By Request: Teacher’s Unions
New Haven Dan wants to know: “Teacher unions, good or bad. Discuss.”
I think the answer is clearly good. In a specific context of a jurisdiction where you have high levels of funding and relatively strong unions, the main valence of union power is going to be to shift education policies at the margin in the interests of the teachers rather than in the public interest. You can see this in good school systems (Massachusetts) and you can see it in bad school systems (DC). But that’s not to say that if you ditched the unions you’d be in a paradise. Instead, you’d wind up with poorly funded school systems that make entering the teaching profession unattractive with bad results following. We actually have plenty of states in the U.S. without powerful teacher unions, generally in the South, and it doesn’t lead to good schools.
It’s just important to think of these things on two levels. If you’re a well-meaning person put in charge of some public agency then of course your efforts to improve agency performance will in some respects clash with what representatives of your workforce want to do. That’s a first-order perspective that makes them look bad. Then there’s a more meta level where you need to ask whether or not systematically things would work better were the workforce disempowered. And I think here the answer is no—it would be harder for your agency to recruit staff, it would be harder to secure funding for it, it would be harder to raise the salience of the issues your agency works on, etc.
80 Responses to “By Request: Teacher’s Unions”
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January 10th, 2009 at 11:10 am
I don’t think it is the unions role to produce a good school, it is a necessary component but other things are needed as well. Just as you can’t blame the UAW for American car companies making crappy cars, management has to take a big share of the blame.
Unions do ensure, however that workers will make a living wage: workers in unions made 28% more than non union workers in 2004 according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics
January 10th, 2009 at 11:14 am
Leaving aside whether teaching unions are on the whole good or bad (I happen to think they are good), I wonder if a better question is whether education reform that antagonizes teachers is ever going to be productive. On the one hand, there are good ideas that teacher’s unions support: universal pre-school, higher teacher pay, more teacher support etc. And on the other hand for any intervention to be successful teachers have to buy in. If we’re really interested in improving education, why not move in areas of consensus and avoid huge fights that will end in nothing.
January 10th, 2009 at 11:25 am
I believe that public sector unions are always bad, because the main restriction on a union (the necessity that the unionized business make a profit so it doesn’t go under) does not apply.
For most jobs, the unions and management have to come to an agreement that is realistic, because if the union asks for more than the company can actually afford, the company goes under and takes the union with it – whereas if management asks for unrealistic concessions, the union can threaten to shut down the business by not working and therefore raising the cost of doing business unacceptably.
With the public sector, the government can make up shortfalls simply by forcing people to pay them more, seeing as governments are funded mainly by taxes rather than by fees for sevices. So the unions have too little restriction on them.
January 10th, 2009 at 11:25 am
The recruitment is the key. Here in NYC we already have shortages of teachers willing to teach in troubled areas. If you take away teachers rights, you will have absolutely nobody. I come from a family of teachers…My mom was a union rep (side not, unions don’t just rep the teachers, my mom was a Para-professional, think pro T.A. for special Ed, and was the rep as well as in the union. My brother taught in the city for two months, quit and went to jersey charter school. He probably wouldn’t have even attempted NYC is it weren’t for the Union.
January 10th, 2009 at 11:26 am
I apologize for how terribly that was written. I’ve been awake for 30 hours now.
January 10th, 2009 at 11:28 am
With the public sector, the government can make up shortfalls simply by forcing people to pay them more, seeing as governments are funded mainly by taxes rather than by fees for sevices. So the unions have too little restriction on them.
I think the mechanism there is the elections. Eventually whatever taxes pay for the schools will get to the point where nobody wants to pay them, and they will elect those who will ensure they don’t go up, or who will bring them down. I guess that is the “market” in a public sector ordeal.
January 10th, 2009 at 11:41 am
A similar question:
Teaching Certification through Ed departments in Colleges and Universities: Good or Bad.
January 10th, 2009 at 11:45 am
Leaving aside whether teaching unions are on the whole good or bad (I happen to think they are good), I wonder if a better question is whether education reform that antagonizes teachers is ever going to be productive. On the one hand, there are good ideas that teacher’s unions support: universal pre-school, higher teacher pay, more teacher support etc. And on the other hand for any intervention to be successful teachers have to buy in. If we’re really interested in improving education, why not move in areas of consensus and avoid huge fights that will end in nothing.
January 10th, 2009 at 11:48 am
It is a little disingenuous to say because the South has weaker unions and weaker schools, weaker unions are responsible. Weak unions could simply be a symptom of an electorate who is less concerned with public education. What you really need to find are two demographically similar cities that both value education equally but treat their teachers’ unions differently.
It is really not that hard to think of examples where a strong teachers’ unions support either cost ineffective (e.g. small class sizes) or counterproductive (e.g. less accountability) policies not in the public’s interest. Taking into account your meta-level problem to what degree should we balance teachers’ empowerment and these conflicting pro-union policies?
January 10th, 2009 at 11:49 am
I have some serious concerns with public sector unions in general. In today’s American society they may be necessary, but at best a necessary evil.
The best argument that I see for labor unions, in general, is that they are a necessary check on the greed of employers and business owners. In a capitalist society, the general tendency is for owners of businesses to try to maximize their profit, which usually means pushing wages as low as the market will bear. In the 19th century, we saw how that leads to exploitation and immiseration of workers. Labor unions are absolutely necessary, in a capitalist society, in order to counteract that tendency. By allowing workers the chance to pursue their self interest at the same time that capitalists pursue theirs, we can (in theory) achieve some sort of balance so that workers are not too heavily exploited. It’s not a balance that I particularly like, given that it relies on using the self-interest of one group to balance the self-interest of another, but it’s better than no balance at all.
The problem is that in public sector companies, the goal is not to pursue private profit, but rather to serve the common good. The self-interest of the workers is thus pitted against the common good, which is a much more problematic situation- it isn’t just the owners and capitalists who have to make concessions to the workers, but the people as a whole. The unions here are resisting, not the greed of owners, but the desire of the government to reasonably allocate its budget.
It’s true that the government does have a tendency to try to keep costs and taxes low (although this constraint is a lot “softer” than the self-interest of private companies) so labor unions are probably still necessary, but their justification is considerably weaker and more problematic than in the private sector. If I was involved in designing an ideal society, there would probably be no public sector unions (and in the private sector, cooperative worker ownership would fill the need that unions fill in this country.)
January 10th, 2009 at 11:50 am
Is there any reason to think that we could have a public education system if it were funded on a fee for service basis? I can’t think of any. But then I also do not understand by using tax dollars to fund public education isn’t properly understood as public investment. One can quibble about how much of a public investment a given segment of society wishes to make—Tim’s right, that’s called politics rather than extortion.
Down in Texas–where I live and teach–we don’t have teachers unions and hence teachers, even good ones, have little or no protection from administrative abuse and, as far as I can see, little if no say in how schools as organized, save in their private capacity as taxpayers and voters. As far as I can tell, most adminstrators down here have not taught much if ever.
January 10th, 2009 at 11:54 am
Anybody who thinks disempowering teachers is a good idea understands nothing whatsoever about teaching, and consequently should STFU. (Not that they ever do.)
Perhaps there are mechanisms other than unions to ensure that teachers are empowered, but I have yet to hear a serious proposal for one. Most conservative “reformers” just want to turn them into Taylorized drones.
January 10th, 2009 at 11:54 am
The extension of this is the union is pitted against the publics willingness to allocate resources…and they have the ability to make the changes…elections, school boards, etc. So they aren’t just pitted against the government, but against the voters, who are also the teachers and also the students parents.
January 10th, 2009 at 11:58 am
As I understand it, there are teacher’s unions and there are teacher’s unions. To an extent found in almost no other industry they vary greatly in their effectiveness.
January 10th, 2009 at 11:59 am
gordon gekko at 9 writes:
It is really not that hard to think of examples where a strong teachers’ unions support either cost ineffective (e.g. small class sizes) or counterproductive (e.g. less accountability) policies not in the public’s interest. Taking into account your meta-level problem to what degree should we balance teachers’ empowerment and these conflicting pro-union policies?
This presumes, rather than elucidates, a definition of the public’s interest. As far as I can tell, I don’t particulalry agree. Most of the measures put in place to increase accountabilty, at least those which have consequences for my work for instance, don’t really have anything to do with accountability. We just count a lot of things because they can be counted in the same sorts of ways again and again; this may be great for administrators, but it isn’t very good for education as far as I can tell. Equally smaller classes are a lot easier to work with and a lot harder to mess up, IMHO.
January 10th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Djeri,
This may be a tough question but if you could do it, what percentage of teachers would you say at your school are good teachers? And what percentage would you say should be fired tomorrow?
January 10th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Djeri,
Is it really an unreasonable assumption that a union will work in their best interests and sometimes these interests will conflict with those of their employer (the public)? But even Matt agrees with me here. My real question is why should we take this empowerment question seriously? Show us some evidence that empowered teachers are not only better but that this enhanced power is worth the cost.
January 10th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Public sector unions mainly serve to insure that any public investment that might be put to good use is instead gobbled up by even higher union wages.
January 10th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
Like I said earlier, I think it’s recruitment. I can’t supply you with numbers or anything, but speaking from experience with others…they wouldn’t have become a teacher is not for the guarantees…and this is a profession with an overall shortage in a lot of areas. If you take away guarantees, you don’t have teachers…this seems more like logic…if you empower teachers, it makes the position attractive.
January 10th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Speaking as a teacher at a charter school with no union representation, I have first hand experience of how it can have a negative impact. Teaching is an incredibly personal profession. I can’t stress enough the degree to which a positive, supportive work atmosphere affects job performance. One of the key aspects to being a good teacher is simply conveying to the students a sense of personal enjoyment in the process of learning.
In many schools (generally those serving poor areas, and which are considered “failing”), teachers are faced with the almost impossible task of taking children who, for a variety of reasons, have not had the life experiences that have prepared them to succeed, and not only rehabilitating them, but then bringing them up to the level which their more fortunate peers will have reached almost effortlessly.
This is an incredibly stressful proposition. Add to this an administration that, knowingly or not, puts them in an even more difficult position, whether by taking away prep time, overscheduling staff development, not providing resources, etc., etc. and every day can seem like a monumental battle.
Then you also have the prospect of an administrator’s often very subjective or seemingly arbitrary metric for deciding what good teaching is, hanging the threat of termination over your head. At most jobs, performance is assessed according to a relatively straightforward standard – customer satisfaction and sales. Children are not simple products, and home and school variables are incredibly complex. This is not to say that judging good teaching is impossible, only that it is complicated – debated at the highest levels of academia – and susceptible to misunderstanding.
As a profession, teaching is also its own end, judged not only by the administrator, but by the teacher. If a student is learning what he needs to, the administration is irrelevant. From a teacher’s perspective, this is why we do what we do – not to keep an administration’s numbers looking good, but to teach children. Administrators often times don’t really know what is going on in the classroom. Their main concern is that they look good to their bosses.
Unions provide an invaluable service to teachers by protecting their personal investment in their profession – securing against unfair workloads, proper resource allocation, standardized evaluation, dispute arbitration, and general advocation. Without them, as I can attest, the workplace can be one permeated by fear, resentment, secrecy, distrust, and despair. And none of that is good for education.
January 10th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
gordon gekko:
My real question is why should we take this empowerment question seriously? Show us some evidence that empowered teachers are not only better but that this enhanced power is worth the cost.
My question is why have democracy at all? What happens is you get various interest groups from different sectors of the economy or from different regions of the nation or from different facets of the culture war and they don’t serve the public interest at large. They’re just looking out for themselves. What we need is an enlightened dictator who knows what is the public interest.
Just as gordon gekko knows the administrators know what’s best for the public (and the children!) and have no-self interest because God wouldn’t have made them administrators otherwise, the benevolent dictator would know what to do. All he/she would need is a lazy/fearful public to empower him/her.
January 10th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
they wouldn’t have become a teacher is not for the guarantees
And I should want those people teaching children because…?
I agree that recruitment is a problem, but if the carrot is ‘once you get tenure, you never have to work hard again’ we’re going to recruit warm bodies but not good warm bodies.
This is a job where quality and performance must matter, and the unions (with some important but all too rare exceptions) have shouted down virtually every proposal in that direction without offering good alternatives. Until they offer some good alternatives and are willing to give up on actively anti-performance measures like tenure and lock-step pay, they should (and will) continue to get very little sympathy even from fairly pro-union types like me.
January 10th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
I still remember when my school district had to remove a staff position in the music department. I had had most of the new teachers, 4 or 5 of them, before. The newest one was one of the best teachers in the school district, whereas the other ones were mediocre at best. But, because of union seniority rules, the youngest teacher was fired. It’s a sample size of one, but it has soured me on unions ever since.
Happy ending, though, they did hire him back about two years later.
January 10th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Because somebodies got to, that’s why. If you don’t have quality now, what makes you think you will find quality if you cut off a certain amount of the supply of teachers? And if you think you’ve living in a world where all the teachers become teachers because they want to shape the minds of tomorrow and not because it’s guaranteed pay, with summers off…I have some magic beans to sell you.
Not to say tenure should be automatic. Judgment is still needed, it’s just difficult, and removing unions isn’t the answer.
January 10th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
I think the problem most people have with teachers’ unions is not that they directly make schools worse, but that on a national level they use their political power to block important reforms like merit pay and the end of tenure.
It’s a very different situation from the UAW, where lots of people suspect the union actually damaged its employer directly.
January 10th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
Hector: the problem in using too expansionary an analogy for public sector labor unions is that public sector employees may be there, in specified purpose, to serve the common good — but they are not employed by the common good. There is, in fact, an employer. It may happen to be a government agency, or a parastatal organization, but it is still an employer. The sources of that employer’s funding is different from most private sector employers, and this changes the regulatory environment. But public sector employees work for an employer, and not directly for the common good, which lacks a prosaic manifestation.
January 10th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
General hilarity. How dare the vassals of the commonweal band together to seek their collective interest? They are to scurry around and among us, invisible in their service whites or whatever, and be grateful for whatever pittance our exalted public officialdom (surely the most sterling and simon-pure golden platonic souls the world has ever seen)deems “affordable” to the public purse. That’s American democracy, dammit!
January 10th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
An acquaintance of mine was ranting about the quality of schools, and blaming everything on teachers’ unions. I quietly pointed out that we’ve been underfunding public education for the last 25 years, and that as a result we’re getting pretty much what we’re paying for. She’d never thought of it that way.
So I think the question of whether such unions improve schools or not misses the point. When you don’t pay for something, you tend not to get it. Pretty much any nine-year-old who gets a weekly allowance has figured that out.
January 10th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
Tim, I don’t understand. Absent the union, you could pay teachers more to work in troubled areas (either directly, or through achievement bonuses). With the union though, salary and work rules are the same everywhere, so schools are competing for good teachers through intangibles like convenience, safety, community perks, and there’s no way that troubled areas can win that game.
How does the union help troubled areas win good teachers?
January 10th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Good post, Matt.
Shorter Gordon Gekko: I’m a college sophmore and I’m going to get my MBA so fuck working people. Seriously dude, smaller class size is just demonstrably “not in the public interest” because it costs more than really big classes? How big do you want them? 100? 300? You don’t need to answer that.
January 10th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
Matt says:
“the main valence of union power is going to be to shift education policies at the margin in the interests of the teachers rather than in the public interest.”
To put it plainly this is just a stupid remark. There is no factual basis for the claim, it’s the kind of remark that comes from the most Neanderthal think tanks like Cato.
If you look at the typical battles going on in big city school systems you will see that the teacher’s unions are the only organized group pushing for additional school funding, smaller class sizes, more services for children at risk, and the elimination of the educationally bogus NCLB program.
Without such an organization who would be pushing these concerns? The parents who don’t even show up to teacher meetings to discuss their own kids? The elected officials?
Teachers in strongly unionized areas like NYC don’t push for much in the way of additional perks, a long history of negotiation has settled most of the big issues. Typically contract negotiations revolve around getting pay increases that keep up with inflation.
This is the same mindset that thinks that because a group of workers managed to get a decent standard of living they are being overpaid. The UAW is the other scapegoat these days.
Rather than wondering why everyone doesn’t have a decent pay scale, health and retirement benefits the critics decide the fix is to take them away from those who do.
The lack of class consciousness in this society is amazing. If you have to work to eat you are a member of the working class. Figure out where your interests lie and stop buying into the arguments of the wealthy.
January 10th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Hey, Francisco The Man, lay off Gekko on the class-size question. Smaller classes cost a lot of money, and there’s mixed evidence that they matter more than teacher quality. Since we have a limited supply of good teachers (at current salaries) smaller class sizes will always increase the number of students with mediocre teachers.
So it’s a valid point.
January 10th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
I spent time in both a non-unionised and an unionised high school system. Let me just say the non-unionised, independent system is about 300% better; I can actually approach the teachers and sit down with them to discuss my work and have some flexibility and personalised attention, because they aren’t just busy maintaining union turf. And most of the teachers I encountered in the independent system expressed disdain for the whole system of teachers’ unions.
This is solid, empirical, personal experience. Case closed?
January 10th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
Then you also have the prospect of an administrator’s often very subjective or seemingly arbitrary metric for deciding what good teaching is, hanging the threat of termination over your head.
At the independent school from which I graduated there is a pretty strict policy of letting go teachers only after evaluation by committee, and only at the end of a school year, when summer break starts anyway. Year-end review, which applies to freshman teachers, is during the early part of the third trimester, so he is left with enough time to find another position; other teachers are insulated by contracts and undergo review only at at their end.
I think that is pretty decent job stability.
January 10th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
Francisco the Man,
What? Are we reading the same post? The only difference between what Matt said and what I said was I want proof/examples/anything to explain why the meta level problem is so important. Tim offered his perspective. I am not sure I entirely agree but I would like to see more.
And I never said smaller class sizes are not beneficial. It is simply a question of who decides what the ideal size is.
January 10th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
Michael Andersen – I’ll criticize who I want in the comments section, thanks. Gekko’s an ignorant troll on workers’ issues. I’m well aware of the studies on class size. And yeah, the results are mixed. That’s vastly different from Gekko’s sophmoric assertion that unions blindly support “cost ineffective” methods. And your comment that smaller class sizes “always” equals more kids with mediocre teachers is laughable. How effective are those good teachers going to be when they’re overwhelmed with 30, 35, 50 kids in a classroom? Make the class sizes too big and you’ll get mediocre results for all of them.
January 10th, 2009 at 2:17 pm
Gekko – your comment, like almost every other comment, is really just a glib tautology. Something like “Unions members support unions. Because they’re not down with policies that get people fired for no good reason, they’re supporting less accountability. Surely, the public wants accountability! Ergo, they’re not acting in the public interest. Unions, bad!”
No Gekko, make teaching a shittier proposition for teachers by weakening their barganing power and you will get shittier teachers and shittier results. That should be obvious.
January 10th, 2009 at 2:17 pm
the non-unionised, independent system is about 300% better;
We’re looking at the effect of unions on public schools, not comparing private schools to public schools. Do try to keep up.
January 10th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
A charter is just as independent as an independent school, or almost.
January 10th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Tim (@16).
Its hard to say.
To be fair, I teach in a community college. I have a contract under terms not very different from those Stephen Myles (at 34) describes. Lots of my colleagues are afraid; many others are angry. We don’t have anything like a formal dispute resolution process.
That said, the larger proportion of my colleagues are probably adequate or better. In most cases I’m just not sure what a meaningful metric would be, and there are significant differences of opinion. I’m very leary of textbooks, even the better ones, and can’t stand some of the electronic gimmicks; some of my colleagues don’t agree, but seem to be good at what they are doing. Perhaps this has to do some with discipline. I have seen some really bad teaching around me, however. I also know that a couple of folks were not renewed this past year, though I know nothing directly of the circumstances. What I do find concerning, and its only partly even tangentially tied to teacher quality, is that so many (though far from all) of the students coming to us out of highschool are really not well prepared; I say this because the teachers do what the administrative appararus requires of them and because, as I said, some of the students are very well prepared so someone has to be doing something right.
Gordon Gekko (@18), you still haven’t defined your terms. As such, there isn’t anything further in what you’ve written to which I see I have to respond.
Nonetheless, let me add a couple of things.
As I understand things the folks down in Austin set policy for all Texas public education, especially standards pertinent to science or sex education, for example; many of my students have never studied evolutionary theory before they get to my classroom and their knowledge of how human fertility works or how STDs are transmitted can be astoundingly negligible. The folks in Austin also have considerable power beyond the Texas state line because of the size of the Texas textbook market. I think this a matter of real concern. Still the folks in Austin do go on about raising standards a lot.
Equally, we have some pretty public scandals in some of the local Independent School Districts where administrators, rather than teachers, have instituted procedures which actively interfere with teachers being able to flunk students, for example, or to give grades commenserate with the quality of work a student turns in. There is not much a teacher, even a very good teacher, can do under these sorts of conditions.
January 10th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
I don’t understand why unions are seen as the best way to ensure wages and benefits to teachers. If we’re going to propose an ideal system, why not increase wages and benefits and get rid of the unions. That will attract more qualified teachers while at the same time increase the ability of schools to get rid of less qualified teachers.
January 10th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Stephen Myles,
Last semester I required students to come meet with me to discuss their major projects. Not everyone did so even though I repeatedly asked folks to do so despite the very real carrots and sticks I put in the syllabus. I’m very approachable, even personable.
January 10th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
A charter is just as independent as an independent school, or almost.
No, actually, they aren’t. Were you referring to your experience in a charter school, or weren’t you? If so, say so. Otherwise, don’t try to associate your experience in a private school and extend that to public schools.
I’ll at least consider getting rid of teachers’ unions as soon as we get rid of police officers’ and firefighters’ unions.
Mostly, though, I can understand why teachers wouldn’t trust administrators and politicians to provide them with a safe work environment and enough breathing space and prep time to be able to do their job well without the force of collective bargaining to make those arrangements.
January 10th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
I was soured on teacher’s unions in Middle/High School. I went to a couple decent schools which were undergoing budget cuts practically the entire time I was at them. I saw two things: terrible teachers that had tenure staying on way too long because they had tenure, and good teachers losing their jobs because of seniority.
Now I can understand tenure in a university setting – academics want the freedom to say what their research shows them. In Middle/High School? It’s an excuse to get lazy. That’s not to say it happens to all teachers, but it definitely happens to some.
And seniority is really bogus. Any time a great teacher gets fired because they’ve been their less time tells me that the rules are their for the teachers, not the students.
I guess the problem isn’t with unions per se but with the results (that I observed) of the unions.
January 10th, 2009 at 6:17 pm
One simple question: Can anyone think of a single industry where both union and non-unionized businesses exist with something close to equal prevalence, where the unionized businesses deliver better goods, services, and/or financial performance?
(cue cricket noises)
January 10th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
djeri,
In my entire time at independent school I had known exactly 1 teacher (out of about 130 teachers/auxiliaries at the school) being removed. He taught planning and eighth-grade socials as well as cricket. He was bloody awful. Sure this formula might not be applicable for community colleges, but I think for high school this is job security enough. I know of some pretty awful teachers who were not replaced because replacements were hard to secure (even with the school’s higher-than-public) salaries, or because they coached school varsity (calculus teacher who coached squash and physics teacher who coached sailing come to mind).
Also, the threat of blunt, tempest-in-teapot micromanagement by administration is not something I have witnessed in my non-unionised school. Duties such as Head of Grade (HoG) and Head of Department (HoD) are assigned to senior teachers, in return for additional compensation and relief from sports coaching commitment. The administration was involved almost never in setting curriculum and so forth, academic purview being under a Academic Director who himself is a practising senior teacher, and in any case mostly parceled to individual departments and grades. So, most of the time teachers in matters academic are managed by their peers, and frequently jointly in committee within departments.
So, let the bogeyman of overzealous administration be laid to rest. It is a scarecrow; totally avoidable and has nothing to do with union/non-union and everything to do with bad management.
January 10th, 2009 at 7:26 pm
We actually have plenty of states in the U.S. without powerful teacher unions, generally in the South, and it doesn’t lead to good schools.
First of all, thanks for taking this topic. It’s an important one. But you make the point about the South and unions, but I must object. Of course the south is going to have a bad educational system. They are governed by Republicans, who underfund and mismanage education (and everything else for that matter)! Utah, for example, is the most Republican state in the union. Not coincidentally, it spends the lowest per pupil on education (just over 5K). Unsurprisingly, the educational system in Utah is not very good. In DC, the educational system is ATROCIOUS, but the spending is in line with the national average (a little over 8k). Efforts to improve DC, however, are not stymied by cheap Republican governors but by anti-reform teachers unions. The solution to better education is, of course, educational institutions built around the kind of accountability and funding advocated by groups like Democrats for Education Reform and people like Rhee. A well-compensated, professional teaching class that can make more if their students perform better and can be fired if they don’t. Perhaps, due to the incompetence of the American political class, teachers unions, because they negotiate higher pay for teachers, are a net positive. But the real answer to the education system is high pay and central management.
January 10th, 2009 at 7:29 pm
Actually, by most objective measure Utahans are better-educated than in most other states. Has something to do with the social homogeneity and Mormon ethic, apparently. It was actually the subject of an Economist article. Mormons, an overwhelmingly Republican demographic (nicknamed the blacks of the GOP), make up something like a third of the people in dentistry school.
Check your facts before going on a laughable anti-GOP tirade.
January 10th, 2009 at 7:31 pm
By the way, under NCLB the rate for decent Utah schools is something like 86%. Again, check your facts.
January 10th, 2009 at 7:51 pm
I’m not opposed to teacher unions per se, however, teacher unions only benefit teachers and do nothing to help students. Teachers are not any more special than any other worker. Teachers in public K-12 should not get tenure – they should get annual contracts. If they prove to be better than average or exceptional teachers then lengthen the terms of their contract to 4 or 6 years or such.
Teachers in a given school system need to accept that not all teachers are worth the same annual remuneration and that remuneration should not be based on seniority. Math and science (or whatever field the market in a particular system dictates)teachers should be able to command and receive higher salaries(perhaps even much higher salaries) if that is what it takes to attract truly qualified candidates.
Schools that have trouble getting teachers to stay for awhile should be paid whatever the market will bear to staff them. If you can get good teachers to staff “troubled” schools by paying them double what other teachers in the system make at “safer” schools that’s a good thing. Most unions oppose that sort of wage “discrimination”.
January 10th, 2009 at 9:19 pm
“By the way, under NCLB the rate for decent Utah schools is something like 86%. ”
Why are you specifying decent Utah schools? (For 2007-08, 80% of Utah schools made AYP.)
“. Let me just say the non-unionised, independent system is about 300% better; I can actually approach the teachers and sit down with them to discuss my work and have some flexibility and personalised attention, because they aren’t just busy maintaining union turf. . . This is solid, empirical, personal experience. Case closed?”
No.
My parents were teachers, my wife is a teacher, and I was a teacher, all of us union members in unionized school system, and the argument you’re making sounds utterly absurd to me – likely either uninformed nonsense or a very unusual & anomalous situation. If you want to offer some evidence/examples/explanation of why you specifically think “busy maintaining union turf” is the relevant factor, go ahead. If you want to argue that union status affects approachability/attention through some other route (rightly or wrongly), again, go ahead. Indeed, even if you want to qualify what you said – well, you get the picture. But otherwise, you’re just insulting all the countless teachers who stay long after that final bell (spend lunches, preps . . . ) with some kid who’s struggling, or almost gets it, or is going through a rough time, or is just really interested in some topic . . .
And, of course, you’re running into a really big problem as well, as Tyro pointed out. Think about what you (might have) learned in science class about experiments and variables – how (ideally), you’ll want to keep everything else constant, so you can isolate the effect of whatever it is. Imagine doing this:
1) Bat is able to navigate through dark, crowded room.
2) Bat is blindfolded, has its ears stuffed, is painted yellow, has its wings taped together, and is exposed to three hours of music of mid-career Ozzy Osbourne . Finally, all oxygen is removed from the room. Bat fails to navigate through room. Clearly, the bat uses its eyes to navigate!
Now, to be fair, a lot of things we’re trying to study out in the real world are about this confusing, which is why there are complicated ways to try to control for this, that, or the other thing. That doesn’t seem to be happening here -for all we know, the teachers in your non-unionized charter? school gave you more individualized attention because because they had 50% fewer kids/weren’t spending their time trying to dealing with utter chaos/you stopped utilizing ‘peeing on stuff’ as an attention-getting strategy/you started utilizing ‘peeing on stuff’ as an attention-getting strategy/random variation in teacher quality and focus/etc., etc., etc.
January 10th, 2009 at 9:29 pm
If you look at the typical battles going on in big city school systems you will see that the teacher’s unions are the only organized group pushing for additional school funding, smaller class sizes, more services for children at risk, and the elimination of the educationally bogus NCLB program.
Exactly . . . the teachers’ unions are an organized group pushing for 1) extra funding that has little proven benefit (see, e.g., Jepsen and Rivkin’s study of California), but that happens to benefit themselves, and 2) less accountability for themselves (your “educationally bogus” claim is without merit).
January 10th, 2009 at 9:31 pm
I did not go to charter school. I went to public school, and subsequently independent school (the word “private” sticks in my throat, because it insinuates for-profit, which it was not.) I have had no personal experience with charter schools.
January 10th, 2009 at 9:59 pm
Public schools districts, at least in California, do not have unlimited resources to spend on schools. So Unions have to negotiate and do take less than Cost of Living. Just like other unions who negotiate with businesses that have to produce something.
To qualify for AYP for the NCLB, this is something set up by the state and is not the same for each state. Comparing states passing of NCLB standards is like comparing apples and oranges. All schools will fail by 2013-14 anyway. If private schools took the test. They to would fail.It is going to be a fun couple of years.
Teachers that teach in private schools where kids can be kicked out if they don’t perform or misbehave can have great satisfaction. They will take less money to do that. This is not practical in any real public school situation. The teachers that don’t like unions are almost always, in my experience, those people who hate conflict. You do get tired about hearing about how someone got screwed.
Evaluating teachers is hard to do. You are not comparing apples with apples.
By test scores or increases in test scores? What if I teach a history class that has a third to half the class that reads at below grade level. Can you compare that to a teacher that teaches children with reading level at or above grade level? We could maybe compare schools with equal socio/economic status. Every district is different. Even if they have comparable socio/economic status.
Do you have a have students fill out surveys. About how much they like the teacher. In that case, one of our best teachers would be out of a job because her class is hard and many students dislike her. If they stick it out and try, they score well, but they don’t enjoy her class.
January 10th, 2009 at 10:22 pm
Unions are a disgrace. All they do is give your address to financial institutions that send you mountains of credit card offers and support Democrats. On the other hand, most teachers are against NCLB and yet we have it; so much for representation. The same short-term “result-oriented management” techniques that were used in the financial industry until it crashed are now used by our “educational leaders” (what used to be called principals). Of course, our unions are only a reflection of us teachers who mostly think unions are commie outfits designed to make our glorious economy less efficient.
Perhaps this crisis will bring back some old-fashioned socialist notions, unions that strike for benefits for all, and a social state. Perhaps even a socialist party and candidates.
January 10th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
Myles,
you nailed me. Utah is an awful example.
January 10th, 2009 at 10:26 pm
however, Texas makes the point better. A redstate, low per pupil spending, even with the lack of teachers unions, still has a low educational outcome.
January 10th, 2009 at 10:29 pm
“So, let the bogeyman of overzealous administration be laid to rest. It is a scarecrow; totally avoidable and has nothing to do with union/non-union and everything to do with bad management.”
Sounds like your school had some relatively good management going on. (the awful teachers being retained isn’t so great, esp. since kids’ calculus and physics education was being screwed in favor of . . . squash and sailing – but change that to football and you have an all-too-common problem). And that’s great. And if management was guaranteed to be magically, perfectly good . . .well, there probably wouldn’t be any need for unions anywhere. Of course, in the real world, the question becomes how to keep administration doing something like a good job, and how to deal with places where it isn’t. Let’s say management changes at Stephen Myles Academy, and not for the better. What recourse does the staff have?
It’s like cops. My street is pretty quiet and peaceful. Does that mean cops aren’t necessary? Well, certainly, crime isn’t just a matter of police presence – there are all sort of demographic, etc. factors to consider. At the same time, cops can play an important role in discouraging crime*, if we were faced with increasing crime, the lack of cops would leave us with seriously limited options, and of course not everywhere is my street.
Incidentally, “He taught planning and eighth-grade socials as well as cricket.”
Just to mention that the New York public school system has a (rather recent) varsity cricket league. Socials is of course social studies, but I love the idea of a school having somebody teach middle school co-ed dancing. Talk about combat pay . . .
Hang on, are you Canadian?
* or just taser random people – but that’s another topic, for another time.
January 10th, 2009 at 11:35 pm
“ 1) extra funding that has little proven benefit”
Oddly enough, you rarely hear this “just throwing money at the problem!” argument in public debate about the military. Dunno why.
(Of course, in both cases the mere presence of money doesn’t ensure it will be used effectively -but its absence ensures that it won’t)
“Public sector unions mainly serve to insure that any public investment that might be put to good use is instead gobbled up by even higher union wages.”
I know – it’s not like we need more middle-class jobs, after all . . .
“Tim, I don’t understand. Absent the union, you could pay teachers more to work in troubled areas (either directly, or through achievement bonuses). With the union though, salary and work rules are the same everywhere, so schools are competing for good teachers through intangibles . . . How does the union help troubled areas win good teachers?”
Well, the premise isn’t quite right – for example, the AFT doesn’t oppose combat pay, although it does want it, if implemented. to be via local negotiation rather than fiat, etc., etc., etc. (afaik). But anyway – the basic idea Tim’s getting at that the union’s keeping working conditions from becoming absolute crap, by maintaining some measure of both material (pay, benefits, etc.) and immaterial (respect, reduction in amount of feces raining down from above, etc.) decency, making it easier to recruit and retain teachers. To bounce off of Steve at #12, one of the things here is that unless one been personally involved in schooling in a “troubled area” (from whatever end), one probably has little grasp of what that actually means. (Intellectually, sometimes – viscerally, rarely). As pointed out in an piece I’m about to link, what those heartwarming movies-of-the-week present as incredibly tough conditions the Hero Teacher has to somehow surmount are often the kind of things where actual teachers wish that was all they had to deal with (I dunno about the bit where Moore mentions that the crooked blinds in Freedom Writers seemed quite spiffy compared to his blindless cracked plastic windowpane – Mrs. S. would have loved to have had a cracked plastic pane in her old classroom, instead of cardboard . . . ). And this kind of fictional exposure, I think, completely fails to convey the actual lived experience, replacing it with simplified fantasies.
“And I should want those people teaching children because…?”
You don’t want people whose main motivation is ‘hey, summers off! (and no, not really). At the same time, sometimes folks seem to think teaching is a kind of secular sainthood sort of thing, to be manned by self-sacrificing martyrdom types“. That’s not fair, reasonable, or sustainable.
January 11th, 2009 at 12:10 am
Stephen Myles, (46) in what sort of a school did you have a cricket coach or a squash coach or a sailing coach? Here in Texas I’ve heard of football coaches who sometimes teach other courses (not necessarily very well), but really sailing??? Just how flush was that school? How well did they pay people? How many people attended that school and for what sort of fee? How big were the classes? Just how varied were the teachers responsibilities over the course of a day/ Did they, for example, have to teach the same course 5, 6, 7 times a day? Or did they get to mix things up before their jokes became stale?
May I suggest that experience in that sort of a school just isn’t very representative of what education in the US is like. It might be wonderful if everyone could go to such schools, but lots of places there isn’t money for programs.
Dallas ISD, for example, has a huge budget problem at the moment, so they sacked a bunch of people including some of the special ed teachers even though the special ed funding doesn’t come from property taxes and therefore has outside limits put on it. Dallas ISD also has a lovely little policy requiring teachers to give a grade no lower than 50 out of 100 for work in the first half (I think, first quarter certainly) of any given semester whether students turn in work or not. Over in Richardson ISD teachers may not flunk any more than 5 students, again regardless of the quality of work. The wife of one of my colleagues teaches first grade here; they start working on the kids to pass standardized tests from the begining of first grade. Again this isn’t happening at the instigation of the teachers, who aren’t members of a union anyway. All of this comes from layers of administration, local and state.
So you may not have seen micro-managing (and bad micro-managing at that) at your independent school but that may not be dispositive; I don’t doubt your account of your experience, only its relevance to more ordinary circumstances.
Of late we’ve heard a good deal about Ms Rhee and the DC system. Perhaps these urban and suburban systems in Texas should also be considered as well. DC may well have one set of problems (for which Ms Rhee’s notions may or may not prove to be solutions) while other places have very different problems (to which questions about union or non-union labor may be largely irrelevant).
January 11th, 2009 at 2:19 am
Aha, you obviously have heard about the Vancouver taser incident. How the word spreads.
And no, djeri, my school was not that flush by American standards. We were a sad joke compared to schools like St. Alban’s or Texas’s own Kinkaid, which charge very stiff fees and have extraordinary resources.
January 11th, 2009 at 8:34 am
Stephen, are you still maintaining that non-union private school teachers are more approachable and attentive specifically “ because they aren’t just busy maintaining union turf“? (alternately, that public school unionized teachers were just too busy maintaining union turf to sit down and discuss your work with you or provide any personalized attention? – Incidentally, were class sizes and student body roughly similar in the two situations?) If so, can you provide some examples of what you’re talking about?
“We were a sad joke compared to schools like St. Alban’s”
Yes, well, djeri was talking about what’s representative of U.S. education. St. Albans charges over $30,000 a year (over $44,000 for boarding students); there are numerous colleges and universities that are cost less. Your private school might well have been impoverished compared to St. Albans, but how would it rank compared to the average school?
January 11th, 2009 at 9:41 am
Re: They are governed by Republicans, who underfund and mismanage education (and everything else for that matter)!
Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t states like North and South Dakota have pretty good educational outcomes, in spite of being governed by Republicans? I think that cultural and socioeconomic makeup needs to be taken into account as well as party ID.
January 11th, 2009 at 10:30 am
Dan S, Stephen Myles’s former school does sound very flush compared with most any public high school, flush enough for teachers to have multiple sorts of activities and keeping them fresh thereby. It also had a lovely internal guild system, with head teachers and heads of school I believe, still in place and probably even parents who were actively interested in the quality of their children’s education. I’m not sure how his school is particularly pertinent to the questions surrounding the presence or absence of a union. So thank you for clarifying what I probably said badly.
Down here in Texas, where most folks don’t go to Kinkaid or even private schools, the folks in Austin will be reviewing the science curriculum this year. They will conclude this process by telling folks what they can teach as well as both what and how they must teach. If the head of that Board prevails, and he might, everyone will be instructed to teach the strengths and weaknesses (emphasis on weaknesses) of evolutionary theory, with all that that means not just for instruction in biology but also physics and geology. Without some sort of institutional protections, teachers will either have to follow instructions or will leave under one or another scenario. It sort of like what happened in Kansas. Granted, there do have to be systems for discussion of subject matter, but surely such systems are not neutral. Didn’t Plato have a point about who will watch the watchers?
Considered on an industrial scale, successful pedagogy is only partly about technique–how good or bad particular teachers are, assuming one can come up with some sort of meaningful measure as opposed to standardized test outcomes or perhaps even student evaluations. But in this debate we rarely hear about reforming the administration, by say rotating classroom professionals through administrative positions instead of having a class of professional administrators who largely lack classroom experience or much understanding of any of the subject matters taught by the people they administer. Way up the thread, Cube (@7) asked a very good question about certification, a question which should be considered with regard to both teachers and administrators. There is still the point, over which I largely disagree with Gordon Gekko and the folks of his general opinion, about whether market ideology is best applied to educational systems or not, of what the common good might be and so forth.
I can concede that unions may protect a bad teacher here and there, but I’d still think it preferable to have some sort of substantial institutional protection, a working union or that lovely guild system at Stephen’s school. Mostly, I gather that the teachers at Stephen Myles’s school just had more time, and much more pleasant working conditions, available than the teachers in many public schools do. Give me time and I can be available even if the students do not want to come see their teachers.
January 11th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
My friend is a middle school teacher in Florida. for what it’s worth, she says she would never teach in a non-union environment because she couldn’t afford her own legal representation if the parents of one of her students sued her for failing or disciplining their kid. Apparently it happens regularly.
I don’t know many other jobs where, making less than $40K/year, you have to worry about being sued by the people you’re trying to help. Or, having the lunatic, entitled parents of your overpriviledged, out-of-control students trying to get you fired for doing you job. Unions protect good teachers, too.
January 11th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
You are probably aware of this, djeri, but the “guild system” you ascribed to my old school was at one point a very prevalent form of administration. A great number of public schools, especially those which were implicitly Protestant, had that system. British grammar schools, which were publicly funded on a near-equal basis with all other schools and mostly served the offspring of the modest to moderate-income classes (aristocracy and gentry gravitated toward the elite Public Schools), also had a similar system, in addition to the much-vaunted House and Prefect System, and were noted for their success in educating the students to an equal or higher intellectual and scientific standard as private schools. A majority of the greatest modern British scientists are from this public system.
I do think it is unhealthy to have high schools the size of say, 3500, or teachers who are forced to undergo so much repetition that they become exhausted. But one must also understand that sometimes it’s not a matter of funding or socio-economics, but rather good allocation of resources. For example, a very sound (and exceedingly efficient) system of science education I had seen, is for the general science course to be split up into three sections (physics, bio, chem) corresponding to the three terms, and have each be taught by a different teacher with a different specialisation, as opposed to a science generalist. Given how difficult it is to make up deficits in science education later on, this is a good way to put it on a solid footing. Rotation between the three, and the elimination of the need for teachers to teach general science, delivers economic benefits. Some wealthier schools with this system, I understand, do not have the rotation, instead having everyone doing the same section at the same section; however this delivers little marginal benefit and is dubious academic value.
It is highly unfortunate that evolution has been mired in such a pointless debate; in Canada this problem has largely not been extant because curricula are set by the Ministry of Education and are insulated from electoral pressure. This system, unfortunately, has also created a load of ghastly politically-correct fluff in the curricula. Perhaps the US should adopt a similar approach in this matter, without falling into the political correctness trap.
January 11th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Come to think of it, why bother running for school board chair if one is uninterested in science education? The illogic is deafening. Couldn’t he placated with say, a religious education or Bible course (which I support vehemently)?
And Dan, I am not saying that unions are the root of all evil; I think unions are a defective system, and obvious there are a great number of other variables, but on a very basic, gut-instinct level unionism prevents the formation of hierarchical loyalties and schools are, much like the Army, the most hierarchical of institutions, or at least should be. This would be in some ways like Army officers having a union; on a philosophical level I find it hard to stomach.
Of course, one could apply the Churchillian quip about the desirability of democracy to this; but that is hardly a glowing endorsement.
January 11th, 2009 at 6:48 pm
Stephen Myles (@66 and 67) yes, I am very aware of the sources of that lovely guild system, just as I am very aware that it is no more acceptable to many of the administrators where I work, and I gather thru Texas generally, than a union, and for much the same reason. I would rather prefer the guild, but that would likely set me against the administration and some of my colleagues, not all of my colleagues just some.
Let me suggest something, all human systems are suceptible to corruption, each in their own various ways; in some circles this formulation would make me a conservative. Any form of organization will have its weaknesses and propensities towards predictable forms of injustice. This means that every form of human system ought (not does, but ought–see MacIntyre on the importance of this difference) to have safeguards and that all persons associated with a given system would need to understand that the system, complete with safeguards, is still susceptible to corruption. Simply getting rid of the safeguards provided by unions, in the absence of an effective guild system which, I note, some writers about education responding to this blog find even more reprehensible than unions, will not do. That just invites classically known forms of injustice associated with notions such as might makes right and so forth.
For what it is worth I owe some of my understanding of this general line of reasoning to Werner Dannhauser, a student of Leo Strauss, and some of it to my own experiences with the powers that be manipulating systems to their own ends all the time using high flown rhetoric.
It is of course lamentable that evolutionary theory has become such a contentious issue, but a certain form of political correctness, a right wing form, demands it; this is precisely why folks run for the school board. There are certain necessary assumptions associated with evolution (mathematicians call such assumptions axioms and note, further, that axioms cannot be proven). These assumptions have principally to do with the consistencey of the nature (Hutchinson) and with the possibility of resolving difficulties with the senses (post-Copernicus). All science is founded upon this set of axioms. But the consequences of this approach–long time, huimans as related to apes, etc, are just not politically correct in those right wing circles. Here in the US, as opposed to Canada, where I gather from what you’ve written you’ve been educated, this is a real problem of the moment, not a fake one and not without consequences. Given that in some parts of the US this particular form of right wing political correctness has been long in the ascendancy and persists as a dominant political force, any consideration of the educational guilds or unions has to take these forms of political correctness into account. The sadly underobserved fact is that in all too many cases the permenant professional adminstration and the forces of right wing political correctness I have referred to have found common cause in the language of standards. This conjunction of interests conduces to a particular and pervasive form of corruption, one, in my experience at least, which is more pervasive than shall we say queer theory.
So I wish Ms Rhee good luck, though I think the problem is not unions as such–that would be too simple. I also wish MY would actually come out an talk with some real teachers; he’s welcome to visit me.
Let me, however, make one more point about that beautiful guild and your comments on the Army. There are important differences between these two which you might consider. Masters and Professors still had or have to obtain political consent in ways which Generals have not had or have to do. Pedagogy is not really a matter of command from above, nor given say Aquinas on disputantum should it be.
Equally, the guild was a system by which master trained apprentices in a craft; this was part of how guilds reproduced themselves and part of how they domesticated power. The Army doesn’t really do things this way.
Let me put this another way. I use monographs rather than textbooks. Many of the students I find in my classroom do not really know how to read a book. It would be easy to blame the teachers one step earlier for this; we have folks who talk with them and try to encourage what we hope would be better (not best) practices. But my own sense is that the system, ostensibly put in to maintain standards and therefore to avoid the impositioon of political correctness in the snese you, but not I, used the term, has a lot more to do with this lamentable fact than non-existant teachers unions.
January 11th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
So, we have a teachers’ union in my school district, a small one in central Florida. And we are surrendering 3 paid work days to keep from firing 10 teachers. And giving up our planning periods starting next year, so that teachers can pick up 30 or more students in addition to their normal load.Oh, and we are also losing supplements for such things as student government, FFA, FEA, and other academic extracurriculars. And our sports teams have had their schedules slashed in half.
They have also locked up the copy paper and cut the individual copy allotment in half, because we cannot afford it. And these are just a few of the massive cuts we are dealing with throughout Florida. Other districts have laid off teachers by the dozens.
Yeah, the problem is the unions. Please.
January 12th, 2009 at 1:59 am
“I quietly pointed out that we’ve been underfunding public education for the last 25 years”
What rubbish! If you add up what we spend on education at the local, state, and federal levels, it’s on par with what we spend on defense.
“Of course the south is going to have a bad educational system. They are governed by Republicans, who underfund and mismanage education (and everything else for that matter)”
Are any liberals statistically literate? Any of you? If so, look at the correlation of race and educational outcomes and see if it doesn’t trump party ID. The South has shitty schools because it has lots of black students. Whiter states, whether Republican (e.g., North Dakota) or Democrat (e.g., Minnesota) have better educational outcomes, because they have fewer low-IQ blacks or Hispanics.
January 12th, 2009 at 7:20 am
“What rubbish! If you add up what we spend on education at the local, state, and federal levels, it’s on par with what we spend on defense.”
Well, if you include all spending on all colleges and universities, which is almost never what anyone means when they talk about the long-running underfunding of public education, yes. (Or alternately, if you don’t count Iraq, Afghanistan, the VA, anything having to do with nukes, etc.) And to be fair, there are chunks of k12 education that aren’t underfunded – public schools in affluent suburbs, for example, tend to funded rather well. Rather, the very much separate and unequal system of education that deals with poor kids, esp. if urban and brown, but also often rural & of any color, is sorta disgustingly underfunded. Or rather, is funded proportionately to how we as a country value these children. Screaming about evil teachers unions is often (not always, no, but often) a way to sorta hide this truth from ourselves*, a kind of modern myth.
* The #2 reason is to attack Democrats, #3 is virulent anti-union ideology, and then, far to the back, is #4, genuine problems. And there are some, to be fair.
January 12th, 2009 at 7:23 am
“Are any liberals statistically literate? Any of you? ”
Are any conservatives not fucking shit-for-brains racists? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
(and yes, I know some aren’t, at least by the standards of our times).
January 12th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
I’m from Alabama, and the state has a particularly powerful teacher’s union. The AEA, as it is called, lobbies hard and gets what it wants…for the teachers, anyway. The schools in Alabama, as I’m sure you might have guessed from the stereotypical Alabama cry, “But hey, at least we’re not in Mississippi,” aren’t all that good.
January 12th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
“Well, if you include all spending on all colleges and universities…”
I was just referring to k-12 education, most of which is financed by local property taxes.
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