LaborPains.org

Taking a page out of the TeachersUnionExposed.com playbook, Michigan teachers union watchdog Education Action Group has launched MEAexposed.com. The new website trains a harsh spotlight on the deeds and misdeeds of the Michigan Education Association, the 800-pound gorilla of education politics in that state. Some of the highlights:

• Extensive coverage of the MEA’s shady insurance arm
• Write-ups of the union’s staff, including its considerable UniServ corps
• Tactics used by the union to get its way

There’s a lot to check out on MEAexposed.com — it’s a magnifying glass focused on one of America’s most powerful state teachers unions.

It’s a little unexpected, but we’ll take it: Al Sharpton has signed on to the Center for Union Facts proposition that teachers unions have made it too difficult to get rid of bad teachers, saying that education reform “includes getting teacher unions to make concessions in contracts so bad teachers can be fired.”

Why is he weighing in on the issue? Sharpton has pegged education as the leading civil rights issue of the day: “I think there is nothing more important as we commemorate 40 years after the assassination of Dr. King than the education crisis,” as he said at a panel hosted by his National Action Network. (Incidentally, we couldn’t agree more on the question of education as a civil rights issue, as this op-ed we published in January makes clear.)

It’s been a little while since our launch of TeachersUnionExposed.com, and we’d like to think our efforts to get the word out about how hard it is to get rid of a bad union-protected teacher are what motivated Sharpton to speak out. After all, since he’s based in New York City, he has surely seen either our massive billboard in Times Square or our full-page advertisement in the New York Times.

If you missed this morning’s Fox and Friends, here’s a clip of our Executive Director discussing our campaign against teachers unions.



Late last week Peter Henry at New Teacher Network called on his readers to disrupt our “Ten Worst Union-Protected Teachers” contest, in which the Center for Union Facts will offer the “winners” $10,000 to leave the classroom for good. Henry writes:

Wouldn’t it be fun if one of us could make up a profile of a teacher, create a story about someone fictional, and get it on their site? Nay, not only get it on their site, but get their story selected as one of the ten worst?

Henry then goes on to promise that he’ll share his prize money — $10,000 — if he is nominated as one of the worst union-protected teachers and wins.

Leaving aside the fact that our rules clearly state that we require objective verification of any person’s nomination before he or she will be named as a winner, it seems as if Henry has misunderstood the purpose of our contest. The reason we’re offering the money is that we want to call attention to how costly it can be to fire a bad union-protected teacher, as we’ve documented on TeachersUnionExposed.com.

The point is not to bash teachers but to call attention to what teachers unions are perpetrating on public schools. Unions and their affiliates protect the policy of teacher tenure throughout the country (even in those states without traditional collective bargaining for teachers), and our original research uses documentation from school districts themselves that shows just how low the firing rates are for tenured teachers.

Far from being “anti-teacher,” we believe that good teachers are critical to quality education. In fact, if Henry’s description of himself as “a pretty decent educator” is true, it would be a shame for him to leave the classroom. There are all sorts of things our schools should be doing to get more “pretty decent educators” working — such as merit pay, something which teachers unions tend to obstruct, unfortunately — but in the meantime, we certainly don’t want to push good teachers out. Our issue is with the unions who protect bad teachers, not the teachers who are serving students well.