The teachers’ union crows, “It’s been a busy week full of victories,” and from its self-interested perspective, that’s quite true.
Across the state, elected volunteer school boards were broken down to yield control of management rights, schedules, assessments, employee evaluations and curriculum. They were also compelled to divert scarce resources from services, materials and facilities to the union priority – compensation.
This is happening in the districts with a strike looming, but happened also in districts where union-bought school boards didn’t resist.
Then the union-funded Washington State Supreme Court ruled that public schools are not allowed to be outside the reach of the union-dominated bargaining table and struck down funding for public charter schools.
The decision was tenuous. Since so little precedent exists, the majority opinion writer had to rely on a precedent from 80 years ago that applied to a funding system that has been extinct for decades. They clearly had the decision in mind and built a wobbly bridge to that conclusion.
How wobbly? The ruling would invalidate funding for Running Start, Skills Centers, Tribal Compact Schools, Education Centers and possibly Multi-district Online Programs. With only a small stretch, the ruling could absurdly invalidate funding for the Department of Social and Health Services and all other state functions other than common schools, since their funding is technically diverted from funds commingled with the extinct “current school fund” just like the funding for charter schools.
In one quirk of the decision, the court demands that the only acceptable “common school” is one in which “voters, through their chosen agents” have “complete control of the schools” to “select qualified teachers, with powers to discharge them if they are incompetent.”
Since union contracts regularly deprive voters and their chosen school boards of the power to hire or discharge teachers, do those provisions violate the ruling? Are schools without this power ineligible for funding?
The ruling was split 6 to 3, but most of the justices received maximum campaign contributions from the Washington Education Association, the primary force behind the legal challenge of charter schools.
The prospects of customized education, education entrepreneurialism and options for families have been set back immensely. The financial might of a private self-seeking organization continues to lock us into a monopoly school system where employees’ interests prevail.
Long live “one size fits all.”
What can we do? Two things.
One: Speak out on behalf of options for families. Even if education is not your fight or you have no children in schools, our state’s future is impacted if we stay with a soviet-style education system. Write those letters to the editor and add comments. If you are comfortable with the Washington State Charter Schools Association, lend your name to their petition to pressure the governor and the legislature to preserve charter schools.
Two: Scrutinize candidates for school board, Legislature or Supreme Court to see if their loyalties are to donors like the WEA or other unions. The conflict of interest is too great. Ultimately, the power the union enterprise has to dominate policy comes from the people we elect.
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