9 ms·

How “illegal” teacher strikes rescued the American labor movement

62 points by howard941 8y ago

Kephael 8y ago
Salman Khan is better than 99% of teachers. We really don't need nearly as many of them as are employed.
- hobs 8y ago
  Do you really believe that some internet videos are going to replace human contact with regard to teaching? I would consider my experience with education sub-par at best, but even I know that this will NEVER be the case.
  - Kephael 8y ago
    Yes, we don't need one teacher to baby sit 28 students. The current model is just an employment program for teachers who'd otherwise be working retail.
    - harimau777 8y ago
      Two thoughts: Are you saying that a teacher should be able to babysit more that 28 students or that a teacher shouldn't be working as a babysitter? It seems to me that as a practical matter "babysitting" is an inherent part of a teachers job (particularly in lower grades) and that's probably something that they cannot do efficiently much above 28 students. Second, my understanding is that teacher to student ratios is one of the major metrics used to identify the health of a school. Granted, since I don't personally know the data behind that, this is effectively an "appeal to authority", but it still strikes me as reasonable to put some stock in the expert's opinions.
    - dang 8y ago
      Would you please stop posting flamebait comments to HN? We ban accounts that do that. If you'd instead review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Here's one of them: "Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
- whatshisface 8y ago
  American public school teachers provide childcare as they shepherd children through their education. The fact that they give lectures is almost incidental - if you had teachers stand at the back of the room and play youtube videos, the price would not go down.
  - Kephael 8y ago
    Not running schools like welfare systems is one of the reasons why the East Asian countries have been doing vastly better when compared to most Western countries.
    - howard941 8y ago
      What do you make of the starkly-contrasting Finnish approach? https://www.deseretnews.com/article/865563989/What-we-can-learn-from-Finlands-education-system.html https://www.deseretnews.com/article/865563989/What-we-can-le...
      - Kephael 8y ago
        I don't know, but you're not going to be successful at real math without a lot of practice. The PISA exam is a joke and looks like 6th grade math. http://www.oecd.org/pisa/test/PISA%202012%20items%20for%20release_ENGLISH.pdf http://www.oecd.org/pisa/test/PISA%202012%20items%20for%20re...
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - duxup 8y ago
    I'd say the education provided is more than "incidental".
  - pnw_hazor 8y ago
    In plenty of school across American, teachers do teach the equivalent of standing in the back of the room and playing youtube videos. It is depressing to see how much the quality of US public education has declined while the spending has increased.
- erentz 8y ago
  I may be wrong but I doubt Salman Khan would agree with you. On the other hand there is this line of thinking that sounds plausible, that we have the idea of instruction and homework backward in our school system. Kids should watch videos by great instructors as homework, and should do the exercises (what would normally be the homework) in the classroom. With the role of the teacher in this scenario to assist students where they have difficulty. This way the teachers aren’t spending 80% of their time doing the repetitive stuff that’s the same for every student but can instead focus more time on the problem areas students are having.
  - Kephael 8y ago
    The flipped classroom model doesn't work with unmotivated students.
    - erentz 8y ago
      You seem to be invalidating your own argument that we don't need teachers.
      - Kephael 8y ago
        No, I'm saying there's no need to throw resources at the lower 40% of the student population. The educational system is already babysitting for them. The smart and motivated students can already learn far more on their own from textbooks and online resources such as KhanAcademy, edX, Cousera, etc.
        eesmith 8y ago
        Right, so how do you tell which are the "lower 40%"? And how do you ensure that it isn't really just a proxy for being poor? Since hunger, lack of a long-term home, parents who need to work multiple jobs to support a family, etc. are things which make it difficult even for smart and motivated students to learn. Of course there are some smart and motivated students who can learn from books and online resources. But is that all of the remaining 60%? Or is it 5% Bear in mind that Khan Academy disagrees with your assessment that it can be a general purpose replacement for teaching. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Academy#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Academy#Criticism : "Khan Academy positions itself as a supplement to in-class learning, with the ability to improve the effectiveness of teachers by freeing them from traditional lectures and giving them more time to tend to individual students' needs", so KhanAcademy" (emphasis mine).
- Helloworldboy 8y ago
  You're being downvoted, but I agree. In the information age public school teaching is a glorified jobs program.
  - pnw_hazor 8y ago
    ...daycare program. But it doesn't have to be this way. And that's what makes it so sad. One look at an 8th grade primer (math, language arts, geography, history, any will do) from the late 19th Century or early 20th Century and it is clear American public education took a very wrong turn somewhere along the line.
morpheuskafka 8y ago
I generally support teacher labor movements. However, I think it's important to consider the effects that even the smallest disruption. For example, last year in NC the teacher's groups organized a "Rally for Respect." What they did to bypass strike laws was they encouraged every teacher in the state to request unpaid personal day, which is normally rubberstamped by the principal as you only have a couple. When half the school wants leave, that would be when you stop signing them. But instead, to avoid that conflict, nearly all major districts cancelled school entirely, treating everyone taking leave as a foregone conclusion. So, one extra teacher workday, barely even worth noting, right? Well, it just so happens that the day selected was the day of the AP Lang exam that year. By the time they saw fit to announce the non-strike, all of the exams had already been ordered and students and teachers had been planning for the normal date. Thanks to the non-strike, the state had to pay $45/exam to get late exams, and it could have caused some students to miss the exam if they had to take a conflicting exam late for a legitimate reason. Oddly enough, College Board wouldn't have charged if it were a real strike.
- door5 8y ago
  The whole point of strikes is that they are disruptive.
  - morpheuskafka 8y ago
    But when government workers strike, they don't disrupt the legislatures that set their pay, they disrupt the everyday citizens who might have even been sympathetic to their cause.
    - door5 8y ago
      Yes they do -- These strikes have been incredibly effective. If ordinary citizens are not sympathetic to the teachers but sympathetic to the legislators, they have a distorted view of the situation, probably from right-wing, anti-union media.
    - sundaeofshock 8y ago
      I’m not sure what point you are trying to make here. Of course strikes are disruptive to the general public; that’s one of the reason people strike. Ordinary citizens who have their lives disrupted will turn to their elected officials to end the disruption. There will always be people who turn unsympathetic when workers withhold their labor. The long-term benefit is worth it.
duxup 8y ago
Teachers are still poorly paid, they aren't really changing any of the problems teachers face, and a great deal of opportunity and advancement is determined purely by seniority.... They may win some battles but I would argue they aren't winning the war, and their emphasis on seinority above all isn't very appealing. I still see young teachers with new ideas held back by a union that caters to luddite established teachers who are effectively untouchable, don't want to change and enjoy most of the benefits. American unions focus on seinority > all is the reason I would never want to be a part of them.
- verisimilidude 8y ago
  The article addresses this, pointing out that many of these teacher strikes are led by the workers themselves, rather than union leadership (which often tries to avoid strikes). This is HN, right? I'd expect someone here to seize on that opportunity, and develop some sort of service to help workers organize themselves, perhaps against the wishes of their union-appointed bureaucrats.
  - duxup 8y ago
    I'm not convinced that either the unions or one off actions are doing much.
    - sundaeofshock 8y ago
      Teachers keep withholding their labor and getting pay increases as well as increases in overall school funding. I’m curious why you feel that is not “doing much”.
whb07 8y ago
The fundamental problem with public school teachers are that the “customer” in the relationship isn’t the parent or the child, but the gov bureaucrat. So while the results of a teacher might hurt the child or the parent, who cares as it’s not them to who they cater to. The incentives aren’t aligned properly and there is no negative incentive when a school fails a generation of children. The teacher and admins will just carry on business as usual(rather monopoly) charge a higher fee and deliver a worse product.
- josho 8y ago
  > The incentives aren’t aligned properly Then explain the success of schools outside of the US that have similar government based funding?
  - whb07 8y ago
    Can you define "success"? Furthermore, can you provide examples where schooling isn't better served by a private entity (in scale and time)?
- wnevets 8y ago
  >The fundamental problem with public school teachers are that the “customer” in the relationship isn’t the parent or the child, but the gov bureaucrat. So while the results of a teacher might hurt the child or the parent, who cares as it’s not them to who they cater to. Thanks no child left behind! Tying school funding and teacher pay to child test schools is one of the largest blunders this country has made.
  - nichos 8y ago
    Thanks to government in general. America's students are much worse since the inception of the DOE.
    - wnevets 8y ago
      Citation needed
hedora 8y ago
Labor laws were a carefully negotiated compromise between economic chaos and workers rights. I think the lesson here is that that they’ve been weakened to the point of irrelevance, people still need to (and will) strike, and it will cause more harm to employers than the system that was intentionally dismantled after the last few decades.
tomatotomato37 8y ago
I don't get labor movements for public institutions. I mean for corporate or private businesses its makes sense to counter the profit above all else motive, but for something like a school which uses public funds to push a societal good I find it to be a bit entitled.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- harimau777 8y ago
  I think that the issue is that even though school is a societal good (and presumably most teachers are motivated at least somewhat by altruism) it is also how teachers make their living. So the same forces involved in a private sector strike are in play, just with management replaced by the government, school board, or citizens.
  - Zach_the_Lizard 8y ago
    On the other hand, private workers don't typically vote for their leaders, but public unions can and do get to vote. So they have additional levers to pull
CryptoPunk 8y ago
Vice writers are unionized and are thus profiting from pro-union laws that allow them to undermine the contracting rights of their employer and get themselves above-market wages. Therefore the angle they choose for this article is not surprising to me. Most of those working in the media have a major conflict of interest when writing about politics.
- harimau777 8y ago
  Can you explain what you mean by contracting right?
  - CryptoPunk 8y ago
    The right to hire whoever you want at whatever terms you want to offer. Collective bargaining mandates for one violate that right. You can't offer an employment contract that doesn't obligate you as an employer to collectively bargain, meaning negotiate with a representative of a collective bargaining unit to the exclusion of all other parties, in the event that a majority of workers in a work unit unionize and demand it. Anything the press commonly defines as a "labor right" is really a restriction on the employer's right to freely contract.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - hedora 8y ago
      > The right to hire whoever you want at whatever terms you want to offer. You are describing the right to own slaves, except that current US law provides slaves with significantly more legal protection than you propose, and the thirteenth amendment limits slavery to criminals. I feel like this should go without saying, but the article is about illegal strikes, and you seem to be advocating for more aggressive enforcement of anti-work-stop laws.
      - CryptoPunk 8y ago
        Making an offer that another person is free to accept or reject has no resemblance to slavery. This kind of inflammatory mischaracterization of what a free market is is unfortunately very common now that millions depend on the rent-seeking that anti-contract-freedom laws enable unionized workers to engage in.

62 points by howard941 8y ago

Kephael 8y ago

Salman Khan is better than 99% of teachers. We really don't need nearly as many of them as are employed.

hobs 8y ago
Do you really believe that some internet videos are going to replace human contact with regard to teaching? I would consider my experience with education sub-par at best, but even I know that this will NEVER be the case.
- Kephael 8y ago
  Yes, we don't need one teacher to baby sit 28 students. The current model is just an employment program for teachers who'd otherwise be working retail.
  - harimau777 8y ago
    Two thoughts: Are you saying that a teacher should be able to babysit more that 28 students or that a teacher shouldn't be working as a babysitter? It seems to me that as a practical matter "babysitting" is an inherent part of a teachers job (particularly in lower grades) and that's probably something that they cannot do efficiently much above 28 students. Second, my understanding is that teacher to student ratios is one of the major metrics used to identify the health of a school. Granted, since I don't personally know the data behind that, this is effectively an "appeal to authority", but it still strikes me as reasonable to put some stock in the expert's opinions.
  - dang 8y ago
    Would you please stop posting flamebait comments to HN? We ban accounts that do that. If you'd instead review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Here's one of them: "Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
whatshisface 8y ago
American public school teachers provide childcare as they shepherd children through their education. The fact that they give lectures is almost incidental - if you had teachers stand at the back of the room and play youtube videos, the price would not go down.
- Kephael 8y ago
  Not running schools like welfare systems is one of the reasons why the East Asian countries have been doing vastly better when compared to most Western countries.
  - howard941 8y ago
    What do you make of the starkly-contrasting Finnish approach? https://www.deseretnews.com/article/865563989/What-we-can-learn-from-Finlands-education-system.html https://www.deseretnews.com/article/865563989/What-we-can-le...
    - Kephael 8y ago
      I don't know, but you're not going to be successful at real math without a lot of practice. The PISA exam is a joke and looks like 6th grade math. http://www.oecd.org/pisa/test/PISA%202012%20items%20for%20release_ENGLISH.pdf http://www.oecd.org/pisa/test/PISA%202012%20items%20for%20re...
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
- duxup 8y ago
  I'd say the education provided is more than "incidental".
- pnw_hazor 8y ago
  In plenty of school across American, teachers do teach the equivalent of standing in the back of the room and playing youtube videos. It is depressing to see how much the quality of US public education has declined while the spending has increased.
erentz 8y ago
I may be wrong but I doubt Salman Khan would agree with you. On the other hand there is this line of thinking that sounds plausible, that we have the idea of instruction and homework backward in our school system. Kids should watch videos by great instructors as homework, and should do the exercises (what would normally be the homework) in the classroom. With the role of the teacher in this scenario to assist students where they have difficulty. This way the teachers aren’t spending 80% of their time doing the repetitive stuff that’s the same for every student but can instead focus more time on the problem areas students are having.
- Kephael 8y ago
  The flipped classroom model doesn't work with unmotivated students.
  - erentz 8y ago
    You seem to be invalidating your own argument that we don't need teachers.
    - Kephael 8y ago
      No, I'm saying there's no need to throw resources at the lower 40% of the student population. The educational system is already babysitting for them. The smart and motivated students can already learn far more on their own from textbooks and online resources such as KhanAcademy, edX, Cousera, etc.
      - eesmith 8y ago
        Right, so how do you tell which are the "lower 40%"? And how do you ensure that it isn't really just a proxy for being poor? Since hunger, lack of a long-term home, parents who need to work multiple jobs to support a family, etc. are things which make it difficult even for smart and motivated students to learn. Of course there are some smart and motivated students who can learn from books and online resources. But is that all of the remaining 60%? Or is it 5% Bear in mind that Khan Academy disagrees with your assessment that it can be a general purpose replacement for teaching. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Academy#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Academy#Criticism : "Khan Academy positions itself as a supplement to in-class learning, with the ability to improve the effectiveness of teachers by freeing them from traditional lectures and giving them more time to tend to individual students' needs", so KhanAcademy" (emphasis mine).
Helloworldboy 8y ago
You're being downvoted, but I agree. In the information age public school teaching is a glorified jobs program.
- pnw_hazor 8y ago
  ...daycare program. But it doesn't have to be this way. And that's what makes it so sad. One look at an 8th grade primer (math, language arts, geography, history, any will do) from the late 19th Century or early 20th Century and it is clear American public education took a very wrong turn somewhere along the line.

morpheuskafka 8y ago

I generally support teacher labor movements. However, I think it's important to consider the effects that even the smallest disruption. For example, last year in NC the teacher's groups organized a "Rally for Respect." What they did to bypass strike laws was they encouraged every teacher in the state to request unpaid personal day, which is normally rubberstamped by the principal as you only have a couple. When half the school wants leave, that would be when you stop signing them. But instead, to avoid that conflict, nearly all major districts cancelled school entirely, treating everyone taking leave as a foregone conclusion. So, one extra teacher workday, barely even worth noting, right? Well, it just so happens that the day selected was the day of the AP Lang exam that year. By the time they saw fit to announce the non-strike, all of the exams had already been ordered and students and teachers had been planning for the normal date. Thanks to the non-strike, the state had to pay $45/exam to get late exams, and it could have caused some students to miss the exam if they had to take a conflicting exam late for a legitimate reason. Oddly enough, College Board wouldn't have charged if it were a real strike.

door5 8y ago
The whole point of strikes is that they are disruptive.
- morpheuskafka 8y ago
  But when government workers strike, they don't disrupt the legislatures that set their pay, they disrupt the everyday citizens who might have even been sympathetic to their cause.
  - door5 8y ago
    Yes they do -- These strikes have been incredibly effective. If ordinary citizens are not sympathetic to the teachers but sympathetic to the legislators, they have a distorted view of the situation, probably from right-wing, anti-union media.
  - sundaeofshock 8y ago
    I’m not sure what point you are trying to make here. Of course strikes are disruptive to the general public; that’s one of the reason people strike. Ordinary citizens who have their lives disrupted will turn to their elected officials to end the disruption. There will always be people who turn unsympathetic when workers withhold their labor. The long-term benefit is worth it.

duxup 8y ago

Teachers are still poorly paid, they aren't really changing any of the problems teachers face, and a great deal of opportunity and advancement is determined purely by seniority.... They may win some battles but I would argue they aren't winning the war, and their emphasis on seinority above all isn't very appealing. I still see young teachers with new ideas held back by a union that caters to luddite established teachers who are effectively untouchable, don't want to change and enjoy most of the benefits. American unions focus on seinority > all is the reason I would never want to be a part of them.

verisimilidude 8y ago
The article addresses this, pointing out that many of these teacher strikes are led by the workers themselves, rather than union leadership (which often tries to avoid strikes). This is HN, right? I'd expect someone here to seize on that opportunity, and develop some sort of service to help workers organize themselves, perhaps against the wishes of their union-appointed bureaucrats.
- duxup 8y ago
  I'm not convinced that either the unions or one off actions are doing much.
  - sundaeofshock 8y ago
    Teachers keep withholding their labor and getting pay increases as well as increases in overall school funding. I’m curious why you feel that is not “doing much”.

whb07 8y ago

The fundamental problem with public school teachers are that the “customer” in the relationship isn’t the parent or the child, but the gov bureaucrat. So while the results of a teacher might hurt the child or the parent, who cares as it’s not them to who they cater to. The incentives aren’t aligned properly and there is no negative incentive when a school fails a generation of children. The teacher and admins will just carry on business as usual(rather monopoly) charge a higher fee and deliver a worse product.

josho 8y ago
> The incentives aren’t aligned properly Then explain the success of schools outside of the US that have similar government based funding?
- whb07 8y ago
  Can you define "success"? Furthermore, can you provide examples where schooling isn't better served by a private entity (in scale and time)?
wnevets 8y ago
>The fundamental problem with public school teachers are that the “customer” in the relationship isn’t the parent or the child, but the gov bureaucrat. So while the results of a teacher might hurt the child or the parent, who cares as it’s not them to who they cater to. Thanks no child left behind! Tying school funding and teacher pay to child test schools is one of the largest blunders this country has made.
- nichos 8y ago
  Thanks to government in general. America's students are much worse since the inception of the DOE.
  - wnevets 8y ago
    Citation needed

hedora 8y ago

Labor laws were a carefully negotiated compromise between economic chaos and workers rights. I think the lesson here is that that they’ve been weakened to the point of irrelevance, people still need to (and will) strike, and it will cause more harm to employers than the system that was intentionally dismantled after the last few decades.

tomatotomato37 8y ago

I don't get labor movements for public institutions. I mean for corporate or private businesses its makes sense to counter the profit above all else motive, but for something like a school which uses public funds to push a societal good I find it to be a bit entitled.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
harimau777 8y ago
I think that the issue is that even though school is a societal good (and presumably most teachers are motivated at least somewhat by altruism) it is also how teachers make their living. So the same forces involved in a private sector strike are in play, just with management replaced by the government, school board, or citizens.
- Zach_the_Lizard 8y ago
  On the other hand, private workers don't typically vote for their leaders, but public unions can and do get to vote. So they have additional levers to pull

CryptoPunk 8y ago

Vice writers are unionized and are thus profiting from pro-union laws that allow them to undermine the contracting rights of their employer and get themselves above-market wages. Therefore the angle they choose for this article is not surprising to me. Most of those working in the media have a major conflict of interest when writing about politics.

harimau777 8y ago
Can you explain what you mean by contracting right?
- CryptoPunk 8y ago
  The right to hire whoever you want at whatever terms you want to offer. Collective bargaining mandates for one violate that right. You can't offer an employment contract that doesn't obligate you as an employer to collectively bargain, meaning negotiate with a representative of a collective bargaining unit to the exclusion of all other parties, in the event that a majority of workers in a work unit unionize and demand it. Anything the press commonly defines as a "labor right" is really a restriction on the employer's right to freely contract.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - hedora 8y ago
    > The right to hire whoever you want at whatever terms you want to offer. You are describing the right to own slaves, except that current US law provides slaves with significantly more legal protection than you propose, and the thirteenth amendment limits slavery to criminals. I feel like this should go without saying, but the article is about illegal strikes, and you seem to be advocating for more aggressive enforcement of anti-work-stop laws.
    - CryptoPunk 8y ago
      Making an offer that another person is free to accept or reject has no resemblance to slavery. This kind of inflammatory mischaracterization of what a free market is is unfortunately very common now that millions depend on the rent-seeking that anti-contract-freedom laws enable unionized workers to engage in.