Chicago lawyer Michael Hendershot takes to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to relate an anecdote from his daughter’s public elementary school:

Due to a combination of budget cuts and enrollment numbers that were lower than expected, Pritzker’s librarian was laid off shortly after this school year began. Without a librarian, Pritzker students aren’t allowed to use the library. Dozens of parents have offered to volunteer in the library to keep it open. There was so much interest that the parent-teacher organization created a rotating schedule of regular volunteers to help out.

But before parents could begin volunteering, a teachers union member filed a formal complaint with the school system, objecting to the parents’ plan. Several weeks later, a union representative appeared at a local school council meeting and informed parents that the union would not stand for parental volunteers in the library. Although the parents intended to do nothing more than help students check books in and out, the union claimed that the parents would be impermissibly filling a role reserved for teachers. The volunteer project was shut down following the meeting and the library is currently being used for dance classes.

Yes, as common a practice as it is in the mainstream media, it’s often unfair to pluck such local stories from around the country and hold them up as examples, but one could easily see this coming up in Rhode Island and easily imagine local unionists arguing for the lockout.  As former President of the RI Federation of Teachers Marcia Reback once put it, when the interests of the students and the teachers are different, “I represent the teachers.”

The problem is that this is the intrinsic incentive structure created by unionization.  It might (might) be appropriate within a private company constrained by market forces and without the muddying influence of union members’ being able to elect the management with whom they’ll be negotiating (like fellow union members from neighboring towns), and it might work for jobs that really are easily enumerated and packaged, but this mentality doesn’t belong anywhere near the education of children.