School Board Union Label

If you think that you can go to your school board with complaints about teacher union efforts to block education reforms, think again. You might find yourself pleading with the very people who you are trying to avoid. “On the Los Angeles School Board, elections are decided by how much money you can raise,” former Colorado Governor Roy Romer said Tuesday. “Because the union could raise the most money, they won the seats so I was facing the union on both sides.”

Romer, who spoke on a panel at the Center for American Progress (CAP), served as the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District. He won elective office in Colorado as a Democrat.

“Local control, particularly in the big cities, often leaves schools in the hands of political school boards who are themselves under the thumb of powerful teachers’ unions that dominate their elections and block sensible reforms,” Matt Miller, a senior fellow at the CAP, writes in a report published by the Center. “As a result of these and related failings, most schools, far from relishing the supposed freedom granted by local control, feel trapped in red tape; principals say they spend their days on unproductive paperwork to comply with endless mandates, when they’re not busy navigating Byzantine district bureaucracies to keep the heat on and the supply room stocked.”

As you might guess, neither Romer nor Miller is particularly right-wing. In fact, their solution to educational stagnation centers around the nationalization of public schools, at least incrementally.

But the unions they point to as roadblocks to reform are already nationalized.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.