I would be a lot more sympathetic to teachers if their pay system wasn't seniority based, or if it wasn't so hard to fire teachers.
It takes a few years to get tenure. Also, note that teachers sign an employment contract for each year they teach. This means that the administration has 3 chances to simply not renew a new teacher's contract if they don't like them.
So, it's only difficult to fire teachers after you've had them working for you for a few years.
And even then, the district can make your life miserable without firing you. They can have someone from the central office sit in and observe you every day. They can give you a lousy schedule, give you too many preps, move you between crummy rooms, or a number of other things to get you to leave.
First, teachers outside of pretty narrow bounds will never be more productive. It takes one teacher to teach 20 students. In 10 years it will take one teacher to teach 20 students. Thus there is no productivity growth while, if you want people to be teachers, you have to eventually pay them more. So assume you don't have a hard time firing teachers; I just found a cute way to save a whole lot of money! Fire everybody with more than 10 years experience, ie all your high salaried employees.
Second, I don't think you'll possibly get good employees without strong unionization. Who would be stupid enough to teach without a union contract? Real people want to do things like own homes, put down roots, start families, and have some job security; that's enormously risky in an area with monopsony employer(s). I'm a software engineer, so there are dozens to thousands of employers in reasonably sized cities, whereas there are typically only one public school district and perhaps a handful of private schools. That's a lot more risk for the employee, since if I have a personality conflict with my boss, there are plenty of other buyers of software engineering. What happens to a teacher if he or she has a conflict with his or her principal? It's not like there are tons of employers around, and if the answer is that employee is just sol, don't expect smart hardworking people with choices to become teachers.
The market can handle delivery of education just fine without complicated unions and pay scales. All we need to do is to ensure that every family can afford to send their kids there (vouchers, or whatever).
Saying, "At my school...." is sort of like saying, "I got a web server to work on my home machine and now I'm ready to handle Amazon level traffic." You gotta think about how it's going to scale. You gotta think about unintended consequences and whatnot. Pointing out an example of how one particular school worked and how it worked well is not an argument for nationwide policy changes.
Edison is a for profit company that run schools in Philadelphia. It used to, I don't know if they do now. Edison has run schools in other districts. Results are mixed as far as I know.
No Child Left Behind has provisions about tutoring and many for profit tutoring companies are making money off of the mandate. Incidentally, one of George Bush's brothers is involved in with a tutoring company. There is a drive to privatize education by going to a for profit model.
For profits (and non profits) don't provide busing. They don't provide school lunches for low income students. The U.S. has dreadful public transportation in most localities and the lack of adequate transportation is a major problem for poor people who get vouchers. For profits don't normally build schools poor neighborhoods. Actually, for profits don't build schools. They get the taxpayers to pay them.
For profits provide workers with sub standard pay and benefits. That's how they become more efficient. For profits provide the corporate leaders with huge salaries though. The realized savings don't occur when one factors in long term damage that will be done.
When you include private education do you include private higher education? Do you include for-profits? Their overall expenditures per student aren't less.
I found the monopsony problem you've pointed out on the employment end of the system quite insightful. Entering an industry with a limited number of employers generally isn't a great idea. However, there's a simpler solution to the problem than more unionization, which in practice requires non-voluntary membership to be effective. I think we'd all be better off if the government continued to fund education for those who can't afford it, but stopped actually running the schools themselves. I don't understand why voucher proposals find such limited support.
A traditional stumbling block (though not the only one) is the question of religious schools. Voucher proposals have historically been seen as ways to get the government to fund religion, leading to various backlashes dating back to the 19th century: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaine_Amendment
A solution could be to only allow vouchers to be used for secular schools, but that runs into opposition from religious conservatives, and it's also unclear if it'd be permissible to exclude all schools run by religious organizations from an otherwise generally available program. I suspect conservative support for school vouchers that allowed religious schools would take a huge nosedive as soon as Islamic schools started taking advantage of them though, which is currently what's causing the Netherlands to rethink its voucher program.
News flash. The government isn't funding anything. The government produces nothing and their only source of income is theft from productive individuals who do produce things.
We would end up with a worse two-tiered system than what we have now.
On the other hand, poor neighborhoods can be more dangerous and involve greater academic and social challenges. The solution is not to measure schools in poor areas against those in good ones and declare them worse because they perform more poorly (due to circumstances beyond teachers' control), but to measure students' baseline ability and then fund and reward relative improvement, rather than on the basis of absolute outcomes.
For example, say you go into a neighborhood on the first day of school and find that only 50% of 10th graders meet expectations for literacy. The best teacher in the world is not going to be be able to bring that up to the 95% level in a wealthy area on the other side of town, but if the proportion of students who are literate rises to 75% by the end of the 12th grade (correcting for dropout %ages), then that's a huge improvement. In economic terms, it's worth adding more funding right up to the point where marginal net gain falls below zero.
There are obviously willing and committed teachers willing to take on these important challenges. Maybe they would do better by setting up nonprofits and applying for funds to establish charter schools instead of abdicating their negotiation power to the national unions.
There is no system you can devise within the bounds of a capitalist society in which people with greater means don't achieve better educational outcomes.
Where my wife grew up, it took one teacher to teach 60 pupils. A class size of 50 was an exceptionally small class size. Several of the countries that best the United States in academic achievement
http://timss.bc.edu/PDF/t03_download/T03_M_Chap1.pdf
have much higher class sizes per teacher than the United States has. It is definitely possible to improve teacher productivity over the low level maintained in the United States. There are whole books on the subject.
http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Gap-Schools-Japanese-Educatio...
http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Schools-David-Perkins/dp/0028740...
http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-Class...
http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...
Actually, there are lots of a cases where underfunded schools improve student performance with more money. There is a strong correlation between school funding level and student test scores.
I'd be happy to look at the examples you can find citations for. In my state, Minnesota, school funding was largely equalized statewide in the 1970s. That political feat was lauded as the "Minnesota miracle," and got our then governor on the cover of Time magazine as a can-do, innovative governor. With special funding adjustments for high-poverty areas and special funding for school districts to promote racial integration, the inner-city school districts of Minneapolis and St. Paul, the two largest school districts in Minnesota, actually get MORE funding per pupil than most other school districts in the state.
But after a generation of this experiment, the results are disappointing. On the whole, schools anywhere in Minnesota are probably better than schools in most places in Mississippi, which is why many observers are guessing at the macro level that funding makes a difference.
But within Minnesota, both the Minneapolis and St. Paul districts are laggards in academic achievement, and most disturbingly to people like me who hope for all school pupils to learn and thrive, the "achievement gap" between "white" pupils and "pupils of color" is wider in Minnesota than almost anywhere else. That last observation is especially disturbing because Minnesota has no history of de jure school segregation or of impairing the civil rights of black people. (The first black graduate of the University of Minnesota graduated before my late grandfather was even born.) Something is seriously awry in the Minneapolis Public Schools, despite adequate funding, and when I read in the local newspaper, as I did a few months ago, that a union-endorsed candidate for the Minneapolis School Board has NEVER lost for as long as the schoolteacher union has been organized as a collective bargaining unit, I think that more than just funding levels are a problem here.
Regarding personality conflicts, having some teachers fired because they can't get along with their boss is a small price to pay to get rid of the worst teachers easily. Principals should be incentivized to keep talented teachers, and thus discouraged from firing them for petty reasons.
No? Well then I guess we're going to have to pay people more as they have more seniority, just like virtually every other industry.
There are obvious downsides to a seniority system. Younger teachers tend to get offered poorer contractual terms during collective bargaining, be handed the worst assignments (when they have the least experience), and are sometimes even bullied by older teachers with much greater authority and job security. I feel this is true of seniority systems in general, but in education the potential consequences have particularly wide-ranging implications for society. While we don't want to lose skilled veteran teachers, we don't want to raise the barriers to entry too high for new entrants to the profession either. Over longer periods, that leads to a succession problem.
I'm less convinced by your argument about monopsony. You mention that there are thousands of employers in cities (plural) for software engineers, but then refer to a single public school district with a handful of private schools, as if teachers were chained to the first city they work in. On the other hand, there are about 6 million teaching jobs in the US, vs. maybe a million software engineering jobs (going by memory from BLS data). And since, as you say, k-12 education necessarily involves a fairly low student-teacher ratio, the demand in that job market is very predictable based on demographics. While instructional methods may be disrupted by technology (and ought to have been disrupted far more than they have been up to now, if you ask me), a good part of junior education is about social skills and learning to find and function as part of a non-familial social group. Even if we could put a holodeck in every classroom tomorrow along with all other pedagogical disiderata, teachers would still be needed to manage kids' behavior and needs in more or less the same proportions as today. I think that number can be a bit higher than 20 (I grew up with class sizes of closer to 30, and it was fine), but there are only so many children that an adult can supervise and assist effectively.
The idea behind this is that one should consider that a bad teacher is far more likely to fail his students (as lon as he doesn't control the exams), while a good teacher will send his students to the best univerisities/high schools/jobs availiable.
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/03/05/why-we-must-fire-bad-teac...
Likewise, some places have very high academic standards, and in other places creationism is considered a valid element in science currricula. Academic quality is not strongly correlated to unions' bargaining ability, as far as I can tell.