David Hansen: “Teacher Unions Hurt School Competition”
David Hansen, President of the non-partisan Buckeye Institute, had this interesting fact in his column that Columbus residents may have missed in The Dispatch:
Regulatory accountability - the rules, regulations, contracts and mandates created by politicians and bureaucrats as their tools for micro-managing public schools - ensures that schools instead dance to the tune of the politically powerful, in particular, teacher unions and school bureaucracies.
The promise of parental choice and market accountability to improve public schools systems assumes that school systems are institutionally capable of responding to market accountability.
Recently, an editorial on Ecole Kenwood in the Columbus Dispatch shows that this assumption does not hold true for Columbus Pubic Schools (CPS).
Its teacher union contract keeps CPS from offering something as commonsensical to parents preparing their children for success in today’s global economy as a language immersion school.
Imagine how the CPS teacher contract thwarts other aspects of running schools for the sake of kids as opposed to that of its teacher union.
But in fairness, who has time to run language immersion schools, when teachers need 4-5 “prep” periods, lunch, incredible publicly-funded benefits packages, great retirement plans, 3-month vacations, tenure, years worth of sick leave days, and the ability to go home by 3pm everyday?
Read the rest of David’s column here.
