ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 26, 1997 TAG: 9701280113
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ROBERT W. KASTEN
SOME EDUCATION partisans seem to think the problem with our schools is parents. This group opposes parental rights, parental choice, and government vouchers that empower parents. The group concedes parents should "have a role" - a revealing phrase - but clearly doesn't find parents capable of taking responsibility for directing their child's schooling.
Others talk as if teachers are the problem. Teachers have blocked school choice, made schools unaccountable, and even blocked standardized performance testing that would give some insight into what schools are doing the best job.
In fact, neither parents nor teachers have done most of the damage to U.S. schools. And neither one is necessarily opposed to reform. The real problem - the wedge between parents and teachers and their shared desire for an education system that works - is a small elite at the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.
A recent study by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution on teacher-union democracy around the world - "teacher choice," as we call it - shows how profoundly out of step are the NEA and AFT compared with their counterparts.
The average developed country in Europe, Oceana and Asia has between four and five major teacher unions. Unions compete for teacher loyalty, usually offering a variety of structures, ideologies, religious leanings and teaching methods. Britain and Spain, for instance, have unions that forswear teacher strikes. Twenty of 21 countries have significant representation of religious- and private-school teachers, often in their own unions.
America's NEA-cracy stands in stark contrast. As an Irish teacher union official told a Tocqueville researcher, "We have only 17,000 teachers, and five unions. You have only two."
This lack of choice not only harms parents and children who must battle the NEA-AFT hydra that blocks school choice wherever it can, it hurts teachers, who lack the choices, flexibility and freedom enjoyed in most other countries.
Fortunately, teachers in Washington state, Indiana, California and Georgia have begun to demand greater right to choose - in the form of court cases, legislation and arbitration rulings that give them greater latitude to form new, competing unions, and to avoid paying forced dues that go to support the NEA-AFT political lobby. But it would be better if U.S. teachers had an effective choice without going to court.
Teacher-union leaders claim they are diverse because teachers are diverse. Well, it may be true, as NEA and AFT spokesmen claim, that one-third of their members are Republican, and perhaps another third are independent.
If so, those members are getting awful representation. In 1996, the two unions gave almost 99 percent of their political-action congressional contributions to Democrats. The remainder went to a handful of Republicans and the only proclaimed socialist in Congress.
The NEA's far-out agenda includes resolutions on "sexual orientation education," animal rights, the metric system and "meeting the needs of left-handed persons." (Yes to each, says the NEA.) The NEA opposes legislation making English the official language, school choice and "visual representations using maps of the United States" that fail to "depict all 50 states and Puerto Rico in their correct geographical location and relative size."
That's diversity of a sort, and represents just a handful of more than 100 NEA policy resolutions. Does anyone think, though, that the ideology suggested by these represents more than a tiny minority of NEA members? The Tocqueville Institution asked a Canadian union official if his union has a stand on "relative size" representations of maps. He chuckled and said, "No, we haven't quite gotten around to that yet .... We're a teachers union."
Among 48 unions, a little less than a quarter (mostly concentrated in England, the United States and New Zealand) oppose public-private school choice. Forty percent neither strongly oppose or support school choice; and more than one-third are in favor.
"We have been for the choice system," comments Sven Kinnander of Lararnas Riksforbund on the Swedish public-private choice program adopted in 1992. "We welcome these schools because it creates the possibility of more than one employer for teachers. Before 1992 we had very few of these schools."
In this, teachers in France, Denmark, Germany, Australia and elsewhere are not so different from their fellow workers in the United States. But in those other countries, teachers enjoy unions that represent them and can easily go elsewhere if they don't. America, by contrast, has the most oligopolistic teacher union structure we could find among 21 developed countries studied.
The problem with American schools today isn't a lack of good teachers or good parents. There are many on both sides of the market - "demand" for education from parents, "supply" from teachers.
The problem is that (except for rich parents and teachers) these two groups can come together and exchange their care and skills and knowledge through a particular institution, the public school nearest to them. That bottleneck is tight enough, but it's choked even more narrowly by the fact that two mammoth unions squeeze the little exchange point as much as they can, reducing competition to represent teachers on one side of the bottleneck and ensuring parents have little or no choice on the other.
Thus, parental-choice "vouchers" and teacher "choice" in unions offer a wider common ground. Are education reformers for parents, or teachers? The answer is yes.
Robert W. Kasten, formerly a Republican senator from Wisconsin, heads the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution's program for the study of education democracy and teachers unions.
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