What the Teachers' Union Wants

Lt. Col. William Corrow (USAF-Ret.) certainly had no intention of igniting the wrath of Vermont's teachers' union. He only volunteered to teach a course for free to Williamstown High School students because he loves kids and loves teaching. The course, entitled "Conflict in the Twentieth Century", is based on his career experience in the Air Force and as a United Nations war crimes investigator in Bosnia.

Corrow has a bachelor's degree in English and a master's degree in counseling. A native of Newport, he was a certified teacher at North Country Union before leaving for Viet Nam in the late 1960s. He is also a member of the Williamstown School Board. From all accounts his students are excited about his course.

The Vermont National Education Association (VT-NEA), on the other hand, wants Corrow out of the classroom. The union has filed a grievance against the school district and demanded binding arbitration, a process which in practice often means forced capitulation to union demands.

To understand why the teachers' union wants Corrow out of the classroom, it's necessary to get a clear fix on just what the business of a teachers' union is. The union exists to bargain with management (school districts) over wages, benefits, duties, working conditions, safety and grievances. Once the members of the bargaining unit (teachers and support staff) authorize the union to do their bargaining, the union has a duty, under the law, to represent all such employees, even those who do not wish to belong to the union.

It is vital to the union to protect its monopoly power over who teaches. Under a typical contract a school cannot hire a teacher who will not pay dues to the union, and it cannot even accept volunteers, like Corrow, who are happy to teach for free.

There is a major difference between a teachers' union and, say, an auto workers union. The auto workers know they cannot enforce demands that would drive their employing companies to the wall in the face of stiff global competition. To do so would mean killing their own jobs. The teachers union, on the other hand, is bargaining with a government which has monopoly power over public schools, and coercive power to extract money from taxpayers.

The auto workers might argue that higher worker productivity produces higher profits for the employer, in which the workers ought to have a fair share. By contrast, the teachers' union is not about fair shares, or productivity, or performance, or results, or students, or indeed about education at all. The VT-NEA is engaged in a purely political struggle. Its goals are to maximize the number of workers paying union dues, control the behavior of those workers and entry to the work force, bargain for ever more pay and benefits for less work and responsibility, and above all preserve the government's near-monopoly over the business of education.

The route to achieving all of these goals is controlling the most congenial political party (the Democratic Party). The VT-NEA does that by throwing its political weight (over 7,000 members in Vermont) and PAC dollars behind pro-union candidates at all levels. The union then lobbies for ever more spending on public education, "for the children", of course. It also makes it a practice to denounce all critics of union policies and practices as "far right extremists".

The VT-NEA's overriding need to preserve monopoly power in education explains its relentless opposition to parental choice of non-unionized schools, leasing empty public school buildings to independent schools, contracting out for education services, alternative certification of teachers, and even the creation of publicly-controlled charter schools. (The VT-NEA- controlled Democrats in the legislature have made sure that Vermont is one of only 13 states not to have a charter school law.)

With strong student, school board, and citizen support Williamstown may succeed in keeping William Corrow in the classroom. But that's only a sideshow. The real battle is between a union working constantly to win greater political power to protect a lucrative near-monopoly, and the people and taxpayers of this state who are "for the children" - not because it lines their own pockets, but because educating our children gives them a real chance to succeed in life, and gives all of us a free and prosperous America.

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November 1999