I have very fond memories of teachers’ pay negotiations. My sixth form maths teacher was a staunch unionist and also very distractable. We could get a good half hour off calculus with a well-timed question like “What’s happening with the teachers pay negotiations?” Teachers didn’t go on strike when I was in High school, but more recently they did, and students took some really awesome support action. A Secondary teachers’ strike has a real potential to radicalise young workers.
So I’m really excited that New Zealand secondary teachers have voted to go on strike in a couple of weeks. I’ll be there.
* Has anyone else ever seen a video called Mom’s on Strike? It featured a young Yeardley Smith (voice of Lisa). The basic plot-line is pretty self-explanatory. A woman left to do all the housework for her family goes on strike (with a picket line and everythign). Then the father left all the work to the two daughters, and they joined the picket-line too. We watched it in a Social Ed class in high school – which led to a pretty cool discussion about girls’ experiences with housework in their families (I went to an all girls school).
What grades/years in school correspond to secondary school where you live?
When I was a Junior in High School (Grade 11), our teachers went on strike. My fellow marching band members and I managed to get into the school building. We got our instruments out, went back outside and started playing marches. Our band teacher was a leader in the strike effort and he was suspected of setting it up. While his sense of humor definitely leaned in that direction, we did it on our own.
I’m curious–you seem to sympathize/agree with the teachers–why?
I’ve always thought that teacher’s unions were a good example of the relatively well-off agitating to be better off. (Since average pay for teachers is way above average pay.)
Sam: I support workers organising to improve their wages and conditions under almost all circumstances. As it happens teachers in New Zealand are incredibly over-worked, and they’re also underpaid (particularly compared to ‘male’ jobs). But even if they had seriously cushy jobs, I’d support them.
Ron – secondary school is 13-18 here. Having a school marching band play on the strike sounds awesome. In New Zealand in 2002, some of the students had a wildcat support strike on a day the students were’nt striking. I”m sure a large part of it was “walking out of school would be fun” but it was cool anyway.
(Since average pay for teachers is way above average pay.)
Where? I live in Illinois, and the starting salary for a fresh new teacher with no experience, just a bachelor’s (in the district my daughter attends), is $28,000 a year (as opposed to what the new superintendant is getting—over $250,000 a year). Even in central Illinois, $28,000 puts you firmly in the ranks of the working poor. In my district, you have to have a master’s degree and over 22 years of teaching experience to clear $60,000.
Damn straight teachers should organize—it’s pathetic what they get paid.
La Lubu –
What better offers are those starting teachers declining in order to go into teaching?
Robert, there’s a high turnover rate with teachers here; relatively few stick with the profession. Around here, the ones that leave, yet remain in the geographic area, tend to go into civil service. Folks enter the field for altruistic reasons, and leave when they get tired of the low pay. It’s not a matter of turning down other offers—they wanted to be teachers.
The ones who stick with it? They tend to do so in other districts. They get hired here, get a couple years experience under their belts, then leave for other districts where the pay is more in line with what the rest of the population is earning. Folks don’t go into teaching to make a mint (for that matter, neither do electricians, in case you were wondering), but Damn! they shouldn’t have to scrape by on a low wage either. Teachers provide an important service to our society, and deserve more than lip service. Teachers should at least be making what tradespeople do.
And meanwhile, back in my district, kids are getting shortchanged—-good teachers cost money. It’s piss-poor social policy to pay teachers a low wage, which is the natural result of the other piss-poor social policy of funding schools primarily through property taxes, enshrining unequal opportunity.
Around here, the ones that leave, yet remain in the geographic area, tend to go into civil service.
And do those jobs pay significantly more than teaching did?
If they don’t, then how can we describe the teachers as underpaid? They’re getting paid the most that anyone is willing to pay them for the skill set and educational attainment they bring to the table.
Teachers should at least be making what tradespeople do.
Do they have the same level and rarity of skills, working conditions, and accountability?
I’m all for raising teacher salaries and making teaching a high-qualification, high-status occupation. That does mean that most of the people who currently do it, won’t be able to do it anymore; they won’t have the level of skill and attainment that the new entrants will have, and they’ll be competed out the door.
I thought I made it perfectly clear that the high turnover amongst teachers entering the profession is because they leave for (literally) greener pastures. A bachelor’s degree still has value, and folks who have one can generally expect higher pay and greater opportunity than those who don’t. And yes, what they’re paying new teachers here is more typical of what someone without higher education would be paid.
Electricians aren’t paid well because our skills are rare; anyone with basic intelligence and rudimentary mechanical ability can be trained to be an electrician, if they want to be. We are paid well because we are organized. There’s guys in my local who were organized in (rather than going through an apprenticeship); they were paid even less than new teachers—some of them made as little as $6.50 an hour! It’s the unionization that made a difference. We sure as hell weren’t paid well a hundred years ago, when our skills were even rarer and the job conditions even worse—-it’s the unionization that changed that.
Teachers don’t have the pay they do because their skills and education are common (they’re not—in my area, only a quarter of the population has a bachelor’s degree, and that’s significantly higher than the surrounding counties). Part of the problem is the system of school funding. In Illinois, it’s based largely on property taxes. Schools with a higher property tax base get all kinds of amenities that schools without that tax base—and that includes access to the good teachers. Those schools can afford to pay a teacher what he or she is worth. Another part of the problem is that teaching has been a traditionally female occupation for quite a long time. Occupations that are traditionally female are paid less than occupations that are traditionally male, with very few exceptions (in fact, I can think of only two—fashion modeling and prostitution. Not exactly lifelong careers, no?). Teachers still have to battle the idea that they don’t need to be paid more, because don’t they have husbands for that? The density of women in the profession dovetails well with another sexist trope, that teachers shouldn’t need higher pay because they’re making a grand sacrifice (and isn’t that what women do?).
Bah.
Meanwhile, organizing has proven to be the only effective means of raising teacher pay. More power to ’em. All together now! “When the union’s inspiration through the worker’s blood shall run….”
It’s hard to see how an absence of unionization explains low teacher pay. Most public school teachers belong to national unions that are quite powerful.
Schools with a higher property tax base get all kinds of amenities that schools without that tax base—and that includes access to the good teachers. Those schools can afford to pay a teacher what he or she is worth.
All schools pay their teachers what they are worth. We have a relatively free labor market; teachers who are not paid what they are worth go somewhere else. The difficulty that the poorer districts have is that the teachers they can afford to pay aren’t very good.
Even in those districts, low teacher pay is as much a question of priorities as it is of resources. You can have high teacher pay in the poorest school district in the country; you’ll just have to give up other things. Is it better to have an awesome teacher trying to run a classroom of 40 kids, or an indifferent teacher trying to teach 20? Is it better to have high-paid teachers and no athletic program, or crappy teachers and a state-leading athletic program? I don’t know; I know what I would do, but I’m not in charge.
The tradeoffs are undoubtedly easier to manage in richer districts; everything is easier when you have more money. But we also see from looking at the vast range of school districts in the country that money is not much of a panacea. The worst districts in the country (in DC) are also the ones with the highest levels of funding.
“If they don’t, then how can we describe the teachers as underpaid?”
We can compare teachers’ salaries here with those in other counties, states, countries, or time periods (though the further removed you get, the less relevant the comparison is).
It could very well be that $28,000 is the most these people should expect, historically or internationally. But at least such concrete comparisons obviate the need for such inane logic such as “they must be getting paid what they are worth, because they’re getting paid exactly that”.
It’s hard to see how an absence of unionization explains low teacher pay. Most public school teachers belong to national unions that are quite powerful.
Sure, now they do. Back in my grandmother’s day, they didn’t—and the comparative pay was lower. Unionization made a difference, just like it did in the trades and civil service. But as with anything else, unions are more powerful in some areas than others. There are areas in the southern U.S. where unionized electricians have a take-home pay that is what I take home on unemployment, because although the national union has a certain amount of clout, that clout doesn’t extend very far in those areas. ‘Nother words, there are battles left to be won.
All schools pay their teachers what they are worth.
Bullshit. If the schools aren’t paying a salary adequate enough to attract and retain the qualified personnel willing to do the job, and do it effectively, then those schools aren’t paying the teachers what they’re worth. The teachers are leaving to go somewhere else where they can get paid what they’re worth.
It all comes down to “what is the purpose of a school?” If you think the purpose of a school is to warehouse young people to keep them off the streets, then attracting quality teachers isn’t going to be your priority. If you think the purpose of a school is to educate young people, then attracting quality teachers is going to be your priority.
Anyway, I don’t want to get too far off topic before going to work; it’s just when SamChevre made the statement about the well-off agitating to be more well off, well, it’s simply not true. As an objective measurement, teacher pay is low, and certainly lower than what people with a comparative level of education and work experience receive. You’re talking about pay as an abstract concern, and I’m talking about pay as necessary purchasing power—what it takes to get by, pay bills, save for the future. Folks aren’t going to college so they can barely make it—the whole point of higher education (where I’m from) is to have a decent standard of living—not being constantly under the gun of bankruptcy. Objectively, getting higher-quality teachers means raising the pay. Period.
My education has been regularly disrupted by strikes. I have yet to cross a picket line, but now as I’m about to start graduate school, I may have to. Under my collective agreement, my union cannot protect me if I don’t cross, (we are, of course, encouraged to picket in solidarity, the union has donated money to the strike fund, etc.).
When I think it over, there have been education-related strikes in Toronto/Ontario almost every two years. Teachers, janitors and administrative staff, food service people (on campus during my undergrad), and bus drivers.
SamChevre made the statement about the well-off agitating to be more well off, well, it’s simply not true. As an objective measurement, teacher pay is low
It’s becoming rapidly obvious that our basis of comparison is different.
I’m saying that $28,000 is HIGHER than the median wage for a worker–and it’s starting pay, guaranteed to go up–and it includes good benefits (at least, here in VA it does). I’m not seeing the logic of taxing people making, on average, less than $28,000, so that people making, on average, somewhere around $35,000 can be paid more.
Now–if you are comparing to the other college-educated professions, a teacher is fairly low-paid; that I will happily agree to. I just don’t see why, in an area where most people don’t have college degrees, that should be the basis of comparison.
I support workers organising to improve their wages and conditions under almost all circumstances.
So do I. One of the few circumstances where I am less certain is when the workers are government employees, paid by taxes. I do not think that it is necessarily fair to charge more taxes to pay government workers more; I am especially uneasy when the people being taxed are poorer than the people being paid.
(Before attacking me, take into account that my wife is a teacher; I’m not talking from ignorance here.)
I don’t know about NZ but in the US a teacher’s low pay relative to education level is offset by extremely high job security through the tenure system. Electricians might be more organized but the ones I know also have to deal with a large amount of downtime and underemployment. I don’t think I’ve ever known a teacher to go on unemployment because there weren’t enough kids to teach.
In many areas of Michigan (the state I live in) it’s all but impossible to find a job as a teacher. So while the pay may be lower than a lawyer’s many people still want the job.
One of the few circumstances where I am less certain is when the workers are government employees, paid by taxes. I do not think that it is necessarily fair to charge more taxes to pay government workers more; I am especially uneasy when the people being taxed are poorer than the people being paid.
So, why is there never any question about taxing these lower-paid workers when it comes to increasing the salaries of other government workers—like police officers, firefighters, 911 operators, public works crews, etc. All of those folks have a starting salary anywhere from $15,000-$20,000 per year higher than that of a teacher, and those careers do not require a college degree (with its attending debt). In my city, the city and county share the costs of the 911 operators. Retention was a huge problem because of the low starting pay, and because of that, in recent years there was mandatory overtime of the 911 operators—12 hours a day, period. My Local started representing these 911 operators, and after a few years we (the Local) were able to increase the starting pay to the high 40s—what the starting pay is for cops and firefighters. The result? Better qualified people are applying for and getting these jobs, and turnover is low. No more mandatory overtime and burnout. Were any people laid off to accommodate the higher salaries? No, it still takes a certain amount of people to do the job. There’s higher salaries, but the dramatically reduced turnover means lower recruitment and training costs—and less overtime. Win-win.
(Before attacking me, take into account that my wife is a teacher; I’m not talking from ignorance here.)
Brava for your wife, Sam! I don’t feel that you are speaking from ignorance here, just that your perspective on who is well-off may be colored by your family situation. See, in the United States there is still the assumption that teachers are going to be female, and that they don’t really need the same rate of pay that other college graduates need, because they will have a husband to support them—they don’t need a family-supporting wage because they’ll have that in the form of a spouse.
That isn’t the case anymore. Men (by and large) aren’t entering teaching because of the low pay, and women are increasingly eschewing teaching as a profession als0—partly because we have opportunities in other arenas that we didn’t have before (thank you, feminism!), and partly because women (especially college-educated women with greater job opportunity) aren’t satisfied with the “petite-cut” wage—women want the man-sized wage. It isn’t sensible to rely on a spouse’s wage as a support; there’s not just divorce to watch out for, but lack of spousal job security for the still-married.
So again, why is there no problem with finding the money to pay government employees who do important work in male-dominated or gender-neutral fields, yet when the employees who do important work, crucial to the proper functioning of our society, happen to be in a female-dominated field—-we can’t afford it?
The social and economic landscape has changed. School districts can no longer rely on a cadre of educated women to enter teaching and be satisfied with the lower pay. The change has already occurred—now its time for school districts to catch up. And yes, that means raising the pay. If taxes have to be raised, or allocations of existing money redistributed in order to accommodate new programs, training, and higher salaries for more qualified police officers, the same can be done for teachers.
We just have to want to do it. We have to value the next generation. We have to value their minds, their future, our future. We have to value the people who are preparing them educationally for that future.
And as a society, we don’t.
Just that your perspective on who is well-off may be colored by your family situation.
It certainly is, but maybe not in the way you are thinking. Remember that I grew up in a county with a median household income that’s half the national average now, and was more like a third when I was a boy. A trailer was a better-than-average dwelling. I’m the best-eductated person in my family with a bachelor’s degree–and I went to college to get that 10 years after dropping out of school.
In other words, I think I’m unbelievably lucky to have a job where I work out of the weather, and have work every day.
It’s interesting to me that in your area, police are paid more than teachers–it’s the opposite here (on base salary–police do make overtime.) A first-year police officer makes $30,617 and a first-year teacher makes $33,303
Regarding the whole thing about it’s being unfair to further tax the lower-paid: Yep. So why the fuck don’t we start properly taxing the rich? And big businesses?
All schools pay their teachers what they are worth.
Bullshit. If the schools aren’t paying a salary adequate enough to attract and retain the qualified personnel willing to do the job, and do it effectively, then those schools aren’t paying the teachers what they’re worth. The teachers are leaving to go somewhere else where they can get paid what they’re worth.
Well, exactly. With a free labor market, nobody can be paid less than what they’re worth, because if the employer tries, the employee leaves. If a school is paying $20k a year, then those whose market worth is greater than that will not take the job. Unless you have some method of coercion, it’s very difficult to get anyone to work for less than what they’re worth.
I think you’re conflating “what they’re worth” with “the amount society should value them by”. What they’re worth is what society DOES value them by; your disagreement with the status quo is that you think the valuation should be higher than it is. We are in agreement there.
So why the fuck don’t we start properly taxing the rich? And big businesses?
Taxing business is economically pointless. And what does the size of an enterprise have to do with the proportional contribution it should make to the tax system?
As for “properly taxing the rich”, the rich pay most of the taxes that are paid. This keeps coming up; there must be a genetic code in liberals that makes you believe that the rich are getting away with something. They get away with lots of things, but the tax situation isn’t one of them. ;)
Most police departments require something more than a high school diploma. A BA and graduation from a police academy is pretty standard outside of small departments. To be promoted within a police department you have to pass specific tests. It’s not the same as getting a MS or PhD in education. But neither of those are the same as an MD, JD, or MBA either.
Everyone I know that left teaching did it more because of the problems they couldn’t fix than they did the money. At least that’s what they said. They described vast frustration at trying to educate students that were tired, under fed, disrespectful of authority, ambivalent to education and distracted by a poor home life. One of my very good friends used to let students sleep for several hours in the back of the room. She knew it was the only safe, quiet time they were likely to get. She felt that way she was able to at least teach them something in the afternoon. Also the class was respectful of the sleeping students need for quiet and it made class room management easier. Makes me sad. She quit to teach a private school. This involved a pay cut and loss of tenure but she’s happier now thanks to the improved work environment.
begin snark: Since the plural of anecdote is data this conclusively proves it’s not about the money. end snark
Everyone I know that left teaching did it more because of the problems they couldn’t fix than they did the money.
Yeah, that’s pretty widespread. Consider the unwinnable war part of the problem to be negative compensation for all teachers.
Everyone I know that left teaching did it more because of the problems they couldn’t fix than they did the money. At least that’s what they said.
Oh, I believe you. But let’s face it, higher pay goes a long way towards getting people interested in less-than-ideal working conditions. I’m an electrician, and I’ve been on jobs where the conditions were abysmal, but the paycheck at the end of the week made up for it. I received the kind of pay where the conditions of my off-work life were not abysmal—they were pretty damn good. All the little things like being able to afford my own house, knowing that my bills are paid, eating well, being able to buy clothes when I need them, having a reliable vehicle—that makes up for bad working conditions. Garbage collectors have poor working conditions; they’re paid more than teachers. Why? Because that job has to carry a certain wage in order to attract workers.
She quit to teach a private school. This involved a pay cut and loss of tenure but she’s happier now thanks to the improved work environment.
How does she negotiate housing, utilities, transportation, food, health insurance, retirement savings, clothing, medical expenses, etc. on that lower pay?
Teacher pay is lower than that of other professions, because as a society we expect spouses (mainly husbands) to subsidize teachers. I’m not saying that teachers can’t or don’t leave the profession for reasons other than the pay. I’m saying that some of them are leaving because of the pay, and others who could be effective teachers won’t even consider entering the field because of the pay. We’re left with too few good teachers in the classroom because of the poor pay. Folks who go into teaching know that they’ll have to deal with kids from dysfunctional homes; kids who haven’t had anything to eat; kids with learning disabilities or mental illness; indifferent, neglectful, or hostile parents; parents who have learning disabilities or mental illness of their own (and thus ill-equipped to help their children); kids left at home in the evenings while their parent works a second job to make the ends; indifferent or incompetant school administrators; obstacles in the bureaucracy—-they know they are likely to encounter all of the above in their classroom going in(in the same way that young folks that sign up for the Marine Corps know there’s a likelihood of getting shot at someday). However, a lot of them haven’t had the visceral experience of trying to make ends meet on the typical teacher’s starting pay. It’s an eye-opener for some of them to realize that the school district ran out of paper in March, so teachers have to make do with their own resources—what about the teacher who can’t afford paper for her classroom? On top of all the rest of the crap they have to deal with?
Maia, how do working conditions, pay and benefits for teachers in New Zealand compare to the U.S.? Are their issues the same?
“Taxing business is economically pointless. And what does the size of an enterprise have to do with the proportional contribution it should make to the tax system?”
The corporate tax does not affect all corporations equally, including those within the same net income bracket – in fact, that’s one of the common *criticisms* of it – so passing most of the cost onto the consumer isn’t an option. Now, perhaps a corporation out there is willing to lose market share this way purely as a matter of principle, but I doubt there are too many of these to worry about.
In fact, the exact same applies to 99% of the situations whenever anyone claims ‘the costs being ultimately borne by the consumer’ as a reason to oppose anything big business doesn’t want, for any reason, ever.
Sam, I understand what you’re trying to say about state employees’ wages – the same thing irks me sometimes as well – but in the end, top down income redistribution isn’t the sole, or even the main, purpose of taxation. Teachers provide a service not just to their students, but to society as a whole (by providing a critical mass of educated citizens). Everyone, rich and poor, benefit from this, and so long as taxes overall remain reasonably progressive, I don’t see a problem with ‘taxing the poor to feed the (comparably) rich’, in this case.
How does she negotiate housing, utilities, transportation, food, health insurance, retirement savings, clothing, medical expenses, etc. on that lower pay?
She has a lower standard of living. I don’t do her books but from what I can see she goes out less and hasn’t bought a new car. But she seems happier.
When I was a local truck driver garbageman made 15$/hour to start and could work their way up to 17.50. That’s 30 – 35k/year with little in the way of benefits and no job security.
Enough when i was/what my friend told me….according to monster.com
the average teacher salary
25th Percentile Median 75th Percentile
$41,645 $47,759 $55,646
(link)
Teacher pay is lower than that of other professions, because as a society we expect spouses (mainly husbands) to subsidize teachers
This might be true; perhaps in the instance of educators, society decides to substitute a moral judgment for the market. I see no evidence of that, but if you have some I’ll be glad to look at it.
I think it more likely that teacher pay is set primarily by the labor markets.
It’s most likely that both of the above are true. There is a labour market that buys and sells teachers’ labour. This labour market in turn is shaped by factors such as spousal support – if the majority of teachers seeking employment have a secure source of sustenance down, secondary considerations such as working in a district they like overtake pure monetary concerns, for instance. Moral judgments don’t substitute for the market, they play a part in shaping it, because markets do not exist independently of the society they operate in.
In fact, the above may explain a large part of the wage gap w/r/t occupational segregation. “Wimmin’s work” pays less because we never expected anyone to live on that alone – single moms being a figment of imagination here.
Many teachers will be paid less than their peers because many teachers are worth less. While they may have degrees, it’s not the same degree as others have.
It’s much more difficult to get a degree in biology than in education. And the market knows that. Teachers are often generalists, and a general “college degree” without any specialization isn’t worth as much.
Math and science degrees, for example, are worth much more in the open market than are, say, English or Art History degrees. And that is also reflected in the teacher salaries; some areas are giving $10,000 bonuses to qualified math teachers, PER YEAR. that split–within the teacher ranks–suggests that the other teachers may be worth less than you propose.
I personally agree that we should overpay teachers, attract people holding grad degrees in their specialty, etc. But a lot of the current teachers would have to be fired first. They just don’t have the skills.
Maia, in the U.S. “secondary” education refers to high school (grades 9 – 12). Grades 13 and above are college and is called “higher education” here. Grades 1 – 8 are called “primary education”.
Robert, La Lubu, Joe; my wife taught in suburban Chicago parochial schools. She left because of the absymal pay.
Teacher pay is lower than that of other professions, because as a society we expect spouses (mainly husbands) to subsidize teachers.
I don’t think so. In fact, after having spent a lot of time thoughout the years listening to and reading debates on teacher pay whenever (numerous) school property tax levy referenda have been up for a vote, I conclude that teacher pay is mainly a function of two factors:
1) Whether or not the current pay levels are high enough to get people to do the job with what the voters of the district consider adequate skill levels and performance, and
2) how much money the voters in the district have.
The voters in my high school district have rather more money than most school districts in Illinios. On the average – there are certainly poor pockets, but there are also quite well-off areas as well. Therefore, in my kids’ high school district that translates to a median teacher salary of $76,000 U.S. a year (mean = $78,000). We have 44 teachers out of 237 making more than $100,000 a year, and only 3 full timers making less than $45,000. But then, my kids’ high school district has a pretty strong tax base and an electorate willing to tax themselves enough to support this. YMMV. So what happens is that the better teachers in surrounding school districts compete to get jobs in our district.
and others who could be effective teachers won’t even consider entering the field because of the pay.
Bingo, La Lubu. I could be a hell of a math or science teacher (if I may be so bold), but unless I was lucky enough to have gotten into my present district I wouldn’t be making more than about 2/3 of what I make now. I can’t speak for the market for language or art or music skills, but someone who’s got strong math/science and communication skills can make a heck of a lot more money in the corporate world than in education.
Now, this can balance out in other ways. A teacher may make less money, but they also get tenure (so they almost never get laid off) and they get summers off. And there’s the satisfaction of seeing the light go on in a kid’s eyes. Taking or leaving a teaching job isn’t just about money. But it’s one of the primary ones.
Folks who go into teaching know that they’ll have to deal with kids from dysfunctional homes; kids who haven’t had anything to eat; kids with learning disabilities or mental illness; indifferent, neglectful, or hostile parents; parents who have learning disabilities or mental illness of their own (and thus ill-equipped to help their children); kids left at home in the evenings while their parent works a second job to make the ends; indifferent or incompetant school administrators; obstacles in the bureaucracy—-they know they are likely to encounter all of the above in their classroom going in
Now, that depends on where you’re teaching. In the inner city, sure – all of the above. And I’ll sign off that in just about any district you’ll run into indifferent, neglectful or hostile parents. In fact, sometimes the more money they have the more hostile they get. But the rest of that is by no means inevitable.
I think in some ways it’s self selecting. In Michigan, and many other states, a lot of the cost of schools is payed through property taxes. This can vary widely between neighboring cities. So when you move, if you want the schools with better facilities and higher teacher pay, you buy less house in the high tax area. If you’re not as interested in the schools you buy more house in the lower tax area. It ends up with a district where many people have intentionally chosen to pay more for a better school system.
But Michigan is NOT a state friendly to the teachers union. When John Engler was governor they made it unlawful for teachers to strike. If they do the local school board can fire them. Still, salaries are pretty high for teachers in most areas.
I don’t think more money to the teacher is really the key anyway. In areas where there isn’t a lot of ‘external challenge’ there’s no shortage of teachers. In areas where there is I don’t think another 10k is going to make up for the hardships.
I will come to catch up on this thread later, I hope, and it may be that someone else has said this, but my own experience suggests that another factor influencing teacher pay is the degree to which the people who pay teachers’ salaries consider teaching to be a profession, a specific set of skills–separate from the discipline that is being taught–that requires training, practice and maintenance, and not simply something that anyone who can get up in front of a classroom with a particular body of knowledge can do. People who understand this, in my experience, tend to be willing, even if they are often unable, to pay for good teachers; people who do not understand this are the ones who tend to talk about teachers being overpaid.
It is true that one does not go into teaching to make a lot of money. (In answer to RonF: I teach writing at a community college and I could easily have been making double what I make now if I had taken my skills and put them to work in corporate world.) It is also probably true that the job security that comes with tenure is worth some portion of what I could have been making were I in the corporate world where tenure would be unavailable to me, as would the state benefits package I enjoy, to which I currently have to contribute nothing, which is also worth not a small sum of money. (Though I also have to say that tenure, properly understood, does not provide the kind of absolute guarantee of employment that may people think: really all it does is guarantee a teacher due process. (I realize that the question of tenure is, in practice, very much more complicated than I have just made it out to be; I simply want to point out that it is not a guarantee of employment.))
Nonetheless, my salary–good as it is in terms of raw numbers–barely, if at all, keeps up with the cost of living, and I am consistently accused of having what is essentially a part time job, since I am in the classroom “only” 15 hours per week, by people who understand little of what is involved either in teaching college courses or in maintaining a college teaching career.
Well, I was going somewhere with this, but I we are leaving for a lovely day at my sister-in-law’s pool. I will try to return later.
Teachers’ unions have always seemed vastly different ethically from most other unions. As a result I am far less supportive of teachers’ unions than of other unions.
Unions generally start at manufacturing level, or below. In those jobs, there is one crucial aspect that leads me to often support the worker: there are few other options. You can’t tell a waitress, or a day laborer, to “go find another field.”
People get “dumped” into work as a coal miner; they “have no choice” other than to work as a housecleaning temp. They start work bagging groceries because it fits into their childcare schedule; they end up as a delivery truck driver because they will pay immediately and they didn’t have the luxury to spend a month looking for work. Not many people plan to be janitors.
But teaching is just the opposite. It takes planning, foresight, and CHOICE. Anyone who is qualified enough to go into college, and obtain a specialized degree, and obtain a job as a teacher… should also be qualified enough to go into college, get a different degree, and get a different job.
It’s a choice, not a forced decision. So for me, at least, a lot of the sympathy is gone. It’s one thing to complain about the conditions or pay of a job when you didn’t choose it, or didn’t really want to end up with it. But if you work for 4 years (or more) to get a job and THEN proceed to complain about the normal and expected working conditions of the job, when you could have done something else? Strikes me as odd. And whiny. And exhibiting an appalling lack of both research and foresight.
As a result, I tend to have much more feeling for older teachers–they often bought into a different system and are getting screwed by recent developments. Things sure have changed in the last couple of decades. But I have essentially no sympathy for the new teachers, and in their limited circumstance I think they’ve dug their own hole.
I realize that the question of tenure is, in practice, very much more complicated than I have just made it out to be; I simply want to point out that it is not a guarantee of employment.
It’s not an absolute guarantee, true. But it’s pretty damn close, at least here in Illinois, as long as you keep your pants on, don’t do drugs and don’t whack the kids around. We’ve had some teachers in our elementary school district that all the parents and members of the school board that I’ve talked to have figured were incompetent. Yet the response has been to move them around and reassign them duties that minimize their exposure to kids rather than just up and fire them. It’s been because of the inordinate documentation and procedural requirements and the associated costs (> $25,000) and sturm und drang that’s required under the terms of the teacher’s union contract. As opposed to just about everyone who works to pay their salaries; the vast majority of us can be kicked out the door of where we work with 2 weeks salary and a heartfelt “Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on your way out!”.
I want to note that I’m not anti-teacher. I say that the majority of the problem that an underachieving child has is due to his or her home environment. A teacher can make up for some of that, but overall it’s the parents’ responsibility. But we as taxpayers and children deserve the best teachers our money can buy, and I don’t see that things like tenure help us with that.
RonF:
Having taught for almost 20 years in a department where, when I was hired, there were two men whom everyone knew had been having sex with their students for years and whose only punishment, as far as I know, was to be forced into “early” retirement–and I put early in quotes because, again, as far as I know, each was close to or beyond retirement age when they left–because the school was unwilling and/or unable to do what it needed to do to remove their tenure, I have no fundamental argument with your point that the burden of documentation and other requirements in a tenure-removal process need to be defined in ways that make the process as practical and doable as possible.
That said, however, I think it’s important to point out that the protection tenure offers teachers–the overwhelming majority of whom do their jobs–are deeply important: i. e., the protection against administrators who might, under various kinds of pressure, pressure teachers to change student grades or do other things that fuck with the integrity of the educational system/process in the interest of whatever local politics happen to be holding sway at the time; the protection, in higher ed, to do one’s research or publishing without worrying that one might be fired because the nature of the work is too controversial (and, I should point out, this also applies to what one teaches; think about what it would mean if a teacher could get fired for teaching, say, a book that enough people found unpopular that they brought sufficient pressure on a principal to get rid of the teacher); tenure also helps, when it works (and, as I have said, I recognize it does not always work), to keep teachers focused on the task of educating those in their classrooms rather than on the competition–between teachers within a school; between schools for the best teachers–that would likely ensue in a system without tenure; tenure makes it possible for a teacher to commit him or herself long term to a community of kids (I am thinking here of primary and secondary school teachers, not higher ed), a kind of commitment that has a great deal of value, I think.
(And here, Sailorman, though it’s not about tenure per se) is something that I think your point about teachers knowing what they are getting themselves into misses: one can feel a commitment to education, believe in it as a public service/good/necessity, go with eyes open into the profession for those and all related reasons–because teaching, I can promise you, is not something you want to be doing if teaching itself is not something you feel committed to; the hours and time off would not be worth it–and still feel and see and act on the need to improve the working conditions within the profession. In other words, the two are not mutually exclusive.)
But, back to tenure: Is it a flawed system? You bet. Are there other ways of doing things that have attractive elements to them? Again, you bet. Sometimes, when I think about my salary and what I could be making in the private sector (and I am not complaining; I am comparing; it is not complaining to acknowledge that my life would be more comfortable in many ways if I were making more money), I think it would be great if teachers were free agents–which is essentially what you would have in a tenureless system. With my record, years of service, etc., I would be worth a whole hell of a lot more than I am now. But then I wonder what kind of a school system would result from that and whether I would want my kid educated in that system, and no one has been able to presuade me that such a system would be one that held the people in the classroom as its central concern to any greater extent than the system we have now, which can at least claim that concern as its central motivation, if not always a goal that is achieved.
I’m finding this thread interesting, because the US employment/education/tax system are so very different from New Zealand.
The teachers strike I’m talking about would be a national strike. In New Zealand Teachers bargain their pay nationally (which is much less a big deal than it sounds, since we’re talking a country of 4 million people). I have to say, though, that the American system seems doomed to entrench social inequalities. If education is paid for locally, then poor communities are going to have the worst education.
For the record, In New Zealand teachers have no more job protection than other workers, but our basic level of job protection is much higher than it would be in most states in America. Benefits are also irrelevant, since we have a national health system (they may have a slightly better retirement deal, although that’s probably being rolled out to the rest of the country).
Apart from that I’d just like to second La Lubu – you get paid what you can negotiate. Collective bargaining is the way workers can increase their bargaining power.
“our basic level of job protection is much higher than it would be in most states in America.”
any chance you can elaborate? I’m curious to hear more.
I think it more likely that teacher pay is set primarily by the labor markets.
Are you now arguing that labor markets are not affected by human factors, such as discrimination? You’re old enough to remember when wants ads were sorted into “Men Wanted” and “Women Wanted”.
Sailorman, not really following the “you asked for it” argument. The point of a union is that workers acting through an organization have greater bargaining power than they do individually. It’s not some kind of reward workers get for being sufficiently oppressed and virtuous.
Are you now arguing that labor markets are not affected by human factors, such as discrimination?
Not at all. Just that a broadly-held sentiment of “I’m not going to pay these teachers much, because I expect their husbands to support them” is at most a small component of those factors.
The point of a union is that workers acting through an organization have greater bargaining power than they do individually.
And this is of course true. At the same time, the existence of the union and its power may have negative consequences for the membership over time. Most Americans don’t like the teacher’s unions. Even among Americans who like labor unions in general, many dislike the teacher’s unions, mainly because they are accurately perceived as providing job security and protections to teachers. That sounds good, but teaching isn’t like working in an office; if the guy who’s in charge of ordering staplers is a fuckup, the unit can route around him. When a teacher is a fuckup, they have to be fired or fixed immediately.
Fixing is hard because of human nature; firing damn near impossible because of the union. So the crapulent teachers instead pile up in the system, and the good ones try desperately to make up for it. But the kids only have some many years in the system. Every year in the hands of Mr. Jones the Happy Incompetent is a year they’ll never get back. Parents aren’t morons; we pick up on all this.
One exceptionally unfortunate side effect of that is that teachers don’t come into the school year with a presumption of competence from parents. The parents don’t think that the system would have gotten rid of them if they were incompetent, so the parents are always leaving open the possibility in their mind. This undermines trust. (I can remember how relieved we were after our kids’ first semester at public school in a new town. The teachers were great. We had no way to know that ahead of time.)
So the union does indeed make sure that the individual teacher is getting a better deal than they would have without the collective bargaining. But the union also reflexively provides job security protections that make it much harder to run a tight ship, and that protection ends up undermining the trust and faith that individual teachers can expect to receive. In other environments that’s not so important; in education it’s pretty critical.
It’s comforting to think that if most people have a negative opinion about X, it’s rational and because X has earned that negative opinion, but I’m a bit more cynical than that.
I wasn’t even thinking of the ‘husband support’ angle, but of the notion that teaching has in the last several decades been seen as women’s work, and we all know how much prestige and pay that adds.
If the guy at your office who’s a fuckup is a Teamster like you, it’s no harder to work around him than it is to work around a bad teacher.
You can’t route around bad teachers. If they’re a teacher, they’re going to be fouling up someone’s education, even if you manage to tuck them away in the A/V room or something. There are few “teaching” jobs that don’t involve being responsible for teaching kids. That’s why bad teachers, and the difficulty of getting rid of them, are such a huge issue, whereas nobody really cares if there’s a bad office worker or a bad truck driver (at least until the latter goes off an overpass and kills someone). A union doesn’t make people hate Teamsters for being fuckups because not many people care. A union does make people hate teachers for being fuckups because lots of people care. It’s not the union’s fault that fuckups exist, but it’s certainly their fault that it’s hard to get rid of the fuckups.
If education is paid for locally, then poor communities are going to have the worst education.
Unfortunately true. There have been various fixes proposed for this. Some work, some don’t, some fall much shorter in the application than in theory.
For one thing, educational funding in the U.S. (and I am limiting myself to K – 12 education, not higher/college education) is not ever wholly dependent on local funding. The Federal government provides a base level of funding to all school districts, on a needs-dependent basis (e.g., my school district gets damn little, but then doesn’t need it) across the country. States also (AFAIK) provide an additional level of funding to the school districts in their stte. Local property taxes may provide very little or almost all of the funding for a given district; for poor ones, very little.
The total formula, however, sometimes proves inadequate. In Illinois, the poorest districts spend a little less than $5,000 per pupil year. The wealthiest spend about $23,000 per pupil year. Now, it’s definitely bad that kids in poor districts get inadequately funded schools. These are the kids who most need good schools! So one logical way to fix this is to use income taxes to help boost funding, funneling wealthier people’s income to poorer people’s kids. This is recognized in the Illinois State Constitution, which states that the State will provide at least 50% of the funding in the State’s school districts. Except – it doesn’t. The General Assembly just doesn’t provide the money. Why this hasn’t resulted in massive lawsuits I don’t know.
You’ll never get away from some property tax dependency – after all, if rich folks want to tax themselves and spend it on their kids, they should be able to. But a minimum level of funding for all school districts that comes out of general tax revenues instead of property taxes in a given district will pay off in the long run.
I’ve worked for some major corporations — J.P. Morgan, Simon & Schuster, and others — and the idea that incompetents get fired in private life, rather than sticking around for decades, runs contrary to my experience.
I have no doubt that there are incompetent teachers out there — there are incompetents in every large organization. I don’t believe there is any imaginable system of running universal public schooling which will eliminate incompetent teachers; nor have my experiences in large corporations given me any reason to believe that more freedom to fire teachers will lead to fewer bad teachers.
Fortunately, kids route around incompetent teachers all the time (contrary to Robert’s apparent belief that a single bad teacher permanently destroys every child he ever teaches). (For one thing, it’s usually just a matter of one bad teacher out of a whole group of teachers, and that only for one year out of many years.)
In the real world, incompetent teachers without tenure would not be fired; not if they knew how to play the game, how to suck up to the principle, how to suck up to the kids with influential parents. In contrast, competent teachers who refused to play that game — or who weren’t competent at playing it — would be declared incompetent and fired. (Richard pointed this out already, but I don’t think anyone responded to him.)
Maybe it should be easier to fire teachers. But the idea that teachers should be as easy to fire as Wal-Mart clerks is an extreme idealogical view, and it’s wrong. (I’m not even convinced that Wal-Mart clerks should be as easy to fire as Wal-Mart clerks.)
Besides, even if every bad teacher was fired tomorrow, the important problems with educating American kids — many of which are more in the homes than in the schools — would remain.
In many areas of Michigan (the state I live in) it’s all but impossible to find a job as a teacher. So while the pay may be lower than a lawyer’s many people still want the job.
A union doesn’t make people hate Teamsters for being fuckups because not many people care.
Uh, right, until the driver goes off the road and kills someone, or until they can’t get their papers filed at City Hall because the public-union clerk is taking another lunch break. The notion that people uniquely hate teachers’ unions is so weak even you’re not really trying to make it whole-heartedly.
If a parent can’t get rid of a teacher because the teacher is the principal’s husband, or threatens a bogus lawsuit and the school board caves, the result is the same regardless of the presence of the union, which is Amp’s point.
mythago:
Of course unions have greater bargaining power than individuals. That’s why they exist–though they certainly weren’t invented for situations like teachers. ‘The question is, when looking at the actions of EITHER a union or an employer, is whether their actions are morally supportable.
Given the unusual links of the education system, teachers, students, public funds, etc, I’m not always convinced that the actions of teacher’s unions–including but not limited to strikes or walkouts–are morally supportable. Often they are not.
I do not think that, generally speaking, it is morally correct to
1) Enter into a difficult-to-get job with full knowledge of the conditions;
2) which job has a large effect on third parties;
3) which job is paid for by taxes;
and then
4) threaten a strike to force change in the job, which change primarily benefits you.
Put more succintly: if you don’t like the job enough that you predict you’re going to have to strike to change it, don’t take the freakin’ job in the first place. The “reward” for being oppressed and/or virtuous isn’t that you get to make a union. It’s that you avoid being judged poorly for doing so.
I don’t know about your area. But here where I live, TEACHERS are generally well respected. Teachers’ UNIONS are hugely disliked. This is notable because of the disparity. there are plenty of other professions that are well regarded, and plenty of other unions that are despised. But teaching has managed to capture both extremes.
A couple of points
I agree with Amp that a lot of private companies are pretty slow to fire. If it’s a large company there’s often so much precedence that it can be VERY hard to fire a low performer. I have worked at a company where they were pretty quick to pull the trigger. But it wasn’t a fun place to work. Not because of the firing, but imo because of the mindset that let to the easy firing.
However, I have seen that it’s common to move the low performers into less critical (and desirable) roles. It’s called the dance of the dunces. You start out in a normal job with pressure and work that’s important to the company. You do a poor job and your boss gets annoyed and moves you on to something else. Eventually you’re working as the third shift ISO compliance officer, sitting in a horrible office in the back of the building and getting a lot of dull tedious work that no one thinks is important. By this time you’re also not getting raises so inflation is effectively giving you a pay cut. If the company hits the skids and HAS to start making hard choices you know you’ll be the first to go. Unless you’re in a union where seniority can protect you.
Do schools have third shift ISO compliance officers?
About local funding
I really like the idea of a minimum for everyone with local communities allowed to go above and beyond. I even like the idea of forcing the local community to share it’s additional revenue. But I’d hate to equalize it across the state/nation.
~Firstly cost of living is different across the nation, and that would be a pain to deal with.
~Secondly I’m willing, eager!, to lower my standard of living to help my kids. I’m willing to pay taxes to help all children. I think it’s the right thing to do. But I’m not as willing to help all children as I am to help mine. Part of this is pure selfishness. I just like mine more than other peoples. Part of this is because I KNOW I make my kids study and do all the things that will help them learn. So I feel money spent locally will be well used. I don’t know this about money spent 2000 miles away.
I also don’t think that money is the end all be all solution. It helps. It helps A LOT. But I don’t think paying teachers 250k/year would make up for the other effects of poverty that impede learning. So I don’t think it would be money well spent.
The other problem with National Funding is national control. My school system teaches that evolution is a part of biology and creationism is not. It teachers Sex ed appropriate to grade level with opt outs and. I feel I and my wife should be the ones making the tough calls for our kids. I’d rather not be overruled by a national consensus and partisan horse trading. If I don’t like what the schools are doing I can look up the number for the school board president and call her at home to lobby my position.
About the Union
I have nothing against Unions. You want to form one go ahead. Society is better with unions than without. But, they exist to help the members. Since I’m not a teacher I know the union has NO interest in me. As soon as the teachers union can explain how they help students more than teachers I’ll support them. In the mean time, can someone from the union explain why the Gym teacher, the Calc teacher and the ESL English teacher for readers behind grade level all make the same (Holding seniority and education equal)? I just don’t see how seniority and tenure are going to best help education improve the lives of poor children.
Wow this is really long. Sorry
Sailorman, you seem to be operating on the assumption that the USA has far more qualified teachers willing to work at teachers’ wages, than we have teaching job openings.
Although I’m sure that’s true in some individual districts, much of the country is currently facing a teacher shortage, and the problem is expected to get worse.
As for your idea that only people in shitty jobs can ever form unions or else they’re bad people, I think that’s lunacy.
But I also think that your logic leads to an interesting circular place:
1) Teachers supposedly know the work conditions when they take the jobs. You shouldn’t strike or form a union if your job is exactly what you knew it would be. (Apparently, in Sailerman’s world, joining an organization with the intention of trying to improve it is morally wrong.) Therefore, we should disband the teachers’ unions.
2) However, one of the conditions teachers’ are aware of when they take a teaching job is that they’ll be taking a job with a (for the US) strong union protecting them. If you disband those unions, then teachers will suddenly be working in conditions significantly different from what they expected when they initially took the jobs.
3) So if teachers unions are disbanded, as Sailerman is suggesting, that would create a situation in which (by Sailerman’s standards) teachers would be justified in forming a union.
“As soon as the teachers union can explain how they help students more than teachers I’ll support them.”
??? But the entire point of a teachers’ union is to support teachers. Why should a union specifically intended to deal with the employment situations of teachers have to prove anything about their committment to students to anyone? In fact, why would anyone assume that a teachers’ union necessarily has a committment to students? It’s simply not their remit.
Why should a union specifically intended to deal with the employment situations of teachers have to prove anything about their committment to students to anyone?
Primarily, because the people that the union represents are being tasked with the future of our nation and culture. Secondarily, because the people that the union represents are being employed directly by the community to serve those long-term interests. People carrying that particular set of freight aren’t permitted to operate purely on the basis of rugged self-interest.
In fact, why would anyone assume that a teachers’ union necessarily has a committment to students?
We don’t assume it. And in fact, it isn’t there. And in fact, this is a huge problem, for what seem to me to be fairly obvious reasons. So you want to educate my kid, and you want to explicitly not have a commitment to my kid’s interests? Yeah, that fills me with a desire to guarantee your employment and make sure you get a good salary. On Mars.
Speaking as a teacher, I have to say that the fact I have a strong union is one of the reasons I can focus on teaching the students in my class. Granted, I teach college and so the situation is very different from primary and secondary school, but I think it needs to be pointed out that when a teacher’s union works–and I am not arguing that all do or that everything teachers’ unions do is above criticism–it actually enables the kind of teaching Robert suggests unions work against. More, I think it’s worth unpacking what it means when teachers’ unions are criticized for not having student interests as a central, if not a sole concern. Leaving aside, for the moment, examples of corruption and incompetence, because I don’t think anyone would disagree that those are instances where concern for students has taken a back seat, in what way(s) precisely, is it true that teachers unions work agains the good of the students in the classroom?
in what way(s) precisely, is it true that teachers unions work agains the good of the students in the classroom?
By taking the side of teachers in instances where the material interests of teachers and the interests of students conflict.
There is a lot of fog in that question because we often have real disagreements as to whether something is good or bad for the interests of students. (Or whether it’s good for some and bad for others, and what the balance is.)
But conceptually, any time you have something good for students but bad for teachers, the union will be opposed to it. (How not?)
This thread is really teaching me where anti-union sentiment comes from. The logic used to denigrate unions truly surprises me. Amp has already outlined one of the problems with the anti-union logic stated by Sailorman. If we follow Robert’s logic, no union should ever exist since the whole point of any union is solely to better the economic and working conditions of its members. So, no Teamsters , no MLBPA, no UAW, ILWU, etc. since those unions wish to have no commitments to their employers customers.
Commitments to the employer’s customer are entirely outside the mission of a union. A union makes commitments to the employer, and the employer alone, in return for commitments from the employer to the union members in the employer’s hire. Believing otherwise, or that it must be otherwise, is incorrect.
Jake/Amp,
I don’t dispute unions in GENERAL.
I have problems with teaching unions SPECIFICALLY, because of the unusual mix of circumstances involved in becoming a teacher and working as one. So a response regarding UAW is inapposite; that’s not the union I’m attacking.
That you view this as “anti union sentiment” generally is also a mistake. I support almost all the unions I know of. As I sit here typing, I can’t off the top of my head identify more than one other I don’t support–it may be out there, but I don’t know it.
Surely you’re not so naive as to think all unions are the same? Because you seem to be talking about the GENERAL case of unions. And I’m talking about the SPECIFIC case of teachers’ unions. It seems fairly obvious that not all general statements will apply equally to each member of a large class, yes?
Oh yes, and as for this:
Is this supposed to be new information?
I’m not debating what a union DOES; I’m debating whether what the union does is morally defensible.
You’re “pro-union,” right? You know that what a corporation or business “does” is to maximize profits through essentially all means necessary, right?
You understand that this “normal” behavior by corporations in general does NOT preclude a corporation from acting in a way which we find reprehensible or problematic in a specific instance.
Hiring scabs, or firing workers who try to organize, or lowering wages as far as possible when leverage permits… there are all part of what a corporation “does.” I strongly suspect that this knowledge wouldn’t prevent you from criticizing the corporation. the reverse is also true.
Robert:
Precisely because this is conceptual, and precisely because there is a lot of fog in the issue, as you acknowledge, I was hoping you would give a specific instance of this.
CryssT, That’s my point. I would love public policy that gave us better education for children. I don’t think giving more money to teachers is necessarily the right answer. (not saying it won’t. I’m agnostic about it.) The teachers union usually tries convince the public that money for teachers = better education for students and that teachers are underpaid in general. The fact that there doesn’t seem to be any shortage of people willing to teach Non-math/science in middle class districts says they’re wrong about the second. Those same districts also seem to do a decent job at educating their students. So we’re really talking about better education for the poor.
Teaches want more money? So do I. I’ll give you some of mine (taxes) but what do I get? I want to know how it will help educate kids. Will another 10K lower class sizes? Will it make teachers work harder? Will it give teachers the motivation to overcome all of the effects of poverty? (I doubt it)
Would that tax money be better spent improving the safety net? Hiring more social workers? Job retraining? More police? If we give you another $ of taxes what does society get for it?
I have no complaint with teachers unions. My hunch is that most of their members want what’s best for their students. But we’re not on the same side. I want better public education. The unions want better stuff for teachers. Our goals might overlap or they might not. We can be allies, we’re not on the same side.
Sailorman,
I have problems with teaching unions SPECIFICALLY, because of the unusual mix of circumstances involved in becoming a teacher and working as one.
I don’t see that teacher’s unions are unique. Nurses also have an unusual set of circumstances surrounding their profession. The same goes for child-care workers, (school) bus drivers, pilots, food-workers, police, firefighters, etc. I just don’t see how a teacher’s union is so special.
In response to your question:
Is this supposed to be new information?
My statement was directed to Robert (I should have made that more clear) and, yes, this seems to be new information to Robert.
You’re “pro-union,” right? You know that what a corporation or business “does” is to maximize profits through essentially all means necessary, right?
You understand that this “normal” behavior by corporations in general does NOT preclude a corporation from acting in a way which we find reprehensible or problematic in a specific instance.
Hiring scabs, or firing workers who try to organize, or lowering wages as far as possible when leverage permits… there are all part of what a corporation “does.” I strongly suspect that this knowledge wouldn’t prevent you from criticizing the corporation. the reverse is also true.
The (ethical and moral) problems with unions are very similar to the problems with businesse’s. That is to say that they both exist within the particular capitalist economy in which we live. That economy encourages people to take as much for themselves as they can get away with. Given the economic environment in which we find ourselves, I find unions, on the whole, to be both good and necessary.
I find myself wondering where the “free-marketeers” are when it comes to agitating against anti-union legislation. But that is (getting to be less) tangential to this thread.
BTW, I do criticise unions when they (or more often, their leadership) do something I find to be wrong.
Commitments to the employer’s customer are entirely outside the mission of a union.
Yes. And that’s why a teacher’s union is specifically problematic. The “customers” of the teacher’s union’s employer are our children. We care, as we should, a great deal about our children. The existence of a powerful entity in close proximity to our children, an entity which explicitly announces “I don’t care about the welfare of your kids, I only care about this other thing” is thus an issue.
In the balance of things, it’s often the case that a union creates a net good for society – for example, when workers are being genuinely oppressed and exploited through coercive means. Even though a farm worker’s union might make produce more expensive, it may well be the case that this is acceptable overall because the union corrects an evil that is much more important than a ten cent rise in the price of grapes.
Teacher’s unions don’t seem to be facing an evil of that scale. Accordingly, my tolerance (and the tolerance of many others, I think) for their self-interest is significantly toned down.
I think this generally applies to any group of public employees, by the way. People who are hired to uphold the public interest should not be permitted to use the weapons of a union against that interest. Teachers are a particularly urgent case, because education is more important than postal service or driver’s license processing.
Precisely because this is conceptual, and precisely because there is a lot of fog in the issue, as you acknowledge, I was hoping you would give a specific instance of this.
Fair enough. Competence testing for teachers. I believe that an objective test that measures a teachers’ basic knowledge and ability to articulate that knowledge would be beneficial to children, by systemically discouraging the recruitment of stupid teachers, encouraging the firing of existing stupid teachers, and increasing the average level of competence in the system. The teacher’s union is opposed to this, because some of the incompetent teachers that would lose their jobs are union members. The union appropriately defends the interests of its membership; this legitimate and appropriate use of their power is bad for children.
I find myself wondering where the “free-marketeers” are when it comes to agitating against anti-union legislation.
I believe in the right to organize. The only places where I can see that right being overridden by other social necessities are when the people organizing are on the public payroll. So for the most part, I don’t like anti-union legislation on conceptual grounds. However, I also note that much of what is framed as “anti-union” is not objectively anti-union; it is instead anti- a particular leadership, or anti- a particular way of organizing things. That SEIU doesn’t like it, doesn’t make it anti-union.
Broadly, though, I favor unions on Burkean grounds. Specifically, there are many unions whose behavior I despise – but I must tolerate that, again on Burkean grounds. I despise a lot of the choices that people will make, but self-organizing cohorts of mutually-selected allies are still the best way to order a society. Public employees have an asterisk that limits their privileges and rights in this regard, because of the unique public service aspect of their work. (“I am here to uphold the public interest! Now, give me more money or I will shut down the government.” Bit of a contradiction there.)
Well, teachers have an unusual set of characteristics. In no particular order:
1) We care about the kids much more than we care about the shareholders of GE. Same model, right? GE is run for the benefit of the shareholders. The schools are run for the benefit of the kids. Both GE and the school negotiate with their employees to serve their customer base.
Now, if we have to choose between supporting some GE dude versus lots of GE workers, we might side with the workers. But if we have to choose between the kids and the teachers, I’ll choose the kids every time.
Would you?
When (if) you accept that reversal of the “who wins?” question, everything changes. (again, same model, right? Just different input.) Unions take power and money away from the corporation for the benefit of the workers; generally, they make it more expensive to purchase the services. That’s a net loss for the corporation and/or its customers, who pay more for the same services.
Again: no problem for GE. I don’t like GE much. But if you think the kids should “win” then it really makes supporting teachers unions more problematic.
The main counterargument to this is that the teachers “only want what’s best for the kids.” To which, politely, I say bullshit (and yes, I know you didn’t say that). We’re all faced with evidence of self interest on a daily basis. It’s a glopbal evil. teachers are not magically immune.
2) It’s sort of a captive market; at the lower levels they’re not especially fungible. Nurses frequently swap shifts, as do many of the others you mentioned. Within most professions, it’s reasonably common. But for many reasons (state specialization; grade specialization; the tendency of young children to react poorly to constant change of authority figures, etc etc) you can’t easily swap teachers. Not incidentally, this is less of a problem in higher ed, because a 22 year old CAN adapt more easily to different lecturers. In fact, many seminars are set up this way on purpose.
That makes them harder to replace. Most of the unions you describe are in jobs where workers are relatively easy to replace.
3) Their available salaries (as part of the large education budget) are determined by public majority vote. Instead of the usual corporate mindset, you have a group of individuals voting.
This affects public interest. We don’t think of corporations as always (ever?) acting in the public interest. So we support unions, which improve the public benefit by changing the status quo, even if they take cash from GE. But the public (voters) ALREADY acts in its own interest, yes? So changing the status quo moves away from the public interest, it doesn’t improve it.
There are more but I gtg work. more later I hope. Sorry about the confusion re quote directed at someone else.
”I am here to uphold the public interest! Now, give me more money or I will shut down the government.” Bit of a contradiction there.
No more so than someone saying, “I’m hear to provide you air travel! Now, give me more money or I will shut down this airline.”
I expect most public employees want to fulfill the mission of their employer, just as most private employees do. It seems natural that people would gravitate to jobs they feel good about, and that people would choose to feel good about the jobs they do, if only out of self-justification. In this sense, the interests of customers and employees (public or private) align.
But employees also want to maximize their compensation. To the extent that compensation costs must be recovered through aggregate sales or aggregate tax revenues, increased compensation may result in increased sales prices or increased tax rates. In this sense, the interests of customers and employees (public or private) diverge.
Similarly, there’s an analogous tension between the interest of customers and the interest of employERs (public or private).
Jake/nobody, I think you’re just not used to thinking about unions from the stand point of the boss. The difference between the pilots and the teachers union from my perspective is that I don’t employ any pilots. So if pilots want more money I think it’s a good thing if their airline can afford it. It’s not really that important to me personally if their company has to make cuts to executive comp, or marketing, or whatever. The limited resources the teamsters are fighting for aren’t my recourses. The limited resources the teachers are fighting for are, in a sense, mine. We can give teachers a raise, or lower taxes, hire more social workers, fix the roads, hire more police, etc.
Sailorman, in the education as a business model students are not the customer. It’s a service industry. The public is the customer. The product is the education of students. The education is the product and the student, while the recipient of the education (we hope) is neither the customer nor the product.
But the people “there to provide air travel” aren’t, in fact, there to provide air travel. They are there to make money. Working to provide air travel is the job they have chosen, for the moment, as being the most likely to create wealth for them.
Teachers are not there with a primary motivation to make money. They ARE there with a primary motivation of teaching children. Or at least, we think they should be.
I’ve really been enjoying this thread. I agree with RJN’s analysis of the value of teachers and the union, especially with the comments about understanding that teaching has its own skill set and protecting teachers from principals. While not a teacher myself, many of my family members are or have been teachers, as are many of my friends. I have spent many a holiday listening to the table talk about administrators, students, unions, contract negotiations, and so on. Some anecdotes (take the relevance as you will):
1. During a school board meeting preliminary to contract negotiations one year, a teacher stood up and asked the president of the school board if he would work for the average salary paid a teacher in that school district. The response was, “Certainly not! *I* have a bachelor’s degree!” This to a roomful of people who had to have their master’s degrees in order to get their permanent teaching certificates.
2. Many people who complain about teacher’s salaries point out that they are being paid for only 9 months’ work. But they ignore the fact that many teachers cannot spend the remaining 3 months working another job (although many teachers spend the summer teaching summer school or day camp or driver’s ed or whatnot, and good on them if they can). Plus, the continuing education demands for some types of teachers need to be addressed during the summer, and teachers are generally not paid for taking the classes they need to maintain their certification. (AP classes come to mind – I believe math and science AP classes require some multiple-week “camp” for the teachers to bring them up to speed on the current requirements.) So IMO bringing up the 9-months argument is based on the false assumption that the teachers are working the remaining 3 months at something that pays the same or more as the schoolyear rate, or that it’s somehow unfair that teachers get 3 months of unpaid leave every year.
3. Unions have done more for teachers than just protect their jobs from capricious principals or parents with clout and an axe to grind. Way back when, teachers got paid in a lump sum in October, based on how many students were in the class or on some other metric used by the school system. So sometimes you got paid more than you thought you would, because there were more students around, or the millage had passed, or something, and sometimes you got paid less, because a lot of property owners were in foreclosure or something. Or sometimes you didn’t get paid at all until much later in the year. My relatives have told me it was always very difficult and stressful in September, not knowing when the paycheck was coming through or how much it would be. Unions were a big force behind dividing the salary into 26 paychecks to be paid over the course of a calendar year.
4. Teachers are considered state employees for pensions and retirement health benefits in many states. This arrangement has advantages (if the local school district is in fiscal distress but the state overall is doing well) and disadvantages (it’s a nice little pot of money for the legislators to fiddle with). Currently, a number of states are looking to cut benefits for retired teachers because they are “too generous”. The retirees get paid pensions based roughly on 2/3 of a high-three average 9-months wage, but it’s inconvenient to take care of them properly now that there’s so many of them. Grrrr.
5. Most good teachers agree it should be easier to get rid of incompetent teachers. Incompetent teachers make everyone else’s job harder in the long run, and they are not good for the kids. However, most solutions to the current rules have substantial flaws that would put teachers even more at the mercy of the administrators than they currently are – and let’s be honest, a bad school administrator can inflict *way* more damage than a bad teacher.
‘Nuff said – I’m late leaving for an errand.
Sailorman,
1) We care about the kids much more than we care about the shareholders of GE.
I think that you’re making a false analogy. The kids are just not analogous to GE stockholders. The kids are more analogous to GE customers. Remember those days when the only lightbulbs you could buy were made by GE? Well, if the union shut down the lightbulb plants – at that time – we’d all be in the dark! No, the analogy to GE stockholders (but I really think you mean GE management) would be non-teacher’s union public education administration. Either that or residents of school districts.
But as I re-read your comment, I see that we have a more basic disagreement. You write:
The schools are run for the benefit of the kids.
I believe that schools are run for the benefit of society. I have no children, nor will I ever, yet public education is a high priority for me. For example, try recruiting for technically demanding jobs in a place with lousy school systems. It’s not easy.
A well educated citizenry is good for the country. The schools are run for my benefit just as much as for the benefit of Tiny Tim.
Also:
But if we have to choose between the kids and the teachers, I’ll choose the kids every time.
I don’t think that you can choose between the two if you really want to have a good school system. But we try (and have, historically, tried) to make that choice and that, of course, leads to the necessity of teacher’s unions.
2) It’s sort of a captive market; at the lower levels they’re not especially fungible.
Even if I were to agree with this point – which I’m not sure that I do – I don’t see it as something that should disqualify unionization.
3) Their available salaries (as part of the large education budget) are determined by public majority vote. Instead of the usual corporate mindset, you have a group of individuals voting.
I see this as both irrelevant and a red herring. Groups of individuals often decide issues by majority vote that result in discrimination or unfairness to a sub-group.
Anyway… Although I believe that you are wrong, I now have a better understanding of why you think teachers unions are unique.
“Groups of individuals often decide issues by majority vote that result in discrimination or unfairness to a sub-group.”
Yes.
But it’s not a red herring IMO, because of the way this subgroup is constructed (voluntarily) and for the other reasons I discussed. Just like, say, discriminating against blacks=bad, but discriminating against Art History majors = OK, if obnoxious.
Anyway, I can see your points, though I just think we may have to agree to disagree. Let me ask you a theoretical question, though, in the interests of further discussion:
Do you think there is ANY point at which a teacher’s prior intent to strike after they are hired becomes unethical? Take this example: Jill thinks salaries are too low and time is too high. She applies for a job, knowing that, once hired, she will consistently vote to walk out, strike, etc for anything less than $150,000/year, and a reduction in working hours to 15 hours/week.
If you think the answer is “yes” (whether it’s Jill or someone else), where/how do you draw the line between “OK” and “not OK?”
Do you think there is ANY point at which a teacher’s prior intent to strike after they are hired becomes unethical?
Do you really think that teachers intend to strike before they’re hired? I’ve been around quite a few people going for their teaching degrees/credentials and none of them has ever mentioned an intent to strike once hired. Is your experience different?
But, to answer your question, no. I honestly don’t think that going into teaching with the intent of working to make compensation for teachers better is unethical – even if that includes striking. If what the union strikes for is unrealistic, no agreement will be reached. This has happened before and will happen again. It’s just part of the “free-market” in which we live.
It seems to me that you are saying that, in this economy in which it is admirable and encouraged to take as much as you can, teachers are the exception. That teachers, due to the importance of their profession which makes unionization & striking unacceptable, must just accept whatever we decide to give them – however little that may be. If we were to accept this as true, I believe that we would have a duty to make sure that there was no room for complaint about compensation by teachers – a point that we obviously haven’t reached.
But now we’re just highlighting our differences, aren’t we?
So here’s what I don’t understand. You’re absolutely right: nobody is forced to be a teacher. Anyone who doesn’t want to be a teacher can choose to do something else. And overwhelmingly, the most talented and ambitious young people in our society are making that choice. Some really smart people are going into K-12 teaching, but not nearly enough of them. There is a profound shortage of qualified teachers, and it’s about to get worse, as the last generation of smart, talented women who didn’t have other options reaches retirement age. (My mom, for instance, is 64. She got into teaching because that was the only option available to academically gifted young women when she was young. If she’d graduated from high school in 1971, rather than 1961, I think she probably would have chosen a different profession.) Part of the reason that there are so many unqualified teachers floating around is that qualified people are voting with their feet and choosing other jobs. Schools have no choice but to hire bad teachers, because the alternative is to hire no teachers. You can’t conjure awesome teachers out of thin air. If teaching is a crappy job, it will only appeal to people who can’t get better jobs.
And you think that the solution to that is to treat teachers worse? I don’t understand how that makes a bit of sense. You cannot draft people into teaching, and you can no longer rely on the traditional recruitment method, which was denying other opportunities to women so that they had to take teaching jobs, no matter how bad the conditions or pay. (And that did lead to serious abuses, which is why teachers unionized in the first place.) There is a limited pool of talented people who are willing to volunteer for the long term to take a demanding, stressful job that has mediocre pay and working conditions. I just don’t understand why people who are so enamored of the free market suddenly change their tune when it comes to teachers. Actually, I do, but I think it’s shitty, and I think people like you and Robert should stop pretending that you are motivated by concern for kids. If you cared about kids, you’d be willing to fork over the money to pay for people who are competent to educate them.
You could get rid of the teachers unions tomorrow, and most school districts would still not fire bad teachers, because they know they can’t replace them. It’s a total red herring.
I don’t doubt that people think like that. Which baffles me.
A moment’s reflection leads me to the conclusion that the cost of goods/services in a competitive market MUST in the long run reflect the cost of production. If you increase the cost of inputs – including salaries – then in the long the run the cost of outputs must change. And conversely, when you reduce the cost of inputs in a competitive market, the price of the output is likely to drop. Oil is a major input to gasoline; when oil prices go up, gasoline prices go up. Labor is a major input to many products; when we start importing those products from places where the cost of labor is low, the price goes down.
Corporate executive compensation and marketing costs are also inputs, not outputs. Admittedly, I don’t understand how firms determine the amount to spend on them. But I kinda doubt the idea that firms set the amount of their executive salaries and marketing budgets on the basis of how much money they have left over after making payroll. (Ok, perhaps very small firms….)
We simply disagree about what is. I don’t think the world divides up into “People who are motivated by intangibles and care nothing about other compensation” and “People who are motivated by other compensation and care nothing about intangibles.” Rather, I expect people are motivated by a variety of factors to a variety of degrees.
Moreover, we disagree about what ought. I don’t embrace the idea that teachers should be willing to accept starvation wages in exchange for the thrill of entertaining our kids every day. Someone suggested that teacher wages reflect the premise that a teacher is a wife that is simply earning a little pocketbook money. I’m not persuaded of this entirely, but I sometimes wonder that people see the teacher/pupil relationship as a surrogate mommy/child relationship – close, personal, and unsullied by filthy financial concerns.
Grow the hell up.
Yes, the relationship may well be close and personal. And it’s also a job, and financial concerns must enter into it. So if you’re thinking Mary Poppins, get over it.
Economic theory undermines the idea that people have “primary” motivations. Rather, classical economics says that people value multiple things simultaneously, and make trade-offs between them constantly. At some level of compensation, you may be able to lure an accounting into the field of teaching; and at some level of compensation, you may be able to lure a teacher into the field of accountancy. It’s not a difference in kind; it’s merely a difference in degree.
Put more succintly: if you don’t like the job enough that you predict you’re going to have to strike to change it, don’t take the freakin’ job in the first place.
And if you take the freakin’ job and it turns out that there are problems that you think require a strike to change–too bad, you shouldn’t be allowed to? (Also not following your claim that unions are not always right, as if this is controversial.)
Teachers are not there with a primary motivation to make money. They ARE there with a primary motivation of teaching children.
Funnily, Miss Manners has anticipated your argument, and points out that we underpay certain jobs–such as teaching–with the excuse that the job itself is its own reward, and therefore if we deign to pay them some little pittance it’s of no consequence. Why, they do it for love!
You don’t usually hear sweeping claims about how entire job classifications (“air travel”) are purely mercenary, though. Tell me, if a person works in air travel because he loves air travel, should it be legal to pay him less than his colleagues?
Robert:
Could you be more specific about what you mean by competence testing? In NYC, anway, the licensing exams are quite rigorous and are, as I understand it, designed as competency tests. My own experience is that the issue of teacher accountability, and competency exams are a form of holding teachers accountable, is quite a bit more complex than you have outlined it. So I am curious to know exactly what form this test was supposed to take, how and when it would be administered and how the results would be used. And I should also state that I am not, in principle, opposed to such an exam.
As to the rest of this thread: Boy, there is so much to respond to here and so much to wrangle over in terms of the model through which we understand what education is, what it does and how it is supposed to do it. I have to say that I find the education-as-business models as presented here woefully inadequate, both in terms of understanding the relatioships between and among the teacher, the students, the parents, the community, the public, the union, the administraton and in terms of what the model implies about what you pay for when you pay school taxes, a teacher’s salary, etc. I wish I had the time to work this through more, and I hope I can come back to do so later.
I do have to say, though, that I find it insulting, personally, both as an educator myself and as the spouse of a public school teacher, when someone says, or implies, that by choosing the profession we have chosen, for reasons that are not primarily salary-driven, we have therefore somehow declared ourselves unconcerned, or rendered ourselves ineligible for concern, with the quality of our compensation and work situation. The instruction that I provde in my classroom and that my wife provides in hers is worth a whole lot more than people are willing to pay for it; yet we stay in this profession because we believe in it. The second part of that statement does not render the first invalid.
Robert, I thought you were a libertarian? Am I wrong? Is this an exception to the general ideas? Or what?
I think teachers are there for a lot of reasons. I agree with mythago that assuming teachers are volunteering for some sort of charity work is silly. I think a system built on that model would be unlikely to work.
Nobody.realy
You’re right that higher pay for employees will likely affect the final price in some way or another. But, if a labor contract causes the price to rise higher than the competition I’ll buy the competitor’s product. If the first company goes under because of this I’m okay with that. Most of the public is. In general I support using competition to keep the price low.
If there were 4+ different school systems competing in a healthy market and no other social concerns I’d have the same lack of interest. But there’s not. There’s one public school system per community. There’s a strong public interest in making sure all kids get a decent education so competitive models become untenable. So I support the public system, but, again. If the teacher wants more money, I want to know what I (society) will get for it. Beyond the warm fuzzy of paying a nice person more.
Sally,
No, I think the solution to getting better teaching is to treat teachers DIFFERENTLY–some teachers will be treated far better, and some will be treated far worse. Overall, the mean for teacher treatment would move way towards the “better” end. But as I said before, we’d need to fire a lot of teachers. And administrators (the same applies to them.)
Of course, I’m speaking as a parent of three young kids, as opposed to being a childless taxpayer. My interests are firmly aligned with getting the schools to be as good as possible, not with saving money. I don’t think the unions are helping.
So to the pro-teacher-union folks, a new question:
Let’s assume for a moment that at least some teachers would be worse off, in one or more aspects, were there no teacher unions in existence.
What similar guess would you make regarding the quality of education? Worse? better?
Sailorman:
This is a much more complicated question than you have made it out to be. To answer fairly and with some degree of substance, we would need to know what you imagine would replace the union contract in terms of teacher credentials, training, accountability, pay and work rules. There is a fairly complex cause-and-effect calculus at work in any classroom, and so really to discuss the question you ask, which I think is a good one, things need to be made a good deal more specific.
Sailorman- in New Zealand without teacher unions I know the quality of education would be much worse for the vast majority of schools. Teacher unions have stopped bulk funding of education and other measures that would lead to the corprotisation and privatisation of education. That’s without looking at the vital work they’ve done improving the wages and conditions of teachers, and making reforms in the education system (they supported outlawing corporal punishment in the 1980s, for example)
But what I don’t understand is what you’re arguing. That teachers shouldn’t have any right to work collectively? That teachers voices are irrelevant to the education system?
The idea that teacher unions don’t take an interest in education, learning and students is just plain wrong, at least in New Zealand (and I’d put money on it being wrong in America as well).
There’s heaps more I want to respond to – but I do think the issue of teacher tenure is a bit a red herring. Coming from somewhere where jobs are more secure than they are in America, the point should be fighting for secure jobs for everyone. There’s nothing special about teachers that mean they should have security of employment, without a fair and reasonable process that shows them to be guilty of serious misconduct, or continued breaches after warnings. That should be the minimum for everyone.
Unions generally start at manufacturing level, or below. In those jobs, there is one crucial aspect that leads me to often support the worker: there are few other options. You can’t tell a waitress, or a day laborer, to “go find another field.”
One of the great things about being an electrician, is that seldom will anyone question why there is a union to begin with. Or that the union is being unreasonable by fighting for cost of living increases for the membership, or getting the contractors to pick up the increased cost of health insurance contribution. No one tells me my job is easy, or that anyone could do it if they wanted to, or that my job is the kind that slackers take ‘cuz they can be “hidden”, or such. In fact, I find that folks often assume that tradespersons have a hard job, and that we are led to take our jobs because we have no other alternatives—we aren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer, and isn’t it nice we’ve found our niche?
And this fascinates me, because in my observation, the folks who become teachers, and the folks who become tradespersons, come from strikingly similar backgrounds. We tend to come from the working class/lower middle class, and we often shared the same classes in high school (and/or community college). We grew up in the same neighborhoods, and live in the same neighborhoods as adults. Our social circles overlap. I’ve met few tradespersons who didn’t have some teachers in the family; in fact, at least one of my union brothers had some actual classroom time under his belt as a teacher (and I know several others with some college who had considered it).
So, why the discrepancy? Why are teachers assumed to be so much more privileged than us great unwashed masses in Carharrts?
Do you think there is ANY point at which a teacher’s prior intent to strike after they are hired becomes unethical? Take this example: Jill thinks salaries are too low and time is too high. She applies for a job, knowing that, once hired, she will consistently vote to walk out, strike, etc for anything less than $150,000/year, and a reduction in working hours to 15 hours/week.
Ha! Hyperbole, much? Here’s a more realistic example for what drives teacher’s unions to strike: Jill gets hired on as a teacher at Vince Lombardi High. She isn’t rolling in dough, but she’s doing alright; she’s satisfied with the pay. Conditions aren’t bad, either. She went into teaching because she wanted a decent middle-class job; she didn’t want to end up stocking the shelves at Home Depot. She hated high school herself, except for a couple of really cool teachers she had—the ones that let her know she was smart. Really smart, not just smart-assed. Smart enough to go to college, do well, and graduate. And the closer she got to graduation, the more she thought about becoming a teacher, so maybe she can reach a few kids that were just like her. With me so far?
So there’s our Jill, moving right along in the classroom, and feeling alright about it. And then it’s time for contract negotiations. The union is asking for a three-year contract, cost of living increases, and pickup of the increase in health insurance costs, rather than having that come off the check. The school board counters that the referendum wasn’t passed, that cost of living increases are doable, but the increase in health care premiums aren’t—the end result being that teachers are asked to accept a contract that gives them lower take-home pay.
So, is Jill wrong to vote for a strike? Surely she realizes that the planned new football stadium and gymnasium are a more worthy use for the district’s money than teacher’s healthcare premiums, right? And hell, what’s she complaining about anyway? She’s a single women with no kids—not like her colleague Janis, with three kids and a carpenter husband to carry the health insurance for.
Sally’s whole post was on point, but this:
You could get rid of the teachers unions tomorrow, and most school districts would still not fire bad teachers, because they know they can’t replace them. It’s a total red herring.
is the boom shot. Right there. That, and not some magical, mystical power of the teacher’s unions, is why bad teachers are not being fired. The district knows it can’t replace them, that their absence would lead to overcrowded classrooms, which would lead to the good, veteran teachers jumping ship too.
I’m willing to pay taxes to help all children. I think it’s the right thing to do. But I’m not as willing to help all children as I am to help mine. Part of this is pure selfishness. I just like mine more than other peoples. Part of this is because I KNOW I make my kids study and do all the things that will help them learn.
Joe, I hear this a lot. This frank admission make me angry, and depressed. Why? Because I’m one of “those” parents—y’know, the ones who are assumed to be the “type” that don’t make their kids study, the kind that don’t read to their kids, the kind that don’t provide educational experiences for their kids. If you only knew how long it takes me to train each new teacher my daughter has that I’m not the stereotype of their dreams/nightmares—damn. At least that won’t happen this year; there’s a new system of “looping” in place, so she’ll have the same teacher.
What similar guess would you make regarding the quality of education? Worse? better?
Worse. We give a lot of lip service in the U.S. towards education, but we fund it like a beat-to-hell used car. Teacher’s unions allow teachers to be vocal in their opposition to new pet theories of the school board, like the one gaining ground with my school board—-that boys and girls are fundamentally different, and have different sex-based educational needs (don’t.get.me.started.). Some teachers have had the courage to speak out against this nonsense, and lo-and-behold, they still have their jobs! Without teacher’s unions, pay would be based on who does the best ass-kissing. Job assignments would be based on who does the best ass-kissing. Equal pay for male and female teachers? Fuggetaboudit. Without union protection, teachers would leave in droves. In order to find replacements, we’d have to lower the qualifications to become a teacher. How low shall we go?
True. And if a labor contract were going to drive an employer into bankruptcy, the employer presumably wouldn’t sign the contract (and an arbitrator presumably wouldn’t approve the contract). The employees might have the legal option to strike but, recognizing their competitive position, would be unlikely to do so, and would lose if they did. This is my understanding of the general state of US labor unions in a globalized economy.
Of course, in many communities you can find public schools, Catholic schools, private “elite” academies, private reform-schools-pretending-to-be-elite-academies, home schooling, and dropping out to take the GED. If public schools prove to be bad enough (by whatever criteria), people have options. When compulsory integration came to south Boston, working class white families somehow scrounged up the cash to attend parochial schools, or simply dropped out, in droves. Competitive alternatives emerge in the most unlikely of places.
That said, I share joe’s view that the labor market for public school teachers cannot really be said to be fully competitive when one buyer – government – sets the dominant price. And certainly public schools tend to have a price advantage on most competitors, being heavily (entirely) subsidized by taxes. So the normal market dynamics that govern union activity don’t apply to public unions. THAT causes me concern.
But the idea that public employees respond to a “higher calling” that precludes union activities such as strikes? Perhaps you’d say that of emergency workers: the military, the police and fire departments, 911 dispatchers, snow plow drivers, maybe even air traffic controllers. But teachers? I’m not sold on this one yet.
“So you want to educate my kid, and you want to explicitly not have a commitment to my kid’s interests?”
Oh, come on: you honestly can’t see the difference between a teachers’ union whose priority is teachers’ rights and teachers themselves, many of whom actually do give a shit about their students? Teachers’ unions aren’t in charge of education, though they may care about it. Their responsibility is making sure teachers have representation regarding employment issues.
Should we require those unions who represent workers in the food service industries to care more about the quality of the meal that gets served to us in a restaurant than about the restaurant workers’ rights?
Related to this discussion, I wanted to recommend this post on Ezra Klein’s blog and its associated links.
Should we require those unions who represent workers in the food service industries to care more about the quality of the meal that gets served to us in a restaurant than about the restaurant workers’ rights?
No. But we should require them to care whether or not they are serving poison to the customers.
Robert, that’s a nice one-liner, but I can’t see any way in which it’s a substantive point.
The difference is other unions work for other people and if their product isn’t good I’ll go elsewhere. Teachers unions work for the public and there isn’t a good competing product. (private/home schooling won’t get the job done for society). The teachers union works for us so we should care about how they interact with the job of providing society with educated children. I’m not saying that teachers shouldn’t unionize or that teaches should be expected to perform their job as an act of charity. I think that’s silly. I’m saying that we should approach the negation with the teachers union like any other negotiation.
I see the union as a roadblock to education reform. I don’t think the existing model is working well for disadvantaged children. The unions answer seems to be the same every year. “Teachers are saints. Teachers are the answer. Hire more teachers and increase their pay. But don’t try to hold teachers accountable for the outcome because there are too many factors beyond their control.”
Oh, and I think expecting teachers to perform their job as a form of charity is silly. It’s a job, they should get paid what they’re worth and what they’re worth should be defined by the market. imho
So if you don’t like how your local fire department does its job, you switch to a competing fire department?
But it’s true that there are too many factors beyond control of teachers, especially when dealing with areas with large numbers of disadvantaged kids. Do you really think the only reason disadvantaged kids are more likely to have less than ideal outcomes is that the schools and teachers aren’t good enough?
I’m of the same opinion on all public employee unions. There’s a lot less controversy about fire/police/sanitation workers unions so it doesn’t often come up there.
I don’t think the only reason disadvantaged kids are more likely to have less than ideal outcomes is that the schools and teachers aren’t good enough.
I do think that society would be better off over all if everyone that went to school K-12 ended up literate, numerate, and knowledgeable about history, biology, economics, civics and personal finance.
I think that the current system largely fails to accomplish that in disadvantaged areas. I think that the teachers union. (not teachers personally) does 2 things that hamper improvements.
1 They automatically reject any change that would not be worse for the union and it’s members. (this is perfectly rational position for them to take) e.g. charter schools. (not saying charter schools are the solution.)
2 They keep much of the local focus about new education spending on getting more money to the teacher. Partially by strong advocacy and partially by equating good teachers with the solution to all education problems.
“2 They keep much of the local focus about new education spending on getting more money to the teacher. Partially by strong advocacy and partially by equating good teachers with the solution to all education problems.”
That’s bullshit, Joe. My mother’s teacher’s union does a lot more than that. She works in a disadvantaged district, and everyone, everyone, everyone works far more than the required hours to try to help the students. The union does NOT only concentrate on teacher salary.
Disclaimer: My mother was a junior high teacher for 30 years and president of the local teacher’s union.
I remember as a kid going to the store or the mall or someplace in public and running across my mom’s students. They were usually shocked or embarassed to see her outside of school. She would often laugh and joke about how kids thought their teachers curled up in their filing cabinets at night and came out the next day to teach class, like she didn’t have a life outside of the classroom.
Teachers are not saints, they’re not some noble do-gooders out to sacrifice their own lives and livelihoods so kids have someplace to go for free every day while their parents go to work. Without a teacher’s union, teachers lose the collective ability to push back against school boards that may have different priorities, priorities that aren’t always in line with how best to educate kids (Let’s build a new stadium and cut funding to art/science/music/books/whatever).
Here’s an example of what could happen to teachers without a union, my mother went 8 years without a pay increase in the late 1970’s-early 1980’s and then another 6 years after that. Not a cost of living, not a merit increase. Nothing, nada. Think about that for a minute, especially people who want to criticize the quality of public school education. Without the union, teachers are either profoundly devoted public servants, the second income in a two income household, independently wealthy, or non-existent. Think about how long you would stay in job without any hope of making enough money to support yourself and/or family.
The competitive market for teachers exists between rich districts that can afford to pay competitive wages and benefits and poor districts who can’t. Leaving children out in the cold. But is that the fault of the way we fund public education? Is it the choices we make as a nation that dictate priorities? Or is the greedy teachers’ union that demands that teachers make a decent salary and benefits?
It’s also interesting to note that the negativity around teachers’ unions always comes up with an impending strike, when the prospect of not having a free place to park the kids comes up.
Mandolin, I should have parsed my words better. I didn’t mean that ALL teachers unions do this and ONLY this. My point was that in general teachers unions do this. Also I’m sure that the lives of teachers would be worse if they didn’t have collective bargaining. My point was that I think our current education system is failing disadvantaged children and that to the extent that teachers benefit from the status quo their union will resist change.
I don’t accept that only wealthy
Disadvantaged children are totally fucked over by hte status quo. We agree there. I just think that the teacher’s union is one of the good guys in that particular mess. Most teachers who stay working with disadvantaged children generally really, really want them to do better — and in my experience, that devotion shows in the unions.
There are, of course, a small minority of teachers who view disadvantaged children with disdain. They’re usually unhappy people, and they leave when they can.
This is an interesting point. First of all, who is to say the the teachers are right? Someone has to make the call on what our education will be. I’d rather the fox didn’t guard the henhouse. I’ve rarely met a teacher who didn’t think their subject (or the actual teacher and their class) was among the most important. You don’t see the basket weaving teachers volunteering to leave the school so their salaries can be used to enhance math skills.
The concept that teachers always (or even “most of the time”) act with students’ interests in mind is a false assumption. Yes: because of the way that the education system works, their interests are OFTEN aligned. But sometimes their interests are diametrically opposed.
You don’t see teachers voluntarily leaving their jobs teaching English just because, say, they can’t actually teach English:
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0831ellmonitor0831.html
And we have all probably read the various occasional news exposes of what happens when you start testing teachers–they often don’t pass the tests. I don’t, um, think that’s in the kids’ best interest in any way, shape, or form.
WITH a teacher’s union, districts ALSO lose some or all of the ability to enact beneficial-to-students changes that are detrimental to teachers.
Basically, it gets to this: who is best qualified to decide how money should best be spent on education? The teacher’s union seems to think it’s them. I propose that this entire board would take about a nanosecond to recognize the conflict of interest inherent in that suggestion, and that the only reason folks aren’t admitting it is because such recognition conflicts with their general pro-union stance.
“You don’t see teachers voluntarily leaving their jobs teaching English just because, say, they can’t actually teach English”
Yeah, actually. You do.
And maybe people who have a ghost of an idea how things actually work in schools and classrooms should decide about education — not people who clearly have no clue.
Basically, it gets to this: who is best qualified to decide how money should best be spent on education? The teacher’s union seems to think it’s them. I propose that this entire board would take about a nanosecond to recognize the conflict of interest inherent in that suggestion, and that the only reason folks aren’t admitting it is because such recognition conflicts with their general pro-union stance.
I don’t understand what this has to do with anything? Teacher’s unions don’t decide how money should best be spent on education. That is the job of school boards (even school boards that mandate teaching “intelligent design” aka creationism in science classes). Teachers’ unions advocate on behalf of teachers. Are those unions always right in their assertions of what benefits students the most? No, but neither are school boards (creationism, book banning, etc.). I just don’t see teachers’ unions as the major impediment to better public education.
WITH a teacher’s union, districts ALSO lose some or all of the ability to enact beneficial-to-students changes that are detrimental to teachers.
Any school district that loses ALL of the ability to enact beneficial-to-students changes that are detrimental to teachers (with or without a union) is run by incompetents and I would say that perhaps that administration is the largest impediment to a better run school. Any school district that complains about losing SOME of the ability to enact beneficial-to-students changes that are detrimental to teachers needs to learn the value of balancing the needs of students and teachers. I just don’t have a lot of sympathy.
Do you honestly believe that if teachers’ unions were outlawed that public education would be significantly and tangibly improved? Can you provide any evidence that that was the case before the advent of unions?
Sailorman:
Would you say the same thing about lawyers, doctors or any other profession in which it is the professionals themselves who define best practices, and who regulate themselves, etc? I do not deny that there is some difference between the situation of teachers and that of lawyers, etc. both in terms of how they are positioned relative to the populations they serve, the social good they do, their job security, how they are paid, the financial and other risks they assume as a result of being in business for themselves (when they are), etc. Nor do I think it is wrong to examine the role teachers unions play in the education process, in terms of how they protect teachers’ interests, how that function can make questions of accountability and other issues very complex and difficult to deal with (and, in some case, more difficult and complex than they ought to be; though I would also argue that such questions–once you examine education for what it is, a process that involves a good deal more than the simple transmission of knowledge–are always to some degree complex and difficult).
I do think, however, that discussion would be better served if we could distinguish between and among teaching as what teachers do, a profession, a set of profesional and professionalized skills and practices; the subjects that teachers teach (practices can be remarkably similar across classrooms with radically different content); who it is that actually determines the curriculum that teachers teach (it is not the union); who decides how, on what and how much money gets spent in a school (again, it is not the union, though the union of course has some influence over this); whose interests are served by the educational system (in addition to the students, it serves the interests of politcians, who love to make educaton, particularly teachers, a scapegoat; it serves the interests of teachers in that it is our source of livelihood; it serves the interests of parents in any number of ways; it serves the interests of employers, of our culture at large, and so on.)
I want to be clear about something: while I am pro-union, I am not blind to the problems that can arise: We had to have my son’s kindergarten class changed because his teacher decided, because she believed my wife and I coddled him too much, that it was her job to make “a man” out of him and so she picked on him to the point where he not only cried every day before he went to school (and this is kindergarten), but also developed a nervous tic in class. When I went to talk to the assistant principal, it was very clear to me that the problem with this teacher was long-standing and that the school administraton had, for whatever reason, decided against going up against the union in trying to remove the instructor. I am giving you the very short version of this story, but my point is that I have first-hand experience of the ways in which the process negotiated by the teacher’s union for the removal of tenure actually hurt students by allowing a teacher who should not longer have been in the classroom to remain there. I think the discussion of how to balance the needs of teachers as employees and the needs of students and the needs society has of our educational system is crucial; I don’t think that discussion can happen in a productive way, given the kinds of conflation that are both implicit and explicit in the kinds of statements I quoted above.
Well, the one thing we CAN do is establish some common ground, Richard. Maybe this discussion won’t advance anything, but can be a resource for another one.
Thus far it seems to me that everyone agrees:
1) Teaching is a profession that should pay its ordinary competent practitioner a living wage.
2) Schools where budgetary constraints are a serious problem have a difficult time giving teacher salaries a sufficiently high priority.
3) Individually, bad teachers exist and can cause significant problems for a child who falls into their orbit.
4) Teacher’s unions are effective at increasing teacher compensation, at a cost of making it more difficult to remove bad teachers.
5) Removing bad teachers is a problematic and tricky thing to do even in the absence of a union.
Any other universals?
I’d suggest changing number 4 to “Teacher’s unions are effective at increasing teacher compensation, at improving teachers’ working conditions, and at making it more difficult to remove good teachers, at a cost of making it more difficult to remove bad teachers.”
I like Amp’s revision of #4; you may not appreciate that difference if you have never been, or been the colleague of, a good teacher that an administration has unjustly tried to remove; or if you have never been a good teacher who, in the course of doing her or his job, becomes the target of some parent’s or administrator’s or even colleague’s spiteful ire–my wife told me the story of one such person tonight–but the difference between his and Robert’s original wording is crucial.
I would add this one:
6) Education–what and how students should be taught and assessed–is contested territory, and this contest is often, not always, but often enough, the (unacknowledged) subtext that drives conflict in and over the areas that Robert outlined in his comment.
That’s a good change.
“we should require them to care whether or not they are serving poison to the customers.”
Well, aside from the fact that nobody but psychopaths would not care if poison were being served in restaurants, worrying about such things is still outside the remit of unions that represent restaurant workers, except inasmuch as the inevitable fallout will affect restaurant workers professionally. There are other organisations that exist to monitor food quality and protect customers’ interests, just as there are organisations that exist to monitor the quality of education and to protect pupils’ interests.
Someone upthread actually suggested that they wouldn’t respect teachers’ unions till they “proved” that educating kids was the highest item on the unions’ agendas. I’m saying that’s ridiculous: that has zero to do with with the purpose of teachers’ unions in the first place. Teachers’ unions exist to represent teachers’ interests, not students’. And that doesn’t mean that they don’t give a damn about the kids, it doesn’t make them Bad People, and it doesn’t make them irresponsible. All it means is that their focus is the teachers, and I really don’t see why other people are getting so bent out of shape at the thought of organisations that exist to make sure the rights of a specific professional group are taken into account. Why on earth would anyone interpret the existence of such an organisation as meaning that it and the teachers associated with it must not care about kids?