Dole Didn’t Do His Homework
Communism has collapsed, and Willie Horton is back in jail. So if you are the Republican candidate for president in 1996, what villain do you conjure up to frighten the voters? Would you believe, teachers and their unions?
Three times during the first presidential debate, Bob Dole singled out the National Education Association for scorn, echoing his corrosive accusation at the GOP convention: “If education were a war, you would be losing it. If it were a business, you would be driving it into bankruptcy.”
Are teachers and their unions really the new Evil Empire? Or are they, as I believe, dedicated professionals who strive mightily to make public education work in an era of stark social and economic challenges?
Ironically, the answer lies partly in the work of William Bennett, one of the campaign advisers who urged Mr. Dole to attack NEA. Several years ago, in an article titled “Quantifying America’s Decline,” Mr. Bennett noted that between 1960 and 1992, there was a 419 percent increase in out-of-wedlock births; a quadrupling of the divorce rate; a tripling of the percentage of children living in single-parent homes; and an increase in the average time Americans spend watching TV from 5 to 7 hours a day.
Is it possible that these trends, with their profoundly negative consequences for children, have also impacted the ability of American kids to learn in school? Indeed, is it possible that the positive gains in student achievement over the last decade - despite the surrounding social decay - are cause for praising teachers rather than demonizing them?
Notwithstanding the media’s fixation on underperforming inner-city schools, the last decade has been a time of significant improvements in U.S. public education. For example, in 1982, a mere 14 percent of high school students completed a core block of rigorous academic coursework recommended by the U.S. Department of Education; by 1994, 51 percent did - and the percentage is rising steadily.
Two years ago, Money magazine did a comprehensive survey of public school systems across the U.S. and concluded: “About 10 percent of all public schools - or about 2,000 nationwide - are as outstanding academically as the nation’s most prestigious and selective private schools.”
Revealingly, in seven of the 50 states, there is virtually no collective bargaining by public school employees. In short, no teacher unions. It is hardly a coincidence that these seven states - all but one, West Virginia, located in the South - have been notorious for their underfunded education systems and for their low standing in national rankings of student achievement.
In recent years, pro-education Southern governors - notably Zell Miller in Georgia and Jim Hunt in North Carolina - have striven to energize their states’ academic performance by, in effect, doing the job that teacher unions perform elsewhere: insisting on decent pay to attract and retain quality teachers, pushing for higher academic standards, and prodding state legislatures to boost investments in education.
And what about the superb public school systems we Americans envy in countries such as Germany, France, and Japan? You guessed it: They all benefit from strong teacher unions.
Yet despite this evidence, it would be foolish to claim that teacher unions guarantee educational excellence. To do so would be the flip side of Mr. Dole’s absurd notion that NEA controls America’s public schools. For the record, NEA and its local affiliates do not certify teachers, hire or fire them, write curricula, determine graduation requirements, or set funding levels. What’s left to control? In the last analysis, the only thing NEA members control is their individual professional commitment to making public education work for as many children as possible.
However, unions do give teachers a strong, unified professional voice within their local school systems. Our members and affiliates have fought not just for decent pay and working conditions, but also for things like smaller class sizes and stricter enforcement of classroom discipline. To take just one recent example, the NEA-affiliated California Teachers Association played the decisive role last spring in passing California’s ambitious $771 million program to reduce kindergarten-through-grade-three class sizes to 20 pupils, down from current class sizes that range as high as 40.
Ultimately, this is what separates public school teachers from their critics: Critics like Mr. Dole stand on the outside and throw spitballs. Teachers - supported by their unions - stand in the classroom and courageously confront the challenges of public education in the 1990s. The good news is that, in most of America’s schools, the teachers are winning.
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