How to Stymie the Teachers Unions
Richard Epstein ·
September 26, 2012 at 1:24pm
Want to prevent another Chicago-style strike? Then let charter schools flourish, as I argue in my column this week for Defining Ideas.
Under the charter school system, the city government continues to fund the schools but leaves separate and competing systems to run the schools and hire the teachers. This competitive environment reduces the gains that teachers get from unionization—no unionization means no dues—and forces them to face savvy school administrators who know full well that the unionization of their schools is a death warrant. It has not gone unnoticed that during the Chicago strike, about 50,000 students continued their education uninterrupted in charter schools…continue reading at Defining Ideas.
- Comment (22)
- · Quote
- · UnfollowFollow (5)
- Pages:
- 1
- 2
Comments:
Sep '10
Re: How to Stymie the Teachers Unions
The idea that competition works is hardly controversial. The question is, are there enough politicians out there that value students and taxpayers more than they do political donations from unions? Probably not.
And if this works for schools, what about other government agencies . . . like the DMV?
Apr '11
Re: How to Stymie the Teachers Unions
As a public school teacher, I may be a bit biased here but a few points.
1.) For all the problems that people have with tenure, generally it takes at least 3 years to get it and if a teacher was that incompetent, where was the administrative oversight? Why was this teacher not removed sooner? One of the great gorillas in the room of education is not that we have tons of terrible teachers, but we in fact have lots of incompetent administrators
2.) I would be all for charter schools if they were forced to compete on a level playing field with public schools. We do not get to choose which students we take, we are not allowed to set up complex application procedures to exclude problem children and those with special needs. (Plus, if you look at the research, charter schools do not really have that great a record) The issue here is not entirely the union (I am not a big fan of them, they do need reform) the issue is decades of bad education policy at the state and national level that has turned the schools into a catch all for society's problems.
Aug '12
Re: How to Stymie the Teachers Unions
We've had the charter school system in place here in Arizona for several years and it seems to be working well.
Apr '11
Re: How to Stymie the Teachers Unions
Cont'd
3.) By turning education into a competition between teachers and threatening to fire those who "under-preform" why would any teacher ever work in an urban school or with students with special needs or those who are English Language Learners. You'll have an even greater flight of teachers to the rich suburbs.
4.) Also, not mentioned is that in a lot of these charter systems, you have astronomical administrative costs (some charter principals make well over 400K) and frankly, I do not trust the fine people of investment firms on Wall Street with public education since they really have no skin in the game themselves since they can send their kids to ritzy private schools that are not under the same requirements or ridiculous standardized testing regimes that we see in the public schools (Just look at Rahm and members of the Chicago board, all their kids go to the U of Chicago Lab school, which is doing pretty much the opposite that we are seeing in other schools. I guess these programs are good enough for other people's children) What is to stop them from looking at schools as nothing more than a bottom line?
May '10
Re: How to Stymie the Teachers Unions
My observation made as a public school teacher many years ago was that there is a thin foam of highly motivated excellent teachers overtopping a sea of time-serving drones.
The only remedy is to detach public funding for education from public provision of education. Specifically, give parents a voucher so they can send their child to whatever school they choose. Not limiting them to the Hobson's choice of the public school to which their child is assigned, nor a difficult-to-impossible to enter charter school. In Chicago it's just a combination of window dressing and safety valve.
Charter schools simply introduce another locus of special interest pleading and under-the-table deals for the connected. Do you really think that "who knows who" won't enter into the decision of who gets the nod to open and operate a charter school?
To Michael's point about "skin in the game," it is not only Rham and the Chicago board members who have their kids in private schools. That's where 40% of the CPS Teachers have their kids. Apparently nothing stops any of them from looking at schools as anything more than a bottom line.
Apr '11
Re: How to Stymie the Teachers Unions
Vouchers aren't really going to solve the problem either as again, schools will be able to rig it so they only get the students they want and leave the ones that are 'too much trouble' to educate. As per a matter of logistics, what do you do when you work in a community like me that is small and rural and there is not an alternative school within 50 miles? Yes, we all would like to have great teachers in every classroom, but is that even possible? No matter what organization you are running, most of the people in it are going to be average. (Yes, we can do something to bring up the average a bit) And, frankly, with the way in which teachers are treated and maligned across society ("those who can't...") why would anyone bright get into education? I know I am ready to leave after the last few years.
*I think one needs to differentiate between the big city unions and teachers and unions at large. My local union (in NY) took pay freezes and took on more for our health care coverage willingly because we wanted to help the district and save jobs.
May '11
Re: How to Stymie the Teachers Unions
What is to stop them from looking at schools as nothing more than a bottom line? · 7 minutes ago
Michael, Schools are looked at as nothing more than a bottom line right now. It depends on the viewers perspective exactly what that bottom line is.
Let me ask you, Mercedes Benz looks at cars as nothing more than a bottom line. Don't they make some fine cars? You can bet that UC Lab School looks at their bottom line.
Your argument assumes that all charter schools will be the same. I can envision specialty schools that cater to specialty students such as English-as-a-second-language students or special needs students, etc.
The free market always provides a variety of solutions to a given problem. Those solutions are usually better than a government run command solution.
BTW, Vance, here in New Mexico we have private companies that dispense driver's licenses and auto registrations. It works very well. Short wait times, convenient (even weekend) hours. After putting up with the DMV in FL, I'm impressed.
Mar '11
Re: How to Stymie the Teachers Unions
I think injecting more competition into the system would be one step toward improving outcomes for more students, but by itself it is not a panacea.
Rick Hess has a thought-provoking piece in the latest National Affairs which also addresses some of these subjects.
One of the counter-intuitive points he makes is that increasing local control of our schools, by itself and without other reforms, actually tends to cede control to the most organized stakeholders at the local level--which are inevitably the unions and their political allies. These in turn tend to be the greatest obstacles to reform.
I think his point about our teacher certification process at the state level is also worth considering, to wit:
Apr '11
Re: How to Stymie the Teachers Unions
@ Phili~ First off, I do not view education as something that should be run like a business, we aren't selling cars or widgets, we are dealing with people (and if it were run with the bottom line in mind, we'd never spend the money we do educating special needs kids) These are people, not commodities. Not everything in life can be reduced to a balance sheet and pure capitalistic competition, which I am totally in favor of, but education I view as more of a public good that needs to be re-geared away from career training and more about civic training. We need to stop doing the job training for companies and give kids a skill set where they can think and learn. The trend is going in the opposite direction where people think school is there to get people a job and nothing else.
As per the charter schools, maybe there would be schools that cater to them, but that would violate a number of state and federal laws about equal treatment for kids with special needs, we'd basically be back to segregated schools where those kids would be in their own school.
Mar '12
Re: How to Stymie the Teachers Unions
I favor charter schools, and the best and most recent research shows they do teach kids better than public schools. Also, contra the well-meaning teachers above, charters cannot pick their students or turn away disabled kids. That's illegal.
A few thoughts for Mr. Epstein's brilliant mind, though. First, two recent studies have shown what makes sense: charters decimate the private school market. Can't compete with free tuition. Second, is it really competition if it's run and regulated by the same entity running the "competition"? (In other words, charters and traditional public schools are both still government schools. So how is this actual competition?)
--Joy
Sep '10
Re: How to Stymie the Teachers Unions
The same argument could be made for healthcare. If we need government run schools, do we also need government run hospitals? Why not? Health is even more important than education.
As for special needs, pulic schools already spend more for special needs kids so the value of a voucher for one of those students would also be higner, creating a financial incentive to design programs that these kids could benefit from.
Edited on September 26, 2012 at 5:07pmApr '11
Re: How to Stymie the Teachers Unions
Joy,
Just because it is illegal doesn't mean they cannot do it. It can be done by setting sign up times at inconvenient hours and by creating a "lottery" process and eliminating applications that have any errors in them. There are a number of ways to ensure that students that they want get in and those that do not are removed. Their disciplinary procedures are legendarily harsh (if one student from a family is removed then the family can no longer send any students to that school) They also have considerably less number of special education students. It's easy to be successful when you can get rid of those you do not want. (Not all charters are bad mind you, but many get test scores on average w/public schools.)
They might not be able to do this publicly, but it goes on in these schools. Public schools have no such means of selection; we get all of them. My argument is not to defend the status quo, but to think that we can just turn all this over to private hands and it will all get fixed thanks to the miracle of competition is shockingly naive.
Apr '11
Re: How to Stymie the Teachers Unions
@ Vance But the financial incentive is gone because schools that do not get these students passing at the same rate as everyone else will get rated as ineffective and shut down. Also, if the incentives are so great, what is to stop a charter company from taking that big money, hiring a bunch of inexperienced people on the cheap and then doing this for 2-3 years and pocketing the difference?
I realize that as conservatives, we think that anything run by the government is the devil, but as someone who grew up poor in a poor community and work in a school that is just as poor, if it were not for federal and state money for education, kids here would never get any educational opportunity. If it is "government shouldn't be doing this" issue, then why is any tax money put into a charter, shouldn't everyone just pay for schooling as they see fit? The logical extension of there being no reason for the government to be involved in education is that there should be no public money sent to it, thereby saying that unless you put up the money yourself, you don't get educated.
Apr '11
Re: How to Stymie the Teachers Unions
As I'm sure you know, Massachusetts owes the education of so many of its youth in a best-in-the-country K-12 system to Mitt Romney and his support for charter schools.
Sep '10
Re: How to Stymie the Teachers Unions
I think Sol Stern has written that the curriculum changes also had a hand in it.
Mar '12
Re: How to Stymie the Teachers Unions
Have the money follow the student by empowering the parents.
Home school
Charter school
Parochial-religious school
Private school
Public school
I know that when Japan started competing with Detroit for the automobile market, the shopper got more choices and Detroit got motivated to build better cars. Using that benchmark, if parents can choose from the menu above, the public schools will get the message: You want the money? Deliver the product.
The alternative? We'll get the liberal whine blaming everyone for the fact that children aren't being taught. We are already getting that whine, and without cheese and crackers.
May '10
Re: How to Stymie the Teachers Unions
City Journal had an article sometime in the last year or so about a very successful voucher program in Belgium.
Dec '10
Re: How to Stymie the Teachers Unions
I've no idea how much truth there is in that. I do know that part of Massachusetts' success is due to the vast number of poor students who are pouring across the border into southern New Hampshire. As an administrator in a NH high school, my wife is constantly inundated with transferees whose parents openly brag that they moved here because their kids can't pass the MCAS graduation test. They move here so their kids can graduate and go to college. This has the effect of increasing MA's average scores (and lowering NH's) without requiring any actual improvement. Maybe one day NH will wake up and increase its own standards enough to prevent this kind of gaming of the system.
May '10
Re: How to Stymie the Teachers Unions
Michael, you talk like public schools do a great job with students who are 'too much trouble' to educate.
I haven't seen it with several family member's kids, and with my own personal experience.
In my state special needs children get twice the funding. I'm confident that private schools would be quite willing to take on special needs children if that money came with them.
In the inner city Catholic and other parochial schools draw their students from the exact same pool as the public schools, and do a much better job with the same difficult kids the public schools simply warehouse for 12 years.
Apr '11
Re: How to Stymie the Teachers Unions
Freeven
I've no idea how much truth there is in that. I do know that part of Massachusetts' success is due to the vast number of poor students who are pouring across the border into southern New Hampshire...
Pseudodionysius
I think Sol Stern has written that the curriculum changes also had a hand in it.
Sorry; should have been clear. Education policy is complicated and features many factors. Mitt's defense of Charter Schools is just one of them, but it is one that seemed relevant to Prof. Epstein's post. I thought I wouldn't go with a comment about Mitt's recent attacks on teacher's unions as those seemed less Epstein friendly and I feel bad attacking Epstein on a subject he hasn't addressed.