Not Accountable

An Issue No Democrat Wants to Talk About

There was a time, back at the turn of the 1990s, when Governor Mario Cuomo would call me at home to discuss policy issues. At length. Once, we “watched” an entire New York Knicks basketball game on the phone, talking presidential politics and his proposal for a 5-point shot from half-court. I enjoyed our jousting; he was a good man. Once he called me, more in sadness than in anger, because I hadn’t given him any credit for “increasing the budget for New York schools by 90%” over his several terms in office.

“You did that?” I said.

“I certainly did.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“SORRY?” Cuomo did have a bit of a temper. “Why?”

“Because the schools still suck.”

In fact, they were getting worse. And have been ever since. Indeed, there are all sorts of reasons why American education isn’t working as well as it used to:

—For one thing, it was never all that good. During the industrial age, public schools didn’t have to teach much more than reading, writing and arithmetic. Only a tiny sliver of students went to college; there were blue-collar muscle jobs galore that didn’t even require a high school degree.

—Then there was the great family fracturing of the post-war era. The 1968 Coleman Report, and everything smart I’ve read about education since, concluded that parental involvement was the single most important indicator when it came to student success. That was far more difficult with absent fathers and both parents working jobs.

—Then came television, cable television, the internet, social media…all competing with the schools for kids’ attention, all a lot more interesting.

—Then came feminism: “We used to get the top 20% of women who graduated from college as teachers,” said the late Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “Now we get the bottom 20%.”

And then came Albert Shanker. More about him later. But there’s a conversation I’ve tried to have with Democratic Party politicians for the last fifty years. It begins and ends with a question: “If industrial unions are organized against the power of capital,” I ask. “What power are the public employees unions organized against?”

Crickets, inevitably. You want to get a reflexive liberal to stop talking? Ask them that. Ask them why public employees unions exist. Democrats are supposed to be the party of government, but that is imprecise. They are the party of funding government—as Mario Cuomo made clear. They are not a party that cares all that much about how government works, especially when it’s run by public employees unions—not just the teachers, but police, sanitation workers, prison guards and others, too. (I exempt health care unions because a great many hospitals are owned by private or not-always-so-charitable organizations).

“We’re in the tank to the teachers,” a very prominent Democrat once told me. Let’s explore why:

Because it’s a rigged game. If the United Auto Workers make excessive demands, General Motors can move to China or Mexico (and has). If the Sacramento teachers union makes excessive demands, the local schools can’t move to Seattle. Same for the police, only worse: after the Minneapolis cops murdered George Floyd and there was a national call for police accountability, an outbreak of “blue flu” ensued across the country, which is one reason why crime spiked for a time.

It gets worse: public employees contribute huge amounts of money and workers to favored politicians. “Teachers run the best phone banks,” I’ve been told. The largest group of delegates at every Democratic National Convention in recent years has been members of teachers unions. And teachers have become among the most successful candidates for local school boards; their unions offer seminars on how to run for office. Negotiating against yourself can be a real pleasure.

The clearest case against this flagrant distortion of American democracy is made in a new book Not Accountable by Philip K. Howard, a lawyer who has been a lonely voice for common sense governance since his brilliant book, The Death of Common Sense, in 1994. I consider him a charter member of the Sanity Caucus. If you don’t want your progeny to have their intellects stunted by mediocre martinets, you should read this book.

I’m not sure I agree with Howard’s conclusion that the public unions are unconstitutional; I’m not a lawyer and don’t have the chops to roust about in these litigational mangrove swamps. Furthermore, I tend to believe that issues in a democracy are best settled democratically, not in the courts…Even when the deck is stacked against the public, as it is in this case. (Howard describes time after time that elected officials tried to push back against unions, and failed miserably…even on microscopic codicils of pension agreements.)

The vast majority of teachers are devoted to their work and a great many are excellent. (I wouldn’t be here without a brilliant high school English teacher.) The unions say, routinely, that teachers should be “treated like professionals.” But they insist on negotiating like the United Auto Workers. Professionals are paid according to merit, not just seniority. Professionals can set their own schedules (especially if they want to work late). Professionals can be fired. If you don’t like your doctor, you can find another. But it’s almost impossible to fire a union teacher. Howard writes:

Terry Moe compiled teacher termination data in his 2011 book, Special Interest. In New York City, “eight teachers out of a total teaching force of 55,000 were dismissed for poor performance in 2006-7: a dismissal rate of about one one-hundredth of one percent.”…. “Dismissing a tenured teacher is not a process,” as one superintendent put it, “It’s a career.”

At the other end of the spectrum, it is impossible to reward excellent teachers. The unions say there are no objective standards for merit, but every parent—and I learned this from experience—knows which are the good teachers in their kids’ schools and which are mediocre (and the teachers do, too). There are also objective measures that can be used: Not so much raw test scores, but improvement over last year’s test scores—a teacher who lifts the poorest students’ performance by 20% is more valuable than one who lifts the good students by 10%, though both are worthy of recognition.

Almost as insidious is the unions’ stranglehold on work rules, ranging from length of school day to length of school year to length of parent-teacher meetings. Our daughter’s English teacher once walked out of a meeting with my wife because the clock struck nine and, he explained, the union contract said it ended then. My wife asked if they could communicate by email. Nope. That wasn’t in the contract.

The most egregious example of union overreach was the unilateral school closings during the covid pandemic. A Democratic Congresswoman told me, “I almost lost my seat because of the damn teachers.” More important, the impact on poor children was, and remains, horrific.

I could go on. But let me close with a conversation I once had with Albert Shanker, who called and said, “I can’t stand you kicking the shit out of my union all the time, let’s see if we can work this out.” So I went to his office in Washington; he was dying of cancer, but ready for battle. “What’s your opening offer?” He asked.

I realized that Shanker saw all life as a negotiation. I wasn’t prepared for that, but I gave it a try, “I’ll give up [private school] vouchers if you give up tenure.” He laughed. “This is going to be fun,” he said.

And it was. For the next few hours, we negotiated an ideal school system. There were a lot more teachers in it. One for every half-dozen elementary school students. Most of them were recent college graduates working off their student loans, closely supervised by more experienced teachers. The best of the novices were given raises and allowed to stay on after a year. Tenure worked in the exact opposite way it does now: Every five years you would be re-evaluated and, as in the military, given a promotion or an honorable discharge. The system would reward excellence. Teachers who burned out would be let go, gently. Innovation and experimentation—Shanker liked the idea of charter schools—would be encouraged. The salaries and status of “master” teachers—this was back in the 90s, so we didn’t think of a gender-neutral title—would be significant. They would be known and celebrated in the community. They would be paid like executives. They would have the function of sitting in on less-experienced teachers’ classes and giving them tips on how to do better.

At the end, Shanker and I felt terrific. We had agreed on something important. “Now, are you going to go sell this to your union?” I asked.

“Are you out of your f-ing mind?” He laughed.

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