It’s up to the press to cover public events for the public, otherwise we would spend all our time running from city council meetings to school board meetings to fire district meetings, ad infinitum. If the press isn’t doing the job, shame on them.

This isn’t about what the public does with the freedom it has. It’s about people taking the position that the public doesn’t have the right to know about negotiations until they’re over.

Only 11 states have open bargaining laws. Most of these are not strong union states and I would be interested to know what the position of the affected public employees’ unions were when those laws were making their way through the process.

I continue to stand by my original statements.

There are many districts where public negotiations take place. Ironically, in my experiences, the “public” rarely shows up for these public negotiations and it is the teachers who make up the majority of the observers. This is typically an advantage for the teachers.

This is another reason to shoot holes in the Eduwonk/Arne Duncan et al national standards movement. If you constantly view education through the lens of the Chicago, D.C., and LAs of the country you miss the boat on what is going on elsewhere. If you need an education battle in the urbans go for it, but don’t use it as an excuse to tread on the rest of us.

My experience is that the public simply finds teacher bargaining exhausting. It is one of the most feared regularly scheduled occurrences in many communities. I have no evidence that translates into public demand for open bargaining. When we did open bargaining, anyone could attend. The only non-bargainers who ever attended were members and an infrequent member of the press.

My sense is the public wants teacher negotiations settled as quickly as possible. If they felt that public bargaining was the way to do that, they’d be clamoring for it. Apart from folks like yourself who have axes to grind, how many people are really demanding open bargaining?

I stand by my characterization of the unions’ position on public bargaining, allowing – as always – there are exceptions. And in keeping with my point, you discuss what the district prefers and what the union prefers, but what the public might prefer doesn’t enter into it.

As for the police, firefighters or any other public sector unions, you are correct. Their negotiations are just as much a public issue and should also be transparent to the public.

It is frequently the district, seeking to avoid such an outcome, that insists upon closed bargaining sessions. Sure there are unions that prefer closed sessions and districts that want to open it up, but it is not all one way or the other.

Frankly, it depends upon the dynamics of the specific round of bargaining. Sometimes neither the union nor the district wants to have the “nitty-gritty conversations” in open sessions. The reality is a lot more mixed than the WaPo’s apologists for the incompetent DC superintendent, Michelle Rhee, or you would like us to believe.

Apart from all of the above, I have never heard of any public sector union, other than teacher unions, bargaining in public. Surely the public has just as big a stake in the bargaining of police officer and firefighter unions. Why are the professional do-gooders like Andrew Rotterdam only concerned about teacher bargaining?