ELK GROVE, Calif. – No one expects teachers’ unions to approach issues in an objective way.

They are advocacy organizations and their role is to present their agenda in the best possible light. Still, unions like to proceed on the assumption that whatever facts they marshal are to be used only in a very restrictive setting.

One example I have used before is the opt-out movement. Even though the same principles of freedom of choice apply, opting out of standardized testing is good, while opting out of sex education (or the union) is bad.

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The other day I came across this slide from a California Teachers Association presentation.

Rather than argue that Californians are not stingy – which is what the normal reaction would be – suppose we simply agree that funding has been on a precipitous decline since 1972. The union wants to illustrate a lack of commitment to school funding. But what does the same assertion tell us about the California Teachers Association?

Prominent parts of the union’s mission statement tell us that CTA “exists to protect and promote the well-being of its members; to improve the conditions of teaching and learning.” The union calls itself the “preeminent voice for public education in California.”

Yet in the salad days of 1972, there was no collective bargaining law for teachers in California. Evidently 40 years of CTA efforts have done nothing to forestall the reduction of the state’s school spending ranking from 19th to 42nd.

CTA is not the only union inadvertently undermining its own performance. The American Federation of Teachers recently released the results of an unscientific survey showing an overwhelming majority of teachers to be highly stressed. As the Yahoo! News story said, “It sounds like the worst job ever.”

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Again, if we accept this complaint in this context, what does it say about the job AFT has been doing? If by its own admission it can’t protect the interests of its members, then who needs it?

Hyping a teacher shortage in order to boost salaries may have worked, but it also had the unintended effect of driving aspirants into the profession, where they either found trouble getting hired, or were quickly laid off when the recession hit. New candidates will now be gun shy, which could conceivably cause an actual teacher shortage.

The unions often depict principals and school administrators as petty and arbitrary, yet almost all of them were once teachers. Were they that way as teachers? If so, why weren’t they weeded out? Maybe they had union protections to prevent such actions.

Either the unions are powerful and influential, which means they also bear some responsibility for the present state of affairs, or school employees are downtrodden and working under dire conditions, which means their unions are powerless and have not improved those conditions. The unions’ role in the public school system is a package, not a menu.

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