Aloha Teacher Unions?

In their fight against school reform, organized teachers in the Aloha state are running into adversaries they probably did not anticipate—car salesmen. “The push for a rigorous, common-core curriculum did not come from the teachers’ union—who testified against the bill, nor the Board of Education, but rather from the Hawaii Automobile Dealers Association (HADA),” according to Laura Brown of the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii.

“HADA President David Rolf testified that the reason for his organization’s push was initially the rejection of reimbursement claims for warranty work done on cars by the Detroit manufacturer, because the written claims submitted by the Hawaii dealership’s auto techs were ‘not clear.’”

Like the rest of the nation, it seems, Hawaii’s schools embraced the education fads popular three decades back, with about the same results. “Now, 30 years later, parents and teachers are experiencing the fallout from progressive-education theorists’ failed assumptions,” Brown writes. “More than 80 percent of Hawaii’s public school children are not functioning at grade level and less than two-thirds of all public school students graduate from high school.”

An education policy analyst for the Grassroot Institute, Brown is also the education reporter and researcher for HawaiiReporter.com. Brown reports that the state Board of Education mandated that “the development of student literacy in all content areas and in all grade levels is an educational and cultural imperative.”

“Unfortunately, the Department of Education has failed to follow the board’s mandate,” Brown writes. “Instead, the state-level DOE devised elaborate ‘standards,’ and then collaborated with national vendors, such as Harcourt Inc. and American Institutes for Research (AIR), to foist progressive education theories—reeking with assumptions about ‘social justice’ and ‘diversity’ that favor process over content—on teachers and their students.”

“Meanwhile, teachers are struggling to reach many of their students who have not even learned how to sound out words or organize those words into coherent sentences.”

Union Mis-education Correction

In a recent story on teachers’ unions, I incorrectly reported that Leo Casey of the United Federation of Teachers was “head of the UFT” and a “union boss.” Specifically, he is “special representative for high schools for New York City’s United Federation of teachers, a position he has held for six years,” according to the bio provided at the book launch of the collection, Collective Bargaining in Education, for which Casey wrote a chapter.

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