JUST SUPPOSE your company decided to upgrade or even scale back. And the requirements of your job changed. So you were asked to do another job-in the same company with the same pay. Unless your immediate supervisor decided to keep you just where you were-whatever the suits at corporate HQ decided. Just suppose.
Now just suppose that your union decided to sue your company because of it. Which might sound strange to many of us, but that’s just what a teachers’ union representing teachers in Little Rock’s school district is doing. Using the usual army of lawyers.
The superintendent of Little Rock’s schools, Dexter Suggs, finds himself in a lawsuit because he wanted 20 or so reading teachers to re-apply for their jobs. They’d still be guaranteed work, he says, but maybe not in Reading Recovery. In a nutshell, here’s the relevant part of the lawsuit: “Defendant Suggs is in the process of making financial decisions regarding teachers. Defendant Suggs cannot assure the Reading Recovery teachers that their right to continued employment will be honored.”
Their right to continued employment? What about the requirement in the state constitution that says the public schools must offer a “general, suitable and efficient” system of education? Yes, the word efficient is right there. How efficient is it to keep financing a program in the schools that the superintendent finds inefficient?
But all this was to be expected. For years Little Rock’s school board has been fighting every hope of innovation or reform or just quality education in general, preferring to continue the district’s decades-long spending spree. Shouldn’t the school board shoulder some of the blame when a teachers’ union claims a right to keep its members on the public payroll? The union has come to expect it-the way every other bully granted his way for so long comes to believe he has a right to push others around.
The ones who profit in these contentious lawsuits aren’t the kids, their families, or even the good hard-working teachers, but mostly the lawyers. The grabby kind who know a cash cow when they can milk it. And this is going to go on as long as We the People and Suckers just sit back and take it-and generally act like uneducated dummies.
Editorial, Pages 14 on 04/10/2014