Morton Kondracke in the Detroit Daily News
Eduwonk referenced this article in a post last week, pointing to it as yet another sign of an emerging left-right consensus on education reform in the US.
Sadly, it’s just one more drumbeat in the “Unions suck” refrain. Kondracke talks about a visit he made to the Aspen Institute last week, and the first person he finds to talk to about making schools better is Joel Klein. Judging on the initiatives that he’s championed in New York City, calling Klein anti-teacher is equivalent to calling hell hot. Similarly, US Chamber of Commerce president Tom Donohue has this fun quote:
On the brighter side Mr. Kondracke does call for raising teacher pay, which would be a nice first step.
Sadly, it’s just one more drumbeat in the “Unions suck” refrain. Kondracke talks about a visit he made to the Aspen Institute last week, and the first person he finds to talk to about making schools better is Joel Klein. Judging on the initiatives that he’s championed in New York City, calling Klein anti-teacher is equivalent to calling hell hot. Similarly, US Chamber of Commerce president Tom Donohue has this fun quote:
“Teachers unions in many communities have made it very difficult to change the school structure, the school curriculum, school hours, school management, the pay system. What we need here is a collaborative effort. We need the school boards and teachers unions to support strong superintendents and strong principals.”
- Unions typically have no say in curriculum. That’s long been a management prerogative.
- Of course teacher’s unions are going to make it difficult to change the hours of the school—any union worth it’s salt would. There are certainly kids who would benefit from a longer school day and school year, but administration should not be able to unilaterally make that decision (i.e., “You’re all going to work for 210 days instead of 180!”) without input from the people who actually teach the kids.
- A call to support strong superintendents and principals is a call to minimize teacher voice, period. The management side of the equation can be every bit as flawed as the labor side, and to paint the principal as some sort of all-knowing Solomon who is restrained only by the petty machinations of the union is naïve.
On the brighter side Mr. Kondracke does call for raising teacher pay, which would be a nice first step.
posted by Ryan at 3:45 PM
2 Comments:
Great post. It's not surprising that right-wing fanatics flock to Klein, though, despite the remarkable absence of evidence that anything he's done has improved education for NYC's 1.1 million kids.
Kondrake (rhymes with wacky) certainly does qualify as a right-wing fanatic. He doesn't care about education, he cares about union-busting. Same goes for Klein and his BFF Bill Gates who love to starve big schools so they can feed all the public funds to small, non-union charters.
As a union member, it's an awful lot of fun to be cmpared to the worst dregs of society by Knodrake, Klein and the rest of the folks looking to bring back feudalism.
Post a Comment
<< Home