9/12/08

To the Editor,                                                                                    
I hope the unfortunate circumstances in the Guilderland School District that led to the transfer and ultimate resignation of Social-Studies teacher Matt Nelligan have taught us something. To me it offers an opportunity to achieve an understanding of the issue of School Choice. The best way I can present this perspective is to relate a discussion I had with a Massachusetts Teacher Union President last year. The union leader was lamenting the assignment of some of his teachers to undesirable schools within the district. He asked how we could expect these teachers to function and perform to the standards we want from them when they are being forced to work in an environment they didn’t want to be in.

I couldn’t believe my ears. He inadvertently expressed a clear understanding of why public schools fail to educate all children to the standards we expect. All he had to do was replace the word “teachers” with “students” in his statement. But when I asked him to do so, he suggested that the result would mean that we shouldn’t force children to be in school at all. I tried further to make an “apples-to-apples” comparison by explaining that the teachers in his scenario weren’t being deprived of employment, or the specific job they had been hired to do, just the environment in which they would be doing it. But he refused to see the simple comparison.      

This narrow minded union leader was so focused on the employment “rights” of the teachers he represented that he could not see the inequity in depriving parents and their children with the same right to choose. After all, a sound basic education is a Constitutional right but there is no such right to the job of your choice. Freedom of choice is the most basic right of the people of any democracy but wherever school choice is proposed, the unions mount a campaign to defeat it. How the unions can get away with depriving American citizens of their rights is mind-boggling. What we need is for teacher union leadership to refocus their attention to the needs of the children first and to stop trying to protect its untenable political standing - that, or some political leadership that isn’t afraid to make them.

David Crawmer