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Here at Labor Pains, we often talk about the political clout of unions, how they funnel millions upon millions of dollars into elections, the vast majority of which goes to Democratic candidates. But it’s not often that a union makes a power play this blatant:

A government studies teacher at Washington Irving High School in Manhattan is making his first run for elective office by taking on an incumbent who angered the teachers’ union. Twenty-year veteran teacher Gregg Lundahl says he entered the Democratic primary because East Side Assemblyman Jonathan Bing introduced a bill this year to get rid of the “last hired, first fired” policy in the event of teacher layoffs.

That’s right: A union-backed, union-approved, union member is running for office in an effort to roll back reforms and maintain the status quo for teachers unions.

It’s one thing for teachers unions to donate money. The American Federation of Teachers, for example, has donated $27.7 million to political campaigns over the last two decades, $27.4 million of which went to Democrats. In other words, literally 99 percent of their political donations went to Democratic candidates. The National Education Association isn’t much better: They have donated $30.6 million in the same timeframe, $28.5 million of which went to Democrats. That’s “only” 93 percent; compared to the AFT, they’re paragons of bipartisanship.

Still, there’s a difference between funding a candidate and putting one of your own on the ballot. One wonders what the voters will make of this situation.

The recent kerfuffle over the Los Angeles Times releasing scads of data on LA’s teachers has provided some interesting insights into how defenders of teachers unions think. The head of the LA teachers union, for example, said he was “outraged” that the Times would publish data revealing which teachers were effective and which teachers weren’t making the grade. The head of the American Federation of Teachers, meanwhile, said she was “disturbed” that teachers might now be held accountable by the public at large.

The Times has now released the entire database, and reactions from teachers have been mixed. Though a few thanked the Times for revealing that they needed improvement, others dug in their heels. “Guilty as charged,” wrote Elizabeth Ellen Snyder, one of the teachers who was evaluated. “I am proud to be ‘less effective’ than some of my peers because I chose to teach to the emotional and academic needs of my students.”

This comment is, at best, ludicrous, and, at worst, an indicative insight into the mindset of bad teachers and the unions that protect them who think they are above being judged based on their performance. It’s possible that Ms. Snyder has been unfairly maligned, but if she were truly teaching to the academic needs of your students, she wouldn’t have been rated poorly. Second of all, while her commitment to the emotional well-being of your charges is admirable, she shouldn’t use it as a crutch to explain your poor performance. Finally, why couldn’t she follow the footsteps of your fellow teachers who said that their ranking showed they “have more room for improvement,” as Monica L. Petit did?

It’s easy to see why teachers unions are fighting tooth and nail against the implementation of value-added analyses; they don’t want to show how many of their members are as stubborn as Ms. Snyder. But don’t the parents of our children deserve to know the quality of education their kids are receiving?

Milton, Massachusetts is going to miss out on a share of $200 million in Race to the Top funding because the union refused to sign on to the application. The union’s president, Margaret Gibbons, said that they did so “primarily because the board is opposed to tying teacher compensation and evaluation to a student’s test score,” but also because “In addition, we [opposed] states competing for funding. The whole idea means winners and losers. We felt all public schools in all states should be fairly funded.”

There are a couple of interesting, related things going on here. Note first that the president freely admits that she and the union does not believe in paying for better performance. Teachers are teachers, and they should be paid in a lockstep manner that neither rewards excellence nor punishes failure. Differentiating their pay would be unfair, and tying their pay to how well they do their jobs? Well, that would just be disastrous.

Keep that point in mind when considering the second part of her quote. Note the intense aversion to having to label “winners and losers.” There’s a deeper problem than simple resistance to reform at work here. There’s an ideology. An ideology that says we may not all be the same, but we all deserve to be treated the same: Why should the race go to the quickest or scholarships to the smartest or raises to the hardest working? Why should we reward those for how well they perform? From each according to his ability, to each according his needs, right?

Wrong. This is a policy destined to fail. How do we know this? Because we’ve seen this policy fail in school district after school district, where children are forced to endure bad teachers who are protected by unions because judging their performance is “unfair” and creates “winners and losers.” Why repeat a policy destined for failure?

President Obama’s education chief, Arne Duncan, delivered a speech last night aimed squarely at those who oppose increased transparency and accountability when it comes to our nation’s school system. Speaking in Little Rock, he played off of the Los Angeles Times’ recent series that exposed the Los Angeles Unified School District’s hesitance to utilize data to determine which teachers were most effective – and union opposition to value-added evaluations that determine the impact a teacher has on the long-term prospects of their students.

Essentially, the Times took seven years of student test data and developed what is called a “value-added” analysis to show which third- through fifth-grade teachers are making the biggest gains. The results are about to be posted on the newspaper’s website in a searchable data base by teacher name — taking transparency to a whole new level.

Needless to say, concerns are running very high in Los Angeles– not only among teachers themselves but also among a wide spectrum of administrators, academics and reformers who question the validity of the scores and the value of the entire exercise. …

I am a strong advocate for transparency. This is one thing that NCLB got right. By requiring districts to publish test scores for subgroups like minorities and special needs students — it changed the national conversation and forced us to focus more closely on achievement gaps. …

Let’s put out data on dropouts, college enrollment, college completion, loan default rates, and every other kind of data that can help us highlight our remarkable success and help us better understand why too many of our children are unprepared.

Let’s do what the State of Louisiana is doing — tracking student scores to teachers and teachers back to their colleges of education so we know who is doing a good job of preparing educators — because the vast majority of teacher colleges in this country are doing a mediocre job at best.

The truth is always hard to swallow but it can only make us better, stronger and smarter. That’s what accountability is all about — facing the truth and taking responsibility and then taking action.

Emphasis mine, because that’s the key here. It’s understandable that teachers unions are worried about total transparency. While the vast majority of teachers are hard-working and dedicated to their students, a certain number of them are going to either not care about their job or simply be terrible at it. That’s just a fact of life in an organization as large as a school district – as with a massive business, a certain percentage of hires will be bad ones. The trick is finding out which apples are rotten and removing them before they spoil the rest of the batch.

Teachers unions, by their very nature, are designed to thwart that removal process. They have been set up to argue against the termination of any employee – to drag out the firing process, to make it as expensive as possible, and to save the jobs of the incompetents under their care. They call this “due process.” We call this obstructionism.

And they’ve been able to get away with this obstructionism because no one knows about it. What the LA Times has done is throw back the curtain. They are about to show us just how many teachers are causing their students to regress, and why nothing is being done about it. The teachers unions are terrified: They’ve already endured a few black eyes, but when the public understands just how deep the problem runs, they’ll turn on the unions for good.

Once accountability – and reforms like merit pay – are in place, you know who the real winners will be? Good teachers. The teachers who lift their students up, who put in the long hours, devise the intense lesson plans, and make students want to improve their base of knowledge. The inspirers.

Photo via I Bird 2.

In his New York Times column today, Tom Friedman takes note of a documentary on education reform hitting theaters this fall. Waiting for Superman is the name of the film, and it comes from the Academy Award-winning director of An Inconvenient Truth, Davis Guggenheim. A taste of Friedman’s column:

There is a movement stirring in this country around education. From the explosion of new charter schools to the new teachers’ union contract in D.C., which will richly reward public school teachers who get their students to improve faster and weed out those who don’t, Americans are finally taking their education crisis seriously. If you don’t want to stand on your head, then just go to a theater near you after Sept. 24 and watch the new documentary “Waiting for Superman.” You’ll see just what I’m talking about. …

It is intolerable that in America today a bouncing bingo ball should determine a kid’s educational future, especially when there are plenty of schools that work and even more that are getting better. This movie is about the people trying to change that. The film’s core thesis is that for too long our public school system was built to serve adults, not kids. For too long we underpaid and undervalued our teachers and compensated them instead by giving them union perks. Over decades, though, those perks accumulated to prevent reform in too many districts. The best ones are now reforming, and the worst are facing challenges from charters.

Guggenheim’s documentary is just the latest in a series of stinging looks at the way teachers unions have tried to stifle reforms across the country. Last month in the Weekly Standard, I looked at Waiting for Superman and a pair of other documentaries, The Lottery and The Cartel. It seems that public opinion is rapidly turning the obstructionist tactics of the teachers union.

Waiting for Superman doesn’t hit theaters nationwide until October, and, like many documentaries, it might have trouble finding a home in theaters, regardless of its impressive pedigree. If you’re interested in bringing the movie to your town, make sure to go to http://www.waitingforsuperman.com and “pledge” to see it. The more people who do so, the better chance the film will get wider distribution.

The Chicago Teachers Union has been locked in a struggle with the city over pay, layoffs, and other sundry issues. Now they’re looking to block a plan to add 90 minutes to the school day, which just so happens to be among the shortest in the country. From the Chicago Tribune:

In an effort to extend what is one of the nation’s shortest school days, Chicago Public Schools plans to add 90 minutes to the schedules of 15 elementary schools using online courses and nonteachers, sources said.

By employing nonteachers at a minimal cost to oversee the students, the district can save money and get around the teachers’ contract, which limits the length of the school day. Mayor Richard Daley has scheduled an announcement about the “Additional Learning Opportunities” pilot program at Walsh Elementary School in the Pilsen neighborhood. School officials declined to comment on the initiative….

The initiative is unpopular with leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union, who view the effort as a way to undermine their contract with the city schools. Because mostly nonteachers will be used to staff the initiative, the district will not have to pay union wages. Many of those who will oversee the classrooms will likely be either after-school providers or community partners.

Karen Lewis, the new fire-breathing head of the CTU, goes on to claim that she’s not against “anything that helps children” while simultaneously arguing that she opposed “drill and kill” style learning. There’s only one problem, as the article points out: similar initiatives have already helped a number of students in the Chicago Public School system.

The district already has a stable of online initiatives, including high school credit recovery programs and summer school courses to help students advance. More than 4,000 students gained credits through online summer school, officials have said.

But the new initiative is the product of a separate online pilot program the district launched last year, which provided online math courses to certain elementary school students. In those schools, students were encouraged — but not required — to attend extended school hours. District officials say math scores increased dramatically as a result of the online classes. [Emp. added]

So Lewis claims to be in favor of doing “anything” to help children learn, yet her union is leaning toward opposing a concrete action that will actually help children learn. Sadly, this is a pretty standard tactic: Say all the right things, do all the wrong things.

What have we been saying at the Center for Union Facts for years? Rules that prevent incompetent employees from being dismissed are bad, because employers need to have flexibility to fire underperforming individuals. It’s good for consumers, it’s good for businesses, and it’s good for the economy.

We’re glad to see that the United Federation of Teachers agrees! But we’re sad to see that they only think they should have the ability to fire poor workers and that nobody else should:

In a move of stunning hypocrisy, the United Federation of Teachers axed one of its longtime employees — for trying to unionize the powerful labor organization’s own workers, it was charged yesterday.

Jim Callaghan, a veteran writer for the teachers union, told The Post he was booted from his $100,000-a-year job just two months after he informed UFT President Michael Mulgrew that he was trying to unionize some of his co-workers. …

“I told him I want to have the same rights that teachers have,” said Callaghan, 63, of Staten Island. “He told me he didn’t want that, that he wanted to be able to fire whoever he wanted to.

“Stunning hypocrisy” is right. Given the evidence that there are few things more detrimental to the development of a child than having a bad teacher, it’s imperative that school districts be given wider latitude to get poor-performing educators out of the classroom and away from our kids — the same kind of latitude that Mulgrew covets for his massively bureaucratic organization.

It’s pretty basic economics: When an organization grows too large to live within its means, it has to either a.) contract to a sustainable level, or b.) find new sources of revenue. Consider, for example, school districts: They have massively expanded the number of teachers in recent years — despite increases of only 22% in enrollment between 1990 and 2007, the number of teachers has risen 44% — and given their employees incredibly rich benefits (the average health care plan for a teacher costs Milwaukee $23,000, for example). And this doesn’t even begin to take into account pension plans and other retirement benefits.

In other words, school districts have promised too much money to too many people. They — and we, the citizens who fund them — simply don’t have the money to sustain this kind of largesse. So the school districts should shrink, right?

Wrong! Just as unions were being forced to think about making some minor concessions — like, say, giving up the Viagra in their health care plans — the federal government came along and bailed them out. Instead of having needed layoffs or reductions in benefits, the feds pumped billions of dollars into the system. The result?

In some cases, unions have prevented state and local governments from making needed cuts in their budgets. For example, earlier this year the Milwaukee School Board announced that it was laying off 428 teachers due to budget shortfalls. The average Milwaukee teacher receives only $56,000 per year in salary, but also gets a generous $40,000 in benefits, including a health care plan that costs $26,000 per family, compared to $14,500 for private employees. The school board sought to cut costs and to keep the teachers by implementing cuts in benefits. A proposed health care plan would have instituted co-pays expected to yield $47.2 million in savings, more than enough to save every teacher’s job. The union refused to bargain, instead opting for layoffs.

Why opt for layoffs when you know that your cronies on Capitol Hill and in the White House will just bail you out and keep the money flowing? Why make concessions when the feds will step in any time you run into a little bit of trouble? It’s impossible to bargain with unions when they have the unlimited backing of the federal government and legislators in their pocked who don’t care a whit about running up the national deficit.