Posted on 06/22/2005 4:43:31 AM PDT by Born Conservative
An education historian takes a look at a dispute in a Luzerne County school district.
“The consequences of the unions taking a really strong ‘we’re not budging’ attitude led to this series of very, very Draconian laws.” Jeffrey Mirel Professor of education studies and history at the University of Michigan
Crestwood School Board in Pennsylvania may have avoided losing all its teachers with a single vote, but a different Crestwood, in Michigan, wasn’t so lucky. And an education historian warned that what happened in the Wolverine state could still happen here.
It was, he said, a disaster for both sides.
During a contract dispute 30 years ago, the Crestwood School Board in Dearborn Heights, Mich., fired the entire teaching staff and refilled the positions, “disrupting relationships the parents and students had with teachers,” according to Jeffrey Mirel, professor of education studies and history at the University of Michigan. It took years for the district to recover.
But teachers arguably fared worse. “The consequences of the unions taking a really strong ‘we’re not budging’ attitude led to this series of very, very Draconian laws” that stripped teacher unions of much of their bargaining power. Mirel, who specializes in the history and politics of public education, said the local situation sounds like a union picking a similarly dangerous hard line.
Last week the local Crestwood School Board president interpreted a letter from the union president as a “mass resignation” and vowed to have the board accept it, vacating all teacher positions and allowing the board to advertise for a new staff. That scenario was avoided Monday when the union president delivered a second letter insisting there was no mass resignation.
It didn’t work out that well in Michigan, where state law bars teachers from striking. Mirel said that teachers routinely ignored the law because it had no real consequences. But when the teachers in Dearborn Heights went on strike, “the school board, in its utter stupidity, fired every one of them, saying they were in violation of the law.” A 1975 Michigan Supreme Court ruling upheld the firings.
The district suffered, but the unions arguably took the bigger hit. Mirel said that in 1994, faced with increasingly bitter school contract disputes, a Republican-controlled state legislature passed a law that “put teeth” in the no-strike rules. For each day on strike, the union was fined $5,000 and each teacher was fined one-day’s pay.
The new law also said teachers could no longer negotiate the terms of health insurance, start and finish times at work, and many other items previously controlled through contract.
Mirel, a former teacher who still has ties to the American Federation of Teachers union, said the problem is that teachers bargain as though everything had stayed the same for 30 years. But economics and politics have changed, and unions have to adapt to avoid having more states step in the way Michigan did.
“I would say without a doubt, Michigan is a model for what could happen in other states, especially if you get a Republican governor and a Republican-dominated legislature.”
It's about time our elected officials get a spine and stopped caving in to the demands of union thugs and goons.
Look what the union did for the retail workers down in Southern California....The strike when on for months and the union caved anyway.....
what an amazingly LEFTIST slanted article
...It's about time our elected officials get a spine and stopped caving in to the demands of union thugs and goons....
Might want to add Judges to that list. Did you see the article about the Judge in Kansas who is telling the Lesgislature how much they have to spend on education funding?
Get a spine, or be crushed like jello. That's what it has come down to.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.