Published November 26th, 2012, in The Wall Street Journal
In your Nov. 19 editorial "The Evil Empire Strikes
Back," you claim that "No reform effort is too small for the teachers
union to squash," citing union opposition to, among other things, charter
schools. "Unions fight as hard as they do because they have one
priority—preserving their jobs and increasing their pay and benefits." You
then urge President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan to "speak
truth to union power."
As an educator of 29 years whose only priority has been to
inspire children, and who gave up much more lucrative careers to do so, I'd
like to "speak truth" to the Journal. The truth is that the
comprehensive study of charters by Stanford University's Center Research of
Educational Outcomes found that, despite all their advantages, only 17% of
charter schools outperformed their regular public school counterparts, while
37% actually lagged significantly behind. Black and Hispanic students generally
fared worse in charter schools.
The truth is, as Diane Ravitch, assistant secretary of
education in the first Bush administration, points out, those states with the
strongest teachers unions have the highest test scores in the nation, while
those with weak unions languish at the bottom.
The truth is that unionized Finland, with the highest test
scores in the world, long ago eschewed all the ideologically based
"reforms" Messrs. Obama and Duncan currently inflict on my students.
See awful comments in response: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324851704578133492170215174.html?mod=ITP_opinion_1
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