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The Citizens Commission on Civil Rights:
On many issues of policy the record of national teachers' unions has been clear. They have a long and honorable history of supporting an end to discrimination in education, they have argued for an end to segregation, for measures to provide equal treatment for women and girls and for assistance to students with disabilities.
But in one major area - public school reform - the record of unions is far less clear. At times, union leaders have treated the measures advocated by others to close the gaps between disadvantaged students and their more affluent peers as inimical to the interests of teachers.And:
While union efforts are not the only obstacle to implementing sensible education reform with broad political support, they have been an important part of the active resistance to efforts they once supported.
Much of the criticism of teachers' unions has come from the political right. However, more telling, instructive, and powerful are the criticisms of the NEA and the AFT that have come from within. As early as 1994, Billy Boyton and John Lloyd, former top officers respectively of the Nebraska and Kansas NEA affiliates spoke out: "The NEA has been the single biggest obstacle to education reform in this country. We know because we worked for the NEA."Not to mention:
...teachers' unions profess to put students first - but often act in ways that subordinate their interests. While the unions state agreement with the goals, they work to oppose specific reform in the political process and the classroom. According to David Kilpatrick, who spent more than a dozen years as a top officer and staffer of affiliates of the NEA and the AFT,
If nothing else, everyone should take from this that the interests of teachers unions and the interests of American students are not the same."The unions do everything possible to maintain [the status quo]...They invariably call for variations of the status quo, more of the same, rather than reforms that mean real changes. Not coincidentally they also almost uniformly call for the spending of more money and the creation of more teaching positions which, of course, result in an increase in union membership, union income and union power."
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One of the primary ways the unions maintain their power at the expense of schools and students is by using their power to create systems in which it is practically impossible to fire a teacher, even for cause.