Lost
Richard Whitmire and Andrew J. Rotherham have a timely piece in today’s Wall Street Journal titled ”How Teachers Unions Lost the Media.” I’m not sure if they’ve hit upon how, or why, teachers’ unions lost the media, but there is no question that the press organs NEA and AFT could usually count on for support are now fiercely criticizing them. Whitmire and Rotherham have some pretty good hypotheses, like this one from Richard Colvin:
“All the reforms unions oppose—charter schools, testing, accountability, No Child Left Behind, performance pay—have been around for a while now and the disasters the unions predicted have not come to pass,” said Richard Colvin, who runs the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media in New York. “The unions are out of touch and are courting irrelevance.”
Colvin is right. For the most part, the press no longer accepts union statements at face value, and it has gotten to the point where the unions’ reputation tarnishes whatever research they sponsor so that it, too, is rarely taken seriously.
A skeptical press is a good thing for both the press and the public. But whether it will have lasting effect on education itself is an open question. I still think we soon may have to deal with two national teachers’ unions who acknowledge the loss of the PR battle and press on with their agenda anyway. An “us against the world” mentality is well-suited to union activism. NEA and AFT are probably a lot more worried about losing influence with a growing number of friendly Democrats than they are about losing influence with the prestige press.
October 2nd, 2009 at 16:41
Testing, accountability, and performance pay have all been around for a long time as issues and made essentially no dent in the education debate. Accountability, in the form of state-level testing, was long ago defanged to the modest extent the idea ever had much bite.
The big change, I believe, is that there’s now a direction for critics of the educational status quo to advance towards rather then just fleeing the inefficiency, ineffectiveness and inertia of the district-based system.
Charters to a greater extent, vouchers to a lesser, provide that goal towards which reform proponents want to move and a distinct goal is a politically-salable position whereas it’s pretty tough to formulate policy to satisfy a desire for something, anything, else.
October 2nd, 2009 at 17:18
Now if we can just get the press, which doesn’t accept union statements at face value, to go to the California Teachers Empowerment Network to get a non-union view, things would be looking up.