Our View - Wednesday

Union is yesterday

A modern alternative for teachers

Free our teachers from the union. Introduce them to the Association of American Educators — an alternative, nonunion organization that gives them benefits without burden. If you can afford to, offer to pay the nominal fees for a favorite teacher or two in order to show support. Teachers in every state may join (www.aaeteachers.org).

Teachers comprise any community’s most important professional community. They earn their higher educations and certificates in order to accept jobs that pay ridiculous wages and garner inadequate respect. They do so in order that commerce and industry will thrive with an educated workforce. Think a brain surgeon is more important than a teacher? Think again, unless you want an unschooled doctor digging into your skull.

In a perfect world, all teachers would work for competitive private schools that excel by attracting and rewarding the best, most dedicated and innovative professionals. In the world we have, however, most teachers work for the government, under contracts that encourage mediocrity. The contracts mostly represent the interests of a union that no longer cares much about kids, education or teachers.

Throughout the country, most teachers belong to a chapter of the National Education Association. The Colorado branch is known as the Colorado Education Association, which is broken down by local chapters. Dues exceed $600 a year, which can be tough for teachers supporting families on wages that average $40-some thousand a year.

In some school districts, such as D-11 in Colorado Springs, the union assumes membership and takes dues from a teacher’s wages unless the educator jumps through hoops to opt out during a short window of opportunity. The union has never succeeded at getting teachers the wages they deserve, and it typically works against efforts to reward excellence with above-average pay. The only tangible benefit most teachers see for their membership fee is liability insurance to cover lawsuits.

Because of international trade and wondrous new technology, today’s business world is more hyper-competitive than ever. Barriers to entry are low, meaning new companies can challenge older businesses. The older companies must innovate or die. The workforce must be better prepared than ever to compete in markets that guarantee nothing and reward energy, quick thinking and ingenuity. Teachers are trying to respond by creating ever-improving, competitive schools — charter schools and neighborhood schools alike. But the union — stuck in the old world of institutionalized entitlement — gets in the way.

Take, for example, the experience of teachers at Denver’s Bruce Randolph Middle School. Principal Kristin Waters and her heroic staff lifted the school in recent years from among the worst in Colorado to one of the best, using what the Rocky Mountain News called “out-of-the-box strategies,” such as refusing to promote students with failing grades.

Realizing the union resisted most innovative measures, Waters and her staff sought to free the school from union rules that were holding it back. For example, they wanted the freedom to determine how much time children should spend in school each day. But the union — supposedly dedicated to the interests of education — balked. Union leaders wanted to maintain control over a variety of everyday decisions at the school, including hiring practices, thus impeding progress.

In addition to maintaining educational mediocrity, the NEA and its affiliates have used the hard-earned money of teachers to fund a variety of endeavors unrelated to education. A report by the U.S. Department of Labor showed the NEA funding Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition, People for the American Way, and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, among an array of other noneducationrelated causes.

While thousands of teachers struggle to make ends meet, more than half the NEA’s 600-plus employees and officers earn salaries of six figures and up — wages paid by teachers who typically earn far less than half that much for more important work.

The American Association of Educators, by contrast, is designed for today’s more competitive, progressive schools. It offers teachers twice the liability coverage of the NEA policies, with fees that are less than a third of the union dues. Teachers can pay as they go, and may opt in or out any time. Money collected in excess of the cost of liability coverage pays for continuing education courses offered through major universities — open to members and nonmembers alike. None of the money goes to fund activism or political lobbyists.

Colorado teachers have been choosing the Association of American Educators over the union in such numbers that the organization opened its own Colorado chapter last year, known as PACE — the Professional Association of Colorado Educators (www.coloradoteachers.org). Still, few teachers know about it. That’s because local NEA chapters have worked hard to prevent PACE representatives from distributing literature in schools or setting up tables at teacher orientation functions and benefit fairs. At one school in the Harrison School District of Colorado Springs, CEA representatives physically blocked a hallway to prevent teachers from reaching the PACE table.

The NEA is yesterday’s union, with no place in the cuttingedge classroom. To usher in a new era, introduce teachers to the Association of American Educators and its local branch, PACE — a non-coercive association designed around modern educational needs. Young minds are too important for an outdated union to waste.