7 Reasons to Say Goodbye to Teachers Unions

[rogue06]

I doubt it's true. The stats I can find on the internet suggest teachers are more likely to send kids to private schools than the average person, but the primary cause is probably just that the average teacher in the US earns twice the average wage in the US, so they can afford private schools more than the average person. I can't find anything to suggest teachers send their kids to private schools more than other professions, e.g. lawyers, bankers etc.

The specific articles I can find of teachers discussing why they have sent their children to private schools seem unanimous in saying that they believe the teaching itself at private schools to be worse, but the social environment to be better due to the private schools drawing on a better class of student and they note that the peer-group of students has significant influence on their lives and educational outcomes. As I noted in my previous post, if you pack the good kids into one school to make the social environment there better, yet tend to make the social environment in the other schools worse as a result. While it might be beneficial for the specific kids that are being moved to a school with 'better' kids in it, it makes for worse outcomes on average if this starts to snowball, so you tend to want to design the system to prevent this happening too much.

As you discovered, teachers are nearly twice as likely than the average American (20% to 11%) to send their school-age kids to a private school. The only group with a higher percentage are members of Congress.

As Mark Perry, a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan, once explained:

What would you conclude about the quality of product or service X under the following circumstances?

1. The employees of Airline X and their families are offered free airline tickets as an employee benefit. The employees refuse to travel with their families on Airline X and instead pay full fare on Airline Y when flying.

2. The employees of Automaker X are offered a company car at a substantial discount and they instead buy a car at full price from Automaker Y.

3. Employees at Health Clinic X and their families are offered medical care at no additional cost as a benefit and yet most employees of Clinic X pay out-of-pocket for medical services at Clinic Y.

In each case, the employees’ willingness to pay full price for a competitor’s product or service and forgo their employer’s product or service at a reduced price (or no cost) makes a strong statement about the low quality of X. What makes the inferior quality of X even more obvious is that the employees at Firm X, since they work in the industry, would have better information about product (service) X and product (service) Y than the average person.

[Starlight]

The only group with a higher percentage are members of Congress.

And yet again you cite nothing that would lead me to believe this unlikely claim... which appears to be in disagreement with your previous unlikely claim that teachers were the highest.

[Cow Poke]

And yet again you cite nothing that would lead me to believe this unlikely claim... which appears to be in disagreement with your previous unlikely claim that teachers were the highest.

I think the big difference is that, in rural America, teachers are much more likely to have their children in their own public school system, because such schools do much better under local control. It's where you get into metropolitan areas and bigger problem school systems that teachers are much more likely to do private school.

[rogue06]

And yet again you cite nothing that would lead me to believe this unlikely claim... which appears to be in disagreement with your previous unlikely claim that teachers were the highest.

I'm not sure that Congressman is considered a profession although more than a few have made it one.

I've got a study from a few years backs in my notes that I haven't got around to downloading from my previous computer that found that teachers lead the professions with school-age kids in private schools followed closely by doctors and lawyers.

[Thoughtful Monk]

Along with the thread about unions being a detriment to police reform....

7 Reasons to Say Goodbye to Teachers Unions

Every year, my school district hosts a beginning of the year meeting with every employee in the district. Amidst all the pomp are 15 minutes during which my school district provides a platform for the head of the local teachers union. He doesn’t say much, keeping it vague and general. He says the union works with the school board and other leaders to fight for both teachers and students.

He also spends time in the teachers’ lounge occasionally, handing out pamphlets. A note in defense of unions was left at a table in the lounge recently. It details accomplishments of unions past and the evils of corporations. This note and this speech are a nice review of a high school civics course, but they have one glaring flaw: they focus entirely on the past.

Contexts change. For instance, the necessity of stationed US troops in Germany has shifted since the Cold War. The same goes for unions at large as the US reaches historical levels of prosperity. We can appreciate the accomplishments of the past while still reconsidering the utility of unions in the present. There are of course defenses of unions within a modern context. That said, they are ultimately lacking. Here are seven reasons why we should support the dissolution of teachers unions in 2019....

Then I'll summarize, or highlight, the 7 reasons from the article...

1. They are advocacy groups as much as unions
2. They have more money in politics than just about everyone
3. Their policy ideals won’t cut it
4. They block meaningful reform
5. They breed a culture of entitlement
6. They bargain for mediocre benefits
7. We can bargain for ourselves

Just like police unions put the interest of the police officers over public safety, teacher unions put the interests of teachers over the interests of the students and the community.

My local school district is now and has been for a long time been a smoking radioactive hole in the ground. Although I am more inclined the place the blame on the school board than the teacher's union.

On the other hand, do teacher's union tend to elect the people they want on the school board to get what they want? In the town I grew up in, that seemed to be the case.

[Cow Poke]

My local school district is now and has been for a long time been a smoking radioactive hole in the ground. Although I am more inclined the place the blame on the school board than the teacher's union.

On the other hand, do teacher's union tend to elect the people they want on the school board to get what they want? In the town I grew up in, that seemed to be the case.

In many cases, the teachers union and the school board are either one and the same, or in some kind of incestuous relationship. In the last few places I have lived, yes, the teacher's union pretty much selected the school board members.

[Sparko]

Unions bad.

[Cow Poke]

Unions bad.

Especially bad unions.

[Thoughtful Monk]

Especially bad unions.

You're being unnecessarily redundant.

[Cow Poke]

You're being unnecessarily redundant.

Laughing.... yeah, I thought the same thing.... "but I repeat myself".

[QuantaFille]

Charter schools typically have entry criteria to ensure they only get good students. Starting with above average students gives the school a self-reinforcing reputation as a 'good school' and in turn attracts the above-average in wealth and intelligence, and this means the school does fine on grades at exam time compared to other schools regardless of whether or not particularly much effort or money is being put into good teaching, because their students are above-average students from the start and probably have support from educated parents at home in their learning and homework. The school in turn can charge the parents slightly less than an equivalent private school would, due the government subsidies, even with the owner diverting some of that money into their own pockets.

So such schools can thrive even if they offer worse teaching than equivalent state schools. Meanwhile the state schools are having their best students siphoned off and being left with all the problem students, thus meaning that per-class they have more problem students, and even if the state schools have better quality teachers and more highly paid ones and better funded classrooms, their outcomes can still be worse as a result of losing all their good students.

An underlying issue is that quality of teaching is very hard to measure, so it's hard to determine what is or isn't a 'good school' in that sense. So people have a tendency to select 'good schools' based on the demographics of the students attending, or the grades of students graduating from them, and both those metrics tend to snowball, and tend to cause other schools to become worse as a consequence of the good students being moved away from the 'bad schools' to the 'good schools'.

In my city, I can't think of a single charter school I've seen on the "good" side of town. Not any. They are all in poorer areas where the behavioural issues are substantially worse. And it's false that they have entry criteria. You apply and are entered into a lottery, which is completely random. I've never even heard of a charter school that didn't use a lottery to select students. If they exist they are not the norm.
Your whole rant here about how charter schools steal all the good kids from bad schools, making the bad schools worse, is just plain ignorant.

[Starlight]

In my city, I can't think of a single charter school I've seen on the "good" side of town. Not any. They are all in poorer areas where the behavioural issues are substantially worse. And it's false that they have entry criteria. You apply and are entered into a lottery, which is completely random. I've never even heard of a charter school that didn't use a lottery to select students. If they exist they are not the norm.
Your whole rant here about how charter schools steal all the good kids from bad schools, making the bad schools worse, is just plain ignorant.

It's totally possible the area you live in is unusual in this regard. The articles I've read about charter schools nationwide in the US all say the opposite.

[QuantaFille]

It's totally possible the area you live in is unusual in this regard. The articles I've read about charter schools nationwide in the US all say the opposite.

It's a school that has almost 100 campuses in multiple states. Their website specifically says there are no criteria you have to meet in order to enter the lottery.

I looked it up, and charter schools are literally not allowed to have entry criteria. They are only allowed to give preference for things like needing to learn English (i.e., the child of immigrants) or being disadvantaged. They can't stop anyone entering the lottery. Which is the opposite of what you're saying. If a school does enforce criteria, they are breaking the rules. Maybe some schools do. That doesn't make it the norm.

[Cow Poke]

In my city, I can't think of a single charter school I've seen on the "good" side of town. Not any. They are all in poorer areas where the behavioural issues are substantially worse. And it's false that they have entry criteria. You apply and are entered into a lottery, which is completely random. I've never even heard of a charter school that didn't use a lottery to select students. If they exist they are not the norm.
Your whole rant here about how charter schools steal all the good kids from bad schools, making the bad schools worse, is just plain ignorant.

I think he may have been confused, thinking a "charter school" was a Christian school, because I have heard the same wrong accusation there.... I have worked in Christian schools - we DELIGHTED in taking the problem children, because that's where you could see the biggest change.

[Cow Poke]

It's totally possible the area you live in is unusual in this regard. The articles I've read about charter schools nationwide in the US all say the opposite.

Perhaps you need to widen your sources of reading materials.