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Probably 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'
by pdelbarba 10y ago
Probably 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.