The Missing Link

March 31, 2006

The Problem with Teacher's Unions

Oh how I hate teachers' unions--let me count the ways!

1) By calcifying a pay system that rewards teachers for seniority rather than skill teachers' unions contribute to a system that loses lots of ambitious teachers to other fields while keeping lots of untalented or burned out teachers in the classroom year after year.

2) By standing firmly against any school experimentation, whether charter schools or school vouchers or greater control for principles, teachers' unions prevent us from trying alternative strategies that might work.

3) Finally, teachers' unions--or at least the New York State Unified Teacher's Union--celebrate rather bizarre characters as heroes, as James Taranto points out today. In the union's newsletter we're told the story of Jack Powell, a substitute teacher "who makes a principled stand."

Powell has lived frugally for years. He works about three days a week as a sub, earning about $70 a day, with no benefits. From March to October, he rides his bike 20 miles to work when work is available.

Sometimes he works for a funeral home to make extra money. The shawl he has wrapped around himself on this winter day, he says simply, doubles as a blanket.

"I do whatever it takes to survive and live a socially conscious life," said Powell, who has a tepee in his yard.

Part of that survival — or so he thought — included shopping at Wal-Mart to take advantage of cheaper prices for himself, his partner and her two children. Then his discussions about Wal-Mart with Sandra Carner-Shafran, a teaching assistant at BOCES and a member of the Board of Directors of New York State United Teachers, started churning inside him...

Powell put the brakes on his actions. Shopping at Wal-Mart? This is a place that encourages employees to get social services because it does not provide adequate health insurance or wages; sells goods made in sweatshops; and upsets entire communities by undercutting the downtown stores, then raising its prices when the locals go out of business.

"I don't like what Wal-Mart stands for," Powell said, noting the mega-chain's scanty health insurance for staffers. "Because of all those things they can lower the prices."

He and his partner agreed to go on food stamps for their family rather than shop at Wal-Mart any longer.

"I don't like to have to do that (use food stamps)," he said. However, the two children who are part of his family gave him extra courage because they had disliked shopping at Wal-Mart anyway, Powell said. They knew what the store stood for.

"I'm just trying to live my life. I try to set an example and do what I believe," said Powell.

So according to the teacher's union, it takes "courage" to voluntarily go on food stamps, and exemplifies how we ought to live? I certainly hope whoever approved that article never teaches one of my children.

Posted by Conor at March 31, 2006 04:32 PM