Harvey Silverglate

The effort should be to, this is an emergency, it's a national emergency, to improve the quality of elementary and secondary education.

And one way to do it is to hire teachers who are fabulous teachers rather than necessarily members of the union.

I have come to oppose

Public workers unions.

I am a very strong supporter of unions in the private sector.

Why do I think there's such a difference between unions in the public sector and the private sector?

In the private sector, management is arguing bargaining with its own money and with the money of shareholders.

In the public sector, there's only one side.

There is the teachers' union, and then there's a school committee that is dealing with the taxpayers' money, not their own.

And so it's a very skewed power balance.

So as supportive as I am of private sector unions, I am in opposition of public sector unions.

They're very destructive.

And I think without teachers' union,

Teachers who are really skilled will be able to get jobs.

They would not have to worry about the seniority of teachers who long since have given up really creative teaching.

And we have to improve the public educational system.

I had...

My late wife and I had a classmate.

We have a son who's now 44 who went to the public schools in Cambridge.

He has a friend, first name Eugene, who was a black kid from Roxbury whose mother understood that the schools in Roxbury were terrible.