Democrats are obsessed with who’ll top their ticket in 2004, but depressing news from urban school districts suggests they ought to be worrying about their union supporters, too.

In New York, new schools chief Joel Klein just announced an innovative plan to give top principals bonuses of up to $25,000 a year to take on the toughest schools for three years. It’s the kind of idea everyone should applaud, because the shortage of good principals and teachers willing to work in our toughest classrooms long ago passed the crisis point.

But the principals union “responded indignantly,” according to The New York Times, saying it would block this “unfair labor practice” until its broader contract was settled.

Klein also announced he was creating an advisory council of 20 high-performing principals to advise him on policy issues. Sounds like common sense, right? A way to pick the best brains on a regular basis? Well, the union is up in arms about this, too, since it views such input as its exclusive turf.

Such craziness isn’t confined to New York. In Philadelphia, a new principal at one of the sites run by Edison Schools was told by the teachers union that she couldn’t have a staff meeting after school to discuss educational strategies. She could cut into these struggling students’ class time to hold this meeting, the union generously allowed, but otherwise it was a no-no.

Or take San Diego. The first time I met Alan Bersin, the superintendent there who’s presiding over one of the most ambitious reform efforts in the country, I asked him what I thought was a straightforward management question. How did he stay in touch with his front lines, to keep teachers regularly apprised of his thinking and priorities as reforms went forward? Did he send an e-mail every week or two to all of them directly, for example? I was stunned when Bersin said union rules didn’t allow that kind of direct contact.

This is nuts. Anyone who’s been involved in running large organizations knows that communication is essential – the connection between leaders and their troops, especially at times of major change, is critical. These examples (and they’re emblematic of many others) remind us that the teachers and principals unions are often the biggest foes of common sense in schools today.

This is a problem for the Democratic Party at a time when George Bush has shrewdly narrowed the traditional advantage Democrats have enjoyed on education issues. Teachers unions are among the Democrats’ biggest financial donors and activists. They sent more delegates to the 2000 convention than the state of California.

Yet many big-city superintendents who are active, lifelong Democrats privately say the unions are the biggest obstacles to sound reform. These supers literally fantasize about schemes to get big chunks of their system out from under debilitating restrictions and industrial union tactics.

The unions rightly reply that you can’t blame everything on them. Unions are often slammed, for example, for making it impossible to fire bad teachers. Yet in many cities, teachers are on probation for the first few years, meaning they can be dismissed with few hassles. When poor performers aren’t fired, it’s because districts are desperate. “They’re putting warm bodies in classrooms and then beating up on the unions because the (dismissal) process takes too long,” Sandra Feldman, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, told me recently.

It’s a fair point. And in a number of instances Feldman and her colleagues have been leaders in efforts to turn around troubled schools.

But the broader truth remains: As we head to 2004, Democrats and the unions need to rethink their openness to common-sense fixes – everything from serious pay differentials to lure top talent to teaching, to generously funded trials of vouchers. If Republicans can make the case that Democrats can’t deliver because their union masters put them on the side of what adults want and not what children need, it will be a disaster for the party that ought to be leading the fight to improve our poorest schools.

Matt Miller is a syndicated columnist. His e-mail address is: mattino@worldnet.att.net.

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