As the nation’s leaders make plans to pull troops out of Iraq, they also need to negotiate a truce in the education wars that affect many schools like an emotional dust storm. The kids badly need the war to stop. Like all wars, this one wastes resources prodigiously. And resources for kids have become scarce.

My wish for the new year is that the combatants lay down arms and rally around the kids.

Teachers’ unions are inherently divisive. They get paid to work for teachers, no one else. In this they have done nothing wrong. Focusing exclusively on teachers, apart from everyone else in the school context, is the union’s business.

But when union leaders use the word “fair,” they don’t mean fair to kids, families, administrators, school communities, or taxpayers. They mean fair to their own.

And that sense of fairness undermines unity among all the stakeholders.

Since collective bargaining laws for teachers were first passed, in the 1960s, the power balance between labor and management has shifted radically. Teachers are no longer fired for getting married, becoming pregnant or disagreeing with the principal. But neither are they fired or reassigned when they’re incompetent, mean to kids, or just not meshing well with a particular school culture. It’s gotten so bad that in especially fierce union strongholds, district leaders believe they can’t so much as change a textbook without either buying the change with a giant raise for teachers, or declaring full-on war.

Which brings us to the other warring camp. Administrators can behave just as nastily as the unions.

The new star general in the union-opposition army is Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the D.C. schools for the last year and a half. Dressed in black, she scowls from the cover of a recent Time magazine. She clutches a broom to symbolize her intention to clean house by sweeping away all the terrible teachers she credits for D.C. school’s abysmal performance. The cover’s headline reads: “How to Fix America’s Schools.”

Oh, please. More war.

Such administrators are the reason so many good teachers believe they still need unions, and need them badly. Hyper-authoritarian administrators storm the beaches, guns blazing, not much caring what dies in the crossfire. Schools may improve, but at the cost of human misery. And miserable teachers cannot foster a love of learning.

I believe that bad teaching is mainly the result of badly organized schools. A well-organized school is first and foremost a strong community that works as a team, and makes most of its own decisions, including whom to hire. The team takes collective responsibility for the kids. A good school is always more like a family than a corporation, though it has a specific job to do, for which it is held accountable. It gives extra support to its new teachers, and helps all teachers grow in their profession.

Still, some teachers, for whatever reasons, just don’t work out. If they’re not pulling their weight academically or bucking the school’s culture, or just being a pain, a good school community will eventually lose patience. While the principal is responsible for lowering the ax, the decision to do so is widely shared. Shared decision-making, such as you find at most charter schools, protects the kids from incompetence and from divisive labor-management fights.

The president-elect’s new education secretary, Arne Duncan, is being touted as a “safe” choice because he belongs to neither of the warring camps. So far.

A lawyer by training, Duncan has been superintending the Chicago Public Schools through bold changes, while maintaining good relations with the unions. He’s “reconstituted” schools, which is to say he closed them in June and opened them again in September with largely new staff.

In some cases he converted failing schools into charter schools — self-managed, but overseen by the district. Duncan endorses “performance pay” instead of the lock-step system of annual raises, regardless of performance, which today is written into almost every teachers’ contract.

In short, he has not tolerated failing schools or unproductive traditions. That pleases the so- called “conservatives,” like Rhee, who endorse high standards, accountability, testing, and a business-like approach to schools. But he has also worked in close collaboration with the unions, which pleases the teachers.

But now that he’s in the federal arena, Duncan’s neutrality can’t last.

Successful superintendents keep labor peace by cultivating good personal relationships with the leaders of all the different stakeholders. This is very time-consuming. And in his new position, Duncan won’t be able to keep up with enough personal relationships to bridge the divide. He can take sides, which I think would be inadvisable. Or he can articulate a strategy to defang the nastiness of labor-management conflict. Maybe he can fashion laws that help school communities work together as teams, while still holding them to rigorous standards.

But the labor-management wars must stop. They’re taking too much attention from the kids.

Julia Steiny, a former member of the Providence School Board, consults for government agencies and schools; she is co-director of Information Works!, Rhode Island’s school-accountability project. She can be reached at juliasteiny@cox.net , or c/o EdWatch, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902.