" . . . although the South provides the raw material for a study of whether unionization affects school performance, apparently such a study has never been done."

Heh.

Never ask questions you don't want to know the answer to.

How many teachers who taught evolution in Kansas have been rehired now that the Kansas State BOE has reemerged from the dinosaur era?

It's easy to fire teachers if you can get a smear campaign going, (like equating spontaneous hugs with sexual fondling!)

Teaching is a tough thing to do in any school.

Many students and parents don't give a rat's ass about learning or refined vocabulary. Heck look who's president!

Is our chidren learning?

Don't misunderestimate me, I really don't know how much a brazillian is.

Is our teachers worth firing?

Tom, if I marry a brazilian, is that big o' me?

I believe Mark Kleiman has a faulty premise. I do not believe that it is particularly easier to fire teachers in the South than in other states.

I know that in Florida, it's actually quite hard. In Alabama, the teachers union are the most powerful political organization.

I think were a study to be done, it would find that whatever differences there are in firing practices they're not particular to the South.

Before even discussing the firing of teachers to take a step back and look at the bigger picture and answer a few more important questions?

1) What is being done to attract good people to the teaching profession?

The answer is virtually nothing....teacher salaries are so low that most intelligent people seek higher paying jobs.

2) Are people who do want to become teachers receiving adequate training?

No. Most college-level education programs are jokes that do little to prepare students for the day-to-day challenges of teaching. Students learn how to write perfect lesson plans, but nothing about how to manage a classroom or teach them effectively.

Firing a bad teacher is relatively easy compared to the challenge of replacing them with someone better. That's why so many bad teachers still have jobs...because schools can't find anyone better to replace them with!

Living in Alabama I'm gonna have to ask around about this some myself. I have some friends wives who are teachers and I never really thought about this before, but Hank is right. The teachers union here is particularly strong.

Having said that I must say that I have a huge amount of respect for the local teachers and their ability to teach. I wish there were more support for the arts, but the area I live in is maybe more enlightened than some parts of the state!

cetaris paribus? other things being equal?

I taught in South Carolina for 16 years, and it is very difficult to fire a teacher here. The state education association, while not a union, does have a lot of political power.

However, many parts of the South could be used to study the effects of extreme poverty on student achievement.

Surely the gap enjoyed by a Massachusetts or a New York over certain southern states flows from the fact that these northern states are more affluent than their southern counterparts -- not that their teachers tend to belong to unions. I'd be mighty surprised to learn that expensive, non-unionized private schools in the Northeast don't get better results than their heavily unionized public competitors.

Mark's post was specifically about Georgia, where teachers are apparently not unionized. That's probably true in some other Southern states too, though not all of them.

And yes, as a professor of public policy, Mark is pretty well aware that you would have to control for other variables in order to study this. If you click the link you'll see that he mentions this.

At least they graduate knowing how to pray, who to hate, and who to vote for.

So go fuck yourself Drum.

PS and Psssst...

American Hawk, Al, Eggy:
Buy Halliburton now.
Here's the skinny:
We are going to bomb us some more ragheads...
Yee-hah!

There has been such a study done. Several, in fact. Look at Eberts and Stone (1987) and Milkman (1997) and Argys and Rees (1995) for examples. There are also some bad studies, like Kurth (1988), some of which compare entire states to each other. (There are too many differences between North Carolina and Massachusetts to think that unions have the biggest effect.)

The five-cent version of the findings is that unions have a net positive effect on students, and on the broad mass of students it's significant, repeatable and undeniable. There are issues at the top and bottom of the student achievement scale, where the union effect is more equivocal, and occasionally even negative in some studies. There is not widespread agreement in academia about *why* these effects occur, but they do occur and are pretty well documented.

You can find the citations to these studies, along with more detail, in the "Unions" section of a report I wrote last year. See http://whatcheer.net/ripr/wri-startline.pdf. Full disclosure: the report was written for a teacher union in Rhode Island, but they didn't edit me, and it's identified that way right up front.

As others above have hinted, it would not be a useful experiment. In order to track the effects of the variable under study, all others need to be held as constant as possible. Even assuming there were a part of the south with easy-to-fire teachers, you'd be looking at a different geographical location, and probably different economic backgrounds and demographics, both for teachers and students. Little useful data would result from looking at this.

Dumb hillbillies can't compare to the students of the 60's. Educational levels peaked in the early 60's because students were held accountable. There was competitive grading.

We'll never get anywhere holding teachers accountable. Why would teachers be responsible for student achievement? Students are responsible for student achievement. You can lead a student to knowledge, but you can't make him drink.

The left has to get back to individual responsibility. Blaming teachers and schools is a dead end.

My husband is a Florida teacher. The unions are tough but he earns over $70,000. That's top pay for teachers with a doctorate so he doesn't complain much. Whenever he brings up any specific disagreement with the union I encourage him to voice his opinion and challenge the leadership. He's a 30 year member. Labor laws can also be changed to prevent these unfair, often politically motivated firings. The union also benefits from retaining the best people.

How dare Kevin answer my post before I post it! (Damn my slow typing.)

I went to high school in semi-rural NC after moving from a suburban upper-middle class school district in western NY. NC, like most of the south, has a toothless union that his little power (I believe some of its restrictions are mandated by statute). And the school, like most schools in NC, was sub-par.

The school in NY, on the other hand, had an all powerful union (we're talking 80K salaries for tenured teachers who stuck around for a couple of decades). The district was also regarded as one of the top performers in the country.

The negative consequences of a tough union areoutweighed by the fact that unions can negotiate for high wages. And high wages attract better teachers.

NC has a scheme called "teaching fellows" that grants college scholarships to kids if they agree to teach in NC for a few years after they graduate. The problem is that teacher salaries (and teacher treatment by the administration) are so crappy that many of them choose to back out of the deal and pay the scholarship back.

The Teacher's Union in Texas is fairly toothless -- and teacher's here sign year or two-year contracts.

It's difficult to fire them during their contract, but trivial to dismiss them after. It's actually much, much harder to fire administrative officials like superintendents during their contract than teachers. (A local school district with a bat-shit crazy superindendent found that out).

And, by and large, the Texas school systems suck because of lack of funding. It's been a running judicial fight for decades to try to even the money out -- my school district has something like 5 or 6k per student, but there are places out in East Texas where it's lucky to bust 1k a year -- where schools lack basics like books and pencisl, and only get teachers (and only for short periods) because if you teach there you for a few years you can get your student loans waived.

Joel:

Never ask questions you don't want to know the answer to.

No shit. Years ago, Money Magazine did a huge (staff in excess of 60) study to see if private education was better than public on an apples to apples basis. Want to guess which was better?

Does anyone really wonder why we haven't seen an avalanche of work comparing conservative ed. quackery with the public education status quo?

This may have gotten lost in my comments on Kevin's last post on the subject, but I have no doubt that getting rid of teacher's unions, at least under any scenario that will realistically happen in the near future, would be just plain nuts.

For me, the starting point for any discussion about teachers is that we need to make K-12 teaching a far more attractive career, It would be pretty much impossible to do that without considerably raising their pay. Teaching is an extremely demanding job under the best of circumstances, and it's hard to see a way to make it any easier while still expecting the kind of excellence we all want from our teachers.

If we were to get rid of teachers' unions, we would guarantee a slow deterioration of teacher pay, and a commensurate degredation in teacher quality.

Unless, that is, we were to simultaneously raise all teachers' salaries by, say, 50%-100%, with guaranteed annual increases in both starting salaries (tied to inflation) and the salaries of continuing teachers (a percent tied to years of experience plus possibly some performance benefits). I suspect that a move like this could be tied to the elimination of unions plus a strong system of teacher evaluations and still enjoy the support of a vast majority of teachers. The one downside, of course, being that it would cost a fortune, but it remains the most plausible idea I've run across to dramatically improve public education.

Or am I just nuts? Does this idea have some major flaw (beyond expense, of course) that I'm missing?

Yeah, it's tragic. All those throngs of brilliant people who want to get into teaching, but can't... 'CAUSE a them DAMN UNIONS!! So they have to go into higher paying, more prestigious, jobs instead. The broken dreams, the years of waiting for an opening at the union hall!

Good grief! Why so much kneejerk viciousness against workers in some quarters? You get what you $%#!!@ pay for. That is some dimwit economics -101 these "new liberals" might understand. Years of low pay before you can make a decent living, long hours, low prestige. Of course geniuses are banging at the gates to get in....'cept they caint 'cause a them damn UNIONS!

Of course, Kaus at the bottom of it again.

I am not a teach. I just typed that to make old farts like Drum fume and snort.

Are we to believe teachers can't get fired for cause? In the south it is hire and fire, low pay and low qualifications too.
When we talk of the failures of our schools we blame it all on the teachers and ignor the social problems our public schools have to cope with. The children come with baggage to inner city schools, poverty which breads broken families, child and spouse abuse, poor health care and even hungry and homeless children. Chidren who live in ugly surroundings never see a park or a beach or anything beautiful. Happy and healthy children have a better chance to learn even if the teachers are mediocre, and other professions have a lot of mediocre people too.
Just a few days ago a report came out about the quality of life for children in 21 advanced nations America was #20 and the UK #21. Something to think about.

Out here in the islands, the Hawaii State Teachers Association has made a convenient scapegoat for critics of public education for years, especially those who serve in politics.

This past election year the anti-teacher rhetoric and policy-making reached its nadir, resulting in an alarming 12% drop in the overall number of teachers as those in the profession have joined the exodus for lack of public support, and gone on to other things.

Nobody -- either in the general public or in authority -- really wants to admit that the primary problems are:

* A Department of Education bureaucracy that has been treated as a repository for political patronage;

* A Board of Education that has been rendered little more than an advisory body by the state legislature, which controls all funding;

* A chronic lack of adequate funding even in boom times, which has left a number of our public schools understaffed, underfunded and undersupplied and many facilities in substandard condition;

* A lack of institutional support from a politicized bureaucracy that has all too often compelled our unionized teachers to pay for needed equipment and materials themselves, often with no immediate prospect of reimbursement;

(NOTE: Those of you working for private sector companies need to ask yourselves what your own reaction would be if corporate policy compelled you to personally subsidize the procurement of necessary office supplies and equipment)

* A legislature that has often shown no hesitation to undermine the role of the elected school board through its power of the purse, resulting in conflicting policies that leave teachers and administrators at a loss;

* A governor that has jealously reserved her right to determine priorities in allocating legislative apprpopriations for the public schools, which has resulted in a nine-year backlog of maintenance and repair of educational facilities; and

* A personnel policy that allows DOE personnel to transfer after only two years service, which on an island where 80% of the people live in Honolulu has resulted in a revolving door at rural Oahu schools, with teachers and administrators returning to urban Honolulu at the first available opprtunity and an accompanying lack of continuity for rural students.

These are all very solvable problems, whenver people want to stop scapegoating teachers and playing political games, and instead deal with real issues for a change, starting with a commitment to adequate funding for programs, facilities and yes, teacher pay and compensation.

Sound familiar?

Can we please keep something clear in all these discussions about evaluating teachers -- teachers' unions defend teachers' rights, not bad teaching.

Now I understand. Teachers in this country are of a very poor quality. However, they retain their job security through unions. So, if we make it easy to fire them and their jobs less secure, more people will flock to the profession. I suppose many college graduates are just waiting to enter a profession with low pay and insecurity.

I believe the teachers unions are just as interested to improve public education as anyone else. Is there any evidence it is not so? It is the usual if one repeats and repeats often enough it becomes the truth. On the other hand it is so convenient to blame the teachers for the failings of our society.
and of course the unions do represent the interests of the teachers, why not? The US does not have the best labor laws in the world to start with. There is a need for unions.

mfw13, above, makes two very good points.

I want to add a third, related point: not much is done to retain good teachers, particularly in schools where students are struggling to master basic skills like reading and math.

I teach at one such school. Last year was my first year of teaching. Out of a total of 21 English teachers, 14 of us were in our first year. Teaching is not the kind of job where first year people do well. Where did all the veterans go?

Re: post by Pacific John above.

The advent of "No Child Left Behind" and its testing and "accountability" requirements has meant that there is a lot of testing in private schools, too, and it has meant that the public/private comparisons are easier to do now, and mean more, since the data is more comparable. That is, it used to be true that after you factor out race and class, there wasn't enough data to make meaningful comparisons between public and private schools, but one of the unintended consequences of NCLB is that now there is, and it's not particularly flattering to private, parochial, or charter schools.

There are an interesting couple of charts on the subject in the report I cited above, and a few citations on the subject, but a direct link to some entertaining research is here:

http://www.ncspe.org/publications_files/OP111.pdf

This is a PR problem.

That is all.

Unions have done a TERRIBLE job of selling the reasons why workers are protected. The CATO institutes, and Heritage Foundations, and American Enterprise Institutes, and all the other Stink Tanks, have done a great PR job of "educating" people why it's a bad thing that Union Membership makes it harder to fire bad teachers. The Unions don't do the opposite job of educating people about why it's a bad thing that Union Membership makes it harder for bad (or otherwise in-bad-faith) employers to capriciously fire GOOD teachers.

That's really what this problem boils down to.

And the people whose job it is to make this argument. . . (the Union bosses) are, apparently, not subject to the normal market forces (elections?) that would otherwise get them kicked out from their positions of power, such that they collect Union Dues, and do not do their jobs of defending Union Employees.

That's why I (and most "centerists") believe that it's better if Unions are all dismantled, (and then rebuilt from scratch).

I was a lawyer who hated his job and became a teacher, but only because my wife makes the money. I teach in a suburban high school and teach on a year to year contract. If they don't want to renew me they won't. Teacher pay is a big problem. Most teachers either rely on a spouse income or leave the profession. I forget the exact statistics, but at least 50-75% of all new teachers leave after 5 years. Granted some of those were bad teachers, but many were good teachers who simply could not stay in the profession after a child was born, spouse looses a job etc. The teacher organizations are the only ones who watch out for the teachers. Administrators pass the blame down, parents pass it up and many kids dodge it entirely. Don't get me wrong, I love my job, and some of the kids are incredible and give me hope for the future. Unfortunately, until we as a society stand up and face the problem, we are going to continue to loose more kids than we should.

In an update, he also delivers the peculiar news that although the South provides the raw material for a study of whether unionization affects school performance, apparently such a study has never been done.

Well sure. Because everyone just knows that unions hurt school performance. No point in letting pesky facts get in the way of universal knowledge.

This is a PR problem. [...]That's why I (and most "centerists") believe that it's better if Unions are all dismantled, (and then rebuilt from scratch).

So...you think all unions should be dissolved because they're not as good at PR as (lavishly-funded) think-tanks? I think most union members might not be too happy to have their dues go to fund PR at the level that Heritage cranks it out.

Anecdotal commentary from a third-year 8th grade English teacher, just out of a two-year alternative certification program. On paper, I'm probably one of the people abstractness thinks should teach - got into 6 top 20 law schools a couple years ago. However, put me in with 10 other educators in my teachers' lounge - a good school in a bad district - and I'm probably the 6th best teacher.

1. Job security - many, many teachers buy into society's meme that they could all be thriving with six-figures in other vocations. This is true for a few. Many could be making more in the private sector. But 1/3-1/2 would struggle to make as much in the private sector working 50 weeks a year.

2. Money - it actually starts well but only tops out at about 50% above starting salary. My district, start at $40k, retire 30 years later, in today's money at $60k. That sucks if you're good.
Other jobs, you're looking at 50% above starting salary after two or three years and then 200-300% 8 years later. Then again, a teacher has the same number of clients year after year.

egbert, al and amchicken hawk are all from Georgia, 'nuff said

There are all sorts of reasons why principals *might* want to fire a teacher. It would be absurd not to be able to fire a teacher who is caught stealing money or having sex with students. Or a teacher who was insubordinate, a teacher who did not show up for work, or did not bother to teach. But I'm having a hard time imagining that there are really that many crazy-ass tenure-having teachers out there who are causing problems for our schools.

My brother was a first year teacher on an expiring contract and the principals at the school where he worked changed. He spent that summer expecting he had a still had a job, and started coaching the soccer team prior to the beginning of school since he ended the year as the men's soccer coach. Less than a week before teachers were to report for their first workday, the new principal told him that she was interviewing other people for his position. There was nothing he could do except scramble to find a new position. He hadn't done anything wrong. Ironically, he ended up in a *much* better teaching job and is in his 9th year of teaching.

Point is, when we say "make it easier to fire teachers" that doesn't just include wise, Solomon-like decisions by principals. It also means crazy-ass principals can more easily fire good teachers for crazy-ass reasons. I've seen *nothing* to convince me that the principals of America are doing such a great job that the only thing holding back educational progress is their lack of ability to fire teachers.

If anything, I think we should increase the merit pay and job instability of *principals* and leave pay and working conditions for teachers about the same. Pay good principals more and boot non-performing ones out. Make it easier for retired people to enter administration. I think we should focus more on making sure we have the best administration possible before we increase the powers of existing administrators. More power won't magically transform a bad principal into a good one.

Thanks, merlallen, for pointing out the Georgian educational connection for egbert, Al, and AmericanChickenHawk.

Yes, they were all honor students at the School for the Americas. Passed torture at the head of their respective classes.

> The five-cent version of the findings is that
> unions have a net positive effect on students,

It would be helpful to go back and actually read the history of teachers' unions, both during their first formation from 1932-1938 and their period of resurgence from 1968-1982. Of course higher salaries and better benefits were part of the goal, but the dedication many teachers and organizers (most teachers' union organizers and officials are teachers) put into the fight was due to the working conditions affecting both teachers _and students_ in the 1970-1980 time period. Things were bad, getting worse, and absolutely no one gave a care. You can call the improvements that the students experienced a side-effect if you wish, but the improvements did occur.

(I personally observed this process from all three sides of the desk)

Cranky

By the way, could posters remind me again where all these US school districts filled with terrible teachers are? The US is primarily a suburban nation today, and essentially every suburb-dweller I meet in my travels around the USofA is happy with _her_ school district. It is only the district in the next county that "everyone knows" is filled with bad teachers; of course when you get over there the story is the reverse.

And if indeed your school district is filled with bad teachers - what are you doing about it? How many hours do you volunteer/year? Do you sit on a principal selection committee? Run for school board? This is the most participative form of government in the US, which doesn't leave much room for griping without action.

Cranky

we can run a natural experiment on whether the ability to easily fire teachers is a good thing

Just for clarity, Kleiman isn't suggesting that we run an experiment, on my reading; being able to fire teachers easily isn't a factor that can be manipulated. He does think that existing data might be analyzed in the usual way by social scientists, in a non-manipulation study.

Amen, Mark. And another natural experiment: charter schools, which have not shown demonstrable superior results over schools supposedly hobbled by union contracts.

Look, this whole issue of "firing teachers" is silly. It reminds mne of when I used to watch baseball games with my father. When a pitcher was struggling, he would yell, "Take him out!" "Dad," I would reply, "you have to bring someone in." If there were some fabulous bullpen of teachers just waiting to get on the mound, I would say sure, fire the bad teachers. But there aren't, as charter schools and Southern schools show. The fact is that we really don't know what to do to raise student achievement across the board, particularly in low-income and very low-performing schools. The idea that we could do it if only those darn unions would get out of the way, is insulting and preposterous.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Mickey Kaus is nothing but a union busting asshole. He doesn't know nothin' 'bout nothin' and yet he is treated like he does. Why Josh keeps him on his link list I will nver understand. I'd rather read The Corner for Chrissake.

Really, he is like the ultimate concern troll for the Democratic Party (he probably says Democrat Party). The sooner we part company with the likes of him and let him know that no one is interested in his opinion of the liberal side of the aisle the better off we will be.

I will no longer even look at Slate, even though I worship Dahlia Lithwick. Really, Kaus, Hitchens, Schaefer, Lord Saletan, and Dickerson. It makes me puke.

Private schools have shown one thing: motivated students with motivated parents do better regardless of who the teacher is. NCLB addresses only one leg of a 3 legged stool - the teacher. The students and parents are not addressed. Until the students and parents are motivated to do well, our schools will not perform well. How to get the poorer parents involved in their children's schooling has not been studied extensively, but this is the key to their children having a good education.

Yes, you can fire bad teachers in a school district with a strong union. I'm on our local school board and we just fired a bad teacher last month. It takes some time, because you have to document the cause(s).

Our Board and Administration have a good working relationship with the teachers' union. Keep this in mind, it's simply not in the best interest of the teachers to enable bad teachers. After all, the students being taught by that bad teacher will end up in other classrooms with other teachers. Think about it...

S.P.

Bob R,

Yup. To use another sport's analogy - the backup quarterback is the most popular player on the team.

Wanting to get rid of tenure isn't the same thing as wanting to get rid of unions.

The other variables at work here would certainly not make this a reasonable test. On the other hand, you might be able to find comparable communities in the south who only incidentally differ on whether they're unionized or not, and that would make for a fair test.

Exlitigator hits it on the head… thank you.

I am a teacher and most teachers must have a spouse to support the habit, especially if you live where I live, an area of California where houses start at $500,000.

A teacher is expected, at least in my district, to buy his or her own supplies. That includes paper clips, note pads, a pencil sharpener—all the things that anyone who has worked in an office would take for granted. We receive 23.00 per class per year.

The district has a $11,000,000 slush fund that goes towards…nobody really knows??

The kids, in general, are great. They are little monsters, don’t get me wrong, but are people that I am perfectly content with leading the country when we are old farts.

The pay sucks. That’s what will drive the competent people out of the job.

And we can all look forward to those heady days after World War Eleven when Manly Men who Dress Well will flock into the teaching profession.

When i was working on my doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago, I was writing a comic book or two to pay the bills. A new comics company started up in Chicago, and suddenly I had a couple of regular books--and Marvel Comics started to remember I was working for them, too.
I looked at my graduate student friends, top of the line scholars, and I was making more doing part-time writing than they were making--or would make for the forseeable future.
The decision was all too easy to make--especially since I loved comics passionately. But I also loved teaching--and had they even been equal, I would have been torn. But it wasn't.

Of course, no one ever blames school administrators. During my brief stint at teaching, every new fad in education was tried by our Superintendent. Of course, it wasted our time to redo our lesson plans to include this in our curricula. And it wasted the town's money by bringing in "gurus" to teach us the new initiative. When the new initiative failed to pan out, we got the blame. These guys suck down salaries approaching $200K now, and no one is holding them accountable.

And one more thing while I'm on a roll -- if parents would just take the initiative to pull their kid away from the television for a couple of hours each day, we'd see a vast improvement in grades. Stop blaming teachers for your failure as a parent.

--Beo

I think this whole debate is somewhat silly.

Too many people seem to think that what's wrong with the schools isa shortage of hero teachers, as portrayed in movies like "Stand and Deliver" or "Music of the Heart". The whole problem is more complicated than that, and energy directed toward questions about firing teachers and by extension their unions is a distraction.

It seems to me, from my limited contact with public education, is that there are resources for just about everything education related everything except putting more people in classrooms with the students. That's where the dialogue should start, not whether or not a principal has to fill out a form before firing someone.

If there were hordes of qualified teachers lined up and waiting for hire, perhaps the ability to fire incompetent teachers would have an effect. However, in reality, there are so few qualified teachers available that districts are lowering the qualifications necessary for hire.

If teaching paid well enough to draw a competitive labor pool, then we'd see improvement in teacher quality.

"...down in the anti-union South we can run a natural experiment on whether the ability to easily fire teachers is a good thing"

This is not true. ("tom" at 10:05 and "jimBOB" at 10:07 have already pointed this out articulately, but I want to explain this a little more.)

It would be a "natural experiment" if unionization (or the right to unionize, or whatever we want the experimental "treatment" to be) were randomly assigned to states. Since unionization is not randomly assigned (indeed, it is almost certainly related to other factors that might affect educational attainment), there is no opportunity to study the causal impact of teacher unionization on educational attainment by comparing states to eachother.

The problems are not the teachers, and not, particularly the funding. The problems are the parents and the students.

The whole issue still leaves open the question of how do you measure teacher performance?

A lot of proposed systems would rely in large part of student performance as a yardstick.

That, then, leaves teachers open to:
1. Grade inflation;
2. Cheating for students on scoring classroom tests and assignments;
3. Cheating for students on standardized test scoring;
4. Allowing or encouraging students to cheat for themselves in categories 2 and 3.

At a newspaper, I can't go out and fake ad sales or new subscribers. I could try faking fluff letters to the editor, but could get caught, especially in a smaller town.

Yancey Ward,

Here, here. Too much talk about bad teachers. Teachers need better students!

What are parents doing to prepare their kids to learn each day? Are they checking their kids' Daily Assignment Books to see what homework they have and whether it is done? Are they shutting off the TV and video games? Establishing mandatory reading times each day? Making sure there is plenty of interesting reading material lying around the house? Staying in regular touch with teachers about assignments? Regularly accessing blackboard.com for the latest homework assignments and syllabus changes? Trying to speak more English at home? Driving kids to and from extra curriculars like chorus, debate club, Lego League?

Conservatives focus on an extremely narrow range of issues when it comes to academics -- health education, Intelligent Design, corrupt and bloated teachers' unions. But when it comes to preparing their kids each day for class they fall on their faces then blame the teachers for their kids' bad grades.

Missing homework is the single most common reason for poor grades. So yo, Republican parents, how many missing homework assignments did your kids have in the fall semester in each of their classes? And why is that??

Cranky,

It would be helpful to go back and actually read the history of teachers' unions, both during their first formation from 1932-1938 and their period of resurgence from 1968-1982.

Do you have any citations for this history? Thanks in advance.

beo,

if parents would just take the initiative to pull their kid away from the television for a couple of hours each day, we'd see a vast improvement in grades. Stop blaming teachers for your failure as a parent.

Absolutely correct. Parents are the number one influence on a child's education. Period. Deal with it teacher-union bashers.

Teachers Unions hurt education, not because they prevent teachers from being fired. They hurt education because the perpetuate flawed teaching pedagogies, fight against merit pay, and rail against accountability. Poor teachers are poor teachers because they haven't been taught how to effectively teach. It's the education schools dummy.

Actually a study has been done,

The study, "Do Teacher Unions Hinder Educational Performance? Lessons Learned from State SAT and ACT Scores," was published in the Harvard Educational Review Winter 2000 issue. It found that, on average, a state in which all teachers are covered by collective bargaining has an average SAT score that is 51.6 points higher than its unorganized counterpart. States with higher rates of unionization also appear to have higher ACT scores.

The researchers, Powell and Robert Carini of Indiana, and Lala Carr Steelman of South Carolina, were actually quite surprised by their findings. "When we began this project, we thought that our results would discount both anti- and pro-teacher union positions," said Powell. "That is, we anticipated that there would be at best a minimal link between teacher unionizations and state scores."
The quote is from the newsletter of the New York State Teachers Union, but I have read the study and it is an accurate characterization of what was found.

What's the obsession with firing teachers anyways? Why not just wait until their contracts expire, then don't offer them a new contract? Does that make too much sense or something? I mean, sure, if you've got a registered sex offender as a teacher, you might not want to wait until the end of the contract, but then you've got, y'know, actual grounds for firing. It's not as if teachers have tenure or something. It's really not terribly difficult to get rid of any you don't like. Turnover is so awful in most states that most of them quit after 2-3 years anyways. Worrying about not being able to fire them fast enough is completely ridiculous.

Rory,

You make some provocative assertions about why teachers unions hurt education. Can you back up your assertions with some real facts? I'm guessing you don't have any.

In any case we'll be right here, waiting for your response.

Pocket Rocket, you are r, but you miss the point. Truly decent teachers tend to be thought provoking catalysts, and conservatives HATE that. They also hate tenure, regardless of who has it, because tenure allows people to speak truth to power. Without tenure, informing an administrator that his pet project is bunk is a request for a pink slip, while telling him how beautiful his car is (or sleeping with him) is a ticket to a promotion, or higher "merit" (ha ha) pay. That's what this is about; conservative hatred of anything that fetters managerial power. Think about it; there are thousands of societal factors that affect test scores, none of which are controlled by teachers unions. All of the empirical data indicate that teachers unions are god things. However, the conservative Wurlitzer has perverted the public debate about this so badly that even moderate pundits like Jonathon Alter assume that tenure is bad WITHOUT ANY DATA!! That's lunacy.

In Kevin's own California, the teachers unions are so powerful that they defeated Gov. Schwarzenegger's set of initiatives in 2005 elections. So, just check out how well California students do in the NAEP achievement test statistics (i.e., typically between 44th and 49th place). But California is still ahead of Mississippi!

Look, the truth is that schools, good or bad, don't make all that measurable of a difference in student performance. It's the quality of the students that matters most, and California students have been getting worse on average for 30 years due to massive illegal immigration of unskilled workers, who tend to have low-skilled children.

In Kevin's own California, the teachers unions are so powerful that they defeated Gov. Schwarzenegger's set of initiatives in 2005 elections.

The teachers unions weren't the only force (even the only unions) involved in that fight. It's rather creative to credit the defeat of those initiatives to the teacher's unions alone, when essentially every public employees union in the state, as well as many labor groups that crossed public/private lines like nurses unions, were involved, as well as other groups.