In a leaked email, Seattle venture capitalist Nick Hanauer called the leadership of the Democratic party and most of its elected members "stooges for the teachers unions," blaming those unions for "strangling our public schools to death with an almost infinite number of institutional rules that limit change, innovation and excellence." Typical "Rethuglican" vitriol? Not so much. Hanauer is one of the biggest Democratic donors in Washington state.
A growing Democratic vanguard faults the teachers' unions for much of what's wrong with our schools. According to Hanauer, "Even other unions, in private, will admit that the teachers make all unions look bad because they are so obviously counterproductive and self-interested." But aren't unions supposed to represent their members' interests? Hanauer acknowledges as much, writing that he is "a huge supporter of unions" because they "balance the interests of capitalists" by representing the interests of workers.
So if teachers unions have the same agenda as other unions, why single them out for attack? Hanauer says it's because "90% of what is in most teacher contracts is self-destructive [expletive] designed to protect the adults with the most seniority and the least ability." But again, iron-clad job security is a prize sought by every union. And since all members pay dues, regardless of ability, a union is duty-bound to protect them all. Unions do not -- and are not meant to -- represent the interests of customers. They represent their dues-paying members and seek to grow that membership.
What really upsets education reform Democrats is that the teachers unions are too successful. Roughly 70 percent of public school employees are unionized, compared to only 7 percent of private sector workers. Public school employment has grown 10 times faster than enrollment for 40 years. Public school teachers' annual compensation is $17,000 higher than that of private sector teachers, on average. And public school teachers are seldom fired for poor performance, contrary to the norm in other fields. Meanwhile, high school student achievement has stagnated or declined since nationally representative testing began around 1970.
But why are teachers unions so much more successful than other unions? The answer is simple: public schools lack both competitors and paying customers, eliminating the checks and balances on union demands that exist in the private sector. A business whose unionized workers drive up costs without raising quality loses customers and may have to lay off workers or even shut down. Union success is thus self-regulating. But if, as a parent, you don't like the way your local district runs its schools, you have nowhere else to turn -- not without moving or paying for a private school. And as a taxpayer, if your local schools mismanage your tax dollars, you can't send those dollars anywhere else. That's why public schooling's inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending has more than doubled in the past four decades despite stagnating or declining academic outcomes: revenues don't depend on satisfying customers.
That's not the unions' fault. It is the natural result of operating K-12 education as a fully state-funded monopoly. That, however, may explain why education-reform Democrats so often blame the unions instead. Acknowledging the real root of the problem -- state school monopolies -- seems like an attack on government or even on the ideal of universal education.
But it is not an attack on government to observe that government is bad at running schools, anymore than it's an attack on shovels to note that they make lousy Web browsers. No single tool can do every job. Nor is it an attack on the ideals of public education to say that state monopolies are an ineffective way to pursue them. That's a confusion of ends and means. Public education is a not a particular pile of bricks or stack of regulations, it is a set of goals: universal access, preparation for participation in public life as well as success in private life, building harmony and understanding among communities.
If the true allegiance of reformist Democrats is to those ultimate ideals, then they should have no problem acknowledging that government monopolies are ill-suited to advancing them, and that teachers-union excesses are more a symptom than a cause of our monopoly-induced woes. Finding the best policies for advancing our educational ideals then becomes a practical, tractable problem. The participation of reformist Democrats in solving it will be a tremendous boon to the children they seek to help.
Andrew Coulson directs the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom and is author of the Cato Journal study "The Effects of Teachers' Unions on American Education."
If a car company buys steel that is sub-standard, the quality of their cars will suffer. They can then seek better quality steel that will support a better quality car. Public schools are required to "process" whatever is sent to them, regardless of "quality". The charter school movement effectively addresses this by creating a "competitive" market that attracts better "raw material suppliers" (engaged parents).
This leaves public schools with the task of "processing" the "rest" of the "raw materials" in the market. No wonder the quality of the "product" suffers.
As far as sub-standard teachers is concerned, teachers do not automatically GET their job security, it has to be awarded - by the school. There is no requirement that a new teacher be granted tenure. If the school administration decides to do so without being sure that the teacher is good at his or her job, that's not on the union, it's on the administration.
LIFO, as a policy, is probably in the best interests. In general, it's going to result in the best teachers staying in front of kids. Teaching is like everything else: you get better with practice. Where there are good administrators in place, the few teachers who aren't doing their job are weeded out and LIFO keeps the better ones. Where there AREN'T good administrators to weed out the relatively rare bad teachers, getting rid of LIFO would put the choices entirely into those administrators' hands--that's something we should avoid.
Also, I can't begin to imagine how much taxpayer money has gone to testing companies due to NCLB. I know that Bush's good buddies at Pearson and Harold McGraw were VERY happy when he signed that wonderful law. Cha-ching!
Also, last year I looked up the costs of the Colorado CSAP (annual standardized tests) given on the state department of ed website. I calculated the cost of the test per student (how much CO pays the private corporation to supply and grade the annual test) times the number of students in Colorado. Next using avage salaries provided by the state Dep of Ed then calculated the total FTE (pay) for the amount of time teachers, admin and support staff are required to administer the test. Then I added the two to get a grand total.
The grand total for administering the CSAP last year was approximately $150 million, which turned out to be about half of the state's budget shortfall for K-12 education. This was the cost for one single test, one single data point. An absolute waste of taxpayer money.
I suspect that the increased dollar cost of testing is less of a problem than the cost to children's education. Kids just aren't interchangeable widgets who all progress at the same rate in every subject. So testing, standards, and curriculum mandates that treat all kids the same based on their chronological age do a huge disservice to those who are behind or ahead of the curve in any particular class. Children are so much better off when we allow them to progress through the curriculum based on their performance rather than how old they are--but that went out of fashion around the same time we were systematizing our school systems in the late 1800s and early 1900s. (I talk a little about this in my book "Market Education: The Unknown History.") Fortunately, it's coming back with the advent of digital learning options like Khan Academy.
If a student, parent or member of the public doesn't like the direction of their local district, they should attend school board meetings that are held open to the public and petition change. From my experience watching the televised board meetings of my local school district, about a dozen parents/members of the public show up on average to school board meetings. The district has about 30,000 students. That tells me that either most of the public approves what the board does or the majority of the public doesn't care.
Given the politics and direction of public education in the US, I lean more towards apathy from the majority. Most people in the US have no desire to do the work it actually takes to get the best public education for their money. The general populace is all to happy to give that control over to the politicians. The US gets the public education it deserves.
However, teachers unions are often not honest about that mission. They routinely claim that the represent the interests of the students. While it is true that there is occassionally a nexus between the interests of teachers and students, they are two separate and independent things. For example, teachers unions fight to protect the jobs of bad teachers -- that is consistent with the mission of unions to protect their members, but it certainly is not in the students' interests.
Participate in this fully Democratic(as in Democracy) process or stop whining. Contrary to what you've been sold, vouchers are not going to change a thing, especially if you (the public) already don't participate in the fully Democratic process already available in public education.
In fact corporate control of education will eventually give you fewer options and less say in education.
i'm all for reforming union leadership, but criticism of all unions en masse lumps the good with the bad. students' interests converge with those of most teachers a whole lot more than they do with politicians, hedge fund managers, testing companies, textbook publishers, edu-tech developers, eli broad, bill gates or michelle rhee.
Then look at the moron politicians, who don't know the first thing about public education, coming up with the most ridiculous reforms possible. NCLB, and Obamas version or it, are a joke.
The US is trying to force square pegs into round holes with this eveyone should go to college bs. Europe recognizes that college isn't for everyone, and they have vocational schools for those people.
Not everyone is going to college due to ability, circumstances, or a thousand other reasons. Once the US understands that maybe education in this country will improve.
But most voters believe that there is a problem in education, and no amount of nay-saying on the part of teachers unions is going to change that. Indeed, the continual denial has convinced many in the public that our public school teachers are either too incompetent or too wrapped-up in their own self interests to see a problem.
In other words, by continually denying that education has problems, and that taxpayers aren't getting enough for their money, Teachers Unions have become Teachers' worst enemy.
Likewise, the AFL-CIO's first president, George Meany, saw a danger in permitting government employees, who were supposed to protect the rights of others, to organize outside of government channels.
I think Roosevelt and Meany got it right.
I am sympathetic to the working conditions you describe--It's been worse in the private sector. I worked at a company where 65% of the people were laid-off over two years, where my pay was cut by a third, and of course, because I am salaried, I could be required to work 60 - 80 hours a week with no additional compensation.
Welcome to the real world.
Most vital public workers aren't permitted to strike, so that's a non-issue. There's still a value in giving them collective voice. If Roosevelt was right, and allowing them to organize was equivalent to "holding the government hostage," we'd expect public workers to be paid much more than comparable private sector workers. In reality, they're paid less. The issues you describe don't exist.
However, the benefits of unions do. Turns out there's actually some value in giving the people who best understand a system some voice in how it runs: schools with unionized teachers generally do a better job than those without.
The teachers that I taught with over the years, the more senior they were, the better they were at teaching. The last high school I was at we had two teachers in their mid 70's who were fabulous.
I am not a supporter of Unions, but they are essential to protect us from people like Mr. Hanauer.
Our salaries are most definitely higher than private school teachers. Private schools pick and choose their students and they do not allow for any behavior problems. That is huge, you have a smaller class size of well behaved students with parents who are supportive.
It makes a world of difference.
Anyone who thinks that we're getting rid of dead wood or something with our teacher-unfriendly policies are fooling themselves. We're losing some of the best teachers, and it will hurt our schools badly.
One hundred years ago, a student who sassed the teacher was out the door. Period. Many students didn't go to school. What the teacher of those classes had was a willing group who listened. What today's teacher has is a anywhere from 20 to 30 percent of students who fight tooth and nail.
Funny, though, that even the hard classes aren't what keep me up at night. It's the testing and common core and VAM and AYP and anti-union crusades. That's what's making teaching a nightmare.