is it the Union or poverty?

 Is it the union or poverty?

Not too long ago, Nikole Hannah-Jones, an African American mother, wrote an article in the New York Times in which she apologized to her daughter for sending her to an inner-city New York elementary school.  Ms Hannah-Jones wanted to support a poor minority-majority school by sending her middle-class daughter.  At the end of elementary school, her daughter begged her to please send her to their neighborhood school that was mixed race and in an upper middle-class area.  Her daughter explained she KNEW she was getting an inferior education and she had plans for college and wanted to be prepared.   Mom finally relented and after her daughter enrolled in the neighborhood school, she saw the error of her previous decision.  Her daughter was behind the other kids in preparation and expectation.  She has a lot of catching up to do. 

The question is, why are schools located in poor minority areas so poor at educating these kids.  Is poverty the answer?  Well, the particular school in question receives $50,000 per year per pupil.  Its total enrollment is low, so class sizes have good pupil/teacher ratios.   Are these kids just genetically deficient?

Joel Klein, a former New York City school system chancellor, argues the problem is the union and the control the union has over the teachers. Thereby, the entire school system.  Teachers’ unions argue that they advocate for children’s learning.  In fact, the unions  have two intractable positions that will not change.   Teachers have life-long tenue.  Don’t believe that?  Try to terminate a public -school teacher.  The second principle is that competence and compensation are totally unrelated and must never interact.  The best teachers go to a public school that is high-performing schools and has well-motivated children.   The teachers that principals of “good schools” don’t select go to the schools where kids are tougher to teach.  So you have the weakest teachers with the kids who are struggling the most to learn.

New York has one strong advantage over Maryland.   In The Big Apple charter school teachers do not have to belong to the union.   The Union has fought that by having the legislature limit the number of charter schools.  In Maryland, charter school staff must join the union just as all public-school teachers.   And the Union is adamant that charter school teachers keep to the strict working hours that public-school teachers are contracted to keep, even if they want to work longer.  So, what’s causing the problem?  Poor kids or poor teachers protected by a strong union.