Dear Marjorie,
I’ll behave if you do. If it’s any consolation, I think I embarrass more easily than you do.
Right on! to the Washington Post and the New York Times for giving big play to the National Education Association’s refusal to merge with the American Federation of Teachers. This is not only the biggest story of the (rather sleepy) holiday weekend; it’s also one of the biggest stories of the year, because public schools aren’t going to get better until the teachers’ unions commit themselves seriously to reform. And reform inevitably would include making it easier to fire incompetent teachers, of whom I gather there are quite a lot.
Significant caveat to above: the decision by the Post and the Times to put this arcane union dispute on page one wouldn’t seem quite so brave if they’d managed to produce stories that were less boring-i.e., that explained the stakes for folks like you and me, who pay taxes and have kids to educate. I’m afraid I found the Times and Post stories very confusing. Usually when I have this problem I turn to my beloved former employer, the Wall Street Journal, which is better at untangling complicated disputes. But not today.
Is the merger’s failure a good thing? Based on my somewhat out-of-date knowledge of the subject (I wrote a piece about this ten years ago), my best guess is yes. The news accounts suggest the NEA didn’t want to become more like the AFT, which (at least when it was run by Albert Shanker) has been more willing to embrace tough-minded education reforms. It’s hard for me to imagine that a humongous beast like the NEA could become more like the AFT; in addition to being bigger, it’s highly decentralized, and highly decentralized organizations don’t cotton to reforms that require sacrifice on the part of their members. The alternative is for the AFT to become more like the NEA. But then we wouldn’t have ANY teacher’s union that cared much about making our schools better.
One big confusion in the coverage is that the NEA is presented as less “union”-like and the AFT is presented as more “union”-like. This goes back to the founding of each group-the NEA fancies itself a professional organization, and the AFT is affiliated with the AFL-CIO. In practice, though, it’s the NEA folks who’ve tended to focus narrowly on protecting their members, while the AFT has seemed to understand that its long-term interests are not served by the wholesale collapse of public education in the U.S. I do wish the papers had gotten this fairly elementary point across.
Meanwhile, I can’t believe you didn’t start off our correspondence with former Time White House correspondent Nina Burleigh, who (according to Howie Kurtz in today’s Washington Post) wrote a piece in Mirabella about wanting to have sex with Bill Clinton, or something. I have (but have not yet read) the piece, and will fax it to you. Annoyingly, Mirabella doesn’t have a photograph of Burleigh accompanying the story. Am I a pig for wanting to know if she’s cute? (It’s relevant because she says the Prez was making eyes at her on Air Force One.)
With Eyes Only For You,
Tim
