Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Monday, December 4, 2006
Saying goodbye to Tom Mooney
Tom Mooney
There was some sad news today in the education world. Tom Mooney, 52, was found dead of an apparent heart attack in Columbus Sunday. Mooney was the forceful and articulate head of the Ohio Federation of Teachers and a member of the guiding executive committee of the national parent union, the American Federation of Teachers, where he was influential in guiding the powerful union’s policy-making.
I always enjoyed speaking with Tom. He was smart and thoughtful and had a gift for explaining the most complex education issues in a way the average newspaper reader could grasp. That made him plenty popular with reporters.
I also had a bit of small world moment with him. I was telling my wife something he said one day when she asked who this Tom Mooney guy was. When I said he was the president of the OFT, she said something like, “Oh, must not be the same guy.” She said when she was a teenager in Cincinnati she used to babysit the kids of a teacher who lived in her neighborhood named Tom Mooney. It turned out it was the same guy.
But Tom’s passing made me think of a different story about him.
About three years ago, I was in Los Angeles at a seminar sponsored by the Hechinger Institute for Education and the Media at Columbia and one session featured Mooney debating Terry Moe.
Moe, who’s on the faculty at Stanford, is one of the smartest and most influential thinkers about education. His 1987 book, Politics, Markets, and the Organization of Schools, co-written with John Chubb, proposed a free-market, choice-driven system of education that helped inspire experimentation in charter schools by reform-minded state legislatures (Ohio included) in the 1990s.
Moe is sharply critical of teachers’ unions and in the session he painted them as a powerful and destructive force in education. Moe said the nature of democratically elected school boards renders them nearly powerless against the organized and well-funded labor unions. Moe described how unions can, at a moment’s notice, rally an intimidating mob of teachers to a school board meeting, or fan out an army of volunteers into neighborhoods to trumpet their favored candidates.
As Mooney and I spoke after the session about charter schools and choice, he seemed distracted. He apologized and said he was still worked up by the debate with Moe. Mooney, who led Cincinnati’s teachers’ union for 21 years, looked at me and asked, “Have you ever been involved in a local union?”
I told him yes. At the time I was on the executive board of the Dayton Newpspaer Guild, a union for editorial employees at the Dayton Daily News (I’m now the group’s treasurer).
“Perfect,” he said. “Let me ask you this — how many people do the bulk of the work in your union?”
Well, I told him, our executive committee had eight members. But at usually three or four do most of the work for a union with 150 members.
“Sounds like every local union I’ve ever heard of,” Mooney replied. “Where does he think we’d get these armies of people? When I was a local union president, we’d be lucky to get more than a few people to show up for anything.”
It was classic Mooney — passionate, a true believer in his cause and focused on the street-level realities over the philosophical. And putting it all in real terms for his listener.
I’ll miss him.
(Image credit: PBS.org)
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