Teacher union head debates Bill Sizemore

By DON McINTOSH, Staff Reporter

FOREST GROVE - In their first-ever meeting face-to-face, anti-tax activist Bill Sizemore and Oregon Education Association (OEA) President Jim Sager went head-to-head March 14 over the value of teachers' unions.

At a Pacific University debate organized by education professor Walt Hellman, about 40 students, many of them future teachers, listened intently as Sager and Sizemore tangled over teacher tenure, merit pay, standardized testing, and educational funding. Hellman, who is a member of OEA, said the debate was instructive as a chance to test arguments about teachers' unions. The OEA videotaped the debate and plans to make it available to members.

In the opinion of Sizemore, head of the anti-union Oregon Taxpayers United, teachers' unions are the number one obstacle to quality education, introducing material motives into what should be a sacred calling, guaranteeing bad teachers a job for life, and standing in the way of reforms such as charter schools that would introduce competition into public education.

"The teachers' union is the most powerful union in the world," Sizemore declared. Several times in the debate he said it takes a school district $30,000 and 18 months to get rid of a bad teacher - though without citing the source of these statistics. Sizemore argued that administrators should have the ability to fire bad teachers at will, and suggested that students be given standardized tests at the beginning and end of each school year to show how much they'd learned in a given teacher's class.

Sager disputed the idea that unionized teachers have a job for life. Administrators already have the ability to fire non-performing teachers, he said. It's just that, with a union in place, teachers have the right to a fair hearing and an appeals process, and an opportunity to get assistance in becoming better teachers before they're tossed out the door.

"We protect our colleagues from unfair and arbitrary attacks. Professional educators must feel secure in their jobs," Sager said.

As for testing, in Sager's view, standardized tests can be a useful diagnostic tool in the classroom, but they have built-in gender and cultural biases, and he ridiculed the notion that they can measure what's important. He said they can measure whether students can regurgitate a set of facts, but not whether they can use that knowledge in their lives to think critically and solve problems.

To Sizemore's argument that schools should stick to the basics, Sager responded vigorously. "Students have the right to have arts, music, drama, and opportunities for advanced study," he insisted.

Such opportunities have been whittled away in recent years, in large part thanks to Sizemore, one of those responsible for the property tax limitation measures that precipitated what educators regard as a crisis in school funding.

Sizemore blamed teacher cuts on teacher unions' success at winning salary increases. At the same time, he denied that his tax limitation measures have had negative effects on education, and asserted that the quality of education is unrelated to either spending per student or class size. He lamented the extent to which public education funding has become "a sacred cow," and said it would be better for taxpayers to weigh it thoughtfully against other government spending priorities.

As the two butted and rebutted, point for point, it seemed they agreed on almost nothing.

To Sizemore, education should be a training ground to produce a workforce that can compete in a fast-paced global economy. To Sager, education should be a crucible of critical thinking and the cornerstone of a healthy democracy.

In Sizemore's view, teachers' unions must create an adversarial relationship with administrators in order to justify their existence. In Sager's view, the unions are fighting alongside administrators advocating adequate funding.

Sizemore argued that public education is in decline, due to an emphasis on spending, not quality; Sager said schools are doing better than ever and that it wasn't teachers' unions that politicized the issue of teacher salaries.

To Sizemore, public school systems are "government-controlled monopolies;" to Sager, they're "public, locally-controlled institutions."

In Sizemore's world, unions are no longer necessary and are in decline because there are laws protecting people from being unjustly fired. To Sager, teachers without unions make less money and have fewer workplace rights.

In class after the debate, Hellman's students sided 10 to 2 with Sager.

Hellman said the students picked up on apparent contradictions in Sizemore's arguments. For example, Sizemore argued that good teachers don't do it for the money, but he wanted administrators to have greater flexibility to set salaries to attract talented professionals, and he suggested merit pay would motivate teachers to improve.

Assessing the debate after it ended, Sager said he thought Sizemore's command of the facts was extremely limited, which made him a difficult opponent. "His arguments were what you'd expect to hear - 30-second sound bites."

Sizemore declined to speak with the NW Labor Press.