Unions
dilbert.com
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Let's say some soldiers start striking during a war for better pay. That puts the country in an immediate danger as the enemy advances and potentially causes irreparable harm (a change that cannot be undone). Even if one can retake the positions given up during the strike, many will die doing so. Clearly, there's a problem there.
Now let's say some teachers start striking in September. Accepting Adams' premise that an uneducated populace is a threat to national security, what affect do striking teachers have on national security? Well, maybe those students have class from October through July that year or they loose a few weeks of schooling. The difference is that the harm is not irreparable. The harm is merely a delay or, at absolute worse, a very marginal harm. In fact, any harm is probably about the same as moving from one school district to another. Different schools teach in slightly different orders and in a slightly different way and so when moving schools, a student might loose out on a small portion of learning just as they would during a strike.
Others can argue whether unions are good or bad, but I think there's a clear difference between the irreparable harm that can be caused by a military strike when compared with the reparable harm caused by a teacher strike. So, rather than September to June, students have an October to July school year one year. There's a distinct difference there.
Now, before one says, "well, what about strikes during peacetime", the military operates under a readiness principle. While I don't believe that countries aren't lining up to attack the US, the whole point of a military is to be ready for that possibility. So, it's peacetime, the army is on strike and then someone attacks. By the time you order the strike to stop (due to it no longer being peacetime), irreparable harm could already be done. Striking soldiers wouldn't be on bases doing drill exercises. They might be at home thousands of miles away from. In fact, Israel fought a war somewhat like this. During Yom Kippur, religious Jews don't eat, don't use electricity, and don't work. That's the perfect time to attack - most of the military was home and wouldn't get fast word that an attack had occurred and some wouldn't do anything about it even if they heard for religious reasons. Suffice it to say, a union on strike could provide an attacker with a similar advantage. Soldiers aren't on base, some might not come back if ordered to end the strike, some might not hear about it immediately, etc.
The difference is irreparable vs reparable harm. A strike by a teachers' union can be repaired by teaching a bit into the summer and the harm caused by that lack of teaching already happens to students when they move schools and have a small mismatch in the curricula. I really love the premise that education is essential to national security because I agree that trade and education create stability that means war is very unlikely. I just don't see the harm caused by a teacher strike to be the same as the harm caused by a military strike.
I find it very difficult to believe that the military and NLRB couldn't find a set of rules to govern military strikes (doh!) that wouldn't jeopardize our national security.
I'm not saying that I think the Military should be able to unionize, they work under a whole different set of rules and values then the rest of us. I just find your argument a bit lacking.
"When I started at IBM there was a dress code, that was an informal oral code of white shirts. You couldn't wear anything but a white shirt, generally with a starched collar. I remember attending my first class, and a gentleman said to me as we were entering the building, are you an IBMer, and I said yes. He had a three piece suit on, vests were of the vogue, and he said could you just lift your pants leg please. I said what, and before I knew it he had lifted my pants leg and he said you're not wearing any garters. I said what?! He said your socks, they're not pulled tight to the top, you need garters. And sure enough I had to go get garters."
http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.html
It wasn't just the US, the UK was also very puritanical.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Conviction_for_inde...
Claiming that these things were restricted to teachers, or have changed because of teachers unions is nothing but the post-hoc fallacy.
The difference is that you don't have the entire town calling the CEO of IBM to get an employee fired for explaining what a condom is. While the same social norms were behind both corporate rules and also rules for school teachers, the rules for school teachers were many times stricter because of much greater pressure from the community. And if you look at the union rules for firing teachers, it's pretty clear that they were crafted in part to make it more difficult for a teacher to get fired due to a few parents putting pressure on the principal. Because if these rules didn't exist, then most principals would take the easy out and fire that teacher every time regardless of whether or not they actually did anything wrong. Because unlike at IBM, the principal doesn't lose any money for firing a good teacher; all that happens is they get rid of a headache, so the incentives are aligned to reward principals for harming students. That's why the protections currently offered by the unions are needed.
In the same era he is discussing (most likely < 1967 [1]), no one would tolerate interracial dating from a newspaper columnist, homosexuality from a money manager or non-whiteness from the CEO of the #3 Bank in the US. In the present era, Paul Krugman, Peter Thiel and Vikram Pandit all have jobs. Can we attribute that to teachers unions as well?
As for firing the occasional good teacher, it's true that schools currently have no incentive to do a good job teaching students. This is a much bigger problem than firing unpopular teachers. Guess which organizations are the biggest proponents of keeping things that way?
[1] Pre 1967, interracial marriage was illegal in some states (Virginia, at least). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_v._Virginia
They applied to all professions, but not at the same time. Check out this possibly-false-but-accurate set of rules for teachers from 1915: http://www.pchswi.org/archives/schools/teacher_conduct_1915....
Sure these rules applied to every other profession as well. The difference is that they probably stopped applying to other professions 200 years earlier than they stopped applying to teaching.
"Guess which organizations are the biggest proponents of keeping things that way?"
No argument there, I'm not defending the unions, just pointing out that historically schools have been extremely abusive toward their employees. Sure the value are different today, but the psychology, social pressures, and incentives are all the same. So if the protections given to teachers were completely repealed teachers might get screwed over for different things, but there would be much injustice nonetheless. But yeah, obviously I don't agree with making it impossible teachers who are bad at teaching, I just think that if there were no protections at all then firings for social or political reasons would become so commonplace that it would drive talented people away from the field. (Granted, talented people are already kept out of teaching today by the unions and a million other policies, but still.)
http://www.autotropolis.com/wiki/index.php?title=Ford
As I pointed out, the rules concerning interracial dating applied until 1967 in Virginia to people of every profession. The rules concerning men wearing garters at IBM applied in the 60's. And according to my late grandmother, you could be fired from a job on the police force for marrying a Jew (I'm not sure of the exact date, but it was definitely post 1915).
So no, the rules didn't stop applying to other professions 200 years earlier than to teaching. Things were just really different in 1915 and even 1970 than today.
If you look back through the primary documents relating to education though it's pretty crazy how much of a role religion plays. For example, the first compulsory education law in the United States was the Ye Old Deluder Satan Act, the first half of which I'll paste below:
"It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures, as in former times by keeping them in an unknown tongue, so in these latter times by persuading from the use of tongues, that so that at least the true sense and meaning of the original might be clouded and corrupted with love and false glosses of saint-seeming deceivers; and to the end that learning may not be buried in the grave of our forefathers, in church and commonwealth, the Lord assisting our endeavors. It is therefore ordered that every township in this jurisdiction, after the Lord hath increased them to fifty households shall forthwith appoint one within their town to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and read, whose wages shall be paid either by the parents or masters of such children, or by the inhabitants in general, by way of supply, as the major part of those that order the prudentials of the town shall appoint; provided those that send their children be not oppressed by paying much more than they can have them taught for in other towns."
Essentially the reason why it started becoming compulsory for town to build schools is that the government thought that children, if left to their own devices, would be corrupted by satan. And these same beliefs are also the basis of how we treat not only our children, but also our school teachers right up to this day. Hardly a week goes by in the US where there isn't a story about a teacher being fired for having a picture of themselves drinking on Facebook, breaking up an assault on a gay student, assigning a book that mentions sex, etc. Of course this mostly happens in small towns in the south; the more 'enlightened' areas of the country have already mostly switched to having their teachers teach f om entirely pre-made curricula geared toward passing standardized tests, a system which was implemented partly to prevent these 'problems' from occurring.
Also, if I remember correctly even pg once commented that the reason he wasn't allowed to give his high school graduation speech is that the principal wouldn't have been able to get him fired if the parents complained.
What's striking to me is the unions of government employees is legal in any way, shape, or dorm.
I'm pretty sure that private schools here in the US remain non-unionized.
The key point was that this wasn't his idea. He solicited topics for debate from the students in the class, those two were chosen as the topics.
This got misconstrued by some parents who were offended as he pushed us to consider these questions becuase he was liberal, and thus was bringing his political beliefs into the classroom.
I ended up being the lead on the team that defended torture and depleted uranium (and we won), and somehow the more difficult debate actually ended up being the one I had at the school board meeting defending him.
The topic was proposed by a student in the class who had actually thought about it beforehand, no one else had any good ideas.
The "winner" of the debate was determined by a panel of other teachers (part of the reason he got in trouble the teachers were "ruling" on gov't policy). Nobody seems to understand that the people (me and a few others) defending the US's policys could actually win. Everyone assumed that it was biased by his politics such that obviously the result would be anti-American. It was actually quite fun. Though I'd say that the reason my group won was largely becuase in 2006 a lot less was known about Gitmo. We could do a lot of "you can't prove that X Y or Z is happening, that is just conjecture", that we wouldn't be able to do today.
As a side note, I'm firmly in the anti-toture and anti-DU camp, but I always find it more interesting in debate to side with the group you disagree with.
Torture is a topic that lends itself to emotional reasoning. How can you be such a meanie? How can _you_ put children at risk while terrorists are running free?
DU also lends itself to sloppy reasoning. People take for granted that it is a radioactivity problem when it's actually a heavy-metal toxicity problem. Radioactivity is more emotional.
My main point is that there are cases where the private sector can do without unions, whereas the public sector schools cannot[1].
[1] At least in California I haven't heard of a single non-unionized public school.
I have yet to see anything persuasive as to relevance.
That is, why is it any different from any other public employment? My understanding is that civil service jobs have specific legal (aka politically-sourced) protections without resorting to techniques from the private sector.
ETA: Moreover, politically-motivated firings aren't necessarily arbitrary, though they're obviously not based on merit. The unionized system doesn't appear to be merit-based, either.
A regulation of the nature you describe would potentially harm the public - an employee might be harming the public under conditions D, but would be unable to be fired.
I'm not sure why you put your faith in the professional judgement of the teacher rather than the school principal.
Why?
If you're being paid by tax dollars, taxpayers should be able to fire you for any reason that they please. If you don't like those conditions, work for someone else who offers the conditions that you'd like.
Yes, your fellow tax payers may well disagree with you about how to spend tax money. That's how democracy works. If you don't want "those people" to decide how to spend "your" money, perhaps you should carefully consider when you pay directly vs via govt.
I agree. The rub is that it's not usually the taxpayers making that decision, but their elected representatives.
I believe there's already a commonly applied differentiation between appointed and civil service[1] positions.
[1] I don't know if these are the actual terms, so corrections are welcome.
Sorry - you don't get to hide behind representatives.
> I believe there's already a commonly applied differentiation between appointed and civil service[1] positions.
While there is a difference, the "you can't do things that piss off the voters" rule applies to both.
It was called the "spoils system" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system), it turns out to be a major vector of abuse by elected officials, and is the reasons the US civil service has safeguards for dismissing civil servants.
There are no technical fixes for social problems.
Further, we've had teachers' unions for generations. (AFT was founded in 1916) But every now and again, there's a flurry of stories about how education is 'broken', and teachers' unions are the problem.
This is all followed and subsumed by the stories about how we all know schools are broken and teachers unions are the problem (begging two questions in the classical sense), but charter schools (specifically) are the solution.
(Despite studies having shown since the last round of this meme, that while some charter schools are superior most are inferior, and overall their average performance is notably lower than the public schools they're supposed to 'fix'.)
It's enough to make you wonder where it all comes from.
On the other hand, I've never actually met anyone who was in the military for money except for those in the ROTC - i.e. those capable of getting a college education that would put them in the segment of the population with lower unemployment than average.
Most people I know in the military joined because it was the best option available, school, housing, and clothing is taken care of. And with signing bonuses and hazard pay they have plenty of money to send home to help family out.
Don't kid yourself for a second if you think the military doesn't recruit heavily in middle America for those reasons. They do very well in places like detroit, south Philly, small towns throughout the bible belt.
Edit: And again, correct me if I'm wrong here, but I'm pretty sure there are lots of different kinds of people in the military. Your family has a culture of serving, and lots of outside opportunities it sounds like, and that's great. But there are lots of people who join up who didn't have the same opportunities they had.
Do you think it's dishonorable for them to serve in part because they didn't have access to money for college, or a good job?
1) I live in New York, our house overlooks what was the smoldering ruins of the WTC. That was about 4 of them right there
2) Our family has been in the military for generations
3) One wanted to be a medic, not sure why but it was his calling? I guess he can be an EMT after but he has been in for 10 years so I don't think he is leaving the military until they kick him out.
Money was never really an issue for any of them. They make the least by far of anyone in the family, they certainly would have made more if they did like the rest of us and didn't go.
Although I might be biased because I heavily considered the military and decided not to specifically because it didn't pay well enough.
I'm sure some do for money, but I think that is overblown by people who simply don't understand why someone would want to serve. I can also tell you that most of the people in it for money are in and out, but the people who stay long term have reasons other than money.
Mr. Spock would've immediately made this distinction. He also would've objected to the whole "teachers union -> bad education -> bad economy -> bad military" handwave. I like Dilbert, but as I've said before this is why Scott is writing cartoons and not proofs.
If government employees believe they're getting the shaft, they can form PACs to get their champion into power. That puts the issue in front of the voter/taxpayer more clearly.
Here's a great free market perspective from Prof. Charles W. Baird: http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2009/Bairdlabor.html
Indeed.
I can't imagine a credible excuse for "bargaining" with your fellow taxpaying citizens, except through the electrocal process.
And there are plenty of civilian employees working for the armed forces that can join unions as much as they like and presumably cause quite a bit of chaos if they go on strike.
Is the argument that teacher unions should be illegal because they somehow stifle education? That seems insane, isn't it a fundamental right to join whatever organisation you wish, not just the ones the government likes?
And there are lots and lots of countries with teachers unions that outrank the US in various quality of education rankings (e.g. Finland), so it doesn't seem like teachers unions are a big barrier to higher quality education.
But you do have the right to select any school you like here, which is considered some sort of extreme right wing thing in the states as far as I can tell. Although free choice of schools has it's own share of problems...
I agree with you on this, but unions gain power from pro-union laws that enforce things like not allowing hiring non-union workers among other things, so it isn't as simple as you state. Without the legal backing, just joining an organization doesn't have much effect. This changes it from a freedom issue to legal policy issue.
Simply: we don't demand the best from our kids anymore.
Studies have shown that good schools and good educators do matter, but what they all highlight, bold and underscore, is that parents and culture matter so, so much more. 'Good homes' and 'good parents' absolutely dwarf the effect that 'good schools' and 'good teachers' have.
And we're just running out of 'good homes' and 'good parents' that care about the results. We've retained a ritual of schooling, but increasingly we just don't give a shit about the outcome. And we're just reaping what we've sown.
I think we can fiddle around with the details but until we actually open up some sort of market and competition the problem will simply never be fixed. Centralized management doesn't work; schools aren't an exception.
Doesn't mean that I want everyone to have to pay for schools. Vouchers are at least a decent idea, even if they still distort the market and raise prices. But without some ability for parents to use the tools of the market to beat low performing schools, possibly unto them going out of business and letting other schools start, we're not going to see improvement. All incentives right now are aligned towards looking like they are improving, not actually improving, and that is the only possible result you're going to get from mandates from above.
That's precisely backwards. Parents expectations are the only thing you can 'do'. And it's the one thing that studies consistently re-affirm as the most important component. Demand more. Help more. Impart a love for learning and exploring. An appreciate for work.
Yes, if the school sucks, maybe you have to work harder with your kid. And if the community sucks, maybe you have to work even harder still. But that work will bear fruit.
As opposed to signing your kid up at the school across town and staying just as disinterested as before. Thinking that 'shopping' schools is helping is precisely the wrong approach.
> "no matter what you put in, you get the same output."
And that's demonstrably false. The families that put in more, get more. The students that put in more, get more. Parent interest and effort and child interest and effort are the most important factors; more important than economic stability, more important than school quality or teacher quality.
The question of why we're getting a certain class of person when they hit 18 is a different question from what the schools are doing and how well they are doing it, and if you want to actually improve schools it's important to stay focused on that task. If the only solution to "improving schools" is to improve parental involvement then I for one seriously question what the schools are bringing to that process at all, and if they are to be intended for merely augmenting a parent-directed education they are grotesquely ill-suited for that right now.
(I say this as someone actually planning very seriously on home schooling my kids, so that's how I look at schools. In fact they can provide a couple of services and as I understand it they are legally obligated to do so, but if you actually want a parent-directed education they are still almost useless.)
Based on your message I don't think you understand the theory behind school choice, either (and I'm explicitly labeling it a "theory", though at this point I think it's a pretty safe one). The important thing about shopping schools, and indeed the important thing about capitalism in general, is the second-order effects of the policy. (This is why so many people have such a fundamentally hard time wrapping their head around the concept of a free market. The far more viscerally appealing but fatally flawed first-order theories would be dead by now if it weren't for this, instead of hanging around wrecking up the global economy as they do now.) The point is not that you can move your child from one crappy school of today to another crappy school of today. The point is that you can actually drive crappy schools out of business, while meanwhile another good school can actually start up and succeed if they are good. It's a second-order effect of creating a highly competitive selection process that produces a pool of schools that are better in general, not merely the right to send your kid to a slightly-better school.
Yeah, and my argument is that is the part that has really changed in the last few generations. In the school, at least in my area, is all but frozen in time since I went through the public schools. Yet the test scores are dropping. I guess it's possible the teachers have all gotten worse, but what sticks out to me is the attitudes of students and parents.
> "Based on your message I don't think you understand the theory behind school choice"
No, I get it. But what I also understand is how little the school and the teacher matter, comparatively.
Put it this way: say we're updating a house to use less energy during the winter months. You're saying we could hang better insulation all around the house and goose up efficiency 8-10%. I don't disagree at all.
I'm saying maybe we should focus on the windows, since they're the biggest problem areas. And with a lot less money, effort and potential for collateral problems, we could boost efficiency around 40+%. You don't say you disagree either.
But where we're not seeing eye to eye, is where you want to start taking down the siding first.
Addressing the cultural problem is lower risk, lower cost and higher return. And if we don't do it, we're still going to have an educational problem when we're done rolling out school choice.
Second-order effects, second-order effects, second-order effects. When schools actually respond to more effort and it has some sort of visible effect on a child's education, more people will care. Incentives matter. The current system absorbs all of a parent's care and hammers it flat into the same basic mediocre product, suppressing it instead of amplifying it. A caring parent may do better than an uncaring one, but nowhere near enough better. Unfortunately, not investing a lot into the system at that point is perfectly locally rational.
How do you propose to fix the culture problem? The same-old, same-old first order solution where you appropriate some money and run some ads exhorting people to care more about schooling? New programs with the sweet, sweet intentions and nobody even examining the question of whether do anything because everybody's too busy feeling good about themselves? Paying people to care more, perhaps by incentivizing good grades? We've tried all those and more. It's not like "it's a culture problem" is exactly a new idea, and it's an easy one for "the system" to deal with because it does involve just what I said (money and government programs, for better and for worse not hard to push through), a solution very easy for the system to deploy. It won't work until schools actually magnify efforts instead of squashing them, and no amount of central mandating is going to get us there.
Cultural issues like schools aren't houses. That's first-order thinking. They're life forms, second order and so on. They react to your decisions, they do not passively consume them. With those sorts of systems it's actually quite common for the straightest path from here to there to be anything but simply striking out in what is most obviously the direction of the goal and pushing as hard as you can. If it were that easy, we wouldn't have a problem in the first place!
Of course, parents choose schools that they can get their children to, so it will probably be nearby.
Not sure what other states do.
That said, they aren't a magical panacea by any means - I've worked with a few of them professionally and haven't seen any amazing benefit over public or private schools.
Personal anecdote: I grew up in a small town in ND where there are not a lot of socioeconomic disparities. Almost everybody was lower-middle class, with a few very poor. Everybody went to the same school and had the same teachers. It should not come as a shock that those who did well in school also had parents that were supportive and themselves educated. Those who did poorly were generally children of uneducated blue collar and farm workers. While poor teacher quality may have some effect on student achievement, I suspect factors outside of schools' control play a much larger role.
The military has incredibly strict rules for advancement and compensation that are very union-like. They have defined ways to make a grievance. They get pretty good benefits and pension. I'm not sure that they'd choose to unionize or what exactly it would get them.
There is, of course, the job itself, which they have zero control over, and would probably not be able to negotiate even if they had a union.
South Korea, Singapore, and many other countries don't have this problem. Why? Because being a teacher there is a good job with good benefits. Benefits the private sector can barely touch. Instead we are left with the PE teacher teaching maths because all the good math teachers are working for Google.
What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart? http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120425355065601997.html
This suggests that school choice might be a good idea, and that Finland's unions might be very different from our unions.
And saying that unions need to be reformed in different directions is very different from saying that unions need to be done away with.
http://www.somdnews.com/stories/03032010/entetop162900_32193...
(The richer suburbs, e.g. Charles and St. Marys spend $3-5k/student less than Baltimore schools.)
There's a considerable amount of research done on the effects and nature of funding disparities, if you haven't looked into it, I'd recommend it.
http://www.bcps.org/offices/PAYROLL/pdf/scales/TABCO-12-Mont...
http://www2.ccboe.com/employment/Teacher-SalaryScale-1011.pd...
http://divisions.smcps.org/hr/sites/divisions.smcps.org.hr/f...
I've heard many assertions that inner city and other underperforming schools are underfunded. But whenever I go to look them up, and compare them to the rich suburbs, they seem to be wildly overfunded. Baltimore seems to be better funded than the rest of Maryland. Newark and Trenton public schools are funded better than most of NJ, and perform terribly.
But hey, you've got vague allusions to a "considerable amount of research". That's more useful than hard numbers.
There's also the issue, unaddressed, of extra per-student costs. For instance, special needs students can be very expensive, often requiring one-on-one instruction, which can greatly skew the per-student costs.