by Chris Savage

TO SAY THAT Republicans are on a mission to destroy unions in this country is not an understatement. Across the country, and particularly in the Midwest, Republican legislators and governors have spent the past three years passing laws that strip away collective bargaining rights, reverse collective bargaining agreements and which weaken unions. This not only gives advantages to employers and governments that employ unionized workers, it diminishes a group that is a major contributor to their Democratic opponents.

In Michigan, no other group has been in the GOP’s bull’s-eye more than teachers. Though they educate our children, literally the future leaders of and contributors to our society, teachers are characterized as parasites; leeches on society who care only for their own self-interest. Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville characterized teachers as “more than greedy” and described their union, the Michigan Education Association (MEA) as being about “big-paid, high-honcho people.” One of his colleagues, Senator Phil Pavlov, introduced legislation that allowed school districts to privatize teaching, the first such move in the country.

Recent changes to the tenure system make it much easier for teachers to be fired, allowing higher-paid teachers with higher salaries to be replaced with lower-paid new teachers. In Northville, the school board threatened to turn the school system over to an Emergency Manager (who could do away with the teachers’ contract) if they didn’t agree to pay and benefit cuts. In district after district across the state, teachers are paying the price for the cuts to schools in the governor Rick Snyder’s budget, cuts which are, in part, helping to pay for an astounding 86 percent tax cut for businesses.

The next potential shoe to drop was to make a Michigan a so-called “Right to Work” state. “Right to Work” (RTW) is a euphemism used to describe making it unnecessary to join a union if a union represents the workers of a particular employer. The result is that many workers would benefit from the collective bargaining agreements negotiated by the union but would not have to contribute the union itself. It also weakens the union by reducing their membership & funding. This is why opponents refer to RTW as “Right to Work for Less” or “Right to Freeload.”

Before he signed RTW into law, Governor Snyder was on record as being against RTW efforts because they were “too divisive.”

Forced to become politically active, teachers are certainly fighting back. But, to their credit, they are also working to help financially strapped school districts. I spoke with MEA president Steve Cook. He told me that Michigan teachers are working with their school administrators and school boards to find solutions to their shrinking budgets.

Teachers unions are also working to help poorly-performing districts improve their programs. The National Education Association (NEA) started the Priority Schools Campaign. This campaign aims to bring all education stakeholders together to help failing schools.

Through our Priority Schools Campaign, we’re promoting increased professionalism and systemic education reform in some of the nation’s lowest-performing schools; what we call priority schools. Partnerships between schools, school districts and educators are a largely untold story, especially to many people exposed to a steady diet of attacks on unions. But across the country, in community after community, collective bargaining and other forms of consensus and collaboration are transforming public education…[participants include] National Education Association members working in lower-performing schools, NEA staff, state affiliates and locals, parents, community leaders, education advocates, policy makers, and businesses.

NEA president Dennis Van Roekel visited Michigan as part of NEA’s “2011 Back-to-School Tour.” During his five-day, seven-city tour, Van Roekel visited a number “priority schools” and stopped by Romulus Middle School which had received a $5.3 million grant as part of the federal School Improvement Grant program. One of the efforts by the NEA’s Priority School Campaign  was to help get a millage passed to support the Romulus school system, a millage that had been twice defeated prior to the NEA’s involvement.

Teachers working with school administrations, parents and the community to improve schools. It’s not sexy. It’s not confrontational. But it’s making a difference. In Romulus, the new funding has allowed them to improve their technology program & equipment and to revamp their curriculum. But, that doesn’t make the news.

Despite the NEA’s effort to draw attention to the “Priority Schools” initiative and the fact that Van Roekel met with the editorial boards of both the Detroit News and the Free Press, the only mention of it from either newspaper was a post on the News’ blog “The Watercooler,” where the focus was on the MEA’s Cook calling Right to Teach “revenge.” Sensationalism! Confrontation! Indeed, a study released by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) shows that billions of dollars every year are wasted in the USA through the hiring of contractors.

POGO’s study analyzed the total compensation paid to federal and private sector employees, and annual billing rates for contractor employees across 35 occupational classifications covering over 550 service activities. The findings were shocking—POGO estimates the government pays billions more annually in taxpayer dollars to hire contractors than it would to hire federal employees to perform comparable services. Specifically, POGO’s study shows that the federal government approves service contract billing rates—deemed fair and reasonable—that pay contractors 1.83 times more than the government pays federal employees in total compensation, and more than 2 times the total compensation paid in the private sector for comparable services.

While this study looked specifically at federal employees, the results are reflected in other studies as well.

What most of us know, and what the NEA’s “Priority School” initiative shows, is that teachers are not greedy, self-interested people on the whole. They care about kids and they care that kids get the best education possible. Every one of us can point to a teacher in their past that motivated them to achieve more than they would have otherwise. We all have a teacher who inspired us to be better and pointed us in the right direction. They are a value to society, not parasites on it.

In any rational society, teachers are not considered “costs.” They are considered assets….Republicans have done an amazingly effective job of turning the public’s perception from seeing teachers as valuable assets to seeing them as parasitic leeches on the jugular vein of society. Rather than valuing them for the important role they play in our society — that of educating our children — they are now coming to be viewed as a “cost,” something to be cut when times get hard.

We have cut their pay, increased their healthcare co-pay amounts, reduced their retirement benefits and made it nearly impossible to bargain on their own behalf. And yet we expect them to effectively educate our children. We do this to help pay for massive tax cuts for businesses. And then we expect them to come to work each day, stand in front of the next generation of leaders and scientists and parents and doctors and trash collectors and make them ready to take their place in society.

Meanwhile, we scream collectively that our schools are failing our children.

I’m not sure how doing all of the things we are doing to our teachers constitutes “making our schools better,” to quote Speaker Bolger. What I do know is that a society that devalues its educators is destined to slowly circle the drain until it glugs down into an empty, fetid tub of ignorance and stupidity….

We are at a turning point in our society with regard to the education of our children. What has happened in Michigan and in Wisconsin to our teachers is going to be our nation’s future unless we act soon. We cannot continue to cast teachers as a “cost” to be cut whenever possible. We must turn around our country’s way of thinking about our educators and their value to society. Because, if we don’t, we will become a nation of uneducated fools. When that happens, our destiny will be controlled by the countries that do value education, not by us.