Kate’s in Rochester to argue a couple of cases, and the Queen of Niskayuna is being Difficult this morning, so I don’t have as much time as I’d like for this. As a result, it may come out a little more inflammatory than I intend, but then, that’s half the fun of blogging. Or something.
Anyway, the minor kerfuffle over firing teachers has produced the usual spate of off-hand comments about the obvious evil of teacher’s unions. For some reason, this seems to be widely accepted as fact by just about everybody– despite evidence that unionized districts perform better. Score another victory for the right-wing noise machine, I guess.
The basis of this idea seems to be the fact that unions often defend bad teachers against attempts to fire them. It’s a short jump from there to the belief that teachers’ unions are somehow all about protecting incompetents, or that they approve of the actions of bad teachers.
This is, of course, completely ridiculous, but it’s a really effective rhetorical strategy. So here’s a totally non-controversial bit of rhetoric going in the other direction: The argument that we must make it easy to fire teachers to improve education is essentially identical to the argument that we must deny due process rights to accused terrorists to win the “War on Terror.”
I know what you’re thinking: “Oh, now he’s just fishing for traffic…” And there’s an element of that, to be sure, but bear with me on this. Sure, the local public school contract isn’t on the same moral plane as the Bill of Rights, but in an important sense, they’re both contracts spelling out the rights and protections afforded to the parties to those contracts.
And in both cases, those rights and protections are sometimes inconvenient. Teacher contracts spell out procedures for documenting poor teaching that have to be followed in order to fire a teacher, and can mean a good deal of work for the district authorities. The Constitution and Bill of Rights outline procedures that have to be followed before you can imprison somebody for a crime, and can mean a good deal of work for the police and prosecutors.
Lots of people claim that those rights and protections make life sufficiently inconvenient for those in charge that they need to be restricted or discarded. It’s too much work to actually document bad classroom performance, so we need to get rid of teacher tenure. It’s too much work to get warrants and have trials, so we need to grant sweeping new powers to the executive branch. In both cases, we’re assured that there’s nothing to worry about– we can trust the people in power to only fire the incompetent teachers, or to only imprison real terrorists.
But here’s the thing: those rights and protections are there for a reason. You can’t always trust the people in power, so the inconvenient procedures have to be followed, even for the cases where it’s really obvious. Yeah, it would be wonderful to be able to instantly fire the English teacher who shows up to class drunk, just like it would be wonderful to be able to instantly jail a guy found with explosives in his shoes. You still have to go through the procedures, though, because the next case might not be quite so obvious. If you make it possible to instantly fire the drunk guy, you open the door to the instant firing of, say, the biology teacher who insists on teaching about evolution, and that’s not an outcome anybody wants.
This comes back to the question of what unions are really for. Unions are there to ensure that the proper procedures are followed, because it’s important to uphold the principle of the thing. The teachers’ union doesn’t defend the drunk English teacher because they approve of his actions– believe me, most of the union officers probably want the drunk guy out of the classroom as badly as the school administration does. They defend the drunk guy for the sake of the principle, so that when the woman teaching evolution comes up, her rights are protected.
In the over-the-top analogy to the “War on Terror,” this puts teachers’ unions in the position of the ACLU, the Democrats in Congress, and, well, pretty much anyone with a shred of a conscience. Which isn’t such a bad place to be, when you think about it.