"Public unions have not proven themselves in the same way as private unions have. Private unions were (and in some cases still are) a good tool to protect employees against corporate greed run a muck."
Though the article deals with teachers, your quote makes me wonder: If public sector unions are a bad deal, why are police and fire department employee unions exempt from being targeted? Where I live (Texas), these employees have both civil service rules and a union (so they are arguably double-protected) while other public employees--except teachers--have neither and are at-will employed. I have seen no hint that police and fire should have their union representation or civil service requirements eliminated; the exact opposite is stated in places like Wisconsin and Ohio.
If public sector unions are a bad deal, why are police and fire department employee unions exempt from being targeted?
Actually police and firefighters are also being targeted. But there's just a lot fewer of them. Remember that there are more teachers in the US than any other profession. For example, see: http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2011/02/police_and_f...
This really isn't about good or bad teachers. The whole myth of the giant population of bad US teachers exists to push the agenda to break up unions.
The reason? Unions weaken the right and strengthen the left. The right has been trying to kill unions for a long time, but it hasn't been until the rise of minority district charter schools where they've been able to make a strong push that bad overpaid teachers are the problem.
The one question I've been asking everyone in my district is to point out the bad teachers. No one will tell me who they are, or how it is decided. I asked do the bad have warning, will they be given time to shapen up and feedback on their issues? Apparently no. These sorts of things make me a tad suspicious.
> The one question I've been asking everyone in my district is to point out the bad teachers. No one will tell me who they are, or how it is decided.
Have you asked the kids? They probably know. There were bad teachers in my high school; pretty much everybody knew who they were. One was so senile he routinely forgot what assignments he'd given or what he was saying.
We didn't have anyone that senile at my schile, but if we did -- the only question would be "how hard is the class". If he forgot assignments and gave A's, he'd be loved by the students.
But I went to a really bad high school. I suspect at better schools students are probably better judges. But you end up with an odd situation where the schools that need the least help have the more accurate assessment (and frankly probably have the fewest poor teachers).
did you seriously have no teachers that were just Bad while you were in public schools? i am so incredibly envious.
no teacher who slept and wet herself? or turned a (nearly blind) eye to students being assaulted in her classroom? (two different teachers, both witnessed by myself.)
those are just the first two cases that come to my mind. i could come up with a bunch more, and i only went through 1 elementary, middle and high school each. when the system doesn't make it trivial to replace such teachers, the system is broken beyond comprehension.
I had bad teachers, but the teachers I thought were bad probably would get the best student reviews. They'd sleep in class, weren't prepared, but they gave mostly A's. My favorite teachers taught well and expected a lot. They were a lot less popular.
I had teachers who were not great. But I never had one out and out bad teacher. Never saw a teacher sleeping (in class) or wetting themselves (wow). And no teacher I had ever stood for any student being assaulted. Maybe there are benefits to growing up in the middle-of-nowhere Missouri.
Kids know who the bad teachers are. Principals know, and schools have both student results year-over-year and evaluations which are good indicators. But these are confidential, and if you can't fire someone, have to keep paying them, and can't afford a replacement, you're highly unlikely to publicly finger problematic teachers as 'bad'. You have to pretend they're good enough, because they're all you've got.
Portraying this as just some unthinking partisan campaign against unions overlooks the fact that the total compensation of teachers and other public employees has been going up while service quality has stagnated or declined. They are being compensated for their reliable political power, not their value in providing necessary services.
And if the only decision criteria is, "teachers are good, give them all the work rules and benefits their unions ask for", there's no end to that trend. The full-time political operators in the unions, accountable for their groups' interests but not society's results, will continue to extract greater pay for worse results — until some other decision criteria, which says 'no' to the union in favor of other interests, can be applied.
Principals know, and schools have both student results year-over-year and evaluations which are good indicators.
Can you get me data on this? I've asked every HS principal and probably half of the middle school principals in the Seattle School District. Maybe every principal in Seattle is incompetent, but I haven't gotten a single name or metric.
If you can get this information for Seattle, please post the result and from which principal. Because I have asked this exact question to every HS principal.
overlooks the fact that the total compensation of teachers and other public employees has been going up while service quality has stagnated or declined.
Citation on the quality of teaching has stagnated or declined. I haven't seen this data.
Are you their boss? No principal is going to bad-mouth an employee that they're obligated to work with to anyone who just asks. That'd poison the workplace. They'd be incompetent if they told you their private thoughts!
The evaluation numbers are not public data. But once in the public school district I attended years ago, I got to see the raw teacher scores from in-room evaluations. Because all teachers seemed to put on a 'dog and pony' show the days that evaluators sat in, I was afraid they'd have no correlation with my perceptions the rest of the year.
And yet, while I did not have enough access to perform a detailed analysis, the teachers I thought bad had low evaluations, from both their immediate supervisors and the 'neutral' observers from the district. The ones I thought good had high evaluations.
K-12 teacher competence is not a complicated matter, imperceptible to all but the finest measurements and highly-trained observers. If you're really curious and have the time, ask your district if you can observe the teachers you're most interested in knowing about.
My impression that the quality of services provided by public employees has stagnated or declined is more general than just 'teaching quality'. It's whole-system outputs.
In the school sphere my impression is driven by how the exact same problems and anguish are being expressed today as 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and 30 years ago (which is as far back as I've been paying attention). And roughly all the same quantifiable complaints are being advanced.
Dropout rates remain high – even with rampant under-reporting by state educational departments. When there are occasionally slight improvements in test scores, it's often shown to be due to manipulation of the comparison pools, or nasty tradeoffs to meet hollow numerical targets. And yet, if schools are to be run by large state-oriented (or even worse nation-oriented) bureaucracies, then managing by crude numerical targets are all that's possible.
In the past 30 years, teacher's unions (and other public employees' unions) have risen to become some of the most powerful political groups in each state. Have schools wildly improved over this same period? Are we now in a golden era of public services? Are civil servants now more respected than ever before?
Or perhaps, the 50-year experiment in public-sector unionism has maximized things other than positive results – like off-budget pension obligations and partisanship.
I take issue with your statement about stagnation. You're implying that apart from pay, the only other variable in the mix is the teacher. Now admittedly I'm in the Australian system not the American, but I know that if you asked teachers here what some of the main detrimental factors are to their teaching, then department policy and political pressure would be pretty high up there.
It's very convenient that politicians forget about forcing schools to accept the latest testing fad, drastically changing course requirements on a regular basis, increasing the numbers of children with learning disabilities in regular classes (much of the time without adequate learning support), etc. Especially when they want to find an excuse for underperformance.
One reason is that many places classify firefighters and police forces as critical services, and therefore cannot go on 'real' strikes. At most they can enact work to rules, and stop working overtimes. This takes away a lot of the bite of unions.
Though the article deals with teachers, your quote makes me wonder: If public sector unions are a bad deal, why are police and fire department employee unions exempt from being targeted? Where I live (Texas), these employees have both civil service rules and a union (so they are arguably double-protected) while other public employees--except teachers--have neither and are at-will employed. I have seen no hint that police and fire should have their union representation or civil service requirements eliminated; the exact opposite is stated in places like Wisconsin and Ohio.