'Contest' to Help Identify Worst Unionized Teachers
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Joan Oleck -- School Library Journal, 03/12/2008
Here’s a contest you wouldn’t want to win. A group called the Center for Union Facts, which bills itself as the nemesis of teachers' unions, has launched a $1 million campaign to identify the nation's "worst unionized teachers" and offer 10 of them $10,000 apiece to resign or quit.
All educators covered by union contracts are eligible for nomination, including school librarians.
Sarah Longwell, director of communications for the Washington, DC-based nonprofit, says that the campaign will post a billboard in Times Square next week and already has run full-page ads in USA Today and the New York Times, with a second Times ad due to follow next week.
"Ultimately we launched the contest to highlight for people just how difficult it is with the unions' antiquated rules to fire an incompetent teacher," says Longwell, noting that 50 nominations already have been received since the campaign launched on March 10.
Although the contest addresses "extreme" cases that have occurred, such as teachers who aren't fired after sexually harassing students, "The big problem is simply that the union protects incompetent teachers [and] it demoralizes good teachers," Longwell says. "It holds them to the same level of pay as bad teachers and it entrenches a kind of mediocrity that is extremely damaging to our public education system."
Leaders of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers (plus smaller, local teachers unions, also targeted) are also offended by the campaign and have zeroed in on the fact that the Center for Union Facts is a nonprofit 501 c (3) offshoot of Berman & Co., a Washington public relations and lobbying firm. Rick Berman, the firm's president (and director of the Center for Union Facts, founded in 2006), is a former labor lawyer who has represented unions but also has attracted controversy as a lobbyist for the alcoholic beverage and tobacco industries.
Teachers' groups aren't the only ones offended by the "contest." Sara Kelly Johns, president of the American Association for School Librarians calls the campaign "appalling" and "disturbing," adding, "I would like to know that a fiar process is followed whenever anyone is considered less than proficient at what they do."
