For a complex tangle of reasons having to do with everything from residence in DC to New York politics in the 80s to sheer faddishness, it's utterly required for elite pundits to spend inordinate amounts of time bashing teacher's unions. They hate them. They "Sister Souljah" them at every chance, always thinking -- oh-so-admirably -- of the poor ghetto children, so terribly incapacitated by collective bargaining agreements. Over at The Quick and the Ed, Kevin Carey writes a blistering, and genuinely important, rejoinder to such types. First, on the DC schools, which are almost uniquely bad, and which thus serve as the base for such remarkable commentaries as Richard Cohen's blast at the Democrats, and Jonah Goldberg's decision to get rid of all public schools:
The salient fact about DC is not that it has education problems. Every big city in America has those. The overriding issue is that our schools are worse than other big cities that also have kids, parents, and teachers unions. In fact, the Washington Teachers Union has kept a pretty low profile since being humbled by a massive corruption scandal a few years back. In DC at least, they're not the big issue.
Something is wrong here. It isn't the unions. But it's very convenient for lefty types to blame the unions. This shows, among other things, that they are forward-looking, and free from organized labor's influence, and generally an independent thinker and analyst. Too bad it's all costume:
[This] creates space for people with an independent image to maintain--your Cohens and Mickey Kauses--to burnish their street cred by selectively adopting one or more of the conservative education principles. So Cohen denounces calls for school funding, Kaus is always looking for a chance to take shots at teachers unions, contrarian-by-design publications like The New Republic trumpet their support for vouchers, etc. As with the three principles themselves, little of this is about education policy per se. Rather, it's about using education policies as a proxy for other things. Maybe there was a time when this came across as gutsy truth-telling, but at this point it all feels like pro forma gesturing and nothing more.
It's not only nothing more, it's something less. By repeatedly ascribing blame to the teacher's unions, these pundits deflect attention from the endemic, root problems, and refocus on more discrete, and demonizable, culprits. This gives conservatives an easy way out of conversations on education reform, even as they lack an actual solution.
