I have been in education for a long time. My first teaching job came two weeks after my younger nephew was born. His birthday is next week, and he’ll be 29. Take out the five years when I was working in retail and going to graduate school, and I’ve been a teacher for 24 years. There is not enough money in the world to tempt me back into public education. I’d rather stay poor, thank you. I keep hearing about a teacher shortage. That’s incorrect. There’s not a teacher shortage; there’s a people willing to be treated like dirt shortage. Why? How did public education come to this sad state? Jonathan Turley’s opinion piece in The Hill speaks to the problem and nails it right to the wall.
His opinion piece titled “The Blue-State Model for Education has Failed, and the Public has Caught On” states early on that one of the reasons the public schools have gone down the drain is because of the teachers’ unions. Early in the article, Turley states, “New polling shows that K-12 education has now reached a record low in the number of people who are even “somewhat satisfied” with the state of education in the U.S.” He then talks about the “education cartel,” a self-sustaining, self-perpetuating alliance between unions and politicians. The cartel has rendered families and students irrelevant.
How is that possible? people ask. Without the students, there is no school system. It doesn’t matter to the cartel. As long as the money keeps coming, which it does through dues, the cartel continues to operate. Personally, I have very little experience with the teachers’ unions. I joined the American Federation of Teachers briefly so I could get some legal help regarding the principal at the high school where I taught. I was a second-year teacher, and he had determined that I needed to go. He was black, and I was white. The AFT pointed me to the union steward at my high school, a government teacher who was also one of the basketball coaches. He told me that there was nothing the principal could do to force me from the building. I had to leave on my own. I’m a stubborn soul, so I was determined that the principal was going to leave first. He did, two years later.
Was the advice I got worth the annual membership? Absolutely. But that was twenty years ago. I dropped my membership the next year. Today, I wouldn’t join any teachers’ union because at their very core, they are about representing the teachers, not the students. The unions protect every teacher, even the teachers who have no business being anywhere near a classroom. In the states where teachers are required to join a union, the power is tenfold over the states that give teachers a choice, the right-to-work states.
In states where union membership is required, even if the teacher is able to quit the union, the union will still take a deduction from the teacher’s paycheck unless the teacher stands up and says “No.” In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court in Janus vs. AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) said that taking dues from non-union members was a violation of the First Amendment. This had an effect on union membership, which dropped by 10% after the ruling. However, the unions are not letting the decision slow them down. One year after the Janus ruling, a full 52% of teachers surveyed did not know they could leave the union without paying a fee. We are now eight years after the Janus decision, and the deep blue Democrat states with powerful teachers’ unions are working to make it easy to join a union but very hard to leave.
Aren’t unions supposed to protect workers and allow them to negotiate on a level playing field with their bosses? During the time of the Robber Barons in the early 1900s, yes. Today, most unions serve no purpose other than to enrich their heads. Both the head of the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) make six figures. The head of the Chicago Teachers Union makes six figures. Their salaries come from dues. Fewer dues-paying members, lower salaries. If the unions actually promoted better teaching and better practices, I would have no problem with them, but they don’t. The problem? Money. As long as the money keeps flowing to the unions, they can do whatever they want.
