing frustration. Here were men and women who could understand the challenges that come with trying to change America’s education system. They clearly understood the need for accountability in public education, and for linking funding to results. They clearly understood the thinking behind the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), a bipartisan law signed less than two years prior by President George W. Bush, joined by top leaders from both parties.

The problem was that the message about increased spending and new accountability wasn’t getting through. While education spending continued to go up year after year, millions of Americans were being told that the federal government was spending less, not more, on our schools. Everyone in the world of politics and education knew who was promulgating that erroneous message. Everyone knew that this organization had not changed its message for nearly forty years. The force behind the partisan political attacks on No Child Left Behind was the National Education Association. Standing there in the nation’s capitol, I could not help but think of the utterly destructive influence of the NEA and its lobbyists. Students, teachers, parents, and the public at large had so much to gain from the No Child Left Behind Act. But that did not matter.

It was then, in a moment of frustration, that I likened the NEA to a terrorist organization for its opposition and smash-mouth tactics that were holding the futures of millions of kids hostage.

The words had barely escaped my lips when I realized just how foolish and inappropriate the remark was. I had meant it as a grim joke, to describe the fear and scare tactics being used to obfuscate the issues and obstruct real reform. But I immediately wished I had not chosen such inflammatory language.

A silence came over the room. Even so, I continued with my remarks, but when I walked away from the speaker’s podium, I knew that nothing else I said would be heard. The remark would get out. No one would consult me for clarification, context, or intention. This was Washington.

In the Bible, in the book of Ecclesiastes, is the warning: Many have fallen by the edge of the sword; but not so many as have fallen by the tongue. I knew that the consequences were yet to come. It didn’t take long. Soon the story was coursing along the wires and cable news programs.

I am not a creature of Washington. I came to the city to get things done, not to pad a résumé or aspire to a higher office. I was angry at myself because I had seen enough in my three years as secretary of education to know that this kind of impetuous linguistic mistake was just what my opponents wanted. As a former football coach, I knew that this was the article in the paper that the opposing coach would cut out and pin to the bulletin board to motivate his team into a fighting fury.

But the volatile reaction to my inadvertent and poor choice of words showed exactly what is wrong with our nation’s public debate about education. In one single phrase, I garnered more attention than most editorial boards had given to the needs of children in a month of coverage. The editorial responses and opinion pieces in the nation’s newspapers published every myth about public education, spread every message of fear, and told every story of woe that had slowed the reform initiative of No Child Left Behind and had frozen education reform long before President Bush had come to office in 2001.

The attacks on my comments fell roughly into three groups: those who objected to brutal language in politics; those who maintained that it was an attack on teachers because teachers and teachers’ unions are the same; and those who viewed the remark as a sign of an administration that would brook no opposition and was imposing unfair