Fred Carl’s attack on unions and public school teachers is flawed on various points. As a native of Anaconda, I frequently read the Montana dailies and was appalled to run across this piece (guest column, July 2).
He wrongly assumes that you can compare as apples to apples achievement scores from foreign countries to that of the United States. You can’t. In other countries, especially those that outscore the United States, you have schools that are better funded than U.S. public schools. And it is not just that they get more money. They are all equally funded from their national governments and thus the huge disparities in funding that exist in the United States are absent around the world. And far less money is squandered on extracurricular activities.
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In the United States, right-wing politicians have diligently worked to defund public education. Republicans have often done this in two major ways. They have diligently and irresponsibly attacked public school teachers. And at the same time have used the alleged shortcomings to divert public school funding toward private schools.
Huge amounts of money have been funneled into the pockets of corporate school operators – private charter schools – operators who are frequent big-dollar contributors to GOP candidates. But private schools are only for those who can afford them. So, this means that they are the havens of the wealthy and the advantaged.
This is not to criticize parochial schools. I attended Catholic schools in Anaconda. But the mission of public schools is to serve everyone – not just those with money, with stable families, with engaged parents. Meanwhile, the charter schools have continually under-performed their public school counterparts and have made headlines through the gross misuse of taxpayer money.
School funding in the U.S. depends on where you live because it is based on local property taxes. Wealthy suburban schools have the best of everything – stable families, generous funding and low crime. By contrast, city neighborhoods nationwide suffer from a lack of funding, families punished by economic conditions and neighborhoods threatened by crime. Immigrants and minorities are concentrated in these poverty-stricken neighborhoods.
Thus, our public school system funding formula generates tremendous inequities of outcomes. If you put our wealthy suburban public schools, adequately funded with adequate social and public support, against our international competition, they perform much better comparatively.
Further, as someone who once covered school boards as a reporter, I can say that many school board members don’t get elected for a good reason. Often, they run because they don’t like a particular teacher, they don’t like their tax bill or they are a fan of the football team. Getting elected to find ways to create a quality academic experience and support the teachers in the classroom is too often not on the radar at all.
Carl would also have you believe that schools in other countries are not “burdened” by unions or tenure. This is not true. Japan and all the European countries that outscore the United States have strong public school teachers unions. Pay and benefits are better and the teachers are not constantly vilified for political purposes by extreme politicians in their countries.
What the right-wing movement is really concerned about is the political role of unions and want to undermine democracy in the workplace created by the union movement. The fact that the teachers tend to support Democratic candidates, like Dick Barrett, Carl’s victorious opponent in the 2012 legislative race, should not come as a surprise. Barrett, a retired University of Montana professor of economics, was a former president of the University Faculty Association at UM, an MEA-MFT union. This attack on public school teachers with tenure seems like sour grapes indeed.
The ill-founded criticisms by Carl and other conservatives are exactly the reason that teachers have tenure in the first place – to protect them from attacks motivated by politics or ideology far removed from the facts.
John T. McNay is an Anaconda native and a professor of history at the University of Cincinnati. He graduated twice from UM; in 1980 with a bachelor’s in journalism and in 1991 with a master’s in history.