Putting Union Jobs Ahead of Children's Futures
You’ve all heard about the embarrassing Republican fratricide in Delaware. Oddball candidate Christine O’Donnell upended party favourite Mike Castle to win the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate — effectively throwing away what would have been a sure win in that state.
But here’s a nomination contest of which you probably have not heard, and that may matter much more to the future of the United States: the fight for the Democratic nomination for mayor of the District of Columbia.
Four years ago, D.C. Democrats nominated and elected a dynamic young newcomer, Adrian Fenty. He campaigned on a promise to repair the city’s notoriously dysfunctional services, and especially its schools.
You have to understand something about the racial divisions of Washington D.C. to understand the importance and audacity of Fenty’s promise. D.C.’s white minority predominantly lives in the pleasant neighborhoods of the city’s northwest quadrant. For them (for us — I live there too), city inefficiency is an annoyance, sometimes a serious annoyance.
But on balance: For us, it’s not so bad. Services have unquestionably improved over the past decade, especially the services the affluent care about most. Where city services have not improved, the affluent white population can usually work its way around city failures. The affluent neighborhoods support a volunteer ambulance service so that they do not have to rely on the city’s lethally lackadaisical ambulances. They maintain neighborhood watch programs to do the job the police do not do. The elementary schools in Northwest D.C. are excellent, and when it comes time for high school, the affluent either pay for private schooling or move to the suburbs.
For the city’s poor, however, bad services matter enormously, and bad schooling matters most of all. The District of Columbia spends more per student than any school district in the nation. But D.C. students record some of the lowest scores in the country in reading and math. Employers often interpret a D.C. high school diploma as a buyer-beware warning: one reason that unemployment in the poor, predominantly black neighborhoods of D.C. now scrapes 25%.
Entering office, Fenty went to work. He appointed a committed school reformer, Michelle Rhee, and gave her scope to work. Among Rhee’s initiatives was a change to city rules that permitted the accelerated removal of incompetent teachers.
You’d think that firing bad teachers would be popular. And yes, according to the opinion polls, so it was.
But the people who benefited most from Rhee’s reforms — the urban poor — tend not to vote, and they especially tend not to vote in party primaries. In these small-electorate contests, small and committed constituencies can overwhelm big, apathetic majorities.
Which is what happened in D.C. Teachers’ unions poured an estimated $1-million into the battle to defeat Adrian Fenty. They mobilized their members (at least, those of their members who live in the city — most D.C. teachers actually live in the suburbs, so as to avoid sending their own children to the schools in which they teach). They won.
Yes, Fenty brought many of his troubles upon himself. He was often brusque and high-handed. But he was also targeted in ugly ways, including the suggestion by some supporters of Vincent Gray, the eventual winner, that the biracial Fenty was not “black enough.”
One ray of hope remains for Fenty and the city’s schoolchildren. The city’s tiny Republican Party did not nominate anyone for mayor. But some 822 Republicans wrote Fenty’s name onto their ballots in the GOP primary — with the result that he can, if he wishes, try again in the general election against Gray, this time as the Republican nominee. It’s not a very promising avenue in this overwhelmingly Democratic city, but it’s a chance.
More probably, the teachers’ unions have sent a message to every urban Democrat in the United States: Your first priority is to protect our jobs, all of our jobs, whether we perform competently or not. If you instead put children and learners first, we will crush you.
Media comment on Tuesday’s vote has focused on the harm that the Tea Party may have done to Republican hopes for a Senate majority. That’s a story. But it’s nowhere near as big, enduring, or tragic a story as the harm that the Teachers Party has done to another generation of urban children’s hopes for an exit out of poverty.
Originally published in the National Post.