Teachers admit it’s not all about them

With Gov. Malloy declining to be the public employee union stooge some of his supporters wanted him to be and instead challenging tenure and proposing a more serious evaluation system, Connecticut’s teachers are fighting back. They’re stacking the governor’s hearings on his education reform legislation and publishing rebuttals, and their main union, the Connecticut Education Association, is broadcasting a TV commercial criticizing him.The teachers have a point. Since the governor complains about the “achievement gap” between city and suburban schools and wants to authorize the state education commissioner to take over as many as 25 poor-performing schools, teachers resent the implication that they are mainly responsible for education’s shortcomings. Of course they’re not. As certain observers have remarked many times, exchange the student populations of Hartford’s and Avon’s school systems and instantly Hartford will have the best schools in the state instead of the worst, and Avon will have the worst instead of the best. Having long benefited from binding arbitration of their union contracts, teachers are more responsible for the high cost of educational failure than for that failure itself.A teacher who lives in Fairfield, Chris Kinsley, probably spoke for many teachers in his essay in the Connecticut Post last week: “Whose job is it to make an appointment with his child’s teacher when he receives a midterm report that states that his child is failing? Whose job is it to teach his child to be respectful to other students, teachers and staff at school? Whose job is it to give his children the incentive to educate themselves and take advantage of what is offered to be learned — not just academics, but life skills? ... How many ankle bracelets are there in any of those suburban schools? I had four in one of my classes last year. How much time does one disruptive student take away from all the other students who want to learn? ... That is a bigger problem than tenure.”Right on, brother! But the social disintegration now being cited by Kinsley and other teachers has been happening for half a century without such agitation from Connecticut’s teachers, its most intimate witnesses.The problem is that teachers and their unions long have been telling the state that they are the most important factor in education. That was the rationale for the big increase in their salaries under the Education Enhancement Act passed in 1986, raises awarded without any requirement for more accountability. Now that a governor has dared to ask for accountability and has questioned their unexcelled job security, Connecticut’s teachers are admitting they’re really not the most important thing in education after all — that students themselves are, or, really, that parents are, even as almost half the students don’t have parents anymore.What if, instead of denouncing the governor, the CEA broadcast a TV commercial identifying all the government subsidies available for the perpetrators of childbearing outside marriage and describing its overwhelming correlations with everything bad in society, like student criminals wearing ankle bracelets?But if that problem is indeed infinitely bigger than tenure, tenure always has been its own problem of public administration. Just as Connecticut legislators should be asking themselves why only liquor stores enjoy a law prohibiting price competition, they should be asking why, among public employees, only teachers enjoy laws insulating themselves against the ordinary accountability that applies to all other government employees — and not just tenure, but also the law exempting teacher job evaluations from disclosure. Of course few legislators will ask those questions, as the answer is only their own political cowardice. That’s why the teachers can knock off the indignation. With the liquor stores they share ownership of the General Assembly. There won’t ever be reform of education in Connecticut, and when family disintegration has wrecked the last public school in the state, today’s teachers will be retired in the Carolinas or Florida enjoying direct deposit of their ample pensions. Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.