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Article Artículo

The Blame Teachers Game: Has Anyone Heard of the South?

Frank Bruni's column complaining about teachers and teachers unions undoubtedly has millions asking, "is our pundits learning?" The proximate cause is a soon to be published book by Joel Klein, the former New York City school chancellor.

It seems that the book repeats most of the old complaints of school "reformers." The big problem with our schools is that we have bad teachers and that unions won't let us get rid of them. Bruni tells readers:

"I was most struck, though, by what he observes about teachers and teaching.

"Because of union contracts and tenure protections in place when he began the job, it was 'virtually impossible to remove a teacher charged with incompetence,' he writes. Firing a teacher 'took an average of almost two and a half years and cost the city over $300,000.'

"And the city, like the rest of the country, wasn’t (and still isn’t) managing to lure enough of the best and brightest college graduates into classrooms. 'In the 1990s, college graduates who became elementary-school teachers in America averaged below 1,000 points, out of a total of 1,600, on the math and verbal Scholastic Aptitude Tests,” he writes. In New York, he notes, “the citywide average for all teachers was about 970.'"

So the problem with NYC's schools is that unions make it "virtually impossible" to fire bad teachers? If this is the big problem with our schools then we should expect places like Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas to be the models of good education since teachers unions are relatively rare and certainly much less powerful than in New York City. Perhaps Klein has a chapter touting the success of public education in union-free areas, but I doubt he has much data to support such claims.

Of course if we look internationally, the best education outcomes on standardized tests are typically found in countries like Finland, where unionization of teachers is close to universal. One of the factors that might explain their success in education relative to the United States is that teachers are paid more relative to other professions. The ratio between the average pay of a  doctor and a teacher in these countries is something closer to 2 to 1 rather than the 5 to 1 in the United States. And, they don't have a bloated financial sector where good performers can easily make 10-20 times the pay of an average teacher.

Dean Baker / October 29, 2014

Article Artículo

Workers

Does the OECD Think That the South Should Rise Again?
A post at Wonkblog earlier this month noted that a recent analysis by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) of regional well-being across its member countries found that the U.S. South was “the worst place to live in the United

John Schmitt and John Schmitt / October 28, 2014