Damn, I didn't realize we teachers and our elected representatives had it so good with the Dems. Please let me know what great thing would be happening if it weren't for this "subservience?" Generally this is an overstated trope of the right. Empirical evidence it that my mom and dad, lifelong teacher union members, would have a much nicer house. And Tom Daschle would be bringing them drinks with little umbrellas in them. Hell, I'd probably still be in the classroom myself.
If you're in Chicago, you know that Mayor Daley isn't exactly washing the cars of the CTU's leadership right about now. Nor is Mayor Kilpatric in Detroit, etc.
Its not really just an overstated trope of the right. The DLC likes to play this card to in order to differentiate themselves so that they seem somehow "independent" and "reasonable" simultaneously straw-manning the unions, which is what you are doing now in this post. Yglesias does it too. Its a little bit of valence politics for the cool kids.
Are you thinking its Democratic subservience to unions that has kept in place seniority provisions that keep us from sending experienced teachers to the schools that need them most? When I can send you to the school that needs you most and make you work there regardless of commute, childcare issues etc, I'll think this is a sincere argument on your part. The actual research on teacher worklives shows that they choose to teach close to home and that they exit the profession in greater rates when they have to teach poorer students with greater discipline issues. The more qualified the teacher, the more likely they are to go. Seniority is actually a way to get buy in for those teachers to stay in the system until they can get a plum post. But the evidence suggests that it is an imperfect buy in. But lets not make the issue complicated. Ground zero on this issue? Boston and Philly - with Democratic mayors. They didn't get the subservience memo.
Tenure? My own experience with this is that I could pick out an incompetent colleague pretty quickly after my first three months in my assignment. I would have loved to see that person go. Didn't see the administration trying to make a case. In the current climate of the administration of urban schools we have a long way to go with trying to actually use due process before we give it up. But ask an administrator why this is, and they'll tell you its the union. However, I do know that if you ask a unionist guy what the problem is and he says the administration it does leave the policy issue up for grabs. However, even if you think that at-will employment will allow us to clear out the deadwood so the legion of great urban teachers-to- be who were only being held back by fear of incompetent colleagues protected by tenure laws would come walking through the fields (like in Witness) once tenure ended, subservience still isn't in evidence. Was the last governor to get rid of tenure the NH guy (R) or the Democrat from Georgia, Roy Barnes? I don't know, but its close to a tie. I know the last governor to reinstate tenure was that flag wavin' Sonny Perdue (R).
Charter schools? Please, there are thousands of them and Democrats are avid supporters.
NCLBA? Its the law of the land. Federalized accountability for disparate state standards, which is crazy -- rewarding the states with the least serious standards and kicking the states with the most stringent. Kennedy and Miller signed on. I'm pretty sure they told NEA president Reg Weaver that this was a mistake they made while sorting his socks.
Vouchers? Somewhere between 40 and 51 percent of the public opposes vouchers. The unions are the locus of opposition, agreed, but that doesn't mean that "subservience" has kept everyone from jumping on the bandwagon.
Merit Pay? The Gubernatorial king of teacher pay for performance was Grey Davis. God love him he actually attached some money to the proposals, until the state went belly up. Then the pay for performance was deemed an unaffordable "extra." Which is why public sector unions typically are very leary of such programs no matter how well intentioned their advocates. Oh, and Grey Davis was a D? Wasn't he.
Which isn't to say that the Democrats don't have a better relationship with unions generally than do Republicans. But really, at the federal level all that means is they take your callsit doesn't take much for a union to have a better relationship with a corpse than it does with the GOP. And the Democrats know this. It also isn't to say that teacher unions are perfect institutions. But they and the Democrats are more complex than this stereotype.
That's a hell of a comment. Thanks. Standard stuff first. I was thinking of vouchers and at-will employment. I'm also thinking of national, rather than local, politics. I think you'll admit that no national Democratic candidate will come out in favor of vouchers or at-will employment as long as the teachers' union is against those things. And insofar as some flavor of those could help schools, then, yeah, that's subservience, and it's no good.
Wackier stuff. Roger Schank thinks we shouldn't be teaching math in high school. I think that's right. Think the Dems will be lining up behind that proposal?
Now, none of that is to say that teachers have it good, or that the Democrats have done wonders for teachers. But I do think their relationship with the teachers' union makes the sort of radical change that seems to be required much less likely.
I think what is most revealed here is the poor applicability of the categories "left" and "right" in 21st century politics. Does protectionism really fall on the left end of any consistent spectrum when Nader, Perot, and Buchanan can simultaneously espouse it?
Thank you 'pos, that was the point of the title actually, as Yglesias often defends the "two-dimensional" left-right categorization scheme.
Schank sent his daughter to a private school in Connecticut, and complains about pressure to get into Harvard? What did he expect? (Not to mention that that pressure largely comes from the type of parents who'll send their kids to prep school. And if he thinks that stress management, how to get along with their friends (don't people already get along with their friends?), and how to work together are things that high-school-age kids will care about, he's nuts. I thought he was basically plumping for more vocational schools, but then he complains that school ruins one's excitement for life. I rather fail to see how his alternate curriculum will buoy it. Plus, for high school, in being a preparation for college, to be preparation for being an academic, wouldn't college have to be a preparation for being an academic? When was that last the case? Given his belief in why people might take a college-level psychology class, I wonder why he thinks people take college-level math classes (make it classes whose relation to economics or securities trading has yet to be determined)—because their fathers were travelling salesmen? And what's up with this sentence: "In the process of researching what makes people "smart," you've concluded that schools have the opposite effect.". Hello? Did the interviewer really just link not knowing French grammar to being creative and independent?)
Not to be pedantic, but I think you meant "One Dimensional Model", left vs. right.
Two dimensions would immensely improve things.
On vouchers. Joe Lieberman. National Candidate more or less. Heck of a nice guy. Voucher supporter. He lost me at "we just need to try some alternatives" as his reasoning last time I heard him speak on it. If he'd based it on some sort of argument about faith or said that he thought private schools might do better I might have given him some credit for at least having thought it through logically if not empirically. But there he is. I will say, however, that I'm not sure that he meets the standard of national candidate so I won't say you're totally wrong here.
Mind you, I think you're totally wrong on the concept of market competition as a vehicle for imrovement, so I don't mind this at all. A better allegory is HMOs. Your traditional public school is likely to become the educator of last resort once the inherent selectivity of the private schools and the processes by which parents pick them kicks in - which will happen lottery or no. At least with charter schools the places that have fewer poor and special ed kids than the districts they are located in will be other public schools. And despite what Eduwonk says, thats exactly the broad result in charter schools generally. While individual exceptions abound, in aggregate they are a bit less poor, a lot less special ed and substantially less ESL in their composition than the districts they reside in.
And the achievement results for the fairly substantial voucher experiments completed haven't shown us much at all. And there is no non right wing think tank evidence of competitive effects to improve local schools that I'm aware of (although what I'm not aware of is probably quite a lot).
But as long as we look at this as simply a question of whether you're in lock step with the teacher union, rather than whether it is a good idea, then the issue has been framed in just the right way for the Republicans in a when did you stop beating your wife kind of way. It becomes good simply because the union says its bad. I think that's a mistake.
Kerry is against tenure. He's for due process, and that makes his position somewhat cute at first glance. But its not a flip flop, its a right approach to what needs to be done on this issue. And he's certainly a national candidate. It's how Florida split the baby when it elminated tenure. Massachusetts has done something similar and he's drawing on that in his proposal. In the end, Kerry's position seems to me to be designed to keep the case out of the courtroom and before an arbitrator and to make sure that there are limits on how long the process would go on. Which I think is an improvement for everyone. My old union supported a big procedural reform change designed to lower their and the districts's spending on lawyers in NY while preserving the meat of due process back in the 1990s. Again, more nuance than is typicaly expected of Democrats - in the NY legislature and I think Cuomo (D) (but it might have been early Pataki (R)). But also more than is expected of the union too.
A systematic procedural reform that speeds up the process, lowers cost and preserves the concept of due process in front an independent arbitrator and perhaps builds in a structure for instituting a comprehensive improvement plan for the low performing teacher for three months or so before lowering the axe is the logical place to have the issue end up and Kerry is there. I'm there, but I do know a lot of people in the union community particularly on the NEA side who aren't.
Again, its a dialogue of sorts. Not subservience. THe GOP again wants to use this simply as a rhetorical horse to flog so whatever Kerry's for won't be good enough. And you know it won't be good enough because he's in the unions' pocket. Framing at work.
My question to you is how many teachers do you think this would affect? Until we get the pipeline problems solved, we're sadly not going to be replacing these people with the leading lights. I can accept that tenure reform is a marginal way to improve working conditions that would help make the workplace more attractive, which is one reason why I'm for it if it preserves that independent hearing. But we have so many other problems with working conditions that it would be a drop in the bucket.
The other reason I'm for it is I think that union interpretations of their Duty for Fair Representation requirements mean that they go to the wall on everything in order to avoid their own liability issues and that limiting the process will be helpful to the unions in this way. If they feel obliged or required in a particular instance to defend the indefensible, at least it will be over quicker.
On the wackier stuff, the unions are the least of your problems now that we are in the grip of the standards movement. There is a lot that is good about said movement and I count myself a supporter of it, but it does generally mean you have to take a lot math.
I commented on another site that I think Matt is going to end up a conservative in the George Will vein. He's already on the way with his $10 words.