Unions are becoming reform minded? My foot.

Nowhere in today’s Washington, DC based news coverage of the Schools Chancellor’s layoffs is there any word - anything from the teachers interviewed or their union leaders - that addresses student achievement. Nothing.

Losing one’s job is an awful thing. I know people who don’t have jobs right now; I’ve lived with people who were unemployed.

The jobs lost from the DC teacher layoffs this week - an estimated 229 out of almost 400 people laid off - may have been the lowest hanging fruit, those who - for some reason - were not performing great with kids. Maybe.

We won’t know - and we can’t know as the union sues to block this action and the Chancellor’s office is bound by privacy rights against talking about how they determined who would get the axe. But regardless of why and how it was done, it would be nice if just one of the teachers out there would consider whether or not he or she is really good for kids before they start demanding a right that doesn’t exist - a right to a job teaching kids in a city where 86% are still in schools called failing.

Tomorrow, on his continuing education tour, Education Secretary Arne Duncan will be joined in Philadelphia by two gentlemen who because of their obvious differences on many levels are called the Odd Couple of education.  I applaud strange bedfellows - when they make things happen for kids. With this one, I’m not so sure.

The first real Odd Couples of education led some of the nation’s most fundamental shifts in education, shifts that had once been considered radical.  Looking back through the past sixteen years, it’s clear that while education reform has changed dramatically, broad, mainstream support for bold changes in education existed then, just as they do now.  It was just much less hip to say so.

Then, policymakers who led the fight for charter schools, merit pay (as it was called in those days), vouchers and the like were accused of being part of the vast right wing conspiracy and generally anti-public education, despite the fact that such nomenclature didn’t fit then, just as it does not now. CER’s first work celebrated legislators like Pennsylvania Democrat Dwight Evans, who joined hands with Republican Tom Ridge to pass that state’s charter bill.  Miami Urban League head T. Willard Fair teamed up with Governor Jeb Bush to bring vouchers to Florida, following in the steps of Representative Polly Williams, a former Black Panther, in league with conservative Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson.

These were the first, real Odd Couples of the modern education reform movement.  They were bold, tenacious, and courageous to cross party lines, incur the wrath of unions together and suffer all sorts of education establishment slurs.

More “Gingrich and Sharpton – An Odd Couple for Education, But Not the First”

Dear Dennis,

You must be exhausted after all of your hard fought battles to block quality public school choices for children all across the country. You seemed to be everywhere at once this past year. In Rhode Island and Tennessee you scrapped with state legislators to place even more obstacles in the way of charter school growth. In Oregon you helped ensure that virtual schooling would not be an option for more parents by asking your friends to place a moratorium on this wildly popular alternative for families. And in Maine you helped legislators see the error of their ever thinking that charters should be allowed to enter the landscape. All of this even after you convinced the President and Secretary Duncan that you are open to reform? How does your rhetoric line up with your actions? Why are you so worried about the decisions parents will make when given a choice? Perhaps the Secretary will take the opportunity to bring some of this up when he addresses your union leadership this morning.

Ed Reformer

The teachers’ union “strongly supports charter schools“.

The nation’s two largest teachers unions talk up their support of charters, but their actions tell a different story. The successful charter concept is rooted in autonomy and accountability  - that, folks, is not what’s in the fine print on the union label.

As entrenched and deep-pocketed political behemoths, the unions’ first line of attack is against charter school legislation and laws themselves, seeking to prevent their passage or implementation (as they did successfully in Washington), to get strong laws watered down into weak ones, or to have them killed in the courts (as they tried to do in Ohio). In state after state, however, the courts have upheld the constitutionality of charter school laws against union plaintiffs. So…

If the unions can’t kill a bill outright, they seek to limit authorizing authority to local school boards, majorities of whom they often already have in their pocket. It’s a fact that 52 percent of the nation’s charter schools are authorized by local school boards, but states in which the local school board is the sole authorizing body account for only 604 of the nation’s 4,600 charter schools.

More “Charter School Mythbusters #4″

Folks have been fawning over Randi Weingarten’s seeming embrace of education reform since her National Press Club speech in November, and Dana Goldstein has a must-read profile of the AFT/UFT president in the latest American Prospect.

Weingarten’s media makeover has served her well, leading many to do as Goldstein has and give her credit for talking the talk.

But that’s not the whole story.

For reformers, the real definition of reform - which we helped give life to in 1993 - is much more cut and dry than what is expounded here. Quite simply:

- The status quo embraces the existing system, and while members of the status quo will often advocate for policy or program changes, none of what they endorse will fundamentally change the balance of power between producer and consumer.

- Conversely, real reformers seek to fundamentally replace what is known as the school system with a system of schools that is accountable to those in power at each school, as well as to the parents, in whose hands the ultimate fate of their children depends.

By this definition, Randi Weingarten doesn’t even approach the notion of a reformer. On the continuum between status quo and reform, she has barely passed go.