This is part of the reason I’m very much pro school choice. Give a credit to each family to do with what they wish.
It’ll drive down costs and let those who want to do at home teaching stay that way. But I suspect many schools would have immediately switched back to in person. It lets the parents and community decide what’s best, instead of teachers and union heads.
If it’s designed correctly it should increase aptitude and decrease cost. What’s not to like?
It seems you trust them enough to take a very major part in raising your child, but not enough to make a decision about what’s best? I’d like you to elaborate because this view makes it seem like parents view teachers as nannies (who, by the way, should also have a say in whether they want to get exposed to a virus or take it home to their own family).
As a parent and tax payer I’d like to have my child taught in a school by competent people. Not via Zoom by someone who can’t understand that the risks are unbelievably low and kids are being damaged by missing out on school.
And, honestly, your post seems further in that direction. That is, you are furthering the narrative that many teachers are not competent, since they "can't understand the risks.". If they are that incompetent, why are they still teaching?
That aside, 68k is perfectly reasonable for a job with fantastic security, summers off, lots of vacation time where you get to work with children. Also, when I started working as a programmer, my salary was ~72k which is not much more and I had no trouble living off it. Of course the ceiling is higher for me but that's the market's doing.
This comes at the expense of having absolutely no flexibility during the school year and usually plenty of long days & weekends, and summer has things like professional development / continuing education keeping it from being a long work-free block.
It’s not bad but it’s not a compensation game changer. One other thing to remember: for a teacher, being out sick is almost as much work as a normal day. The tempo of a school year means that a lot of people need a couple weeks to unwind at the end of the year.
I'm torn. Both sides of this debate can make pretty good arguments. And I'm particularly swayed by the arguments in Case Against Education.
That said... What is the path forward? I'm just not seeing it.
If salary isn't over a threshold, relative to their workplace, they're eligible for subsidized housing (in a mixed-income development) and food.
That we have necessary people unable to live in the communities they serve is insane. And if we're not going to address it from the salary side, at least we can do something from the expense side.
* Where "essential worker" means any job fulfilling a social function in the local community. Teacher, nurse, police officer, firefighter etc.
Cards on the table, I'm very keen on some sort of UBI. I also have doubts on much of the reporting I've seen surrounding it.
I further think this needs a way to both double down in access and advancement for those with access, while further increasing funding and effort for those that don't. Main belief is that success affords more and more. Such that you want to double down in success, but you also need to use more of that success to lift up everyone.
The premise above was that school choice could fix things. But, for places without capital, how?
Like anyone else, they've mostly chosen the latter.
The point is that teacher unions have too much power, not that teachers are worse or better than other groups - they're not.
It’s 100% about doing less work for the same pay
What does that tell you?
It’s about teachers, not students.
this is a false dichotomy and reeks of political rhetoric. it’s honestly both. teachers desire a safe working environment for themselves AND want to do the best they can to educate students under the circumstances.
How does opposing a vaccine mandate help students? The answer is it doesn’t, its just the union flexing its politics muscle by using the mandate as a bargaining chip.
How does fighting for an exception to the vaccine mandate (one of the few for public sector in CA - LA just fired 1500 city workers) help students?
Instead you refuse to answer it.
It is especially hard on parents whose jobs don't allow working remotely- retail, manufacturing, etc. Why should teachers be exempt when parents are not?
Good point, more Americans should be unionized.
I've worked at public, private and charter schools, and all have issues.
But I can put this out there: I’m not particularly happy about my money going towards religious schools either, but I have known many people in my life who have gone to such schools who I am happy to have known and their educational upbringing has not been to their detriment to the point that I consider it a non-factor in my view of them so: money follows the child (or some variation thereof) and family picks the schooling. If my money is going to be taken from me to fund any amount of schooling, I am a lot happier with that compromise than I am with my money being used to continue the same kind of public schools I attended in a diminished and uncompetitive educational market.
High Schoolers have staged walkouts in response to omicron in some cities.
Seems disingenuous to say only teachers have been heard.
“School choice” isn’t school choice unless I’m free choose to send my kids to the rich district across town or the private school the politicians and elites send their kids to.
People shouldn’t have to choose between “good schools” and “bad schools.” The idea of trying to find a home “with good schools” should be a thing of the past. All schools should good schools. I think that is the goal to work towards, not having parents fight for the too few remaining life-rafts.
Schools will open in neighborhoods that have 8 students and one stellar teacher. You’ll have all the parents coming by and seeing the kids and joining in the education process.
Other parents might want their kid to have a classical education. Other parents might want a traditional Islamic education. Others may want a massive university style education, with half online.
All of these styles can be possible with school choice. I don’t really understand the vitriol. Its better for everyone if everyone is more involved and has a more tailored approach. Even those with special needs, it’s not unreasonable to double the credit. Have them get help.
I think there’s plenty of ways to improve this.
I like the idea in principle, but one challenge I haven't seen addressed is that the cost of educating a student is not uniform. Students on either end of the bell curve with special needs, unstable home situations, no/broken English, exceptional intelligence, ADHD, behavioral issues, etc cost more than average.
Therefore, similar to health insurance, every organization is incentivized to attract cheaper-than-average students/patients and expel or discourage the expensive ones. You typically end up with the most expensive participants dumped onto the public schools/plans which results in a death spiral.
In my experience, most people love this kind of libertarian approach right up until the moment they find out they're going to be one of the expensive ones, at which point they discover a newfound appreciation for public services.
This is your own partisan definition of school choice. And frankly this attitude is why public schools are so terrible. The current system where people are forced to pay for school through taxes and then are forced to go to a specific public school means the system has ZERO reason or incentive to improve or change because their students are more like prisoners in that they have no choice where to go.
In reality school choice creates competition in the education market. If school choice were allowed to exist there would be no bad schools or they would be around for less time because people would vote with their feet and find a school that is worth it. The bad schools would go out of business.
This has already been proven to work with public and private charter schools which are hot beds for innovation and great student outcomes. Charter schools where students aren’t served well exist but they go out of business quickly due to students leaving.
Would it be perfect? No. Would it be better than what we have, most definitely.
And teaching isn't dangerous. Everyone will be exposed to the virus so it hardly matters whether that happens in a classroom or some other setting. The teachers who want to get vaccinated have been for months now.
Workers anywhere need to be able to negotiate with organisational management on roughly equal terms, which means a comparable level of organisational backing. Most civil service management is not elected and nor should it be; making every superintendent or subject head an elected position would cause bigger problems.
> And teaching isn't dangerous. Everyone will be exposed to the virus so it hardly matters whether that happens in a classroom or some other setting. The teachers who want to get vaccinated have been for months now.
That's easy to say when you're not the one having to do it. Not everyone can safely be vaccinated, and not everyone has the same judgement of the risks. If there really is compelling medical evidence to support the position of those who want to return to in-person schooling, then they have nothing to fear from negotiating with the union on equal terms.
Wtf? Why?
Anyone who isn't living in a cabin in the woods is "paid out of public money" to some extent. Most businesses have some government contract somewhere upstream or downstream of them; almost everyone interacts with the tax system, almost everyone is affected by zoning or law enforcement. Why should the employment relationship be a special case, and what conceivable purpose is served by blocking such an arbitrary class of people from unionizing?
This is objectively false.
> Most businesses have some government contract somewhere upstream or downstream of them;
A private business providing services that the government purchased as a market participant is not the same as people who are on the government’s payroll. This is not a small distinction, but if you want me to compromise and consider public contractors ineligible to unionize too, that’s a compromise I am willing to make, but it’s unnecessary.
> almost everyone interacts with the tax system, almost everyone is affected by zoning or law enforcement
Zoning is a can of worms that is outside the scope of this discussion, but I would have plenty to say about how this exactly is abused, in another thread actually on the topic. Needless to say, being the market-based beneficiary of poor laws is everyone’s right as a citizen in our Republic today, in a way I find disagreeable, and if they can manage it. This is also why you shouldn’t also get to be both a voter, and on the government’s payroll, and have a union.
> Why should the employment relationship be a special case, and what conceivable purpose is served by blocking such an arbitrary class of people from unionizing?
Because it is a moral hazard to have a class of citizens who are able to vote for both sides at the negotiating table when what’s at stake is somebody else’s money.
Nonsense. We live in a society which is maintained with public money, and very few businesses would be profitable without that. Heck, money itself is a public institution.
> Zoning is a can of worms that is outside the scope of this discussion, but I would have plenty to say about how this exactly is abused, in another thread actually on the topic.
It's absolutely on topic when you're suggesting that we should apply much stricter rules to employment relations than we apply to every other interaction between citizens and government.
> Needless to say, being the market-based beneficiary of poor laws is everyone’s right as a citizen in our Republic today, in a way I find disagreeable, and if they can manage it. This is also why you shouldn’t also get to be both a voter, and on the government’s payroll, and have a union.
> it is a moral hazard to have a class of citizens who are able to vote for both sides at the negotiating table when what’s at stake is somebody else’s money.
Banning unions does nothing to address that - people are still "on both sides of the table" when negotiating as individuals, they're just a lot more reliant on their individual capabilities. Requiring everyone to do their own legal research and individual negotiations is both grossly inequitable and also could never be a full solution to that kind of issue - if there's some principled problem with citizens negotiating with their governments, that needs to apply to powerful individuals (including but not limited to higher-class government employees) too.
(And again, what's so special about the employment relationship? Surely the same logic applies to residents' associations, or advocacy groups, or professional associations - there are all kinds of groups of citizens that regularly find themselves on the other side of negotiations with those same citizens' elected governments)
That we vote to pay for through our elected representatives; the same people who directly determine budgets, salaries and have political skin in the game to get re-elected at the time of contract negotiation and have firing power.
Public projects are not the same as public salaries. A highway is not drawing a salary from the treasury, but the people who work on it are.
> Heck, money itself is a public institution.
Not necessarily so, and also irrelevant.
> It's absolutely on topic when you're suggesting that we should apply much stricter rules to employment relations than we apply to every other interaction between citizens and government.
The market price of your house going up because of restrictive zoning is not the same as drawing a salary directly from the treasury. Restrictive zoning has other issues, but zoning is only one factor of many which can inform the price of your house, it does not set the price of your house. You are conflating something which is unrelated to working directly for the government.
> Banning unions does nothing to address that - people are still "on both sides of the table" when negotiating as individuals, they're just a lot more reliant on their individual capabilities. Requiring everyone to do their own legal research and individual negotiations is grossly inequitable and could never be a full solution to that kind of issue - if there's some principled problem with citizens negotiating with their governments, that needs to apply to powerful individuals (including but not limited to higher-class government employees) too.
People decide all the time whether unions are actually beneficial for them in the private sector and many times vote against it either by choosing non-union employers where both are an option or by voting for or against joining a union when a unionization vote occurs.
Let’s take an example: Google is a large employer where there has been an effort to unionize the workforce (how is that going by the way? Hadn’t thought about it in a while till I was typing this). They are a private employer, and they earn their revenue from many sources: namely anyone that chooses to pay for ads on their properties, and then variously from other sources which can include government contracts. Government organizations may also choose to pay for ads on Google Search the same as if they purchased ads from elsewhere as they have been known to do from time to time. This does not make Google a public sector employer though: they are a publicly traded but private organization with a Board of Directors to represent their owners interests and an Executive team which is tasked with operating the company including whether to take on or pass on government contracts as they so choose. Taking a dollar, a thousand dollars or a billion dollars in revenue from the Feds does not make Google a corporate serf of the Feds and the owners, Board of Directors, Executive team, Employees and 1099s each have their own rights and interests. A Google employee working on a government project did not elect the Executives who approved the project and his salary, even if he may have elected the Senator that said it was a good idea for Google to handle it.
(That said this should come with the caveat that government projects have their own moral hazards all the time, they’re just usually not this one that we are discussing.)
> And again, what's so special about the employment relationship? Surely the same logic applies to residents' associations, or advocacy groups, or professional associations - there are all kinds of groups of citizens that regularly find themselves on the other side of negotiations with those same citizens' elected governments
Private advocacy groups have to compete with other moneyed interests. Public-sector unions do not. There is no one else that is going to pay government salaries except the government, and they get their money by taking it from people who earned it. Unionized employees of all stripes tend to vote as a bloc because taking collective action is their raison d’être. The government is not approving contracts between private sector companies and private sector unions. They are approving contracts between themselves and public sector unions, and have hiring and firing power over the negotiators at the table representing the public’s interest.
That’s a moral hazard. That is the distinction.
All of that applies to employing people just as much as to other ways of spending public money. (Yes it's hard to fire a public employee - but it's also hard to cancel a public works project).
> Public projects are not the same as public salaries. A highway is not drawing a salary from the treasury, but the people who work on it are.
Public money is spent, private individuals and/or businesses benefit. Whether it's structured as an employment contract or a public works project seems pretty irrelevant.
> People decide all the time whether unions are actually beneficial for them in the private sector and many times vote against it either by choosing non-union employers where both are an option or by voting for or against joining a union when a unionization vote occurs.
Which is their right (I think it's foolish except maybe for upper-class people in fields where individual performance is directly measurable, but it's their choice), but how is that any different for a public employer vs private employer?
> A Google employee working on a government project did not elect the Executives who approved the project and his salary, even if he may have elected the Senator that said it was a good idea for Google to handle it.
What difference does that make though? That executive is hardly going to turn down a profitable contract even if they think it's for something stupid, so you're not bringing in any more accountability on any aspect that's actually relevant. (And in practice a public employee is going to be in a very similar position: there will be several layers of unelected civil service administrators between the person they vote for and the decision about how much they get paid).
> Private advocacy groups have to compete with other moneyed interests. Public-sector unions do not.
There are plenty of moneyed interests opposing public-sector unions.
> There is no one else that is going to pay government salaries except the government, and they get their money by taking it from people who earned it.
Your bias is showing. Many government employees earn their money (including many teachers) and many taxpayers don't.
> Unionized employees of all stripes tend to vote as a bloc because taking collective action is their raison d’être.
Sure, but that's exactly the same for advocacy groups, neighbourhood associations and so on.
> The government is not approving contracts between private sector companies and private sector unions. They are approving contracts between themselves and public sector unions, and have hiring and firing power over the negotiators at the table representing the public’s interest.
Right, but they negotiate contracts or quasi-contracts with all sorts of collective organisations - businesses, business groups, professional associations, residents' associations, advocacy groups - all the time, under the same kind of conditions.
There must be a surplus, at least of qualified teachers, if not quality ones. Otherwise how do we find enough people with a master's degree willing to take 45K a year to teach 25-30 rambunctious kids all day long? It baffles me that we still manage to find people willing to enter the career field, frankly.
Over there you can find educated people who are willing to work in Seely, MT for 30 kUSD/year. On a J-1 visa, with no possibility to settle permanently in the US.
Good luck to all of us.
My school district gets an average of 350 applicants for every open teaching position.
After all they could just go elsewhere or be homeless right? It is after all there freedom to choose: risking their life or homelessness: it’s their choice.
> More than 270,000 public school teachers are projected to leave the profession from 2016 to 2026, according to government data, and recent polling by a prominent national teachers union showed that nearly 1 in 3 teachers said Covid-19 had made them more likely to resign or retire early
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/more-half-tea...
https://www.npr.org/2022/02/01/1076943883/teachers-quitting-...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/teachers-are-quitting-and-compa...
https://www.epi.org/publication/the-teacher-shortage-is-real...
https://www.npr.org/2022/01/14/1073253450/lawmakers-are-rewr...
As GP mentioned, the standard scores for black people, disabled people, and poor people dropped by more than the average. I had my eye on disabled people - and I was disappointed in the change!
We should fund kids not systems.
The wealthier parents hired private teachers and the kids didn’t miss a beat. Even the middle class parents just split the cost across 5 kids and they did class in the park (to align with restrictions).
The poor parents? Well they can’t take time off their jobs or work from home. So they scrambled to find someone willing to watch their kids do online learning. It started with a couple hours per day and now those kids are at least a year behind while their middle-upper class peers and right on track.
Uh what? Do you really not see how racist this is???
As a blanket statement, yes, it is wrong. It is, however, more right than wrong when you look at the statistics.
And by the way, many “people of color” groups outperform white people both academically and economically. Asians Americans, for instance.
Expanding the term POC to include Asians is yet another example of white liberals undermining Black and Latino causes to try to convince themselves that they're not racist, only those nasty conservatives are.
You're entitled to choose a non-public school, to want to divert a public resource to yourself with fewer strings attached, and to want more leverage to disregard teachers' stakes in delivering education. Not everyone would agree with your conclusion that it "should" make things better, or that it's even necessary to make improvements.
How is that? In the US schools are paid for via property tax.
You pay the same property tax to the school whether you have 0 kids in the public school system or 100.
If you choose to pay for private school, you still pay the same amount of tax to the public school system even though you aren’t using it. Only some states have a “voucher” system that lets you have your student’s fees redirects from public school to a private school. About 70% of states don’t have any voucher system so there’s no way to redirect your public school funds to a private school.
Is this right? I thought this point was debated, outside the re-introduction of segregation into the school system.
The opposite happened- almost all of the kids from the city choosing the program were white, and all the kids from the burbs in the program to go to the city schools were black or Latino.
The end result (Which killed the program) was that kids and their families chose an increase in segregation, rather than diversity.
Opt out if you like (there are always private schools), but not with my taxes.
Charter schools are absolutely for-profit businesses, they scam it by having the "non-profit" running the charter school employ a management company that obviously is a for-profit entity. See https://networkforpubliceducation.org/wp-content/uploads/202...
All the evidence also shows that charter schools do not produce better outcomes than regular public schools.
The real reason certain groups want charter schools (aside from grift) is a desire to indoctrinate and teach nonsense as fact.
No, they don't. Charter schools operate as non-default schools within the public school system, they don't get to charge parents at all.
> Here’s an idea: let charter schools make a profit by “being efficient”: they get exactly the same amount of money as a public school
That would be an increase, charter schools typically only get a reduced amount of the per-pupil funding that the default public school would get, with the remainder retained by the host district even though the charter school itself provides for itself the services the district would provide for public schools.
>
You need a great big asterisk on that statement. There's a well regarded charter school about a mile from my house, we considered sending our kids there. They may not actually charge parents money, but you know what they do? They require parents to spend one day a week volunteering. Technically that isn't a charge, but effectively it's exactly that.
Anyone from a family where the parents are necessarily unable to do that cannot attend. So this is a really good way to select for a specific socio-economic group. This also helps inflate grades because most data shows that wealth correlates with academic achievement (for many reasons that aren’t “families are rich because they are smarter than other poorer families”)
Because that's what they typically do. Special needs students who lag behind but are required to be allowed to attend on vouchers get declassified so that schools no longer have to apply resources towards them. They eventually either fail out and thus are no longer their problem, or are withdrawn by parents.
However, your assumptions about the motivations of charter school proponents seems uncharitable. The proponents I know come by their position honestly -- they truly believe that vouchers and charter schools are good solutions to the problems facing our nation's students.
Sure thing, if the federal "defense" budget would also be split up into credits, and each family could decide whether it wants to fund the various wars or do something else with the money.
> decrease cost. What's not to like?
Everything's not to like - not the least of which being your desire to cut salaries (or perhaps just shove children into shabbier schools? Who knows how you want to cut costs).
I'm a parent and the idea that other parents will vote on education worries me. They're too stupid to make good education decisions.
What I described let’s the parents take the money and decide which school is best positioned to educate their children.
My sense is that education budgets are pretty variable by the taxes in a region.
I'm in a Boston suburb, and there are at least five different hospitals with 25 minutes of me, and way more than that if I were planning something ahead of time and could go further.
They all advertise on the sides of buses. They advertise on the highway. In the pages of the New Yorker hospitals far from me advertise their brain surgeons, or that they have cyberknife or all sorts of things. It's insane how many ads for hospitals you see if you look.
Meanwhile, our public school system is very good. The teachers are paid well. And a lot of work is done to ensure equity between the schools, so there isn't a "good school" and a school for all the poor kids.
They won't be able to fine, arrest, jail, or recommend charges to a prosecutor, but outside of that they can do pretty much anything police would (and many things police would not, depending on how busy the department is).
Many event venues will even require hiring an off duty police officer as security when serving alcohol, for example.
Also, it brings competition to teaching... which drives people to work hard(er).
To be clear, I'm in favor of school choice. Just some thoughts.
I admit that there would have to be a system that forces schools to take "undesirables" who can't get accepted anywhere, which is the hard part.