Teachers’ Unions: Time To Earn Your KeepIt happens every November and it’s as dead certain as the ever-earlier evening darkness. This year the number is 60 percent. I’m talking about the percentage of Greater Cleveland school levies that failed this past Election Day.
There’s no sense in going through the litany of excuses, rationalizations, villains and victims surrounding these losses, except to say that nothing is going to dramatically change for many Ohio school systems until the state’s current obscene school-funding system is fed to the fishes and a more equitable one is put in its place. Which, in case you’ve forgotten, is exactly what the Ohio Supreme Court said in the DeRolph case over a decade ago when it called the existing funding system “unconstitutional” because of its over-reliance on local property taxes and ruled that the state’s public school financing method “must undergo a complete systematic overhaul.”
Since that time the Ohio Supreme Court and our state legislature have volleyballed this issue back and forth, with the legislature sending inadequate funding proposals and the court sending them back with the dictum to try to do better next time. This Abbott and Costello routine has been played out numerous times over the past decade. And while, perhaps, proving only that vaudeville is not dead, this tragicomic shtick is killing Ohio’s public school kids, especially those in larger urban districts where property values continually plummet and schools deteriorate.
That’s why it’s time for, if not outright revolution, than at least some bold behavior. The problem with the Ohio court’s 1997 ruling is that it didn’t go far enough. It did not unequivocally rule that education is a “fundamental right” for all, and it specifically barred local courts from “rectifying inadequate local funding systems.” Essentially, these two limitations took away the urgency of a civil rights edict and the opportunity for local systems to redress inequities, thereby setting up this ongoing back and forth between the Supreme Court and the Ohio legislature.
In a former incarnation I was a public school teacher for nearly 15 years. I taught in four different Ohio systems ranging from a middle-of-nowhere rural district to a large urban one. Based on this experience, I concluded that the American system of local school control – with its life and death dependence on community property taxes for financing – is Jeffersonian democracy at its worst and is the single biggest problem facing education in this country. It formalizes the brutal inequities between the haves and have nots and results in severe economic and social ills.
Here in Ohio – which is one of the country’s worst offenders since it calls for local property taxes to supply over 50 percent of school revenues – the simplest method of bringing about funding equity is to find a way to pressure the Ohio Supreme Court into revisiting the DeRolph case and to declare that education is a “fundamental right of every child” and to allow local courts to mandate funding changes for their districts. This would force the legislature to act with all due urgency to level the playing field for school financing.
Now, the problem with this is that most people are relatively content with the current set-up and could care less about the poor, predominantly urban and minority districts which are suffering the most. But someone has to take up the challenge before Ohio, educationally, turns into the Mississippi of the North. And even though it is certainly everyone’s responsibility to remedy this, one group of individuals has the vested interest and wherewithal to dramatize this cause, if they have the guts to do it.
To lead the charge, I’m calling on the state’s individual teachers’ unions and the Ohio Education Association – which invariably pay lip service to having the best interests of kids at heart and should be willing to put their actions where there mouths are – to begin this crusade by threatening to walk off the job in order to bring attention to this issue. If they can get all lathered up about cost-of-living increases, perhaps they can take bold action fighting a funding system that guarantees that tens of thousands of kids get left behind, leaving our state’s future hanging in the balance.
These organizations need to get their priorities straight and stop, for instance, moaning about vouchers destroying public schools. The battle over vouchers has been lost because anyone with common sense and an awareness of what goes on in our most troubled schools knows that parents who can get their children into a better school will do it, leaving those who can’t afford to as the ones who get stuck in suffocating environments. There is something morally wrong with this and any way to remedy it should be explored and honored.
And please don’t tell me that massive funds are being stripped from public education because of vouchers when, in fact, if you put a price tag on how much it costs to educate a student (say $4000 per year), doesn’t it follow that taking a student out of a public school saves the system $4000? Mathematically, this appears to be a wash while allowing parents the chance to give their children a better present and brighter future. In a word, vouchers are a no-brainer.
Also, these teachers’ groups need to stop threatening to go to the wall to preserve the jobs of older, out-of-touch teachers, many of whom simply go through the motions as they become more and more burned out in the classroom and poisonously cynical outside it. That’s a psychodrama I’ve seen played out in every teachers’ lounge I’ve had the misfortune to observe.
Tenure in public schools is not the same as tenure in, say, colleges or universities. Overcrowded public school classrooms are pressure cookers where teachers have to maintain discipline and find new and creative ways to reach a broad spectrum of students with multi-layered issues and problems. They are no place for the faint of heart or those counting the days to retirement. Generally speaking, younger teachers are better suited for this task. The have the energy to do it and can do it cheaper, thus freeing up more money for school districts to better serve their students.
Here’s a somewhat radical suggestion as to what can be done about school-system inequities. For Northeast Ohio, I propose that the Cleveland Teachers’ Union and the surrounding suburban teachers’ groups get together and demand that students be allowed to cross district borders and attend nearby schools. This is permissible by existing state law as long as the school systems involved agree to it and would certainly provide more students with broader choices of educational opportunities. Of course, this would require teachers in many suburban districts to act selflessly, which has not always been a characteristic of those working in cushier schools.
As we wait for the glorious day when Ohio’s immoral funding system is revamped by the court and the legislature, teachers and their unions need to dispossess themselves of obsessing about vouchers and tenure and somehow muster the courage to find a way of stopping a generation or two of kids from slipping into oblivion.
Larry Durstin is an independent journalist who has covered politics and sports for a variety of publications and websites over the past 20 years. He was the founding editor of the Cleveland Tab and an associate editor at the Cleveland Free Times. Durstin has won 12 Ohio Excellence in Journalism awards, including six first places in six different writing categories. LarryDurstinATyahoo.com