Unions And Education: A Deficient System

National Review Online: Teacher Unions And Their Democratic Party Ties Leave Children Behind

(National Review Online)  This column was written by Michael Barone.

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Education is not ordinarily thought to be in the purview of a Federal Reserve chairman. So it’s striking when Alan Greenspan in his memoir, "The Age of Turbulence", raises the subject.

“Our primary and secondary education system,” he writes, “is deeply deficient in providing homegrown talent to operate our increasingly complex infrastructure.” The result: “Too many of our students languish at too low a level of skill upon graduation, adding to the supply of lesser-skilled labor in the face of an apparently declining demand.”

So if you’re concerned about widening disparities in income, Greenspan tells readers attracted to his book by its publicists’ promise of criticism of George W. Bush, then what you need to do is to “harness better the forces of competition” in educating kids.

As Greenspan concedes, we have done that to some extent. Governors Republican and Democratic have worked to make public schools more accountable, charter schools provide some needed competition, and the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act has further prodded states and localities in those directions. But except for a few cities, notably Milwaukee and Cleveland, we have not had school-choice programs with vouchers allowing parents to choose private as well as public schools.

Vouchers are adamantly opposed by the teacher unions, which spent millions persuading Utah voters last week to repeal a voucher law passed by the legislature. No one can say for sure how much vouchers would improve education. But they are “forces of competition,” as Greenspan puts it, which we’re almost entirely prevented from harnessing because of the power of teacher unions - the power, more specifically, that they wield in the Democratic party.

I was reminded of this by a recent exchange on theatlantic.com between libertarian blogger Megan McArdle and liberal bloggers Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum. These are three of the most intellectually interesting and usually independent-minded young liberal bloggers, but on vouchers they advanced one lame argument after another. On this issue, they were playing team ball.

The teacher unions are an incredibly important source of money and volunteers for the Democratic party - about one in ten delegates or their spouses at recent Democratic national conventions have been teacher union members. When they snap their fingers, the Democrats jump. Vouchers threaten to dry up dues money, and that is that.

Teacher unions are not the only public employee unions important to the Democrats - nearly half the union members in the country are public employees. And you can see their power exerted as well in House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel’s tax reform proposal.

Rangel, who deserves credit for raising the issue of broad tax changes, proposes vast tax increases in order to eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax. The AMT, originally designed to make sure that a few millionaires could not avoid paying income tax, has never been indexed for inflation, and threatens to engulf 20 million taxpayers next year unless Congress passes another one-year “patch” or, as Rangel wants, abolishes it.

The AMT has no deduction for state and local taxes, and tends to hit high earners in high-tax states like Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and California - heavily Democratic states, you’ll notice. These states tend to have highly paid unionized public employees, and their union leaders surely understand that the AMT threatens to create political pressure to lower state and local taxes and therefore spending. If voters can’t deduct their state and local taxes, their tax burden will go way up, and they may start a tax revolt. Better not let that happen! So eliminating the AMT is an imperative for Democrats.

Looking ahead to future fiscal burdens, many people understand that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid threaten to consume an ever-larger share of the economy over the years. But so do state and local governments if public employee unions get their way. And to get it, they rely on taxpayer’s funds - all their dues income comes from the public fisc.

Their goals are to increase pay, which runs counter to taxpayers’ interests, and to minimize accountability, which runs counter to citizens’. Republicans are not their reliable adversaries - union leaders get cozy with Republican legislators when they can, by letting them know they won’t oppose them. But the Democrats are, with some few exceptions, their humble obedient servants - from the young liberal bloggers up to the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

[random_radar]

Anything the government runs, the government ruins. As long as we cling to the naive belief in public education, we will have a society of ignorant thralls. Parents have the responsibility to pay for their children''s education and the right to decide how their children will be educated. This is a fundamental right of parentage.

"Society" has no right to force other people to pay for someone else''s children to be educated. The parents chose to have children, and it is the parents that should raise their children.

"Society" has no right to tell parents how to educate their children. If people want to decide how children should be raised, let them raise their own children as an example to us all. Parents have the right to raise and educate their children as they see fit. No one should impose their own system of values on other people''s children through force of government in a compulsory education system.

America would be better off to disband the public schools, sell off the assets to the highest bidder, end school taxes, and let parents take responsibility for the children they chose to bear. I assure you that every child would be better off. Even the children people claim would be harmed would wind up better off because truly concerned people would develop private charity to help them.

What the government runs, the government ruins. Lets stop the government schools from ruining our children.

[eggy1620]

If public education was abolished in this country, society would be left with two immediate choices: Oral Roberts elementary or Saudi run madrassas.

[sparks224]

random_radar,
Our school system used to be the best in the world, until the Republicans got a hold of it.
You should say:
%u201CWhat the Republicans run, the Republicans ruin%u201D.

[roger3815]

This is the education system you get when you let invisible sky god worshipers take over. People who demand dogma be taught in place of science.

[tburzio]

I once talked to a man who took inner city youths and helped them get an education. The other people thought that was impressive, and lauded him. I told him that I thought that his story was horrible! He looked perplexed. I told him that his story showed that the majority of students who he did not help were abandoned by a school that had given up on them. He didn''t get it, no matter how hard I tried, that he had actually helped the system he loathed by bringing up a heart rendering success story, when there was so much evil in his actions.

[walt1944-2009]

The Great Emperor Bush agrees that there is much wrong with the educational system in this country, despite his attempts to "improve it" with No Child Left Behind! He agrees with the NRO that it is the evil labor unions aided by the just-as-evil Liberals who have ruined the educational system and it is up to the Fascist right-wing neocons to remedy the situation by taking science out of the schools and installing "hard-core family values". Children don''t need to learn math or grammar, just ways on how to make money!

After all, look at the Emperor who is a product of the educational system. He may not know how to read, put a sentence together, or the multiplication tables, but he knows how to make money, which is the secret of "No Child Left Behind".

SIG HEIL, BUSH!!!

[alanrobisch]

Our school system used to be the best in the world, until the Republicans got a hold of it.
You should say:
%u201CWhat the Republicans run, the Republicans ruin

thats fascinating it is also plain silly. the policy of education is almost entirely controlled at either state or local levels. Our biggest problems is not a partisan one it comes from poverty and those in poverty not seeing education as a way out. Giving poor parents vouchers to get their children where good education is provided is a good idea but with the strength of the teacher unions it will never be made into law.

[sparks224]

alanrobisch2,
It%u2019s a fact that our public school system used to be the best in the world (we must have had better poor people back then).
It%u2019s no secret that conservative Republicans on both the state and federal level have been trying to bring it down and replace it with a privatized system (vouchers) for the past 40 years.

[dmgenet]

Unions do not get higher wages overall for their employees. A Harvard study in the late 1980''s showed that the biggest advance unions provided their members were social and not monetary. Better working conditions and more structured ways to approach management.

But to say that union will cause "looming fiscal burdens" is a laugh. Direct your attention to the Bush admin who''s looming fiscal burden is the biggest to date. Those guys definitely got left behind.

No system is perfect and the union system was a response to repeated abuses by management. I have never been in a company that did not ask for unions 9 by their inconsistent and abusive managerial style. You want unions out? Learn to manage people not "resources".

[cfin5]

When reading, writing and arithmetic are way more important than socialist studies, then things will turn around for the kids.

[imnho]

The republicans would like to do away with public education all togather. Vouchers allow a set of population to go to private schools at public expense. The real purpose of vouchers is to undermine the public schools.

If unions did not exsits the schools would get more politized then they already are.

[cfin5]

The republicans would like to do away with public education all togather. Vouchers allow a set of population to go to private schools at public expense. The real purpose of vouchers is to undermine the public schools.

If unions did not exsits the schools would get more politized then they already are.

Posted by IMNHO at 09:30 PM : Nov 12, 2007
After your spelling display here, I can''t blame them......Spell checker is what you need to get. :)

[incog-nito]

The American educational system is hopelessly outdated and is rooted in the past, back when America was mostly rural. It needs major changes:

First, get rid of summer vacation. This is not the 18th century. We don''t need kids to take time off to help their parents with the harvest anymore. Instead now they spend their summer hanging out at the mall causing trouble, while forgetting much of what they learned in the school year.

Second, make the curriculum much harder. Grade levels are at least 1 or 2 years behind other nations. Too many years spent in the system not learning much of anything. Today''s high school senior should have the equivalent of a two-year college degree.

And finally, get rid of the current system of using property taxes to pay for schools, and spend money per child equally. Public education is supposed to be EQUAL for every child. The current system is inequitable and puts poorer neighborhoods at a disadvantage, with obvious consequences.

[bluestardad]

THE MAJORITY OF TENURED TEACHERS LEAVE THE EDUCATION OF THE STUDENTS TO THEMSELVES...I HAVE SEEN THEM WALK INTO A CLASS AND SAY READ CHAPTER 12 AND THEN WALK OUT TO THE TEACHERS LOBBY AND SET UNTIL THE END OF THE CLASS...

THERE SHOULD BE NO TENURE FOR TEACHERS AND THEY SHOULD BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE AS THEIR ADMINISTRATORS FOR THE GRADES THE STUDENTS MAKE...

HOWEVER WHEN WE ARE GIVING MILLIONS AND BILLIONS OF DOLLARS TO FIGHT WARS FOR THE OIL COMPANIES AND ISRAEL IT IS A SHAME THAT OUR KIDS AND STUDENTS HAVE TO HAVE BAKE SALES AND CAR WASHES FOR BAND UNIFORMS AND SCHOOL SUPPLIES...OUR OWN GOVERNMENT MUST BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE ALSO!

[kesac4650]

Unions are institutionalized mediocrity. They push the brilliant towards the mean, and push the average towards the the lower end of the scale.
The system today mandates that you cannot ask the educational system to rise to meet the requirements of your child, and that it will mold him instead to be just like every other child.
"No child left behind", authored by Teddy Kennedy is one small step towards finding a cure for America''s educational mediocrity.

[quatrops]

A post at 7:19 suggests that the main problem is poverty. And have you noticed how much attention the neocon administration has paid to poverty in America over the past 7 years?

Addressing poverty didn''t look nearly as lucrative as invading Iraq when it came to lining their pockets and those of their corporate sponsors with tax $.

The failure of the Bush administration to plan for post-invasion Iraq (and the many other examples of their failure to plan for the future) is that THEY NEVER EXPECTED TO BE IN POWER THIS LONG. THEY EXPECTED THEIR SHELL GAME TO BE UNCOVERED LONG BEFORE THIS!

The milking of the treasury by the likes of Halliburton and Blackwater is coming to an end, so don''t expect much progress in any area until Inaugeration Day, January 2009.

[runningralph]

If tenure agreements have tied the hands of the taxpayers, taxpayers should demand that teacher unions
police their own ranks. School administrators should not be given contracts longer than 1 or 2 years. Taxpayers should pay attention and attend school board meetings.
Education programs should be designed to teach the majority of students and cull the minority. Students should not be allowed to pass if they can''t perform to standards set by the taxpayers through the school boards. This way the whole will move ahead. Liberal grading policies will cause the whole system to collapse.

[eskieville1]

It''s not all the teachers and administrators fault. There are too many parents who believe in tough and rigorous standards for everyone except THEIR KID! This is why teachers unions exist - to protect from ARBITRARY DISMISSAL CAUSED BY A WACKO PARENT.Teachers do need to police their own ranks better however!

[sanfelz]

As if paying teachers less would attract more and better teachers. Sure, have tax funds pay for parochials schools and enrich the coffers of a Walton heir.The brilliance of privatization as found in banks, insurance companies and car manufacturers.

[libsluvsuvs]

The milking of the treasury by the likes of Halliburton and Blackwater is coming to an end, so don''''t expect much progress in any area until Inaugeration Day, January 2009.


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Posted by Quatrops at 06:33 AM : Nov 13, 2007
+ report abuse


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in this country poverty afflicts only the ones that refuses to go to school, refuse to work hard, refuse to earn any rewards and depends on pity and handouts.

btw...poverty will prevail as long as people like you would give these ''poor'' people justification to stay poor..and will prevail past the predicted event you mentioned..

a great liberal (Goldof and bono) once said that poverty ends right after live8..well did it?

[quatrops]

The sad poster at 7:30 may misguidedly think the poor don''t want to get an education, but his english usage would seem to indicate that, at whatever grade level he managed to achieve, he wasn''t paying much attention in english class!

E.g.: " . . .the ones that refuses . . .". Tsk tsk! Try getting the verb that matches the plural noun.

Of serious concern, though, is his screwed-up lack of understanding of sociology and economics. If he ever took courses in either, they certainly weren''t taught by one of those "left-wing educators" that the right always insists our educational system is inundated with!

[ioweign]

Unions And Education: A Deficient System
National Review Online: Teacher Unions And Their Democratic Party Ties Leave Children Behind

Who has been vetoing domestic spending for America''s children ?