Teacher Unions and Professionalism – Part 2

Larry Sand compares teacher unions in Finland to those in the United States and finds teacher union officials here wanting in professionalism.

One could always depend on old “Uncle Bob” to tell the truth about what teacher union officials were doing with your dues, even if it was morally offensive.

West Virginia has some of the worst schools in the country. In fact, over 75 percent of the state’s 116 high schools fall in the “does not meet standard” category. As such, charter schools would be a beneficial addition. But one of the prominent reasons for the recent teacher strike was a proposed law that would have allowed West Virginia to establish charter schools – making it the 44th state in the U.S. to do so. When a reporter went to the Mountain State, she found “a culture of overwhelming fear and intimidation related to unions.” She writes that some West Virginians’ fear of speaking freely about charters and other reform issues is “something I’ve never before encountered in America. It is, in fact, much closer to the corruption culture I’ve experienced in my 22 years of charity work in post-communist Romania.”