Teachers unions are not the reason many schools suck

I think a lot of people have problems with teachers unions because they think of teaching like any other job. It's not - here are the important differences:

Pay raises. It's a fantastic idea for a company to increase the pay of individuals based on performance. If individuals do well, the company does well and makes more money, and can therefore afford to pay the employees more, so this reward system is great.

In schools, there is no profit. So if teachers do better, their students perform better, and the teachers should get paid more. But they don't, since this has not brought any more money into the school. In fact, if schools are doing well they are less likely to have their budgets increased, since people will see no need to increase the budget of something that is functioning well.

This fixed-budget kind of thing is the root of the difference between the education system and private enterprise. In a business, if you are not making enough money (that is, if you have a spending problem), you cut back on things: often you may lay off employees. You will have fewer employees now, but since your business isn't doing well you probably have less work to do, so it can even out. Or, if it doesn't even out, your business closes down.

Neither of these is true of education. Except for rare cases, it is unthinkable to close down a school. Obviously closing would bad for students and education in general, so it is avoided.

More importantly, workload doesn't flex as easily in schools. That is, if you run into budget problems and have to cut teachers, the other teachers must work harder to pick up their slack, since the student body population remains unchanged. Thus it is in the interest of both the teachers and the students to keep budgetary layoffs to an absolute minimum.

So what do you do with a tight budget? Who knows? Removing teachers decreases the effectiveness of education severely. So does the numerous other things I've seen schools do - stop providing textbooks, make the quality of food go down, shorten the school day, remove planning time of teachers, stop giving teachers their own offices, stop plowing the parking lot, etc. In other words, make schools suck in every way possible.

I don't have a good solution for this, beyond the obvious "spend more on education". Personally, I think this is our best bet, but that money would have to come from somewhere else, and people are not willing to pay more taxes for it.

Unions are based on the idea that fungible "workers" need to unite against "management" to avoid being replaced with workers who will accept lower compensation. The primary interest of unions is to preserve for their members jobs that pay above-market compensation.

The presence of teachers' unions means that teachers see teaching as an industrial factory job in a mature field where no more innovation is possible. Students in such a world are the products of the factory. They come into the school system at 5 years of age as unprocessed raw material and they exit 12 years later as high-school graduates, ready to take on a job.

This whole mindset is wrong. The industrial-factory model of schools should be abolished. People, whether young (students) or old (teachers), are not fungible. They should not be viewed as factors in factory. They are not.

I think this is a bit of a straw man. I haven't met anyone that believes that teachers unions are the problem. Schools face many problems, and the inability of school districts to fire lousy performers is just one of them. Teenage pregnancy is fast rising as one of the major problems in urban school districts, but I don't foresee any politicians campaigning on a "kids these days need to stop fucking" platform.

For those who haven't seen it:

http://www.mckinsey.com/App_Media/Reports/SSO/Worlds_School_...

The experiences of these top school systems suggests that three things matter most: 1) getting the right people to become teachers, 2) developing them into effective instructors and, 3) ensuring that the system is able to deliver the best possible instruction for every child.

Single page: http://www.slate.com/id/2285650/pagenum/all/#p2

"Chancellor Joel Klein terminated only three teachers for incompetence between 2008 and 2010."

This seems dishonest given how hard he tried-- only to be thwarted by a union which always closes ranks.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/31/090831fa_fact_... http://gothamist.com/2011/01/30/joel_klein_easier_to_prosecu...

Let's not forget that Rhee was only at it for 3 years. The kind of reform she's aiming for will probably take decades to implement.

If you examine a school in terms of those who teach and those who don't excluding service personnel then you should quickly be able to understand who catches the money when they 'throw money' at the problem. In the long ago, even the principle taught classes--- same boat, everybody rows. Now the less useful (useless?) level of bureaucracy begins well down from the top of your typical school and extends all of the way up. Since demonization has already been going on for years, instead of attending to the real problem, Union busting (note that no one calls it that) is being pushed as the necessary silver bullet without regard to other problems (maybe even the real problem...) Now that many school systems can't afford textbooks (at least not one per student) removing teachers doesn't seem like a useful addition to the solution set.

The only real evidence they present is the Stanford study that found charter schools don't perform better than regular public schools. So their argument is that unions can't be the problem because charter schools don't have them and are doing just as bad. But that's a straw man.

Charter schools allow for better management they don't guarantee it. So in the first few decades of a charter school system there will be a lot of bad ideas and a lot of good ideas. But the bad ideas will throw off the average.

But the bottom line is at least the well managed charter schools can take steps to correct problems where as regular public schools can't because of union rules. Which is why some Charter schools do dramatically better.

I'm slightly biased here because I will almost certainly never need a union to protect my job or interests (I'm well educated, with in-demand skills, and I'm mobile). But it really bothers me how unions produce such inefficiencies in specific industries. Teachers and autoworkers being the biggest have crippled the ability of their respective industries to innovate and compete globally. While this may protect the livelihood of current workers, it hinders the ability of future workers to compete and earn a living. Like national debt its one generation fucking over the next...

PS - I'm young and pissed with the general recklessness of baby boomers.

An honest question: Why do highly skilled professionals like teachers require union representation whereas computer professionals do not?

That peer review system that was mentioned seemed nice. I wonder about how well it works.

Yes, there exist schools whose suckage isn't due to teacher's unions.

tl;dr

Many schools suck because they are full of low quality students. Rhee made some improvements, but no improvements to teachers can compensate for low quality students.