While taking the Washington Teachers Union to task today, the Post is mostly spot on. They are right to point out that the union is largely acting against the interests of its members, especially in terms of how much money is being offered to all teachers, green and red track alike. They run into some trouble near the end, however, when they address the issue of seniority. Professing they find the opposition by older experienced teachers "perplexing", the Post editors ask: "Isn't the argument for the seniority pay scale based on the notion that experienced teachers do a better job?"
At first glance, this seems nothing more than a stock rhetorical question getting at the heart of a contradiction--experienced teachers should be "better" and therefore benefit from and support merit pay. If experience is correlated with performance, we should be seeing the younger teachers up in arms. They're not, of course, and that's the point, argues the Post. But there's a bigger issue here, and one that reveals why the unions and senior teachers have much to lose by Rhee's plan. The Post points out the problem without even realizing it: "Isn't the argument for the seniority pay scale based on the notion that experienced teachers do a better job?" These senior teachers wouldn't just be putting their own jobs at risk; they would be confirming the illogicality of the seniority pay scale and in large part, the seniority based structure of teachers' unions (and unions in general) all together. The senior teachers lose their non-monetary perks, the unions' power structures are undercut. Their opposition doesn't seem so "perplexing" after all.
