Educating the public
Pay, accountability and teachers’ unions
The Los Angeles Times has a new series “exploring the effectiveness of public schools and individual teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District.” The study, which relies on standardized test scores rather than more comprehensive metrics, is obviously far from perfect. But, as the LA Times explains, this is surely better than nothing when “…across the country, parents have no access to objective information about teacher effectiveness…” Arne Duncan, Obama’s Secretary of Education, has professed support for the LA Times releasing the data.
However, the program has provoked hostility from the Los Angeles and national teachers unions, who claim that the study unfairly scapegoats teachers, many of whom are in poor districts and face unenviable classroom conditions.
During the Industrial Revolution, unions were formed to counteract the relative powerlessness of individual workers in a buyer’s market for labor. In the public sector, there is essentially one buyer –the government. Thus, it is eminently justifiable that public servants form unions to protect themselves from a monopoly buyer.
In general, the goals of unions are to raise the pay and ensure the job security of their members. Public school teachers are no exception, on average earning 61% more than their private counterparts. But the law of averages does not appear to benefit teachers in tough circumstances or those with critical skills. In most cases, pay is tied to seniority rather than merit or circumstance.
It is clear that the compensation system for public school teachers is broken. What is less obvious is the appropriateness of teacher union power in general.
On the one hand, one might consider teachers such an important class of public servant that they are entitled to relatively high average pay and job protection. The possibility of retaining a few bad apples is an acceptable cost for ensuring that the profession thrives. Moreover, it might be possible to resolve some of the more egregious problems associated with teacher unionism through contract reforms, without disbanding or marginalizing the unions altogether.
On the other hand, teachers’ unions have been highly (and often successfully) resistant to attempts to increase the transparency and accountability of its members. High pay is certainly compatible with accountability and transparency, but job security of the degree that leads to rubber rooms is not.
If we truly seek a better education for our nation’s children, something will have to give. What should teachers, parents, and everyone in between be willing to sacrifice, compromise, or rethink in order to ensure a higher quality of public education?
-Charles
Image from Flickr user mar is sea Y used under a Creative Commons Attribution License.
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- Performance and reward in the public sector
- No one reforms my kid’s education
- Public philosophy 4 kidz, continued
- The court of public opinion
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