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My wife works as a teacher at one of the largest schoolboards in Québec, and she can tell you that the solution "hire good people, pay them the going rate and t
by pmilot 10y ago
My wife works as a teacher at one of the largest schoolboards in Québec, and she can tell you that the solution "hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability" doesn't work in a unionized system.
Complacency a systemic problem. When your union protects your job, you don't need to actually put effort into doing the job. Of course, that doesn't mean ALL teachers are lazy; but it does mean that a teacher who works hard and gets better results than average is not rewarded for it. It also means that bad teachers cannot be replaced by good ones.
Of course, preventing public school teachers from unionizing will simply allow the government to exploit them. Perhaps the solution would be to replace unions with a professional order, similar to how engineers and lawyers are regulated.
- wycx 10y agoAn infernal situation. There is no solidarity in a meritocracy, and no reward for merit with solidarity.
- trentnix 10y agoOn the contrary, consider team sports as a perfect example of a meritocracy which often also promotes solidarity. A good team, led by a good coach, recognizes merit is earned by the performance of the whole. The whole wins and the whole loses together. The best of sport very clearly defines success and failure. It uses competition to spur innovation and the pursuit of excellence. Solidarity is often the consequence of that pursuit. Very little about education, from how teachers are managed to how schools are run, does the same.
- geodel 10y agoFor sports one very important difference is that real time performance is monitored by a large number of people. People who do not pay salaries of sports person and do not meddle with working of sports team directly. For any other kind of job performance is measured by insiders. Outsiders may gauge performance on quarterly / annual basis.
- js2 10y agoSports teams are also relatively small organizations. The number of players on a team is in the dozens. No one could shirk by w/o it being noticed. (Well, mostly: http://www.fourfourtwo.com/us/features/confessions-carlos-kaiser-soccers-biggest-conman http://www.fourfourtwo.com/us/features/confessions-carlos-ka...)
- trentnix 10y agoAlmost like the size of...a classroom? Team sports and the innovation, pursuit of excellence, and solidarity that comes with it are prevalent at all levels - recreational, amateur, and professional.
- metaphorm 10y agoTeam sports are highly unionized. It's also not a generalizable example because most industries are not controlled by a few hundred workers globally.
- jessriedel 10y ago> Of course, preventing public school teachers from unionizing will simply allow the government to exploit them. What are the examples in modern liberal democracies where governments exploited non-unionized workers? The arguments for unions assume an adversarial relationship between employer and employees. But they don't go through for governments. http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/02/budgets_and_bargaining_power http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/02/bu...
- pdelbarba 10y agoProbably more abstract than you were hoping, but look at the controversy surrounding public education in the US right now. It's always been a politically 'hot' area and each new administration wants to de-regulate or re-regulate the sector in some new and ever more confusing way. If it wasn't for the unions, I'm sure some administration would come up with the idea of firing the bottom 10% of teachers based on standardized test scores or something similarly misguided.
- jessriedel 10y agoMy criticism of that example isn't that it's abstract, it's that it's purely hypothetical. I'm claiming there's no evidence to back up the assertion that there would be bad effects without public sector unions, so yet another assertion of this does not really change anything.
- pdelbarba 10y agoFair. I would assert that one would only have to look as far as the parent article to get an indication of where things would go however. As others have said, adding metrics that become targets is bad, and in academia this usually turns into using publishing to determine who gets tenure. In this sense, professors are essentially non-union teachers and their promotions are based on random metrics. I should also mention that we've already seen some of these effects in public schools with the "teaching to the tests" debate in which students are often subjected to a large number of standardized tests that are used to make funding decisions. I think the problem is that in the end, any debate over schools at the federal level will always turn into something reminiscent of the gun regulation debate where neither side's argument is founded in reality and as such, the teachers will be the ones to suffer.
- CuriouslyC 10y agoIt doesn't matter how good the people you hire are, the current educational system is absolutely horrible. A good teacher can salvage some results from the disaster, but what we really need to do is switch to a system that doesn't need superstars to produce results. It is a sad state of affairs that the thing education teaches most effectively is that learning is a chore.
- rhino369 10y agoThey probably aren't hiring good people, at least they aren't hiring enough good people. The problem is that there aren't enough "good people" to go around. Challenging PhD programs weed out people who aren't self motivated to succeed. Teacher education programs do not. Most other fields education programs have a hard time doing it. That advice is basically "just hire great people." No shit. The reason you need management is because that usually isn't possible.
- jgamman 10y agoisn't 'get better run unions' an option? Germany for instance has worker representation at the board level. I find it hard to believe that they tolerate members en masse dialing it in.