12% of twelfth graders
were proficient
in U.S. history.
When it comes to politics, both sides like to create villains upon which all of our frustrations can be hurled. The right has unions, Jimmy Carter, Hollywood, the media, and Keith Olbermann—and the left has millionaires, George W. Bush, Big Oil, the Koch brothers, and, well, me. In many cases these villains simply make convenient targets, but teachers unions are the exception. In fact, it’s difficult to make the case that teachers unions are not worse than their reputation.
The arguments and stunning stats and stories about teachers unions have been well covered. I won’t waste your time rehashing it all here, other than to say that, at their most basic level, these unions are fundamentally opposed to everything we believe in—both as parents and as Americans.
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We’re All Winners!
Don’t worry, American kids aren’t near the bottom of the pack in every category! They rank first—first—in self-esteem.
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Unions work to ensure that teachers have very little incentive to do a good job and suffer no consequences for doing a bad one. It’s the very definition of mediocrity, and our test scores only serve to prove the old adage correct: Garbage in, garbage out.
Teachers unions have lobbied for teachers to do less and receive more. They’ve created a system in which educators get paid based on how many degrees they collect instead of on how well they teach. Why should a third grader care whether a teacher has a Ph.D. in astrophysics?
Teachers don’t get merit-based raises, they get raises based on longevity. The goal of the game is to simply stay employed—which isn’t all that difficult given the tenure system. In fact, most teachers union contracts actually have “last in, first out” terms, meaning that the last teacher hired is the first one fired if layoffs are necessary. It doesn’t matter if that most recent hire is the single greatest teacher in the history of education. The contract stipulates that he has to go first, and so he does.
Because everybody loves teachers, few people fight against their unions, even though it’s clear that the unions themselves don’t make quality of education their top priority. Actually, that’s putting it mildly. Since this book is about truth, let me put it as bluntly as I can: teachers union leaders generally don’t give a darn about kids.
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Government Solutions
Even criminal actions sometimes can’t get these teachers fired. In New York City, for example (where the union contract runs over two hundred pages), it can take months or years for the city to go through all the steps required in the union contract. Until recently, the teachers accused of wrongdoing reported each school day to a “rubber room” where they would spend their time reading novels or doing crossword puzzles. Five hundred and fifty teachers reported to these rooms each day, costing the city $30 million a year.
Once the existence of these rooms went public the negative publicity was too much for both sides to handle. So, in 2010 a big announcement was made: the rubber rooms would be shut down. Great news, except that, in typical government/union fashion, they did nothing to solve the underlying problem. The teachers will still spend months or years waiting for the contractual process to play out, but instead of reporting to a rubber room, they’ll report to the school that is attempting to fire them. Genius.
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Sound incendiary? It’s meant to. But here’s the best part: it’s not just hatemonger Glenn Beck saying that—the unions themselves are! In 2009, Bob Chanin, the former top lawyer for the National Education Association (America’s biggest teachers union), spoke at the NEA’s annual meeting about why union members support them:
NEA and its affiliates are effective advocates because we have power.
And we have power because there are more than 3.2 million people who are willing to pay us hundreds of millions of dollars in dues each year, because they believe that we are the unions that can most effectively represent them, the unions that can protect their rights and advance their interests as education employees.
This is not to say that the concern of NEA and its affiliates with closing achievement gaps, reducing dropout rates, improving teacher quality and the like are unimportant or inappropriate. To the contrary. These are the goals that guide the work we do. But they need not and must not be achieved at the expense of due process, employee rights and collective bargaining. That simply is too high a price to pay.
The last part is worth reading again. He wants quality teachers and better education, but not if that means having to hurt the union. That’s absurd! Any parents would tell you that they don’t care about the bureaucracy, or contracts, or collective bargaining—they care only about results. But here you have a union leader saying that they only care about the results if those results can be achieved within the structure of their union contract. The problem is that history has proven we can’t have it both ways. If you don’t align the interests of the educators and the educated then you set yourself up for certain failure. Decades’ worth of evidence is in: unions are not improving the quality of education.
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The Not-So-Golden State
In California, the situation is so bad that schools have taken to shifting sexual predators from place to place, just as the Catholic Church did in the bad old days. At Miramonte Elementary School, one teacher who’d been in the system for nearly thirty years was arrested and held on $23 million bail, for, among other things, spoon-feeding “an unknown cloudy-colored liquid substance” to children. The school district actually paid him $40,000 for the privilege of getting rid of him. They covered over $16,000 in legal fees and another $24,000 or so in back pay. Plus he’ll receive full pension and health benefits.
* * *
If you put the data aside you are still left with the commonsense argument as to why union leaders care more about their own organization than anything else: The more teachers the unions have who are employed, the more dues the unions receive. The more dues they get, the more money they have to fund political campaigns. The more politicians they can fund, the more favors they are owed. The more favors they are owed, the more favors they can redeem via legislation that raises spending levels on education and increases their dues. It’s a vicious cycle that at no point factors in teacher quality or student progress.
It also can’t be overlooked that, given their central role in the education of our kids, unions have an unfair ability to spread their message in the classroom. In fact, the left’s favorite “historian,” Howard Zinn, advocated exactly that, writing, “If teacher unions want to be strong and well-supported, it’s essential that they not only be teacher-unionists but teachers of unionism. We need to create a generation of students who support teachers and the movement of teachers for their rights.”
While they’ve been very successful at meeting that objective, they’ve been far less successful at creating a generation of something much more important for our future: good students.
WHY YOUR KIDS BECOME SOCIALISTS
Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of great, wonderful public school teachers out there. I know some of them personally. Some even believe in capitalism and are not well represented by their left-leaning union leaders. But the reality is that some significant portion of public school teachers chose to get into the field in part because it was a secure, stable, government job with predictable hours and generous vacations—in other words, the exact opposite of the risks and rewards of entrepreneurship.
Here’s how this works in practice, according to Joe Kernen, a CNBC television anchor who relayed a conversation he had with his nine-year-old son, Blake, who attends a New Jersey public school:
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Are Unions the Problem?
It’s helpful to understand the rationale of those who seem to genuinely want to improve education, but who also support the current union structure. What I’ve generally found is that their arguments almost always come b
ack to political ideology—they support unions because they fear that “evil capitalists” will somehow take over if these unions are gone. For example, consider this quote from a Forbes writer in a column titled “Why I Support the Teachers Unions.”
The teachers unions are not always right. No group is. But they represent a democratic approach to our public education system, and if we push them out and usher in an age of for-profit online schools, cheaper labor, and funnel all those saved tax dollars back in the pockets of the wealthiest Americans, we may as well kiss our public schools goodbye.
After spending virtually the entire column arguing that teachers unions are valuable because they protect teachers, whose buy-in and support we need for reform, he finally reveals his real motivations: reach the money quote at the end. He supports teachers unions because he thinks so little about capitalism, freedom of choice, and bringing education back to the local level that he fears for the future without them. In his mind, unions are apparently the only thing preventing us from outsourcing American history teacher jobs to call centers in Mumbai.
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BLAKE: My teacher says the recession is the banks’ fault.
JOE KERNEN: That’s way too simple, Blake. For something as big as this recession, there’s a lot of blame to go around.
BLAKE: And my teacher says it’s ’cause we care too much about buying stuff, and it might not be so bad if we stopped.
JOE KERNEN: Your teacher said . . . what?
Only twenty-one states require students to take an economics course as a high school graduation requirement, and only five states (Georgia, Louisiana, New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina) require entrepreneurship to be a component of a course offered in high schools.
If you think education from kindergarten through high school is in trouble, though, it’s nothing compared to college.
THE COLLEGE SCHEME
A college education is a key part of the American Dream, right? Isn’t that what we’ve all been told? You haven’t really “made it” in America if you don’t have a degree.
I don’t buy it. And you shouldn’t, either.
In theory, the Dream goes like this: you do well in school, graduate from a good college, and get a great job with which you’ll finance a home, family, and, ultimately, the college education of your children. And on and on it goes.
* * *
Bankruptcy 101
There will be 5.4 million students going to colleges and universities in the United States this fall and about that many American parents wondering how they’ll ever meet all the costs.
—ASSOCIATED PRESS, AUGUST 1965
* * *
But is that still the reality? More often than not, no—not even close. These days, kids enroll in college, borrow tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for it, have their worldviews shaped by tenured professors, then leave and begin the often lengthy process of trying to find a job, which often ends up not even being in their area of study.
Maybe it’s time to rethink the whole value proposition of a college education.
Average college debt has now climbed to roughly $24,000 a student. And college debt, unlike other debts, doesn’t get eliminated by declaring bankruptcy—it follows you around the rest of your life. “Kids become indentured servants,” James Altucher, managing director of Formula Capital, says, “taking jobs and pursuing careers they don’t necessarily want. Instead, if they had a five-year head start over their peers by not going to college, they could figure out how to make a lot more money—and wouldn’t have to deal with massive debt.”
“Indentured servants” . . . is it any wonder that progressives have pushed so hard for college to become ingrained as part of “the Dream” in our culture?
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The Unions Get Rich While Your Kids Get Dumb
There is no way to separate the teachers unions from politics. The NEA and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) make $2 billion in union dues every year. The teachers unions have also gotten fully behind both Obamacare and Occupy Wall Street in order to back the Democrat machine.
In the 2008 election cycle, teachers unions gave $5.4 million to candidates for national office. Ninety-five percent of that went to Democrats. It’s no coincidence that the biggest single recipient of Obamacare waivers is the union representing New York City public school teachers.
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While earning a college degree does correlate with higher lifetime earnings, it’s certainly no guarantee of it. Especially not anymore. And it’s definitely not going to guarantee a population with more common sense or basic knowledge. It turns out that, in many cases, kids actually lose basic knowledge as they go through college. At universities like Cornell, Yale, Duke, and Princeton, freshmen did better on a basic civics test than seniors. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute found that going to college made you more likely to favor same-sex marriage, approve of abortion, and disagree with the idea that “anyone can succeed in America with hard work and perseverance.”
Peter Thiel, the cofounder of PayPal, has actually started handing out money to smart young kids who agree to leave college and work instead. “Learning is good,” he says. “College gives people learning and also takes away future opportunities by loading the next generation down with debt.” Thiel points out that education costs have escalated by a factor of three since 1980.
* * *
Uncritical Thinking
A recent study by Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia found that one in three students didn’t improve at all in critical thinking skills throughout college.
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Here’s the truth: smart people don’t absolutely have to go to college. They certainly should consider it—but, in many cases, they’re better off not going to college. If instead of drinking beer and being indoctrinated, students spent those four (or five, or six) years gaining real experience, then, by twenty-two, they’d have a great leg up on many of their competitors. That’s why Benjamin Franklin apprenticed at a print shop instead of going to college—it was less expensive, and it afforded him the opportunity to learn to do something useful. Or how about Abraham Lincoln? Or Edison? We need more Americans with practical know-how and fewer with multiple degrees in stupid crap nobody cares about, taught by people who hate the country that has made them rich.
By claiming that college is for everyone, we just end up dumbing down the entire system and preventing people from going into the areas where they’ll really excel. Widespread access means we have to ensure that everybody can pass and prosper. And that means lower standards so that everybody can feel good about themselves, which, in today’s schools, is way more important than knowing how to program a computer or develop a vaccine. Sure, Silicon Valley may be hiring applicants from China and India to fill their open slots, but at least our guys can put that gold star on their welfare-sponsored refrigerator in their rent-controlled apartments.
* * *
Good Company?
In addition to the nine U.S. presidents who did not graduate from college, neither did Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Michael Dell—or me.
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But it gets worse.
Throughout our educational system, teachers and professors are indoctrinating students purposefully into the cult of the Left. Most of these teachers and professors are protected by law and by policy and many enjoy tenure, which grants them the unalienable right to teach any ideas they want to. The education system is the vanguard of the socialist revolution in the United States. And what no one will tell you is that it’s been that way for decades.
Until the 1960s, America’s universities were the best in the world—and the students who came out led the world in know-how. Going to college was something special. It wasn’t a place to play beer pong and smoke pot. Nobody went to college to get the “college experience.” People went to college to get an education.
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&n
bsp; You’re Qualified . . . for the Wrong Job
In his documentary Waiting for Superman, former teachers union supporter Davis Guggenheim reported that, by the year 2020, there will be 123 million high-pay, high-skill jobs available throughout the country . . . but just 50 million Americans with the qualifications to fill those jobs.
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Then the universities became indoctrination centers, with tenured professors spouting insane theories for high pay, lecturing the rest of us on how we’re bad Americans because we’re not more like the Chinese. While there had always been hints that higher education was a leftist bastion—Woodrow Wilson was, after all, president of Princeton—it wasn’t until the 1960s that everything went to hell in a handbasket.
That’s when the Frankfurt School took over.
THE MARXIST THOUGHT INVASION
After World War I, a group of German Marxists decided that the best shot for communist success was to infiltrate culture and education. It was a good idea, actually. Once they were firmly ensconced in culture and education they could tear it down with something called “critical theory”—the idea that everything needs to be criticized endlessly. After culture and education had been stripped bare, Marxism could rebuild society in its own image.