Yesterday, WOS drew our attention to an editorial on the Chicago Tribune's website. In it, the editors take Bob Chanin to task. Chanin is the recently retired top lawyer for the National Education Association (NEA), one of the largest (if not the largest) teachers' unions in the country. At his retirement speech, Chanin discussed the importance of teachers' unions:
"This is not to say that the concern of NEA and its affiliates with closing achievement gaps, reducing dropout rates, improving teacher quality and the like are unimportant or inappropriate. To the contrary. These are the goals that guide the work we do. But they need not and must not be achieved at the expense of due process, employee rights and collective bargaining. That simply is too high a price to pay."
Now, unless we're completely misreading what Chanin is saying, we can paraphrase his comments as follows: Teachers' unions want to ensure quality education for schoolchildren, but they also want to protect the rights of teachers. Does that sound about right?
The editors of the Tribune, however, have a different spin: "We wanted to ask [NEA officials] if the rest of the union leadership believed that kids ranked behind collective bargaining on the teacher priority list."
First, Chanin was addressing a union audience in his capacity as that union's lawyer; he was articulating what may be considered his professional mission--one which he had been fulfilling for 40-plus years. He was not, in other words, expressing a teacher's mission, but a union representative's mission--and the mission of a union rep is to take care of the union members.
Second, the Tribune editors are engaging in what is known as a "straw man" argument: They attribute to their opponent an argument that he did not advance and then proceed to refute that argument. Nowhere does Chanin say that kids "ranked behind" collective bargaining. Rather, he said that teachers' rights cannot be sacrificed in the name of educating children.
By the way, he's right.
(TO BE CONTINUED)
Lil' story. A few years ago, the teachers at my daughters school were going out on strike, but Stacy's teacher didn't. When I asked her why, she stated that she just loved to teach and didn't really need the pay increase because her husband had such a lovely job.
ReplyDeleteThat woman was born to teach at a charter school! In the more hard-bitten union world, she'd have been beaten up, of course.
ReplyDeleteI love this disclaimer and plan to use it on everything I write from now on: "This series of posts calls for more polish than we're willing to give at this time. We put it out there as a work-in-progress." Great posts, though.