Pro-Union

Richard Kahlenberg's article “Bipartisan, but Unfounded: The Assault of Teachers' Unions” strongly contests the idea that teachers' unions are at the root of public educations' current shortcomings. His central argument is a bold one: though a bipartisan effort pushes for legislative changes regarding unions' power of collective bargaining, these groups have no empirical data to support their cause. He bases this claim on Waiting for Superman's ignorance of poverty as an educational issue and a misrepresentation of the “firing process” for bad teachers – which he feels is excellent. Ironically, Kahlenberg's argument does not employ an analysis of evidence utilizing many statistics and data either. Still, he raises two questions for Guggenheim that are worth noting:

“If factors like poverty and segregation matter a great deal more to student achievement than the existensce of collective bargaining, why not focus on those issues instead of claiming that the ability of teachers to band together and pursue their interests is the central problem in American education?”

He asks this to argue that Guggenheim either ignores the issue of poverty or claims it is simply the scapegoat for unionized teachers failing numbers He goes on to ask:

“Why do we see states like Massachusetts and countries like Finland, both with strong teachers' unions, leading the pack?”

Kahlenberg raises this question to drive home his point that unions certainly serve a role in pushing education forward. He adds that deregulation has a poor track record of improving the peoples' conditions, citing the unregulated Deep South public school system and the failures that followed the deregulation of US banks.

Richard Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who has authored a number of works promoting teachers' unions, affirmative action, injustice in higher education, and other educational policy issues.