Holly Yettick is a doctoral student in the Educational Foundations, Policy and Practice program at the School of Education at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

The recent push to weaken public sector unions is making me uneasy. Part of the reason I am uneasy is that I am not even sure that this subtext is real. From day to day, my opinion shifts, to the point that I wonder whether I should even be writing this post. The object of this discomfort: The concern that teachers are the focal point of the rhetoric surrounding these initiatives at least in part because education is dominated by females.

There, I dropped the F bomb. But first let me explain why I hesitated to do so.  It is because I can think of many other reasons why teachers and teachers’ unions are the focus of the rhetoric surrounding initiatives. These reasons range from the credulous (There are more teachers than policemen and firemen and so reducing teacher pension benefits will make a bigger dint in state budget deficits.) to the cynical (The governors supporting the cuts are Republicans and conservatives are more likely to be sympathetic to the law and order functions of government.)

Now here’s what made me uneasy: As national attention has turned to the protests surrounding the Wisconsin capital, it has been focused almost entirely on the teachers and teachers unions that would be affected by Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal to weaken or eliminate collective bargaining.  Nationwide, more than 80% of K-12 teachers are female. If other affected employees were mentioned at all, they were referred to as social workers (69% female) or nurses (92% female for registered nurses). Exempt from Walker’s proposals (although supportive of the affected unions) are police and fire unions. Nationwide, 16% of patrol officers are female, and 3% of firefighters.

Then, in a profile in this week’s Sunday Times Magazine, reporter Matt Bai zeroed in on New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s antagonistic relationship with public employees’ unions.  Yet the only union members interviewed for the article were leaders of teachers unions.  On the first page of the article, Bai writes:

“Hundreds of thousands of YouTube viewers linger on scenes from Christie’s town hall meetings, like the one in which he takes a part a teacher for her histrionics. (‘If what you want to do is put on a show and giggle every time I talk, then I have no interest in answering your question.’)”

Personally, I cannot ever recall hearing a man referred to as “histrionic. “When I viewed the clip in question, I certainly did not find the teacher to be “deliberately affected or self-consciously emotional; overly dramatic, in behavior or speech.” I could not help but think that if the questioner had been a man, he would have been described as “persistent” or “insistent.”   As for Christie’s response, I also cannot think of the last time I heard a grown man’s laughter described as a giggle except perhaps in jest. Yet it remains acceptable to subtly denigrate a grown woman by describing her like a child.

Anti-union sentiment and initiatives are nothing new in this nation. Union membership has been shrinking now for decades in the private sector as the percentage of the general public that supports unionization. As Bai writes, public sector unions are in a sense, “the final frontier” for those who oppose unions.  There are many, many potential reasons why teachers’ unions appear to be viewed as both the primary target and the weakest link in this battle. I can’t help but wonder if the “f” word is one of them.  Further, it is not uncommon these days to hear complaints about “anti-teacher rhetoric.” (The crafters of such rhetoric generally deny that they are anti-teacher, as does Christie.)For those who believe that such rhetoric does exist, I can’t help but wonder if some it may also be anti-female.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Cross-posted from the Failing Schools blog

Some people just don’t know when to quit.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is one of those people.

In the wake of the state’s recent budget shortfall, Walker could have done the humble, fiscally-sound thing: admit that the tax breaks and conservative health care experiment he championed had worsened the state’s budget situation, and asked lawmakers to correct the problem. He could also have done the tough but responsible thing: negotiate fairly with public sector workers, who have expressed their willingness to pay a greater share of their pension and benefits to ease that burden on the state’s budget.

But no. Like the glutton who eats until his buttons give way, Walker and his allies have decided to keep their pet policies intact and try to grab evenmore power for themselves by trying to eliminate some public employees’ rights to collective bargaining. (I’m not sure how they plan to continue spinning the mere having of rights as too expensive for the state to afford, but I’m sure theirwealthy friends, think tank pals, and buddies in Murdoch’s Media Misinformation Machine will continue funding and broadcasting their efforts.) While completely ignoring the self-serving actions that have caused much of the state’s financial distress, they are trying to:

• Adopt a proposal that clearly punishes members of certain unions (teachers, nurses, social workers, etc.) and not others (police, firefighters). We’ve a number of choices regarding how to interpret this disparate treatment, but one is particularly clear: it’s a naked attempt to limit the power of unions that didn’t support Walker & Co during election season, and protect those that did.
• Obscure the true origins of the budget shortfall, appealing to a troubling nationwide narrative thatblames public sector workers for budget problems, instead of the toxic economic mess created by greedy and under-regulated Wall Street financiers
• Pretend there is no choice but to make cuts and restrict rights that overwhelmingly affect middle and low-income people—instead of correcting the tax structures and other policies that enrich the wealthy at everyone else’s expense
• Cultivate and capitalize on the current fiscal situation and whatever resentment exists between privately-employed taxpayers and unionized public employees to break their unions permanently.

Threatened with the outrageous theft of hard-won workers’ rights—many won right there in Wisconsin—fourteen state senators left the state to avoid having to vote on the bill, and tens of thousands of citizens are demonstrating in the streets and the capitol building, including thousands of teachers and students.

As a result, some in the “news” media and elsewhere have whined about “self-serving” teachers staging a sick-out to protest these attacks on their rights. They’ve accused teachers of being liars for calling in they’re sick when they’re not (I guess being sick of injustice doesn’t qualify!), while completely ignoring by the self-serving, multi-million dollar lies on which this entire bill is based. Others are “concerned” about kids who are missing school. These people are completely missing the point.

One: Our public school system exists in large part to prepare students for their future roles as citizens. Students who watch and participate in peaceful demonstrations are getting an important lesson on how to exercise their First Amendment rights, and why we have such rights in the first place. And if there are any adults in Wisconsin, or anywhere in the US, who aren’t using these current events as teachable moments for the children in their care, then our democratic republic faces much larger threats than a budget crisis!

Two: Like this post, most of what’s happening in Wisconsin isn’t just, or even primarily, about teachers and schools. But it does further expose an ugly truth about national conversations over austerity measures and public policy reform: some people aren’t in these discussions to “repair budgets,” orimprove schools, or shore up Social Security, or any of that. Some people try to exploit our hysteria and ignorance to coerce us into making policy decisions that benefit themselves (or their ideologies) at our expense. These are decisions we wouldn’t otherwise make if we felt we had other options, or enough time to stop and deliberate.

Fortunately for proponents of responsible public policy, the brazen nature of Walker’s bill has awakened many to the need to think critically when political and economic elites use the words “crisis” and “reform” in close succession. However this all turns out in Wisconsin, there’s no turning back that awareness. Here’s hoping more of us greet this moment with courage: the courage to stand up for ourselves and our fellow men and women who’ve been unfairly attacked, and the courage to take an honest, fair-minded approach to solving our social and economic problems.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Ben DeGrow is a public policy analyst with the Independence Institute, focusing on education labor issues.

Plenty of pixels have been expended in the past five days to report and discuss the momentous happenings in Madison, Wisc. Whoever thought the Badger State would receive even more national spotlight so soon after Aaron Rodgers and the Packers secured Super Bowl champion prestige? But it’s worth all the coverage. The significance of unfolding events in Wisconsin’s capital is hard to overestimate.

Start with the fact that Wisconsin was the first state to grant government workers collective bargaining rights (in 1959). Just over half a century later, and the unsustainable trend unleashed is about to get seriously reined in. Ignored was the wisdom of reliably pro-labor Democratic Party icon Franklin D. Roosevelt. During his presidency FDR strenuously resisted the notion of public-sector unionism, famously asserting:

All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service….The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress.

Government worker unions are a different breed than their private-sector counterparts. Commenting on the affair, Time Magazine editor and liberal stalwart Joe Klein ably catches the vital distinction:

Public employees unions are an interesting hybrid. Industrial unions are organized against the might and greed of ownership. Public employees unions are organized against the might and greed…of the public?

The events unfolding in Wisconsin are highly relevant to these pages because teachers unions are among the largest and strongest labor organizations in America. The degree of unions’ political influence can be exaggerated (slightly), but their collective ability to block unwanted policy changes is almost unrivaled.

If you don’t believe me, what other group could get an entire party caucus to flee their legislative duties and hide across state lines in order to forestall a vote that would weaken its legally-protected privileges? As for the unions themselves, they aren’t winning political sympathies from staging sick-outs (“by all means, defend your right to collectively bargain an agreement that you can flout at your convenience”) or getting fake doctors’ notes to cover for them.

But so it goes in Wisconsin. What is it about Senate Bill 11′s attempt to fix a looming $3.6 billion budget hole that drives the protests and the political posturing of opponents? It didn’t take long for Democratic legislators in exile to offer capitulation on the modest and eminently reasonable proposals to increase government workers’ retirement and health insurance contributions.

What else is at stake? A lot of hyperbolic rhetoric has flown around, including some National Education Association talking points that have floated into many Colorado teachers’ email inboxes (e.g., the claim that “educators will have no say in school quality issues,” an irresponsible and self-serving distortion of reality). Amid all the confusion, the other key points of the budget-repair legislation are not precisely understood:

1. Limiting the scope of collective bargaining to worker salaries, with total negotiated increases above the inflation rate subject to local voter referendum, which would enhance public accountability to one of the largest drivers of government cost and neutralizing the power of arbitrators to reward unions for lavish proposals;
2. Requiring an annual affirmative opt-in to continue a union’s status as exclusive bargaining representative through a simple majority vote of affected workers, which simply would ensure greater accountability in unions’ claims that they operate democratically; and
3. Prohibiting government agencies from collecting union dues through member payroll deductions, which would end the cycle of using government resources to raise funds that are used to reward political candidates and perpetuate union power.

Since last week I’ve already been asked more than once: Could or should something like Wisconsin’s Senate Bill 11 be done in Colorado? First of all, apart from the lack of symbolism here, a smaller and less militant government union sector would make such a legislative dispute less dramatic. But more fundamentally, it wouldn’t all work in the Colorado context.

Wisconsin has a long-established and recognized body of public-sector labor law that simply does not exist here. For Colorado state legislators to have some mandated public school (or other) collective bargaining procedures to alter or remove, there would have to be something enshrined in state statute in the first place. Since there isn’t, agenda items 1 and 2 would make very little sense for a Colorado lawmaker to introduce. The third item, on the other hand, is not inextricably linked to the union negotiating process. A repeat of 2008′s citizen-initiated Amendment 49 (sponsored by the Independence Institute where I work) doubtless still would draw more dues funds spent on outrageous and misleading advertising.

The proposals championed by Governor Scott Walker and the Wisconsin Republicans would not wash away workers’ rights. Rather, they would open the door to fiscal sustainability by providing greater flexibility to elected government officials and restoring some power and accountability to taxpaying citizens. Wisconsin is receiving a large share of attention for good reason: A few states are following suit, and others soon may jump in.

Driven by the overwhelming fiscal crisis facing most state governments, what’s taking place in the Badger State looks to be a watershed. The Tea Parties are flexing their muscles, while politically-reinforced government employee unions are making a Waterloo-like stand. An identical repeat in Colorado is off the table, but local school boards may be impelled to take a closer look at negotiated policies that empower union interests over the public interest.

Popularity: 34% [?]