Local teachers should quit the union

The fat lady, as they say, has sung: the negotiations negotiated, the arbitration arbitrated, the layoffs laid off.

The Clark County School District and the Clark County Education Association were locked in bitter combat for the past school year. An arbitration decision in May favored the union and said teachers must be given contractual raises. The district was subsequently forced, because of financial constraints, to eliminate more than 1,000 positions through attrition and 419 layoffs.

Unfortunately, the political posturing and hyperbolic bluster continue. Negotiations for the next school year have already been declared an impasse, with the decision again punted to an arbitrator. As a result of this mess and the resulting public controversy, a self-styled free-market think tank - the Nevada Policy Research Institute - recently launched a campaign to bring awareness to the fact that the union has only a 15-day annual window in which teachers can cancel membership and thus avoid a $32-per-paycheck - or $768 annual - deduction of union dues.

There's one obvious reason for relatively new teachers to not support the union: self-interest. The union does not represent these teachers. It eats its young, demanding raises for senior teachers at the expense of new teachers' jobs. But the problem is more complex than only the determined pursuits of opposing self-interests. There's no doubt that this is a losing issue, for teachers, for parents, for students. There are two more reasons that teachers should reconsider paying dues.

The first is the tactics embraced by this union: bad-mouthing the district, behaving churlishly at official meetings and a refusal to face facts.

Denial of obvious fact is usually reserved for the especially skeptical: Holocaust deniers, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, moon-landing unbelievers, and those unwilling to accept global warming as a solid scientific conclusion. But if you are a teacher supporting the union, you are supporting an organization that does just that: it denies, as the district claims, that there is not enough money to both sustain raises and keep the jobs we have. This union campaigned for raises, despite the threat of layoffs, and then vilified the district for implementing what it promised would be the consequence.

Finally, union members not only protested outside board meetings, but protested inside a meeting itself, shouting down the trustees and delaying the meeting. Such ignorance and reprehensible tactics are embarrassing, and make all teachers look frivolous, unprofessional and self-serving.

The second reason is that our work affects far more than our own isolated selves. It affects our families, our children and community. We help form people, giving them the ability and even the motivation to pursue their dreams and make their lives their own.

Yet the actions of the union demonstrate an unashamed disregard for the best interests of students. It is not in the best interests of students for teachers to be laid off based mostly on seniority, rather than performance. It's not in their interests for class sizes to increase from an average of 32 students per class - which was already the highest among the 20 largest school districts in the nation - to 35.

Unlike us teachers, they don't have an indignant mass of adults willing to throw tantrums and otherwise gallivant in front of elected officials to lobby for their interests. And, obviously, children can neither vote nor otherwise advocate in the public realm for themselves.

Some argue that parents and PTAs should or already do fill this roll. It is too easy - a copout, even - to yet again blame parents. Furthermore, how can it be fair to expect parents to compete with the practiced and frantic activism of the union? Can we honestly expect every parent to understand the overly complex educational and political systems well enough to realize that the union representing their children's teachers is advocating primarily for its own interests and not the interests of students?

Imagine if every parent did have the knowledge, money, time and power to effectively advocate for their children. Imagine if there were a union to which students, parents and dedicated teachers belonged, and could fight mightily for the rights of all children to an excellent public education. Imagine if students had an advocate that could go punch-for-punch with the CCEA. Imagine if adult bickering over self-interest, taxes and revenues were secondary to the concerns of properly educating our children.

That is something worth fighting for.

Nathan Warner is a fourth-grade teacher in the Clark County School District.