ONE UNION'S WAR AGAINST CHOICE
Teachers union officials worry about keeping students in the schools the way German shepherds worry about the straying of their sheep. When Governor Wilson recently proposed pushing back the start of kindergarten to save money, the CTA didn't just object - it countered with a television ad campaign showing a tearful child being turned away from kindergarten. It's also the reason, says Myron Lieberman, a former teacher and union member who has just published a book on public education and the free market (Public Education: An Autopsy), that teachers unions oppose the notion of a sub-minimum wage for teenagers - it would enable indifferent and disinterested students to drop out of school and find entry-level work appropriate to their skill level, thereby reducing the need for teachers and union members.DESPITE ALL the time scholars spend studying the decline of the schools, they tend to neglect one of the most obvious reasons of all. "Public schools are the last great vestige of socialism in America," points out John Nelson, a Sacramento consultant who does opposition research for the "Yes on 174" campaign. Teachers and administrators are buried under a blind monopolistic system of rigid central control (the California Education Code is three times as large as the IRS code). If any business were run the way the LAUSD runs the Los Angeles public schools it couldn't survive six months. But the LAUSD lurches on decade after decade enthusiastically handing out condoms, awarding A's for little more than showing up for class, and then at graduation proudly conferring diplomas on kids who can't read them anyway.
A June 1993 management review of the Los Angeles Unified School District by the Arthur M. Anderson company found that LAUSD routinely violates virtually every principle known to American business. The district has "excessive layers of management" choked by "unclear lines of responsibility" and "bureaucratic red tape." It doesn't use "objective performance measures" to hold people accountable; it performs "little long-term planning;" its decisions are "driven by rules rather than customer needs."
ONE WOULD think the educational establishment would be appalled by the effect such conditions have on student achievement. But when educators or union officials are challenged on these grounds their first reaction is to become irate that anyone would blame them just because their students don't learn. "Am I responsible because kids come to school unfed, underclothed, abused because of an alcoholic parent or because the family is so poor they have to pick crops in the middle of the semester?" UTLA president Helen Bernstein told the California Journal's Stanley Moss last year. "Am I responsible because someone threatened them on the way to school? Am I responsible for 60 percent of kids on class roll in September not being there in June?"
"Educators . . . have not as a group failed society," wrote Arizona State University Professor David Berliner, in a recent irate attack on the critics of public schools. "Rather it is society that has failed educators."
("Yeah right," says Alibrandi. "If you produce lousy automobiles, blame the driver.")
In the early 1980s, when Joe Alibrandi, in his capacity as chairman of the Business Roundtable's Education Task Force, first tried to do something about the depressing effect of public education on both individual happiness and business productivity, his initial idea was to work with educators and teachers unions in order to pass a major reform bill. But it soon became clear, says Alibrandi, he and the educational establishment had radically different approaches to solving the problem. "As long as we talked about getting more money, more staff development, smaller class size, they gave us full support across the board but as soon as we began to talk about parents having a choice, or teacher qualifications or merit pay –whoops!– that was anathema."
