It’s all for the children, of course

Berkeley teachers refuse to work any more than the minimum

By John McGregor
From the April 2005 Print Edition

The greatest obstacle on the road to education reform is not, regardless what one is constantly told, growing class size. Class size is currently playing a role as a considerably greater threat to the education of Berkeley K-12 students, but it’s not what you might think. Barry Fike, president of the Berkeley teachers’ union, announced in February that the district’s teachers would be implementing a work “scale down,” after reaching an impasse in contractual negotiations with the district.

Since the scale down began, teachers have worked only the 7.5 contractually mandated hours per day, refusing to grade assignments or participate in extracurricular events outside this window — and class size is one of the reasons given for this impasse. Indeed, class size isn’t the biggest threat faced by students in this case — teachers are.

Berkeley teachers, who have taken to wearing red armbands in order to show their “anger and passion,” claim that, were the contract complete, only their passion would remain. Passion, one assumes, for students, but also for striking and whining (in the name of the students, of course). Chief on their current list of demands are salary increases and the aforementioned class-size reductions.

Berkeley Unified School District teachers, as union officials repeat ad nauseam in interviews, have not had a pay raise in two and a half years and claim a raise is necessary to keep pace with cost-of-living increases. Superintendent Michele Lawrence, while sympathetic to the union’s demands, insists that the current budget does not allow for an increase in teachers’ pay rates. Depending on experience, teachers make $30,000 to $70,000 a year. By contrast, the district’s lowest-paid employees, classified workers, have not had a raise in four years.

While all this is going on, the Berkeley Unified School District is mired in incompetence. After repeatedly failing to meet federal standards for education, the district faces sanctions. The teachers, whose first interest is of course always the students, apparently did not feel that increasing the risk of sanctions was reason enough to refrain from engaging in this quasi-strike. How long can teachers go on contending that they act to improve education before they finally admit that they act only in their own interests?

As the quality of education continues to decline across the country, teachers’ unions have opposed virtually every measure that could reverse the trend. Two prominent examples are school vouchers and tenure reform. Both of these proposals would have improved the quality of education for many K-12 students, but would also have taken power away from teachers’ unions.

School vouchers give parents the opportunity to enroll their children in private schools while deferring some of the costs they would otherwise incur. Private schools consistently outperform public ones because of better teachers and higher standards of education.

Tenure reform is perhaps the most needed alteration to the public school system. As it is, the tenure system allows grossly incompetent teachers to retain their positions indefinitely, with essentially no fear of termination, no matter what extremes their ineptitude reaches. All the while, their students wallow in uncontrolled classrooms with virtually no hope of receiving up-to-standard education. Tenure reform is among the ideas most vehemently opposed by teachers’ unions.

Instead, teachers’ unions have historically advocated one solution to the problem. Essentially, they say, “Throw money at it.” History has shown time and again that this course of action does nothing to remedy the problem, and may even compound it by rewarding poor performance. It’s not hard to see why the idea appeals to teachers, though.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that the unions acted as they did in these cases. The primary goal of any institution is, after all, self-preservation. Even in the case of tenure reform, which might have restored some modicum of lost integrity to the teaching profession, unions rejected the proposal. This is the nature of unions: to fight for what they want rather than what they deserve while clinging to perceptions of the world totally incommensurate with reality. Unions demand that money that doesn’t exist be given to them to reward achievements that haven’t been made. Two companies that used a similar business model were recently in the news. Their names are Enron and WorldCom.

Certainly, it’s the right of anyone to request a pay raise for a job well done. But pay raises need to be earned, and no one involved in an enterprise performing as poorly as the Berkeley Unified School District should expect one right now. If teachers nevertheless persist in asking for one, they should at the very least put an end to their hypocrisy by admitting that education and student welfare have always been distant seconds to their own ends.

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