TEACHERS UNIONS

My old pal Matt comments on my school vouchers post from last week:

Come on, you're skipping some big issues! Education unions have made it hard to change schools or make them accountable for results - so people want to give more funding to private schools because they are union-free. So, just like car buyers, steel purchasers and other consumers, when unions began negatively impacting the quality and/or value of the product, people looked for providers that were not so encumbered. Vouchers are an attempt to defund the teachers unions. And there are some good reasons to do that.

And my response:

Okay, I'm going out on a limb here. The teachers unions have absolutely nothing to do with the problems in our schools. I mean, I'm sure we could find some actual problems they cause if we used a fine tooth comb, but the notion that our school problems are because of "bad teachers" is nothing but right-wing anti-union rhetoric. The biggest problem with this point of view is very similar to what I write about in the main post: because it is so difficult to accurately gauge how well students are learning, it is necessarily difficult to gauge how well teachers are teaching. When student achievement on standardized tests is so clearly tied to family income, it is almost as though teacher quality, whatever that may mean, is irrelevant. Yet the entire establishment ignores this fact, and it is a fact, asserting that teachers whose students score poorly on standardized tests are "bad," but the evil unions won't let society do away with them.

I mean, sure, we've all had good teachers; we've all had bad teachers. We remember the extremes the best. On the other hand, how do we know who was good and who was bad? And how do we rank all those teachers we had who weren't at the extremes? That makes it a bit more difficult. Now throw in the fact that the payoff for educational work may very well take a decade or more to become manifest. And by that time, it's much more murky as to who taught what and how well they did it. The bottom line here is that education, as a "product" like the steel you mentioned, is extraordinarily intangible and abstract, which makes it really difficult to assign causes and effects the way we do with other consumer products. I mean, when steel is brittle and easily breaks, we know it was poorly manufactured. When a student scores poorly on a test, it is not easy to know how much of that comes from "bad teaching" and how much of that stems from other factors, like poverty, drug abuse, or community violence.

Teachers unions serve as a moustache twirling villain with a face for television news spots on education. Like I said, unions may very well play a role--in fact, I think they do, but only because their views on education are very much in line with the conventional wisdom, which serves to reinforce that conventional wisdom. But as a major cause for low student achievement, the unions are simply a distraction, nothing more.

BTW, I'm still looking at that Economist article on unions. Obviously, I'm going very slowly.

Here's a Democracy Now piece from last October discussing the anti-union propaganda film Waiting for Superman that delves more deeply into this issue.

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