Per the Green Bay Press-Gazette today:

The City of Green Bay is now looking to hire a private security firm to provide school crossing guards; currently, crossing guards are employed by the city, represented by the Teamsters Union, and are paid around $12 per hour.  The guards fear that privatizing the service would drop their pay and benefits, although there's no evidence cited in the story that would back up their claim.

The decline of California's public education system -- once one of the country's finest, now near the bottom in most national rankings -- owes to a wide variety of wayward public policy choices. One that has a particularly deleterious effect on some of the Golden State's worst schools is the practice of laying off teachers by seniority, so that the most junior instructors are the first to be relieved of their employment, regardless of classroom performance. This is particularly noxious for underperforming urban campuses, where young, energetic teachers (often with special training) tend to be the only instructors capable of turning around flagging institutions. Now, in San Francisco, precisely that kind of progress is being snuffed out through union opposition.

One of the few bright spots on California's otherwise dismal educational landscape in recent years has been the proliferation of charter schools, of which there are now nearly 1,000, serving approximately 412,000 students. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, charters consistently outperform conventional public schools by dramatic margins, creating a beacon of hope amidst some of the worst schools in the state.

Last autumn I wrote about the growing discontent of union households over the high price of membership. A Harris Interactive poll I cited found 47 percent of those in union households saying they didn't believe they were getting their money's worth out of union dues, in part because more and more of the money seemed to be going to political campaigns and advocacy outside of labor rather than to representing workers. Now a former government union official in Michigan, a state where reformers are pushing a so-called 'right to teach' act allowing public school instructors to opt out of the teacher's union, acknowledges as much.

Earlier this year, as the truly repulsive story of Mark Berndt (warning: the link is not for the faint of heart) -- an elementary teacher in the L.A. Unified School District accused of committing unspeakable acts against his students -- came to light, I noted here on Public Sector Inc. that the failure to prevent his crimes owed in part to the influence of the California Teachers Association, the teachers union that is the state's most powerful special interest.

It was the CTA's local affiliate in Los Angeles that negotiated a contract under which past allegations of misconduct would be jettisoned from a teacher's personnel file. And it was CTA influence that created a disciplinary process so unnavigable that L.A. Unified was unable to fire Berndt even when photographic evidence of his crimes emerged. You'd think that the attendant shame would be enough to force the CTA to swallow at least modest reforms. Yet now the union is coming out swinging against legislation intended to remove problem teachers from the classroom.