Bt JACK FARIS

IOne of the poorest performing school districts in the new K-12 accountability program is Orleans Parish. The high concentration of “at risk” kids in the New Orleans area certainly works against the school district scoring at levels similar to more affluent areas.

That factor also necessitates more targeted intervention by resource teams to raise the level of student achievement in the worst performing schools.

In an attempt to be a valuable resource to the New Orleans public schools, the University of New Orleans offered an outreach program called the New Millennium Schools Project, which is a proposed partnership between the Orleans School District and the Center for School Improvement and Teaching and Learning Excellence at UNO.

This proposed partnership seems like a perfect match between a school district challenged to provide innovative techniques and adequate resources to reverse negative learning trends in the district’s underperforming schools. The Superintendent and the Orleans Parish School Board enthusiastically embraced UNO’s offer to invite four public schools to participate in the project.

After receiving the school board’s unanimous permission to proceed, UNO extended the invitation. According to the guidelines of the project, the principals of the schools, 75 percent of their certified professional educators, and a majority of the parents had to agree to participate. Unfortunately, before the wheels started rolling on this promising partnership, the United Teachers of New Orleans union, which is recognized by the school board for collective bargaining purposes, all but killed the program.

As the UNO professional staff began making presentations to the faculty of the schools that had been invited, union representatives began to appear, often asking for closed-door meetings with the teachers after the UNO representatives left. After those encounters, the enthusiasm for the project initially shared by the teachers was replaced with negativity. UTNO convinced the faculties at all but one of the four schools that they would be giving up benefits if they voted to participate, and those schools declined UNO’s invitation.

Actually, the teachers would receive the same pay, benefits and leave time under the provisions of the NMS Project. The only substantive difference is that, since they would technically be employees of UNO during the course of the project, they would not be under a collective bargaining agreement. The union would not accept that arrangement and prevailed upon the teachers to turn down participation in a project that held out great hope to improve learning in schools that desperately needed it.

UTNO’s actions are a sad commentary on the effect that unionization has had on learning in our public schools. Former U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett was interviewed recently about the decline of American public schools and was asked to trace the cause. He did not pause a second to come up with an answer.

Bennett pointed to the conversion of school employee groups from professional development organizations to hard-core unions as the genesis of the problem. According to Bennett, teacher associations once were in the forefront of education reforms in America but now are often the leading voices of opposition to reform. In his view, they have gone from being advocates of high professional standards to a trade union, preoccupied with wages and work rules rather than students in public education.

One of the few national teacher union leaders in modern times who would occasionally buck the trend and stand tall for real reform in public education was the late Al Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers, the national affiliate of UTNO. It would be interesting to know what Shanker, if he were still alive, would think about UTNO’s campaign to disrupt the promising partnership between a university willing to help and a school system in desperate need of the resources and assistance it could provide to children in dire need of help.

Maybe one day the kids will come first.

DAN JUNEAU is the president of the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry.