Unions' war on accountability

Steven Greenhut: The LA teachers’ union is livid over a Los Angeles Times series and database that enables readers and parents to look up the ratings of district teachers.  The unions have made it impossible to fire even abusive or incompetent teachers, and now they want to keep the public from knowing anything about the effectiveness of teachers. Only in a government monopoly can the corrupt and incompetent get such wonderful protections. Only a union would fight to keep the “customers” in the dark, so we’re stuck having our kids mis-educated by any incompetent the union wants to protect.

As the Times reported: “‘It is the height of journalistic irresponsibility to make public these deeply flawed judgments about a teacher’s effectiveness,’ said a statement issued by United Teachers Los Angeles.”

That statement and this brouhaha reveals exactly what the state’s public-sector unions are all about: protecting the worst among them, and to hell with the students and their parents. The nearly criminal mis-education of the state’s poorest students — not to mention the near-criminal waste of taxpayer dollars — is, as LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has put it, the major civil rights issue of our time. But California’s Democrats — ever beholden to these self-interested union power brokers — will never do anything to fix the situation. The state’s school systems desperately need competition, and the unions are doing everything they can to halt competition and to ensure that the work they do is done in secrecy.

It’s revolting and it won’t change until the public starts revolting (figuratively speaking, of course).