GOP candidates take aim in N.H. at teachers' unions

LONDONDERRY, N.H — GOP presidential candidates tripped over each other to criticize teachers’ unions at an education forum Wednesday in the nation's first primary state.

However, a couple of candidates sought to show they can work with unions, while reassuring conservatives here that their policies prioritized children over teachers.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie boasted that he’d worked with the American Federation of Teachers to negotiate merit-based pay in Newark.

Still, he said, education would benefit from the elimination of teachers’ unions. “You’re talking about nirvana,” Christie said. He advocated for incorporating merit-based accountability into the tenure system.

Teachers’ unions can be allies in efforts to improve education “if we work together,” said Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who backed off anti-union legislation after it was overturned by a statewide referendum. But union leaders tend to overlook progress to focus on the negative, he said.

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If he were king, Kasich joked, “I would abolish all teachers’ lounges, where they sit together and worry about ‘Woe is us.’ ”

In all, six of the 17 GOP presidential candidates spoke at the education summit, sponsored by The Seventy Four, an online education news site that examines efforts to reform education for the nation’s 74 million schoolchildren.

The candidates took their shots at Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, criticizing her for having received the endorsement of the AFT.

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush said teachers support education reforms — such as allowing students to progress through subjects at their own pace and possibly graduate early — but teachers’ unions don’t.

“They want to have a collective bargaining entity that is subservient to them, as though it was 1950,” Bush said. “The people who want rising achievement want to tear down all these barriers.”

Unions reward seniority, not excellence, said Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO who has surged after her early-August debate performance.

She also criticized federal spending policies toward schools.

“When Washington spends more money, the quality of education in this nation does not improve,” she said.

States should reward good teachers and weed out the bad ones, said Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiana, where the New Orleans Recovery School District closed all of its public schools and switched entirely to charter schools, which teachers’ unions traditionally oppose.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker used the sympathetic audience to tout his clashes with labor unions. He said his bid to end public-sector collective bargaining in his state, which sparked mass protests and a recall election “wasn’t just about unions."

"It wasn’t about collective bargaining. It wasn’t just about pensions and health care contributions. …It was really about education reform.”

In response to the criticism of teachers' unions at the summit, Scott McGilvray, president of NEA New Hampshire, called the GOP presidential field the “most anti-public education, anti-working class” in history.

To his fellow teachers, he said, "I’m not the villain, and you’re not the villain.”

Contributing: The Associated Press

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