How “illegal” teacher strikes rescued the American labor movement
news.vice.com
news.vice.com
The incentives aren’t aligned properly and there is no negative incentive when a school fails a generation of children. The teacher and admins will just carry on business as usual(rather monopoly) charge a higher fee and deliver a worse product.
Thanks no child left behind! Tying school funding and teacher pay to child test schools is one of the largest blunders this country has made.
You need good quality tests that aren't supplied by book publishers. Ideally you'd test anything, but if tests are unavailable for a particular subject then you have to mandate hours for that subject to keep it from disappearing. You need test security so that the teachers don't cheat.
Instead of just cutting pay, which isn't helpful, you should pay per-student and adjust the number of students per teacher. It is easy to teach a very small group, but very hard to teach a large group. Shift students from bad teachers to good teachers until the quality is equalized. Unfortunately this hits a problem with standardized classroom size. Aside from that though, it would be fine to have one teacher with 9 students and another teacher with 72 students. The teacher with 75 is getting paid 8x as much as the teacher with 9, and the students all get equal quality.
Case in point, look at everyone's favorite "socialist" country: Sweden. Schooling has improved significantly after privatization with a voucher system.
There is evidence that the outcome was an improvement:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130512223637/http://www.ifau.s...
Of course, there's a political debate attached to it and you will find a lot of people to frame it all differently, but the facts are clear: The private schools are superior.
https://tino.us/2011/03/on-the-swedish-voucher-system/
Sinking PISA scores in the last years is probably best explained by a lowering of standards to accommodate, among other things, for a surging population of newly-arrived immigrants.
Then explain the success of schools outside of the US that have similar government based funding?
It is why tenure is a thing - what is true and right may not be popular.
They do get a reward for doing well but it is very long term - if they are successful and society could get better funding and well liked for being a success story.
They may win some battles but I would argue they aren't winning the war, and their emphasis on seinority above all isn't very appealing.
I still see young teachers with new ideas held back by a union that caters to luddite established teachers who are effectively untouchable, don't want to change and enjoy most of the benefits.
American unions focus on seinority > all is the reason I would never want to be a part of them.
This is HN, right? I'd expect someone here to seize on that opportunity, and develop some sort of service to help workers organize themselves, perhaps against the wishes of their union-appointed bureaucrats.
So, one extra teacher workday, barely even worth noting, right? Well, it just so happens that the day selected was the day of the AP Lang exam that year. By the time they saw fit to announce the non-strike, all of the exams had already been ordered and students and teachers had been planning for the normal date. Thanks to the non-strike, the state had to pay $45/exam to get late exams, and it could have caused some students to miss the exam if they had to take a conflicting exam late for a legitimate reason. Oddly enough, College Board wouldn't have charged if it were a real strike.
In general, strike is a tool labor has against capital. Just because capital happens to be provided by taxpayers, how does that warrant a special case handling?
This is pretty much why there are very few public school computer science teachers who do a decent job, since the ones who can legitimately write code can get a much better job at a private company.
When you factor that they only work 2/3 of the year, the value of their pension and healthcare teachers actually make a considerable amount of money.
That being said I’m not sure what the right amount is - I put a great deal of value on education - then again the best private institutions probably pay less than public ones at the k-12 level
When government employee unions negotiate with their employers, they negotiate with a political actors who, if they act right, get support from the union for their next re-election.
The incentives encourage political actors to bend to the unions will to receive donations or endorsements in their next election.
Typically this is called a conflict-of-interest.
Granted, cheaper private schools are more common in the less affluent areas (namely, the South) where it's essentially taken for granted that the moderately well off and above send their kids to private schools. If you're from a wealthy coastal city with public schools good enough that the wealthy are comfortable sending their kids there, then it's understandable why some may associate private schools as being more exclusive to the upper class.
1. https://www.privateschoolreview.com/tuition-stats/private-sc...
You also mention religious schools. Why should a person have to indoctrinated in a religion to receive a good education?
Er, no? Assuming it's tax deductible most families can probably make some lifestyle changes to free up $10k. Sure it might inhibit other goals, like building up saving or consumer spending. But it's a sacrifice that many people can make if they have a strong incentive to do so (like if the local public school is crap). And this is ignoring any sort of subsidy or assistance.
> You also mention religious schools. Why should a person have to indoctrinated in a religion to receive a good education?
I mentioned them in context cheaper private school education. Not to mention, the fact that you immediately leapt from "religious school" to "indoctrination" indicates that you seem to be approaching this with your conclusions decided a priori and are looking to justify them rather than participate in good faith.
Seriously? Do you have a family? Raising kids is really expensive, even without sending them off to public school. After rent, food, clothing, medical care, and transportation, there is not much left.
As for your comments about religious school, I am basing my comments on real the real world experience of having gone to a religious school for 7-years. All of these schools require some type of education about the school’s founding religion. At a minimum, we are talking about a regular class. Many schools require their students to adhere to the standards of the religion during the course of the school day. Please explain to me how this is not indoctrination?
> All of these schools require some type of education about the school’s founding religion. At a minimum, we are talking about a regular class. Many schools require their students to adhere to the standards of the religion during the course of the school day.
And from this, you jump to "indoctrination". I and other family members have been to religious schools as well. One of my sister's closest friends was Jewish, and went to Catholic without any type of issue. And both my sister and I are about as atheistic as you can get. If merely teaching a class about the founding religion counts as indoctrination then this is a very, very permissive definition of indoctrination you're using.
The above commenter immediately claimed that private religious schools are "indoctrination" - despite the previous comment only mentioning religious schools in passing (since they're generally less expensive than secular religious schools). That kind of intense blanket leap to a serious allegation is not indicative of reasonable view on the subject, regardless of one's opinions on public funds going towards religious schools.
Also, I don't believe that you are more invested in the 90% over the 10% unless the 10% is a group you disfavor -- such as parents who refuse to condemn their children to bad public schools if they can help it.
It's oddly transparent to limit your stats to white people.
Government office holders benefit greatly if they take care of the government unions in terms of campaign donations, endorsements, rallies, and so on. Taxpayers not so much.
Why else do government union employees get outsized retirement benefits that have caused disabling debts to local governments?
That is what happens when the taxpayers' negotiator personally benefits from keeping the government unions happy happy.
I think the lesson here is that that they’ve been weakened to the point of irrelevance, people still need to (and will) strike, and it will cause more harm to employers than the system that was intentionally dismantled after the last few decades.
Most of those working in the media have a major conflict of interest when writing about politics.
Anything the press commonly defines as a "labor right" is really a restriction on the employer's right to freely contract.
You are describing the right to own slaves, except that current US law provides slaves with significantly more legal protection than you propose, and the thirteenth amendment limits slavery to criminals.
I feel like this should go without saying, but the article is about illegal strikes, and you seem to be advocating for more aggressive enforcement of anti-work-stop laws.
Since most people do not have the opportunity to support themselves anymore (because they cannot afford farmland or the capital to start their own business), for most people working for someone else is no longer voluntary. Therefore, I think those people must have the right to negotiate fair* working conditions with their employer.
* I realize that the exact definition of what constitutes fair is going to differ between different people and political views. However, I think there are general principles that most people can agree on such as making enough to provide for ones family, a safe work environment, being treated with respect by the employer, and work hours that allow the employee to participate in other aspects of life.
Profit is the dream that drives entrepreneurs to take crazy risks to start businesses. Without that, they would not try, and jobs would not get created.
There is some justification for keeping the profit from getting extreme, to keep customers from being hit with abusive monopoly pricing. The least harmful way to do this is by enforcing the existence of competition, breaking up any business that gains excessive market share. One could draw the line at 15% for example, splitting any business with a greater market share. Another possibility is to persuade businesses to split themselves, perhaps via taxes based on market share. A danger is that innovation slows due to businesses avoiding hitting the market share limit.
Another option is for the state to directly fund open-source software in sectors prone to monopolization. Then there will be competition, and if the open source software wins out and becomes the market standard, no profit gouging.
Employers as a whole have a certain amount that they can afford to spend on labor expenses. Forcing them to spend more on that, or divide that spending between a fewer number of workers to pay each a higher wage, does not raise aggregate wages in the long run.
The former does in the short run, but it comes at the expense of lower capital investment, which results in less company/productivity growth, and smaller future wage gains. The split between labor expenditure, or profit from selling services, and company profits, or profit from delaying compensation and personal consumption to found and invest in companies, has some optimal ratio that maximizes growth in productivity. The aggregate of all interactions of a free market will approach that optimal ratio as a result of the pursuit of profit aligning with the outcome of raising total productivity, while mandates to reduce company profits to raise wages won't. And growth in productivity is the source of almost all wage growth, and is the only sustainable source of wage growth. Sacrificing it is a huge strategic mistake for public welfare.
As for the latter - hiring fewer workers and paying each more - it provides no short term net boost to wages, because the higher per worker compensation is neutralized by fewer workers being hired, and it reduces company performance, and with it, growth in GDP output and future labor expenditures.
As for fairness, the only fair outcome is that both parties are free to accept or reject what the other offers. A fair wage is what the worker's service is actually worth based on supply and demand. Anything else is just some ideological judgment.
It is unfair to use the threat of imprisonment to restrict someone from making an offer in the market. Force should always be used as a last resort, to punish and deter others from violating people's rights, and not as a policy tool to shape consensual human interaction and engineer some ideologically desired social outcome. The use of force means the imprisonment of those who do not comply. This is not a power that should be used against behaviour that is not unambigiously a violation of another party's rights.
>>for most people working for someone else is no longer voluntary
We must work to live. That is the nature of the world. It doesn't mean making an offer in the market, that others are free to accept if it is better than the next best offer they can find, is an act of coercion. Therefore there is no moral justification for prohibiting people from making offers that don't meet some arbitrary minimum standard. It's only ideology, that is designed to rationalize exerting totalitarian control over others, that says otherwise.
People would have to work even if all land was divided equally across all people.
Furthermore, there's no fundamental reason why every person born deserves to share equally in all natural resources. The act of being born does not add value to the world. A family can have 10 children per generation and massively increase the share of natural resources they control under your moral code.
Finally, even if someone's share of natural resources is unfairly small, it doesn't follow that the person offering a job is violating their rights by offering one that doesn't meet some minimum standard.
If you want to make a case that someone is being unfairly denied natural resources, then that should be the issue dealt with, by gathering evidence and proving the case in a court of law. The alleged injustuce shouldn't be used as a flimsy excuse to restrict other people's rights.