I’m a charter member of the Colorado Education Association’s “anti-public education” club, so as usual you can take what I write about their kindred organizations through that filter. But I have to ask: Are we witnessing the political isolation of the teachers unions before our very eyes?
It’s hard to ignore the question after you read a great new Wall Street Journal column co-authored by Education Sector’s Andy Rotherham. School choice and charter schools have gained favor on the pages of our nation’s leading left-leaning newspapers, while unions tend to be falling out of favor:
This new attitude in the press has little to do with the media and everything to do with changed public opinion. Parents are familiar with headlines about the educated work force in the U.S. falling behind international competitors. The public, for the most part, no longer sees school accountability measures as a plot to harm public schools. Indeed, according to a recent poll by the journal Education Next, almost three in four Americans support a national test for students.
Plus, as school reform moves from the abstract to the concrete, reporters have more to write about. Take charter schools as an example. For years, they were a messy story for reporters. Of the 4,600 charter schools around the country, most do no better than comparable traditional public schools. Some, in fact, do worse.
But that’s not why charter schools are changing the education conversation. Among those schools, roughly 300 high-performing charters have emerged to accomplish something once thought impossible. They take low-income urban students previously viewed as a lost cause and turn them out college-ready. The success of these charters shows that being born black or Hispanic in poverty to poorly educated parents won’t necessarily lead to bad educational outcomes. Good teaching might be able to overcome all of these factors. And if charter schools can close the education gap, why not traditional public schools?
Why not indeed? Yes, it’s a complicated conversation and an even tougher challenge to implement at scale. But unions on the national stage, and to a lesser degree here in Colorado, have cast themselves in the role of status quo defenders — a position looking less tenable all the time, between confrontation from a liberal presidential administration and an increasingly-informed American public facing greater challenges at keeping their own jobs these days.
Consequently, NEA appears to be backtracking a bit from its strenuous defense of archaic teacher transfer and placement rules in collective bargaining contracts. As Mike Antonucci breaks it down, the rest of NEA President Dennis Van Roekel’s recent Congressional testimony (PDF) is largely vague fluff. But he’s right that holding NEA to its word on contract flexibility, “Policymakers and school boards across the country should pick up the ball and run with it.”
Of course, while I’m citing Antonucci, I would be foolish not to point out that the union’s decline in public opinion popularity does not change the fact that NEA and its sometime rival AFT are still powerful entities along the lines of “Big Oil” and the tobacco companies. But they still could buck up. As Machiavelli told the prince nearly five centuries ago, so the large lobbying interest groups can learn that it’s “better to be feared than loved.”
But if they still crave the love, NEA and AFT soon may have to start complaining about the “anti-public education” media. Or else prove they truly are willing to change their stripes.
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