The Minuteman: The Official Newspaper of Newark Academy since 1940

The Minuteman

The Official Newark Academy Newspaper

Union Protest at Newark Academy Brings to Mind the Disadvantages of Teacher’s Unions

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By Jake Cohen ’14, Staff Writer

As the student body has been informed, there will be an Ironworkers’ Union strike outside Newark Academy. Unions protect the rights of their members and organize strikes. At Newark Academy, the Ironworkers Union plans to protest the fact that the contractors of the school’s new construction project did not hire union workers. Unions can have both positive effects (mostly for their members), and negative effects (mostly on the employers).

The teachers at Newark Academy are not unionized. This gives the school the freedom to pay, hire, fire, and assess teachers in any way the school sees fit. By not having a union, the school saves money from lawsuits and has much more freedom in hiring the best teachers. Unfortunately for the public sector of education, unions are bringing education systems down. Teachers unions hurt public school systems by making it nearly impossible to fire teachers, forcing governments to pay teachers who have been fired, and by making the cost of firing a teacher too high.

Let’s start with a problem. In Newark, NJ, not even a Twenty-minute drive from NA, the graduation rate is 30%. That means that out of every ten kids that walk through the Newark high school system as freshmen, only three of them will receive only high school diplomas. In Chicago, only 28% of students pass the joke-of-a-statewide standardized test. That’s about the percent of juniors we have achieve national merit status from the PSAT.

Abysmal graduation rates, intolerable test scores. Who is at fault? We cannot blame the kids. Teachers are being paid to teach, so when those few bad teachers do not do their jobs, they cannot continue to “teach.” Why, then, do we? The union makes firing nearly impossible. In Newark, 1 out of every 3,000 teachers is fired per year for poor performance. Yet this does not change the 30% graduation rate. In Chicago, 0.1%—yes that’s zero point one percent of teachers are fired. In light of this fact, schools should perhaps consider the state’s mere 28% passing rate.

The teachers union takes steps to make sure that firing a teacher is nearly impossible. One must analyze the teacher, then write reports, come up with plans and continuously reanalyze the teacher. It can take as long as five years to truly fire a teacher. In addition, the cost of firing teachers becomes outrageous.

The average cost to fire a teacher in the country is $168,000. This is average cost in the entire USA to fire one teacher, for any reason. But it gets worse. With the lengthy appeals processes in court, Governments can end up spending much more on firing a teacher. In the last decade, the city of Los Angeles spent $3.5 million attempting to fire only seven teachers.

Beyond these outrageous numbers, the teachers unions force cities to spend millions paying teachers who do not even teach anymore. In New York City, $65 million dollars is spent annually paying teachers in “rubber rooms”. Teachers go to these rooms while they wait for the city to investigate any charges from drugs to sexual harassment to nearly anything. They literally spend hours sitting and collecting money. The “absent teacher reserve pool” takes $100 million of NYC education funds to pay former teachers “until they can find a new job”. The average salary in the absent teacher reserve pool is $82,000 a year. For simply “trying” to find a new job. But most teachers can keep collecting these benefits (much higher than unemployment) for years. And who can blame them? They don’t have to do anything but collect a more than gracious salary. And all because they were bad teachers.

The New Jersey Teachers Union collects $130 million dollars in revenue. That is $130 million that could be used to improve young people’s educations. To improving schools. To raising graduation rates. The teachers union has outlived its usefulness, and has been wasting money and children’s futures. The teachers unions are a horrible waste of government time and resources, and are hurting our nation’s children. The unions must be stopped.

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One response to “Union Protest at Newark Academy Brings to Mind the Disadvantages of Teacher’s Unions”

  1. Ms. Acquadro Avatar
    Ms. Acquadro

    In 1973 I was hired as an English teacher at Watchung HIlls Regional HIgh School. My department head was a man by the name of Joe Donnelly. Fresh out of college, hired to teach sophomore English, at 22, I was brought to the English department book room, where Mr. Donnelly pointed to a stack of well-worn paperbacks that included “The Pigman” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and said, “Here are the sophomore books. These are the books you will be teaching.” That was all the guidance and mentoring I got that first year from my department head. In October of that year, he observed my class and noted that the film strip I was showing was not properly centered on the screen. He also told me that my voice was so “strident,” (a direct quotation–I still have the observation) that no one would ever be able to listen to me long enough to learn anything from me. Had it not been for the teachers’ association (our union) I would have probably been fired that year. Fortunately, the next year, it was Mr. Donnelly who was fired and my next department head, Doris Egger, thought I had some of promise as a teacher. I was teaching 129 students that year.

    It is fashionable today, in a time of economic strife, to find fault with the unions of public employees and blame them for the financial hole in which we find ourselves. I taught with a few teachers who probably should not have been able to hold onto their jobs, but I have also worked on Wall Street, where brokers came back drunk from three hour lunches and spent the rest of the day in the executive bathrooms, reading “The New York Post.” and not working a tenth as hard as the teachers I have worked with in five different schools in my nearly four decade career as a teacher. i have met few teachers who did not have a second job to support their families–whether they worked at summer school or painting houses in the summer, like my husband and his teacher buddies did for nearly twenty years.

    In spite of what certain outlets of the press have promoted, unions of public employees have not caused the economic meltdown; they have, in fact, been the victims of it. Unions, like the ones my uncles belonged to and the one I belonged to, built this country. Bust the unions, as was done by a certain president of the 1980’s and you break the economic stability of this country. When union workers at General Motors got a raise in wages, so did the guys who sold coffee to them on their way to work.
    I don’t know any millionaire teachers. I know many non-union financial types who are. Unions are not invited guests to someone’s house who tell the host what to do. They’re the guys who are invited to the boss’s house for dinner, brought individually into the boss’s kitchen, beaten up and warned that if they say anything to their buddies, they’ll lose their jobs and their families will be left without food or healthcare.

    Teachers in Newark have a documented level of failure with their students, granted: but how is one individual, who at best, spends about 120 hours a year with a student, expected to combat a system of familial and societal disregard? Yes, teachers can make a difference–but individually, they can’t undo a lifetime of prejudice and indifference.

    Teacher unions–unions in general, are not the problem: our country’s moral compass is broken when we reward CEO’s with millions even when they have driven their companies into the ground and left thousands unemployed, while the wealthy pay a lower percentage of their income in taxes than my fellow teachers do. Yes, NYC used to have a rubber room where teachers waited out their appeals, but those individuals are in the minority. As you drive into NA’s parking lot, in late model luxury cars, check out the old Hondas and Toyotas parked in the teachers’ lot and ask yourself: if teachers are gaming the system so much, why are they driving such lousy cars?

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