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By DAVID GONDAK
Thursday, August 31, 1995     Page: 12A

Rather than taking Labor Day as just another day off work, I recommend that
Pennsylvanians spend at least part of this annual holiday considering the role
of public schools and labor in our society.
   
Our public schools face a growing crisis as they confront greater
challenges and higher expectations in an era of government belt-tightening.
    At the root of this crisis are two key questions. Are public schools
serving the public interest? And can efforts to improve the public schools be
undertaken without the involvement and support of organized labor?
   
It is popular today to condemn labor as a “special interest” and to tacitly
encourage citizens to be consumers rather than contributing members of our
society. Americans today too often simply calculate their own self-interest.
   
The citizen-as-consumer mindset has arrived in education. Public
education’s critics contend the government should take tax dollars and give
them to parents in the form of tuition vouchers. Marketplace competition, they
argue, will create quality education for all.
   
These proposals to privatize the school system treat parents as consumers
of a product and education as only a private decision. They deny the public
interest in education.
   
In a privatized system, there is no common good, only the private good of
individuals maximizing their own self-interest.
   
Marketplaces are not designed to provide services for all people. Markets
distribute goods and services to people who can afford them.
   
In disadvantaged communities, the marketplace seldom provides the services
people need — health care, housing, or transportation, to name a few of the
marketplace services we all need.
   
Democracy demands that each of us think about more than our narrow
self-interest because, as citizens, we are responsible for decisions affecting
our entire nation, not just our own small piece of it.
   
A system of schooling which subsidizes the creation of different schools,
each catering to a different student clientele, is inherently incapable of
serving the public interest. A society which offers schools organized by
ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic status, learning or athletic ability is a
separatist society and denies the promise of equal opportunity for academic
achievement and upward social movement.
   
All of us who value our nation’s democratic heritage must understand that
public schools are essential to our future. Our public schools can foster an
appreciation of the public interest.
   
Public schools, which open their doors to a wide diversity of students,
offer equal opportunity for all children to fulfill their potential. A
privatized system of education only offers academic opportunity to those who
can afford it.
   
So if we are to retain the ideal of our American democracy, we must renew
our understanding of the public interest, the common good. We must work
together to improve our public schools, not abandon them.
   
Organized labor has a tradition of support for public schools. Unions have
traditionally recognized the link between the common good of their members and
the common good of our society, which are both served by the public schools.
   
As the organized core of the teaching profession, education unions are
critical to restoring confidence and commitment to public education. We are
committed to the task of reform and improvement in public schools.
   
Not surprisingly, those who favor privatizing our public schools are not
interested in dialogue with unions on the subject of reform. Their ideas of
“education reform” are inherently anti-labor, anti-child, and anti-future.
They exercise the politics of blame with the contention that if schools are
struggling, the school employees are to blame.
   
Yet without the unions, any type of “reform” is doomed to fall short. When
General Motors set out to build a better automobile at the Saturn plant in
Tennessee, the company’s managers recognized that success would come only by
working together with the unions, not by punishing them.
   
Our nation’s efforts to improve public education must continue. We must
recognize the necessity of educating each and every child. Until we embrace
that principle, and all the stakeholders in our education system work
together, our society will default on the promise of our American democracy.
   
David Gondak, a chemistry teacher at Central Bucks High School, became
president of the Pennsylvania State Education on Sept. 1.