Taking the Skin Off the 3-D Onion
The National Council on Teacher Quality unveiled its collective bargaining database today, and it is an exceptional piece of work. It's like Contract Hits, except user-friendly, searchable and designed by professionals who know what they're doing.
The database contains the full text of contracts in the nation's 50 largest school districts, plus board policies and handbooks in states without collective bargaining. The neatest feature is the ability to select certain provisions and compare them among districts.
USA Today's Greg Toppo asked union officials what they thought of the database and I was surprised by the response - though I shouldn't have been.
"The contract is really just a piece of the picture," said Bill Raabe, NEA's director of collective bargaining and member advocacy, who worried that people might draw "erroneous conclusions."
AFT President Ed McElroy painted an unusual word-picture. "It is important for the public to realize that labor relations are far more complex than what this database captures," he said. "This is just one layer of a three-dimensional onion."
That imagery is more appropriate than he knows. If you keep peeling away layers of an onion all you find is more onion. Until you get to the last layer, and find nothing inside.
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