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 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?

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?

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.

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.