Rare News Desk
These have not been good days for American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. Or for the nation’s second-largest teachers union. Both have been painfully reminded that neither law nor public opinion is on their side.
Videos by Rare
First came last week’s ruling in Vergara v. California, which forces the Golden State to end near-lifetime employment for public school teachers that teachers union have long defended. For Weingarten and National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel, Vergara is an existential threat to their unions – and not just because California will now have to rewrite tenure, dismissal, and layoff laws.
School reformers in other states are now looking to file similar suits that strike at the near-lifetime employment regardless of classroom performance that make teaching the most-comfortable profession in the public sector.
The Vergara ruling strikes another blow to the six decades-old grand bargain the AFT and NEA struck with teachers. Educators would lend the unions support for their aims in exchange for better pay and conditions. At a time in which the both AFT and NEA are struggling financially and suffering declines in rank-and-file membership, Vergara is another reminder of how politically weak both unions have become.
Weingarten then found herself on the losing end of a scuffle with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan over his statement last week praising the Vergara ruling as an opportunity to “build a new framework” for teacher employment that “protects students’ rights to equal educational opportunities”.
As I noted on Saturday on the pages of Dropout Nation, Weingarten complained that Duncan’s support for the ruling supposedly “added to the polarization” of debates over education policy.
To Weingarten’s horror, Duncan then doubled down on his initial comments, declaring that teachers shouldn’t be given near-lifetime employment “after only 18 months in the job” and that other policies defended by teachers unions “undercut the public’s confidence in public education.”
So not only did Weingarten not get the apology she sought, she was also reminded that teachers unions can no longer count on Democrats for unquestioned support.
Weingarten didn’t even get succor from the education press. Particularly harsh was John Merrow, a dean of the nation’s corps of education news reporters, who speculated that Weingarten (along with Van Roekel) was probably cursing up a storm when Vergara was handed down because she knew “the three California rules were indefensible.”
Politico’s Stephanie Simon added to the sandbagging with her piece detailing the steady decline in AFT’s and NEA’s influence.
Perhaps you could feel sorry for Weingarten if she and the AFT were truly concerned about improving the nation’s woeful traditional public schools. But that is manifestly not the case.
For years, Weingarten and her union have defended near-lifetime employment policies that have protected incompetent and even criminally-abusive teachers at the expense of children. The fact that two decades of research have shown that there is little correlation between seniority and student achievement makes teachers unions’ defense of tenure even less defensible.
Weingarten would also merit sympathy if the AFT was truly working to help teachers improve their profession. But younger teachers, who make up the majority of rank-and-file members in both the AFT and the NEA, have long ago figured out that teachers unions are less-interested in addressing their concerns than with defending seniority-based policies (including “last hired, first fired” rules) that put them on unemployment lines while keeping veteran teachers on payrolls.
Because of these failures, along with the fact that AFT locals rig their elections in order to weaken the role of younger teachers, the only thing guaranteeing the teachers unions’ survival at this point are state laws forcing teachers to pay into their coffers. As seen in Wisconsin and Tennessee, when teachers are given the choice to leave unions, they will.
Weingarten is surely hoping that a lawsuit currently making its way through Michigan’s courts, which challenges such requirements, doesn’t go against the unions.
At this point, only the Devil may have sympathy for Weingarten. And if you believe Atheists, she may not even have that.
