RALEIGH – Liberal politicians speak a different language from most of us – which may help to explain why the “liberal” label, unlike the “conservative” one, is eschewed at all costs by most politicians seeking election or reelection.
For example, when liberal politicians say the government needs a “balanced” package of “revenue enhancements,” what they really mean is that you have too much money in your pocket – and that they plan to pick it in the most-surreptitious manner they can come up with.
Fiscal problems tend to expand the liberal lexicon. Smaller-than-desired increases in government spending become “cuts.” The special interests who pocket most tax dollars – either as salaries, subsidies, or vendor payments – become “the people.” The general interest of average taxpayers who don’t derive their income or status from the government, on the other hand, turns into a “special interest.”
Every now and then, however, liberal politicians drift away from their carefully constructed terminology of obfuscation and say what they think. Check out how North Carolina House Speaker Joe Hackney defined his terms in press interviews leading up to the opening day of the 2010 legislative session in Raleigh.
Asked about his fiscal priorities in fashioning a 2010-11 state budget that is several hundred millions dollars in the red, Hackney first indicated that education would be a top priority. But later he defined the priority as protecting teachers, a phrase that had the virtue of explaining precisely what he really meant – though not really what most people think of as the top education priority, namely protecting students.
Hackney apparently believes that protecting the economic interests of teachers is the same thing as protecting educational opportunity. It is no coincidence that the North Carolina Association of Educators, the state’s largest teacher union, sees the issue the same way. Its president told the Associated Press just before the legislative session began that its top priority would be to protect the jobs of its members. The next priority, it seems is to push for a pay raise for teachers, a policy that Gov. Beverly Perdue and some House leaders favor but Senate leaders do not, at least at the moment.
But in few other areas of our political debate is it so blithely assumed that the interests of the producers and consumers of a good or service are precisely aligned. Political liberals castigate the financial-services industry for working against the interests of their borrowers and investors. During recent local referenda across North Carolina seeking voter approval for proposed new taxes on home sales, liberals complained that the real-estate lobby’s claims of protecting homeowners against tax increases were fallacious and self-serving.
Liberals rarely equate the interests of drug companies and the elderly, hospitals and patients, oil companies and motorists, or police officers and crime victims. Yet they routinely equate the interests of teacher unions with the delivery of high-quality educational services to North Carolina families.
It is certainly true that there are many education policies that have the potential to help specific groups of educators and students at the same time. Differentiating teacher pay according to evident performance in the classroom would serve to reward the best teachers, which would create an incentive for them to stay in the profession and for other current or would-be teachers to improve their performance to make more money. These incentives would help students be more successful, too.
And eliminating the statewide cap on charter schools would give both parents and teachers more choices, more opportunities to find the educational setting that best meets their preferences and expectations.
But simply protecting the jobs of current teachers – the good, the bad, and the (professionally) ugly – is hardly in the interests of the students subjected to the supervision of the latter two groups. It doesn’t take a cynic to recognize that liberals who advocate such a policy are more likely to be responding to pressure-group politics than to the prospect of educational progress.
Just to be clear: I’m defining “educational progress” as demonstrable increases in student learning and parental satisfaction, not as a teacher-union endorsement for the next election.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.