Ken Berwitz

Let me start off by stating, as I have many times on this blog, that I am a strong proponent of unions.  I believe that working people with common interests must be able to band together, in order to have any kind of reasonable leverage with corporations.  What's fair is fair, and that's fair.

But, as I also have said many times, I have a major problem with unions in non-competitive situations. 

Where there is competition, it is in union members' best interests to make their company's products/services better so they will be more successful in the marketplace.  Doing so will keep them at their jobs, may open up opportunities for advancement, etc. 

But in a monopoly, competition is not a factor; it doesn't exist.  So the entire situation changes.  Inefficiency doesn't send unhappy customers elsewhere, because there is no elsewhere.  And, since there is no market share to worry about, the only consequence of a monopoly running inefficiently is that more, not fewer, jobs are created.  Where are union members' interests then?

Public school unions are an excellent example of what I am talking about.  Unless parents have thousands of dollars to burn each year on private schooling, or all the time in the world for home-schooling, public schools are a virtual monopoly in most cities.

And what does that lead to? 

Well, in this blog it leads to USA Today's excellent editorial on the subject.  And here it is:

Our view on school reform: Unions protect bad teachers, harming kids’ education

Mass firing in Rhode Island reflects need to shake up the status quo.

At this time of high unemployment, one group of professionals has no shortage of job security: bad teachers. Few public school principals in the country are able to dismiss an incompetent teacher without a protracted, expensive struggle, and therefore firings rarely happen. Yet researchers agree that hiring good teachers, and ditching bad ones, is the best way to improve education.

Nationwide, 2% or fewer teachers are ever fired or fail to have their contracts renewed because of poor performance. Among tenured teachers — those who get job security, typically after two or three years of satisfactory performance — there are often no dismissals at all, according to the U.S. Education Department.

In Arkansas, Delaware, Hawaii, Montana, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Utah and Vermont — states in which fewer than half of fourth-graders are proficient at reading or math — the average school district did not remove a single tenured teacher in 2007-08. It's no wonder: Dismissing one teacher can cost upwards of $100,000, and the legal struggle can drag on for years.

A prime example of the irrationality is in New York City, where teachers accused of misconduct or incompetence can spend years in "rubber rooms" — doing nothing, collecting their full salaries and accruing benefits while their cases crawl through the arbitration process.

At long last, some troubled school districts are deciding that enough is enough. Rhode Island officials have given five failing schools until next Wednesday to decide to close down permanently or restart with tools that include new management, merit-based teaching jobs and more teaching hours. At a sixth, Central Falls High, the teachers' union balked at such a restart plan. As a result, all the teachers and the principal were fired, with their work ending this June. No more than half can be rehired for next fall.

When Education Secretary Arne Duncan and then President Obama expressed support for the mass firings, the unions protested. But if unions take their protection of incompetence much further, they risk, and perhaps deserve, the fate that befell federal air traffic controllers in 1981, when President Reagan fired more than 11,000 of them for staging an illegal strike.

An extreme step, to be sure, but a clear message about the public interest and who's in charge.

At most schools, things don't have to go that far. Brave state lawmakers could support ending tenure, which protects employment and rewards incompetence in a manner unparalleled in the private sector. Lawmakers could tie teacher evaluations to students' standardized test results. They could streamline disciplinary systems. And they could do much of this while taking political cover under the Obama administration's Race to the Top program, which rewards reforms with federal funding.

Congratulations to Secretary Duncan and President Obama for taking a firm stand in the Rhode Island situation.  It gives me hope that they are committed to real change - for the better - when it comes to schools. 

And congratulations to USA today for running today's editorial.  If our educational systems are to come back from the morass they are currently residing in, this is the kind of thinking that has to take hold.