Peter H. Hanley

ARNOLD Schwarzenegger's mandate to change the status quo and attack structural impediments should include a reevaluation of the role the large labor unions, like the California Teachers Association (CTA), have in education.

When California installed this teacher trust as the sole labor supply within a state-operated monopoly, it vastly strengthened the inherent union tendency to advocate for the status quo and self-interest and weakened the power of local boards to enact critical reforms, creating a dynamic that has exploded education budgets with virtually no return in increased achievement. Two examples -- education productivity and teacher union-promoted class-size reduction -- illustrate these points.

Utilizing a measure designed for comparison over long periods of time, Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby analyzed productivity from 1970 -- about the time that collective bargaining spread to education -- through 2000. Productivity for 9-year-olds, measured by points scored per thousand dollars of per-student spending, fell an astronomical 55 percent for math scores and 72 percent for reading. For 17-year-olds the declines were an even sharper 62 percent and 73 percent.

By comparison, service industry productivity rose 1 percent per year, slower than the rest of the economy, but an increase nevertheless.

Most recently, a Sept. 16 report from the OECD, the industrialized world's leading economic agency, affirmed that the U.S. leads the world in education spending, but with mediocre to poor achievement. CTA is excoriating Sen. Dianne Feinstein's support for vouchers in Washington, D.C. as a "gamble" and untested, but it sold California on a multi-billion dollar, multiyear effort to reduce class sizes without any evidence that action increases student learning. The state's own evaluation in 2002, conducted by mainstream organizations such as RAND, WestEd, and EdSource, found only limited evidence linking gains to class size reduction, and those were small.

If the Teamsters Union suddenly proposed that smaller trucks be used on the highway to improve safety and reduce wear-and-tear on the roads, and that drivers should only work 180 days a year because of stressful job conditions, the public would view it suspiciously as an effort to reduce the workload of existing drivers and create thousands of new union jobs. Yet we continue to restrict the flexibility of local school boards and pay billions for the educational equivalent of this policy.

Reducing class size has created thousands of new teaching jobs. CTA has added 50,000 new members and collected $145 million in 2002, adding fuel to aggressive political contributions. Further, the resulting shortage of teachers drove up salaries, making California teachers the nation's highest paid.

The only real chance for sustained improvement is substantial restructuring of the educational system. To do that, we need flexibility and accountability. We have the best colleges in the world utilizing master teachers in tandem with lower paid assistants to provide tailored student assistance, a more logical and effective approach, but no school board could implement it with the current teacher trust in place.

Similarly, incentive pay to encourage good teachers to work in distressed areas is blocked in favor of seniority, resulting in the best teachers working with the easiest students. Who can blame them when the compensation is the same? The egalitarian pay scale unconnected to achievement leads great teachers to leave classrooms to become administrators. The CTA clings to lifetime tenure, which no other profession in society still receives, meaning that annually many poor performers are neither remediated nor fired.

Our kids pay for these policies. Only through empowering parents with choice, ending the state monopoly, and reducing the extraordinary power of teacher unions will we ever see continuous, sustained academic achievement for all students.

Peter H. Hanley is executive director of California Parents for Educational Choice and vice president of the San Mateo Union High School District.

Vote for Peter H. Hanley on November 8

Education for the Knowledge Economy

Education
for the
Knowledge Economy