The way I see it - anti-union forces in this nation have been skilled at pointing our the flaws of the system. Are there flaws? Are there corrupt union officials and lousy teachers? Of course there are. But such is the human condition, and it's found universally.
Every day I open the business section of the Los Angeles Times, I read of component failures, bad designs, cheap materials, counterfeit parts, management glitches, fraud, corruption and cheating. I don't see folks lining up to do away with Big Business because of this.
So we work hard to be sure systems work ... doing away with unions, or weakening them to the point of crippling them, and throwing teachers into a high-anxiety produce-or-perish environment will only worsen American education. But conservative voices have always painted unions as the all-time worst element standing in the way of prosperity. But it's simply not true. A case could be made, using the same logic, that Big Business is the worst element standing in the way of prosperity.
It all depends on what sources we trust for our point of view - and those sources might stretch back as far as our parents, our Sunday School, as well as the news-sources to which we listen and the books we read.
