In response to the discussion in the Blaming teachers post, Greg Forster writes AFT and UAW – More Alike Than You’d Think on Jay P. Greene’s Blog.
I think the real problem is not that school reformers demonize teachers but that defenders of the government school monopoly angelize them. When we reformers insist that teachers should be treated as, you know, human beings, who respond to incentives and all that, rather than as some sort of perfect angelic beings who would never ever allow things like absolute job protection to affect their performance, it drives people like (AFT head Randi) Weingarten and (New York Times columnist Bob) Herbert nuts.
“Teachers’ unions have pushed up costs dramatically” in the past 40 years, Forster writes. Public school costs have doubled, after inflation, primarily because unions pushed schools to hire more teachers relative to student enrollment.
It’s true that high salaries aren’t the main issue in schools, although teacher salaries are in fact surprisingly high. The disconnect between teacher pay and teacher performance is much more important. But the UAW has the same problem! Their pay scales don’t reward performance, either.
Incentives matter for skilled blue-collar and white-collar workers, he argues. The auto industry has been hurt badly by “union work rules – including poor performance due to absolute job protection, pay scales that don’t reward performance, and rigid job descriptions that make process modernization impossible.”
That does sound familiar.
Why assume what motivates you motivates everyone else? Perhaps people are different, and perhaps some or most of them do work less hard when they’re complacent. People are diverse, or so the left keeps telling us.
Also, where’s this great deal the teacher’s unions have secured for their members? In private industry, any employer who offered a pay system as poor as that secured by teacher’s unions for their members would go under because they’d fail to attract qualified workers. If any professional was moving from one company to another in the same field with decades of experience but was only offered fresh-out-of-college pay, he’d laugh at the offer. Yet teachers have to put up with that all the time thanks to their unions.
GM plant workers aren’t given the chance to work as hard as their non-union counterparts at Toyota and Honda. In the UAW shops, workers are categorized by the specific task they perform, and due to work rules fought for by the union cannot perform any other task. At the Toyota plant, all line workers have the same job description and are trained in many aspects of assembling a car.
Given the choice, I’d take the Toyota plant any day of the week.
Ponderosa, I can easily believe that you work very hard. What I am doubtful about is whether everyone in the education sector works effectively. Teachers themselves tell many stories of education sector ineffectiveness. From this thread alone, Lightly Seasoned mentions an administrator, an ex English teacher, who didn’t know the proper use of who/whom. You yourself mentioned schools that follow “ed claptrap, use the same watered-down curricula and crappy commercial textbooks, and are led by the same confused administrators and state ed leaders”, Miller Smith mentioned a school system that puts children in Honors Chemistry who can’t add without a calculator (and I assume Miller’s not teaching Honors Chemistry to first graders), and also a new teacher who apparently was never taught in teachers’ training that kids forget things if they don’t revise.
This list is merely from this thread, and ignoring second-hand reports about what some poster’s wife has experienced (I didn’t mention them because there was plenty of material already). There are numerous reports over the edu-blogsphere of bad practices by school administrations. Now people always make mistakes, but if Miller Smith is regularly getting students in Honors Chemistry that can’t add without a calculator that indicates a systematic problem.
Furthermore, much of the education sector is apparently totally happy to ignore the results of large scale studies into what works, like Project Followthrough – for example Miller Smith has totally ignored my references to material that indicates that kids can learn even without not doing homework. This is the sign of an industry that isn’t working effectively and isn’t interested in working effectively. Individual teachers may be working extremely hard, but there’s very few systems to support them. I mean, you get a new teacher who doesn’t know that kids forget stuff?! What on earth was she taught at ed school? This is like churning out new doctors who don’t know that wounds sometimes get infected!
Tracy,
I agree that public education is dysfunctional is many ways. My only point was that I don’t see how unions are the major cause of that dysfunction.
Sorry Ponderosa for misreading you. I thought you were making a more general argument that competition in education was unnecessary because you were already working hard.
Teacher unions drive up costs and shift the balance of power away from administrators, many of whom are incompetent and arbitrary. It is hard to say how this affects the quality of education one way or another. My wife is a phenomenal teacher. She has little use for teacher unions but she knows what administrators are capable of doing to innocent teachers. Unions protect the innocent. Unfortunately, they also protect the guilty and the mediocre.
As long as the public school monopoly exists, teacher unions are a necessary evil.
Empowering the parents who care about the quality of their children’s education is the only way to keep both teachers and administrators accountable.
> The eight hour day and five day week were not arrived at through the beneficence and wisdom of managers and owners, but through the action of organized workers.
In the US at least, they became federal law during the 30s because FDR was trying to reduce production. They were upheld in cases involving “big bread” trying to shut down small bakers.
I’ve no objection to whatever working conditions a given biz chooses. However, I see no reason why one biz’ decisions should be binding on another.
> I doubt the workers at a non-union Honda plant work much harder or better than the workers at a GM plant.
“harder or better” misses the point. As a car buyer, I don’t care about “harder or better” wrt the workers. I care about car quality and price.
It’s also false.
Here’s what the UAW defends (http://www.regularfolksunited.com/index.php?tab=article_view&article_id=561)
“For instance, I had an employee who punched in his time card and then disappeared. The rules were such that I had to spend hours documenting that this man was not in his three foot by three foot work area. I needed witnesses, timed reports, calls over the intercom and a plant wide search all documented in detail. After this absurdity I decided to go my own route; I called the corner bar and paged him and he came to the phone. I gave him a 30 day unpaid disciplinary lay off because he was a “repeat offender”. When he returned he thanked me for the PAID vacation. I scoffed, until he explained: (1) He had tried to get the lay off because it was fishing season; (2) The UAW negotiated with GM Labor Relations Department to give him the time WITH PAY.”
I supervised a loading dock and 21 UAW workers who worked approximately five hours per day for eight hours pay. They could easily load one third more rail cars and still maintain their union negotiated break times, but when I tried to make them increase production ever so slightly they sabotaged my ability to make even the current production levels by hiding stock, calling in sick, feigning equipment problems, and even once, as a show of force, used a fork lift truck and pallets and racks to create a car part prison where they trapped me while I was conducting inventory. The reaction of upper management to my request to boost production was that I should “not be naïve”.
One afternoon I was helping oversee the plant while upper management was off site. The workers brought an RV into the loading yard with a female “entertainer” who danced for them and then “entertained” them in the RV. With no other management around, I went to Labor Relations for assistance. As a twenty five year old woman, I was not about to try to break up a crowd of fifty rowdy men. The Labor Relations Rep pulled out the work rules and asked me which of the rules the men were breaking. I read through the rules and none applied directly of course. Who wrote work rules to cover prostitutes at lunch? The only “legal” cause I had was an unauthorized vehicle and person and that blame did not fall on the union workers who were being “entertained” but on the security guards at the gate. Not one person suffered any consequence.
Another employee in the plant urinated on the feet of his supervisor as a protest to discipline. He was, of course, fired…that is until the union negotiated and got his job back.”
It’s easy to find stories like this about union workers.
I applaud Miller Smith’s demand for teacher professionalism with two caveats.
(1) It isn’t the public who has set up the current system, it is teachers, via political advocacy. The public has gone along for the ride.
(2) As Smith points out, some kids can’t be educated by even the best teachers. Smith seems to think that we should nonethless pay to try. I disagree.
> BTW–I have never before encountered anyone who argued that the eight hour day was unrelated to labor organizing. Many countries celebrate May 1 and the Haymarket demonstration for this reason.
Huh? http://www.kentlaw.edu/ilhs/haymarket.htm says “When police ordered the protest meeting to disperse (peaceful though it was), a bomb was thrown toward the police by an unknown person. The police responded by firing at the crowd. This became known as the “Haymarket Riot,” now more properly named the Haymarket Tragedy. The 8-Hour Day Movement was destroyed in the nation-wide hysteria which followed.”
The existence of “labor day” holidays doesn’t prove anything about what unions did. Claiming credit is standard PR for every kind of organization. (Roosters claim credit for the dawn.)
BTW – What countries celebrate the Haymarket incident? (And, who got to May 1 first, the trade unions or the communists? They’re not always the same, even though the latter often try to co-opt the former.)
Andy:
The following is excerpted from InfoPlease:
Labor Day
In many countries, May Day is also Labor Day. This originates with the United States labor movement in the late 19th Century. On May 1, 1886, unions across the country went on strike, demanding that the standard workday be shortened to eight hours. The organizers of these strikes included socialists, anarchists, and others in organized labor movements. Rioting in Chicago’s Haymarket Square on May 4th including a bomb thrown by an anarchist led to the deaths of a dozen people (including several police officers) and the injury of over 100 more.
The protests were not immediately successful, but they proved effective down the line, as eight-hour work days eventually did become the norm. Labor leaders, socialists, and anarchists around the world took the American strikes and their fallout as a rallying point, choosing May Day as a day for demonstrations, parades, and speeches. It was a major state holiday in the Soviet Union and other communist countries.
Labor Day is still celebrated on May 1 in countries around the world, and it is still often a day for protests and rallies. In recent years, these have often been targeted against globalization.
http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h750.html
“The Haymarket Riot was a signal event in the early history of American labor. It was largely responsible for DELAYING acceptance of the eight-hour day, as workers deserted the K.O.L. and moved toward the more moderate American Federation of Labor. For many years the police at Haymarket Square were regarded as martyrs and the workers as violent anarchists; that view moderated to a large extent in later times.”
emphasis added
Andy–the point was that it was the work of organized labor, not that it was achieved by the Haymarket riot. That day is nonetheless memorialized as labor day in many countries. Unless I am mistake the American Federation of Labor is another instance of organized labor.
> Andy–the point was that it was the work of organized labor, not that it was achieved by the Haymarket riot.
Actually, several claims have been made.
One was that the Haymarket Riot was a labor success. It pretty clearly wasn’t. (The AFL was a huge pull-back from the Knights of Labor.)
Another was that the 8 hour day came about only because of organized labor. The statutes may be due to organized labor, but lots of folks got an 8 hour day before then.
A third claim was that unions made things better for an industry. We’re still waiting for an example. Does anyone want to argue that the auto and steel industries were helped by unions?