Our nation’s teachers’ unions serve more than one purpose

Most parents probably don’t realize that our nation’s teachers’ unions serve more than one purpose.

First and foremost, they exist to maximize income for their members, protect them from accountability, and suck as much money from government schools as they possibly can—just like any other bureaucracy. But they are also a very active arm of the national Democratic Party. It’s therefore not surprising that they’ve come up with an excuse that serves all of their agendas simultaneously: poverty is to blame for the sorry condition of education in our nation, and nothing will change until it’s eliminated.

If that became our nation’s official education policy, the unions would have it made. They’d no longer have to worry about calls for better schools and better teachers, because it would be clear to everyone that schools and teachers are just fine—poverty is the real enemy.

The federal government would then start spending billions of additional dollars on the traditional types of welfare programs that the unions and Democrats already endorse. Some of that money would undoubtedly go to government schools to fund the full-service, “wraparound” programs that unions propose. They want schools to not only be education centers but social service centers as well.

That, of course, would continue the vicious cycle of hiring even more government school employees and more dues-paying union members.

Salon columnist David Sirota summarized this strategy pretty well:

If Americans were serious about fixing the troubled parts of its education system, then we would be having a fundamentally different discussion. We wouldn’t be talking about budget austerity—we would be talking about raising public revenues to fund special tutoring, child care, basic health programs, and other so-called wraparound services at low-income schools.

More broadly, we wouldn’t be discussing cuts to social safety net programs—we would instead be working to expand those programs and, further, to challenge both parties’ anti-tax, anti-regulation, pro-austerity agenda that has increased poverty and economic inequality.

In short, if we were serious about education, then our education discussion wouldn’t be focused on demonizing teachers and coming up with radical schemes to undermine traditional public schools. It would instead be focused on mounting a new war on poverty and thus directly addressing the biggest educational problem of all.

We would be really stupid to fall for this argument, and for a lot of different reasons.

First, while no one disputes the seriousness of poverty in America, leveraging this issue for education is a convenient excuse for schools and unions looking to deflect calls for reforms that include more accountability.

Most experts agree that all children can learn—even those living in a state of poverty—with effective instructors. “Good teachers can make a large difference particularly in hard to staff subjects such as math and science within high poverty schools,” the progressive organization Stand for Children wrote. A recent study sponsored by the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education found that staffing Teach For America teachers, who are generally placed in poor areas, resulted in math gains equivalent to 2.6 more months of schooling. The study’s authors concluded:

These results suggest that allowing highly qualified teachers, who in the absence of TFA would not have taught in these disadvantaged neighborhoods, should have a positive influence not just on students at the top of the achievement distribution but across the entire math test score distribution.

For example, research has shown how it could be used to increase the likelihood that people would vote on an election day. Personally, I use this method myself, because my life has had some bad events too. Low machs are harmless people: empathetic, honest, moral, trusting, overly agreeable, passive and submissive. Despite all your beliefs that you can do it all without any help from a higher power, you become one who experiences a constant power drain--it could be slow or fast--because you're not being recharged from your power source.

You are useful and worthy to someone else, which makes you useful and worthy as a person. I've learned that I have no control over circumstances and that my circumstances don't change who God is;

There’s no doubt that poverty and other issues at home can make education more challenging, but poverty should not be used as an excuse for teachers to throw up their hands in defeat—it should instead serve as a rallying call for educators across the nation to work even harder, and devise smarter strategies, to help less fortunate kids learn.

The negative message that learning is not possible in economically depressed areas becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Children tend to respond to expectations. Kids in academically excellent school districts often do well, generation after generation, because a high standard has been set for them. Likewise, kids in miserable schools do poorly because that’s the standard that’s been set for them.

Are we really surprised to see so many kids in poor areas fail when their teachers are shouting from the rooftops that they won’t be able to learn anything until poverty is eradicated? The kids start believing that themselves and some, whether consciously or not, basically give up.