News that Michelle Rhee ’92 was coming to campus brought the Cornell Organization for Labor Action to its feet. With little time to spare, COLA met to calculate a response and to strategize. They would print out some quarter cards, draw some attention to their cause and get people talking. We welcome a good debate, but COLA’s actions on Monday did little to ignite constructive dialogue. Instead, they oversimplified the complexities that lie beneath Rhee’s speech, polarizing the multifaceted issue that is educational reform.

Rhee, the chancellor of the D.C. public schools, is certainly a controversial figure. Tasked with transforming what she described as “the most troubled public school district in the country” two years ago, Rhee has taken drastic steps like closing 23 under-enrolled schools and replacing almost one-third of principals in the district. This past Monday, as Rhee spoke to a crowded Bailey Hall, hundreds of students and teachers protested the layoffs of 229 teachers back in D.C.

For obvious reasons, COLA fixated on labor rights issues, protesting the layoffs and a lack of accountability behind these dismissals. By doing so, COLA equated labor rights with educational reform, painting a black and white portrait of a rather colorful debate.

The issues surrounding Rhee’s handling of the the D.C. public schools are for more complex than what COLA made them out to be. To focus solely on issues of hiring and firing is to merely scratch the surface of a dense educational policy debate. Many education experts — ranging from progressive charter school principals to doctors of education to teachers — criticize unions, which they claim hold teacher’s interests as employees as a main priority, rather than protect the best interests of students.

A current example of how labor issues hinder progressive action in education can be seen in New York City. Upon closing a number of under-performing schools in the city, Chancellor Joel I. Klein was forced to keep close to 2,000 teachers on payroll, providing them with salaries and benefits, which cost New York City over $200 million per year. As a result, Klein enacted a hiring freeze prior to the start of this school year in an attempt to close the budget deficit. This inactive pool of unqualified teachers — whose pay is protected by the teachers’ union — is presently preventing schools from bringing new, young teachers into the classroom. Instead, schools are forced to hire from within the pool, bringing back teachers who were already deemed unfit.

We worry that the narrow focus of COLA’s protest, which sought to blanket support for labor unions, is in fact detrimental to real “action”. Rather than encourage a discussion — no matter how passionate it might have been — COLA vehemently supported one faction involved in the debate, which in fact stifled progress.

COLA’s protest glossed over the intricacies that are behind Rhee’s actions as chancellor. If their goal was to inform attendees about the opposing viewpoint, quarter cards outlining four over-simplified simplified points did not do the job. Rather, their actions only made them contrarians in a debate that could have benefited from proactive discourse.