Telling the Difference

In the midst of an interesting post on his disagreements with myself and Ezra Klein, Mickey Kaus writes:

For example, Democrats aren't going to fix the schools unless they in effect bust the teachers' unions. If you make that point, is it because you want to bolster your credentials as an independent-minded blogger or because you want to fix the schools?

As it happens, some of my favorite people are neoliberal education policy analysts and it's genuinely not so hard to tell the difference. Someone who wants to fix the schools and says mean things about teacher's unions because they believe teacher's unions are an impediment to improving American education will, for example, write on a range of education-related topics and engage in various education-related debates. Kaus's interest in education policy, by contrast, begins and ends with his dislike of the teacher's unions. And, not incidentally, there are all kinds of other unions -- all unions, as best I can tell -- that Kaus doesn't like.

Comments

You're too young! That's all we need to know.

Oh, and that Kaus's dislike of bureaucracy comes from his "New Left" roots.

Posted by otto | May 3, 2007 6:25 PM

The hard part of arguing against Kaus's vision of education reform is that what he says isn't substantiated by any data. Kaus believes that the problem with American education is that our public schools are filled with legions of terrible teachers who are impossible to fire because of the unions. But he doesn't have any statistical evidence to back it up; it's just another of his anecdotal homsepun wisdoms that he's so sure about that he doesn't have to offer evidence. I'm willing to wager that there are some bad teachers out there, and I'm also willing to say that they are probably unduly protected by unions from being fired. But there's simply no reason to believe that the problem is nearly as large as he says it is, and there's no way to contradict him because you can't counter facts that don't exist.

Posted by Freddie | May 3, 2007 6:39 PM

A convo with Kaus is just wasted electrons and frustration for any rational being (including any rational dogs or cats in the vicinity).

But you certainly have it right: when the 'pundit' is one issue deep in the ocean, they speaketh not truth, nor for enlightenment. Sharks like these kind of meals - blubber and all.

How many times and how many people have called him a hack? Surely a sentient being would maybe start getting the message, so my guess is that he was around when sentientness was passed out.

Posted by JimPortlandOR | May 3, 2007 6:54 PM

Sorry, he may have been around, but he was peeing in the punch bowl and missed his allotment of sentientous goodies.

Posted by JimPortlandOR | May 3, 2007 6:56 PM

Kaus: I get my kicks by breaking with the liberal/Democratic establishment. Don't blame me, I'm just being true to my roots!

Kaus (in the same week): I loathe Chuck Hagel because I think he gets his kicks by breaking with the conservative/Republican establishment.

Anyone notice a bit of a disconnect here?

Posted by CraigM | May 3, 2007 7:05 PM

Off-topic a bit, but after several years of reading liberal blogs I have yet to note a positive word said about Mickey Kaus. (Even Kevin Drum hasn't said what I'd consider to be a good word about him.) Why he still gets attention from anyone in the blogosphere I can't say, unless it's just so much phoning it in when there's nothing else handy to write about.

Posted by David W. | May 3, 2007 7:09 PM

David W said: "Off-topic a bit"...

I do not "get" Kaus. He gets very exercised by some of the most inane aspects of a topic. Why does Josh Marshall link to him?

After reading him for weeks, I concluded that he was a pinhead Repub. His writing hardly qualifies as any kind of leftist, new or old. But his pinheadedness IS genuine.

Kaus reeks of Hollywood and seems the perfect individual to label "unserious".

Posted by HyperIon | May 3, 2007 7:35 PM

Freddie's claim that the idea that it's hard to fire teachers is only an anecdotal canard is flat wrong. From 1990 to 1999 in the Los Angeles Unified School District, there was only one case -- ONE -- where a tenured teacher was fired through the district's dismissal process. That's according to the California state government's Office of Administrative Hearings.

Anyone who thinks that teachers unions have a bad rap should read the editorial page of the L.A. Times regularly.

Posted by Chris | May 3, 2007 7:38 PM

I think a lot of it has to do with Kaus living in California, where public-sector unions are a big, if not the force in politics. It's like a New York that never had the '70s collapse to beat some discipline into it.

And it's gotten by so far, but in no small part because the state's been in near-constant boom since World War II. Tellingly, the biggest exception - the few years in the '80s- '90s between the end of the SoCal industrial boom and the subsequent NorCal tech booms and statewide property/construction boom - were the years in which L.A. burned, "ungovernable". Kaus thinks we need someone like a first-term Schwarzenegger to break the unions' back before the next recession, and I'm not sure he's wrong, though I think he overestimates the way this insight applies nationwide.

In contrast, most of his biggest critics live in New York, which already went through such a back-breaking in the '70s and has a stacked state senate and the three-wise-men governing structure to insulate the budget against such pressures, or D.C., where they don't pay much attention to local issues and things get paid for by taxing other states anyway.

Posted by Senescent | May 3, 2007 8:17 PM

There's a bit of lunacy in the obsession about teachers unions. The underlying assumption is that if we get rid of teachers unions, we'll get rid of all the bad teachers, and that will permit this influx of great teachers who will drop whatever it is they are doing now and go teach. And, presumably, our disaffected kids will stop listening to ipods, text messaging, chewing gum, doing crack, having crack babies, and fill up their new time with differential calc, Shakespeare, and C++. And learn Arabic for their new jobs in today's Army.

I was in high school nearly 40 years ago. I never saw a teacher with a union card & I was as bored out of my mind by high school as any teen is today. Bad teaching didn't start yesterday.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | May 3, 2007 8:20 PM

I don't think MY's point is quite true. Yes, there's something "ostentatiously independent" about constantly offering isolated observations that run against the grain of one's declared ideology. It's reasonable to call this quality superficial when, as MY suggests, their significance to larger policy outcomes is assumed (rather than demonstrated) or ignored altogether. But the person who does this sort of thing isn't thereby nongenuine, merely superficial. Further, while not everyone can be a policy wonk about every subject, if the Democrats haven't changed on this issue, then even the superficial point Kaus makes remains politically relevant and (assuming its truth) potentially helpful.

But MY is right that there's a genuineness problem with this rhetoric; the moral and political value of the declared ideology, in this case liberalism, is rarely made on its own terms. Instead it must, in the view of the ostentatiously independent commentator, prove itself on the commentator's chosen area of heterodoxy, to be morally legitimate or politically palatable. Rather than simply saying, I think the Democrats (or the liberals or the activists) are wrong about this and here's why, the commentator is apt to assert that the Democrats et al. are defined politically and morally not by their dominant values and the preponderance of sound policy outcomes toward which those values lead but by what I regard as their blind spots or compromises. To express only liberalism's talking points can indeed be boring, and can indeed neglect weak points in our thinking. But to avoid making arguments for its overall value in a political culture in which its claims are highly contested and rarely given a fair hearing is to raise questions about how seriously the ostentatiously independent liberal commentator adheres to liberalism in the first place.

Posted by jason | May 3, 2007 8:22 PM

As I understand it, most modern union contracts emphasize job security because guaranteeing job security is a lot cheaper for employers than paying higher salaries. Educators accept crappy pay because at least they get a more reliable job than most of the private sector. If you want teachers to consider limiting their job security, you'd have to offer them something else instead - ie, spend a fair bit more on salaries. And not just a few bonuses for top performers - significant raises to compensate for the significant rise in risk teachers would be taking on. That sounds like a worthwhile tradeoff to me, but it's a liberal solution - tax more and spend more - rather than a neoliberal one. As far as I can tell, the neoliberal solution is to bitch, moan, and try to undermine the few labor laws that are left.

Posted by Ted Friedman | May 3, 2007 8:25 PM

Actually, the teacher's union, as I understand it, stood against the pointless, childdestroying, unimaginative and useless testing mania that's behind the No child left behind act. So I'd say teacher's union stand for a better education than their opponents, the testing industry and the GOP. The latter seem to love the paint- by-numbers-until-you-are-18 one promoted by the prez Kaus piously doesn't vote and otherwise works to promote day by day, dull year by year.

Of course, he only supports Bush's programs because he is the last SDSer. Otherwise he'd be planting bombs in the Pentagon. He and David Horowitz and Che. Comrades all.

Posted by roger | May 3, 2007 8:27 PM

What's weird is that Kaus doesn't hold the same type of emnity for the union here in California that makes the teachers green with envy: the prison guards. Their salaries are much higher, and have increased a lot more during recent years. But I've never heard him say anything about them.

Posted by JoshA | May 3, 2007 8:29 PM

Freddie's claim that the idea that it's hard to fire teachers is only an anecdotal canard is flat wron

I never said that! I never said anything close to that! I even said "and I'm also willing to say that they are probably unduly protected by unions from being fired." What I was saying wasn't that teachers are hard to fire but that the idea that public schools are filled with incompetent teachers is entirely unsupported by data.

Can you read a 5 line comment in its entirety before you start bashing what it (doesn't) say please?

Posted by Freddie | May 3, 2007 8:48 PM

*aren't hard to fire

Posted by Freddie | May 3, 2007 8:56 PM

I remember when I started reading online political commentary, I thought Kaus was a Republican for about two years. Of course, I didn't read him very often; he just turned me off the few times I did. It wasn't until a Bushian Republican was trying to make nice with me by telling me he read Mickey Kaus (showing me how open-minded he was, see?), that I realized everyone else thought Kaus was a Democrat.

Posted by Kiril | May 3, 2007 8:57 PM

Yeah, JoshA, you're right. My guesses for this are

1) The guy loves his grudges, and the shitty LA schools are taken as a personal insult, and thus valid pretext for a grudge, by his rich, white, westside elite social cohort in a way that prison conditions aren't.

and/or

2) It's less universalizable - every state has a teachers' union that plays a significant role in education policy, few states have a guards' union in a position similar to California's (google "teachers union", and you get results from everywhere, google "prison guards union" and it's California as far as the eye can see), and so when writing for a national audience, he emphasizes the former more.

Posted by Senescent | May 3, 2007 9:00 PM

I have worked in a public school as an SLP for a long time. And it is true that the unions help protect some bad teachers. It is also true that most teachers-at least in the primary and early education grades with which I am familiar-work hard, and are good at their jobs.There are lots of problems with the public schools:

-some bad teachers

-bloated administrative costs

-kids who come to school unprepared-indeed, many not even prepared for whatever the weather will be

-in my school system(small city) there are a lot of IQs between 70 and 85. These kids don't normally qualify for help, but they do have trouble keeping up.

-lots of kids who are very angry. I work in a Special Needs Preschool now, and we focus on social skills and language.

Early education can-and is-making a difference. It is key to get kids who live in unstimulating environments out of them so that they develop language and social skills. Many of you can't imagine a house with no books or magazines, little conversation, and few toys. But they exist.

Posted by Susan | May 3, 2007 9:07 PM

it's probably just b/c i was educated in the public schools of west virginia instead of california (where In-N-Out burger pays janitors in spanish bullion), but i got the crazy impression that poor teaching was due less to stalinism / the weathermen / jimmy hoffa than the fact that half my teachers weren't paid enough (in west by god virginia - oy! the rent!) to move out of their parents' houses.

a skeptic might answer "federalism!" but a visionary like kaus recognizes that the future of america lies in abolishing the states.

which totally explains why a true progressive should (nay, must!) stand against union hegemony, the one true threat to our future, manning the barricades against george mcgovern, armed only with embarrassingly shallow quadruple-reverse contrarianism and an obsessive preoccupation with the personal foibles of national democrats. teachers unions are the root of all evil in america's body politic -> wait! wait! don't rush me: bush or gore?!?! -> random selection from boston phone book clearly preferable to kerry (dean screamed! he screaaaaamed!) -> we fight the islamofascists there because we can't possibly defeat the mighty los angeles teacher's lobby here. i love cars! i love ann coulter in cars because i'm not gay, not like gay andrew gay sullivan gay! tom tancredo is the felier faster immigration jesus!

i can't believe anyone pays him to write (you're just jealous - ed.) f*ck you, kaus. you can tell tip o'neill he betrayed liberalism in hell.

Posted by matty | May 3, 2007 9:19 PM

why do i defend myself against yglesias and klein? obviously not because they hurt my feelings by pointing out that, mired in my 1980's TNR neoliberalism, i've stalwartly used my platform as a writer to defend quite possibly the worst administration since the gilded age against an enemy that was rendered extinct at the national level along with the generation-long democratic control of the house. horsefeathers! obviously it's because, unlike the young and impressionable youth, i love liberalism so much that i'd rather see seven more bush administrations than abide another day enduring the living hell of writing for slate in beverly hills knowing the teachers' union of los angeles endures.

Posted by matty | May 3, 2007 9:30 PM

Kaus isn't contrarian so much as repulsive-arian as far as I'm concerned. But looking at his rant on bloggertv (overcoming the almost overwhelming temptation to turn it off), it is obvious that he is spinning the netroot critique. The critique is that the msm has set up a structure in which the 'neo-liberals', the liberal bashing liberals, are preponderant. Now, I am sure he thinks this is because the editors at Slate have always admired the steadfast leftiness of the SDS. However, on planet earth, one attributes these career trajectories to just what Matt said in the reply to Jonathan Chait - an institutional preference for conservatives and liberals willing to take conservative positions. Does this mean he is insincere? No, it means that he rewarded for bashing liberals - and not for talking about other parts of the New Left program (apparently, he had to go to the bathroom when the comrades were deciding NOT to support Barry Goldwater. Another case of a man missing a memo). And one can justly assume that a pavlovian process goes on in which a person discovers which views will advance him and which don't - if Kaus doesn't believe that, then he is even sillier than I think he is.

The end result of this is, for instance, the msm will not go to Nicholas Lemann's take on the welfare system for the liberal view, but Kaus or a Kaus-alike. Frustration with Kaus's views, then, are one part disagreement with the views, but 9 parts frustration with mislabeling those views as liberal. If I order sphaghetti at a restaurant and I get noodles with catsup sauce on it, the issue isn't whether I like catsup, but the fraud perpetrated by the kitchen.

Posted by roger | May 3, 2007 9:34 PM

I'm with Freddie, the idea that Teachers Unions preventing you from firing bad teachers is the problem with education is just knee jerk ideological opposition to unions.

First you need to prove that the problem is bad teachers, I'm skeptical of this. Basically if kids don't want to learn they aren't going to learn. Sure there are the feel good stories (usually turned into movies starring actresses trying for an Oscar) of some incredible teacher who goes into a hopeless school and motivates the kids. But those are just that extraordinary cases, you can't base an education policy on finding superstar teachers who are willing to work for lower pay than they could make elsewhere.

Second, even if bad teachers were the problem you'd need a way to identify them. Test scores are not an answer.

Finally, if bad teachers were the porblem and you could magically identify every bad teacher in America and fire them tomorrow who do you think is going to replace them? Face it you get what you pay for and with what we pay teachers you aren't goign to get a much better selection of talent than what you already have.

I think we're back to where I started, with waht we're willign to pay teachers you are gonna get the education system we have where kids will only learn if they are willing to learn. If we want schools to solve society porblems and replace bad parenting to create motivated kids we need to redesign our education system.

Posted by Eric | May 3, 2007 9:47 PM

The one sure way to improve the public schools is to cut down on the influx of lousy students by cracking down on illegal immigration ... which Kaus wants to do. Yglesias, in contrast, seems to want to dodge the whole topic.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 3, 2007 10:06 PM

I love unions, but I HATE stupid teachers. Can we (a) triple teacher pay, and (b) 86 the education major? Education majors are fucking stupid - why do we accept idiots teaching our kids?

Posted by sherifffruitfly | May 3, 2007 10:10 PM

matty wrote:

i can't believe anyone pays him to write (you're just jealous - ed.)

yes, that stupid parenthetical "back and forth" is another annoying thing about Kaus.

wrt fixing education in the US, low teacher salaries guarantee that only folks-who-can afford-to-do-it-because-they-love-it stick around. particularly given the increase in youth truculence.

Posted by HyperIon | May 3, 2007 10:10 PM

In the Netherlands they have unions for teachers and choice for families.

They also have strange noodle lunches.

Posted by Linus | May 3, 2007 10:11 PM

It strikes me that, in Kaus-ian fashion, Steve Sailer could bolster his credentials as an independent-minded blogger if he'd occasionally criticize some of excesses of figures like David Duke or Adolf Hitler.

Posted by Petey | May 3, 2007 10:14 PM

Teachers Unions may not be THE problem with education - there are rather a lot of them - but I personally find them very hard to defend.

Admittedly, this is largely due to my own anectdotal experiences - teachers in High School who were safe in their jobs in spite of highly inappropriate conduct - and the knowledge of the inability of my school's administration to properly deal with these issues.

That said... I really doubt that if you simply can suddenly get rid of the bad teachers that anything would magically be fixed. I do think that the breaking of the Teachers Union is a necessary prerequisite to the kind of radical change that our education system needs. This is more a matter of practicality than idealogy - the Teachers' Union is essentially Establishment - and I doubt it would support any plan that called for radical reform and change. If an establishment union could be brough on board for an effort that would probably adversely impact the job security of its membership... Well, I'd love to learn how.

I'm always caught in the middle when it comes to unions - I'm mostly a liberal, but my limited exposure to unions has been negative (UFT incidents in H.S., recent NYC transit strike). I've gotten to the point where I tend to regard unions with roughly as much trust as I do their employers - generally none. I'm not sure if this actually makes my viewpoint more balanced or not.

Posted by Daniel | May 3, 2007 10:26 PM

Democrats aren't going to fix the schools unless they in effect bust the teachers' unions.

Kaus isn't going to bust the teachers' unions unless he appears to be fixing the schools.

Posted by Tyrone Slothrop | May 3, 2007 10:27 PM

Somebody fire Charles Barkely. Please.

Posted by sherifffruitfly | May 3, 2007 10:39 PM

Sailor is a parody post right? Like all the fake Al's at Drum's site?

I mean the guy is a racist a-hole, but he isn't that much of a blithering idiot is he? EVen if you take the high end illegal immigrant numbers they are what 1% of the student population at most? Sure getting rid of them will solve everything...

Daniel, several posts have basically proposed exactly the tradeoff you're asking for, it isn't rocket science, increase the pay in exchange for eliminating tenure. There is a reason people like me who work in high tech and make twice or more than teachers don't unionize. (though if the free traders keep having their way and keep turning us into high paid temps that may change)

Posted by Eric | May 3, 2007 10:44 PM

Fire Barkley?

Are you nuts, he's great. He is there for entertainment value not serious analysis. Even when he's totally wrong he's totally wrong in hilarious ways.

And he does have some good stuff about the whole mindset of the elite basketball player.

Posted by Eric | May 3, 2007 10:53 PM

Dude - I get enough Andy Rooney on 60 minutes. I don't need that cantankerous-for-cantankerosity's-sake shit in my basketball.

Posted by sherifffruitfly | May 3, 2007 11:02 PM

Petey writes:
"It strikes me that, in Kaus-ian fashion, Steve Sailer could bolster his credentials as an independent-minded blogger if he'd occasionally criticize some of excesses of figures like David Duke or Adolf Hitler."
Petey is completely misleading about Sailer:

Sailer vs. Taylor, Round II —"Citizenism" vs. White Nationalism
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/051008_round2.htm

Posted by pjgoober | May 3, 2007 11:04 PM

I found interesting Josh's question concerning why teacher's union critics like Kaus (mostly conservative) do not take issue with C.O. unions, or with other L.E. unions. I think that the answers are that: (1) to do so would threaten the critic's "law and order" credentials; (2) C.O's have a very dangerous and difficult jobs that they are generally seen as doing quite well (poor grades and dropout rates are more accessible than smuggled drugs, to the extent that that practice is widespread); and (3) the fact that teacher's unions are generally made up of white "do gooder" liberals and minorities, the natural enemy, and (4) a bunch of other reasons that I've now forgotten.

To be fair, the third reason is the same justification for why Teacher's unions get enormous support from progressives while the law enforcement unions do not. Teachers are their ideological partners and their friends and children. I find progressive support for uniformed units and other blue collar unions (e.g. construction, Teamsters) to be empty and based less on support for working class people and more on romantic PBR fuled lefty wet-dreams of Che Guevara doing the tango in a seedy "worker" bar while Victor Serge chats it up with Murray Boochkin in the corner booth. They mean well but they don't really get it.

Posted by laborlibert | May 3, 2007 11:11 PM

My above comment was unfair to Jarod Taylor. Jarod Taylor does not equal David Duke and Hitler.

Posted by pjgoober | May 3, 2007 11:15 PM

"EVen if you take the high end illegal immigrant numbers they are what 1% of the student population at most?"

The disconnect from reality around here is breath-taking.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 3, 2007 11:33 PM

It makes more sense to attack the principals' unions than to attack the teachers' unions, because firing a lazy principal will do a school much more good than firing a lazy teacher.

Yet, principals' unions stay remarkably far below the radar. Most people don't realize they even exist in many big cities because the concept of a principals' union doesn't make much sense -- aren't they management? And yet they are around in quite a few cities.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 3, 2007 11:40 PM

Dude,

The high end estimate is 12 million illegal Aliens. They are disprotiantally single men.

Just how many students do you think there are?

Posted by Eric | May 3, 2007 11:41 PM

Progressives could do a public service by taking on principals and school administrators unions, such as the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, "which represents the Middle Managers in the Los Angeles Unified School District."

http://www.aalausd.org/

The principal of a 4,000 student LA high school has a couple of hundred teachers and staffers working for him. If that's not Management with a capital M, I don't know what it. It's ridiculous that principals and downtown adminstrators have their own union to keep them unaccountable, and that their unions are almost unknown in the press, while teachers unions are constantly denounced.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 4, 2007 12:02 AM

"Petey is completely misleading about Sailer"

If your point is that Sailer's ideology is marginally less offensive than David Duke's or Adolf Hitler's, then I'm certainly willing to concede the point.

After all, Sailer naturally has problems with traditional White Supremacist thinking, given that his definition of the master race include Jews. Thus his willingness to endorse positions like Duke's and Hitler's will always be qualified.

Posted by Petey | May 4, 2007 12:12 AM

Sailer may have some weird, 19th Century ideas about race (I always imagine him as a temporally displaced high Victorian), but at least he unearths some genuinely interesting information in his articles and has a lively, engaging writing style. Kaus is a terrible writer as well as possessing odious political beliefs.

If you're gonna get on Sailer's case, it should be for not liking Casino Royale, the best Bond movie since Goldfinger. That's truly unforgivable.

Posted by Hank Scorpio | May 4, 2007 12:38 AM

Kaus's invocation of New Left principles is rankly opportunistic. Yes, the Port Huron Statement criticizes large-scale unionism--as a facet of the larger socio-political trend toward centralization and personal disenfranchisement. PHS also denounced, with far-more vigor, the increasing militarization of the economy, the consolidation of corporate power and the rise of the national security State. Has Kaus ever tackled those topics? On a website once owned by Microsoft, now owned by the Washington Post Company?

Yes, the New Leftists detested Lyndon Johnson. But they reviled him as vile warmonger, and rightly so. The man sold out the Great Society--which many NLs had placed great faith in--in order to spread death throughout Indochina. Does Kaus decry the war in Iraq? Has he ever discussed the social costs of spending trillions on empire, to the neglect of the domestic welfare? Will Kaus ever offer up a systematic critique of the workings of the warfare State--the very sort put forward by innumerable New Left intellectuals?
Will Kaus ever take to task the two-party duopoly, the de-politicization of the population, the amazing unaccountability of the Executive? Has Kaus ever once employed the phrase "participatory democracy"?

No, no, no, no, no, etc. Of course not.

Whatever; Kaus can slag the unions. In some cases I might agree with him. But for Kaus--a glib, center-right commentator--to justify his editorial choices as a legacy of the New Left is surely a piece of perversion. Please, if we're going to piss on the Sixties, at least let's have Gingrich and Coulter (Kaus' bud)--anything but this ill-begotten tribute.

Posted by Mark | May 4, 2007 12:48 AM

Yes if only we break teacher's union so teachers earn less can we see the great influx of highly skilled teachers!

Posted by Rob | May 4, 2007 12:49 AM

And Rob nails it with the pithy comment to sum it all up!

Posted by Eric | May 4, 2007 1:14 AM

There's no need for theory. We can look at empirical evidence.

In most of the South, teachers' unions are weak or nonexistent, and teacher pay is correspondingly low. And guess what? The South has the worst educational outcomes in the nation.

QED.

Posted by Josh G. | May 4, 2007 3:51 AM

Josh has it exactly right.

Texas has no teachers unions. Most schools hire teachers on year-to-year contracts and can essentially fire teachers at will or simply not renew their contracts.

That, of course, explains why Texas has the highest performing schools in the nation.

...or not.

Posted by Kent | May 4, 2007 9:26 AM

California, home of Silicon Valley, now has incredibly badly performing public schools, 49th in the NAEP verbal, better than only Mississippi, and 44th in math. I doubt if the teachers' unions are much to blame -- demographic change, anyone? -- but there doesn't seem to be any excuse for principals' unions.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 4, 2007 1:48 PM

Oddly enough, Sailer has a good point. Not so much that "Principals' Unions" are to blame, a point on which I'm agnostic, but that BAD SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS do far more harm than bad teachers. There are undoubtedly some truly lousy teachers in American public schools, but most children will encounter a mix of good and bad teachers during the course of their educational careers. A mismanaged school system, like a mismanaged business, can quickly go rotten from top to bottom.

But that's not really the root problem. And I'm not going to claim that illegal immigration isn't a problem for educators, particularly in California, but it's hardly the root problem, either. The root problem is that 1960s and 1970s white flight created a vicious cycle that sent many school districts into a death spiral. Now all the structural incentives perversely reward families who flee for private schools and/or elite suburbs, leaving urban public school districts to pick up the pieces. If there were a solution to THAT problem, we wouldn't be having this discussion at all.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | May 4, 2007 2:07 PM

For the last 20+ years, my law practice has been devoted to representing employees. I receive many, many telephone calls, e-mails, letters, etc., each day from people who have been fired. A steady and not-insignificant percent of these come from teachers, government employees, etc. – some union members and some not. Sometimes when I’m listening to the employee – my potential client – tell his or her story, I think “even I, bleeding heart that I am, would have fired you!” But more often, the story I’m hearing raises suspicions that the firing was done for bad or even illegal reasons.

The idea that it’s difficult to fire employees because they’re union members, government workers, etc. is a myth. Firing an employee and getting away with it is ridiculously easy – especially if the person orchestrating the firing is willing to be patient.

The best thing workers can have is a good union that will stand up for them. Of course, not all unions are like that.

And, remember, management is made up of people. The incidence of incompetence, pettiness, buck-passing, etc. among management is not significantly statistically different than it is among workers.

Posted by Civil-Rights Lawyer | May 4, 2007 3:06 PM

He's a hack. Nuff said. Move on.

Your making mountains out a midget.

Posted by Kuas | May 4, 2007 3:31 PM

Sailer's point about demographic change is the most salient one on this thread: good students, and good parents, make good schools.

Here in NJ, the difference between world-beating public school systems like the one in, say Tenafly, and lagging systems like the one in, say, Englewood (a town bordering Tenafly) is demographics.

Tenafly is demographically white and Northeast Asian, with a significant Jewish population. Parents who moved to Tenafly paid a premium in real estate prices to do so because they value education.

Englewood, although only 50% black as a city, has a school system that's 90%+ black. There are far fewer two-parent families in the African American community, and education and isn't as valued in that community. The minority of engaged black parents who do value education often seek out parochial schools or charter schools for their kids, so what's left for the Englewood public school system is a sub-par group of students.

Posted by Dave | May 4, 2007 5:53 PM

I think this is the crux of the confusion about teachers unions versus school performance: critics of teachers unions see that the schools that have demonstrated success in improving academic outcomes for poor black and Latino students tend to be charter schools that are free of most union rules. These same critics then assume that if the rest of the public schools with black and Latino student populations do away with unionism, they will achieve similar results.

Realistically, there are probably two factors responsible for the out-performance of some charter school programs like KIPP: one is their rigidly-structured approach that emphasizes behavioral discipline as a key element of the learning process. This factor might be difficult to institute in a unionized public school due to work rules. The other factor behind the success of some of these charter schools is simply the self-selection of students and parents. Only parents who value education highly make the effort to apply to get their children into charter schools, so the charter schools have the advantage of motivated parents behind their students.

If unions were ditched in the regular public schools with predominantly black & Latino populations, and the charter school methods were applied universally, you wouldn't get the same positive results you see in successful charter schools now, because you'd lack that self-selection. You might still get an overall, if lesser increase in performance.

Posted by Dave | May 4, 2007 6:21 PM

Freddie, Whilst it might not be logically proovable that teachers being unfireable means that there are incompetent teachers that should be fired, in the real world this is undoubtedly true.

Posted by Mike L | May 7, 2007 10:22 PM

Wow -- this place is getting like Atrios's: all the comments are about the guy, not the topic -- he's a liar, he's dumb as a dog, he's a waste.

Fun crowd.

Posted by Carleton Tang | May 8, 2007 2:07 PM

"all the comments are about the guy"

Obviously that's not the case.

Posted by Mark | May 8, 2007 2:24 PM

What is devastatingly annoying in Kaus's discussions (and I actually like things he says occasionally, not on education) as well as much of what you see here: There are huge swaths of the US where there are NO teachers unions. That needs to be repeated every time unions get brought into discussions about public education. In most of the South it is ILLEGAL for public employees to unionize. I've worked in great schools in some of the best school systems in the country, and there were bad teachers no more than two classrooms away. Why? Because they are paying under $30k for college graduates, and under $50k for people with 15 years experience and a masters degree. The principals know who their weak links are, could (and occasionally do) get rid of them fairly easily if they have under four years in the local system, could get rid of them with some effort after that. They almost never do, except maybe to apply enough pressure on the lowest performing newcomers that they move on. The reason is because, with those salaries, it is a total crapshoot what kind of quality you will get in the replacement. And again, this is with absolutely no union influence.
I could see how, in some northern cities where student populations are shrinking, unions allow deadwood to stay in the classroom while younger talent is sent packing. But in most of the country, the issue is finding someone, anyone, to put in that classroom on the first day of the year. In a lot of states, a union would actually help the situation, because higher pay would attract more people, and keep more early- and mid-career teachers from leaving, so you didn't have to scrape the bottom of the barrel everytime you had an open teaching position.

Posted by david | May 9, 2007 10:53 PM