12 ms·

States where teachers’ unions are strongest are slowest to get back to in-person

96 points by lxm 5y ago

knightofmars 5y ago
The irony of technology workers who constantly express their unhappiness and frustration with being micromanaged telling a discipline (teaching) how they should be doing things.
- chelical 5y ago
  It's not ironic at all to realize that remote learning is worsening racial and economic disparities in education. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/our-insights/covid-19-and-learning-loss-disparities-grow-and-students-need-help https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector...
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    In-person learning does, too. Districts with more minority students tend to have larger class sizes. Fewer technology resources. Less property tax to draw upon. In-person instruction - which 95% of American schools were doing in January of this year, and 99% of them in December (https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2021-12-15/nearly-100-of-students-back-to-school-full-time-and-in-person https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2021-12-...) - isn't gonna solve these structural problems. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/-person-learning-wasnt-magic-bullet-many-hoped-teens-are-still-sufferi-rcna16878 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/-person-learning-wasnt-... > Hailey is not alone. As the U.S. reaches the second anniversary of the pandemic, a growing number of parents and psychiatrists report that a return to in-person learning was not the magic bullet many had hoped it would be for school-age children and that the pandemic has resulted in a host of mental health challenges even for those young people who seemed as recently as a year ago to be faring relatively well.
    - chelical 5y ago
      Remote learning makes these gaps wider. Yes, they already exist. But making things worse for minorities isn't the solution imo. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/covid-19-has-left-millions-of-students-behind-now-what/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/covid-19-has-left-milli...
    - thethimble 5y ago
      The claim is not that in person learning fundamentally solves these problems. The claim is that remote learning makes these problems worse, offering a clear rationale to return back to in person learning.
      - ceejayoz 5y ago
        The causes for the inequity in remote learning are the same ones causing the inequity in in-person learning, though.
- Clubber 5y ago
  >The irony of technology workers who constantly express their unhappiness and frustration with being micromanaged telling a discipline (teaching) how they should be doing things. I know that was an attempt at a zinger but deciding whether to remote school or in person school isn't anywhere close to micromanaging.
lettergram 5y ago
Is that a surprise? This is part of the reason I’m very much pro school choice. Give a credit to each family to do with what they wish. It’ll drive down costs and let those who want to do at home teaching stay that way. But I suspect many schools would have immediately switched back to in person. It lets the parents and community decide what’s best, instead of teachers and union heads. If it’s designed correctly it should increase aptitude and decrease cost. What’s not to like?
- saagarjha 5y ago
  Families and students are not the only people exposed to COVID. Why shouldn’t teachers have a say in the risk they are asked to deal with?
  - colordrops 5y ago
    Because no one else has a say. Seems like all groups should have a say, including teachers, students, and parents.
    - jounker 5y ago
      Well that’s bullshit.
      - britch 5y ago
        Can you elaborate a bit?
    - britch 5y ago
      Seems like some parents are heard pretty loudly. High Schoolers have staged walkouts in response to omicron in some cities. Seems disingenuous to say only teachers have been heard.
    - Pulcinella 5y ago
      You do have a say! School board meetings are usually public and the board elections are democratic (usually. Some districts, usually in the south still have some at-large boards seats for racism reasons). When I was a teacher and blamed for things by parents I had no power over (e.g. standardized tests mandated by the state) I wished parents would direct their (justified & righteous) rage at the school board and state politicians instead. “School choice” isn’t school choice unless I’m free choose to send my kids to the rich district across town or the private school the politicians and elites send their kids to.
lsy 5y ago
What this is saying is that workplaces where the employees have more power are more likely to be cautious about returning to work during a pandemic. That makes a lot of sense, as employees are going to be more careful with their own health than employers are going to be with the health of other people. And it shouldn't be very surprising to us high-demand tech workers who are still allowed to work from home due to that leverage.
- olliej 5y ago
  Yeah - given the option workers would rather not risk their health for minimal pay, in the absence of an option (or the ability to say no on mass) workers do not “choose” to return to on premise employment they are forced to.
- civilized 5y ago
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    > Public sector employees don't get to suck up my tax dollars and then only work if they feel like it. Does your position on this extend to police unions?
    - nradov 5y ago
      Yes. All public employee unions including police should be decertified. If they want better pay or working conditions then they should ask their elected politicians just like any other citizen.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - civilized 5y ago
      If someone wants to work out the logistics of "charter police" I'll hear them out, but right now the option doesn't exist.
baggy_trough 5y ago
- markdown 5y ago
  The teacher's union represents teachers. Do you really consider teachers to be the enemy of your kids? Do you place your children into the care of their enemies five days a week? Do your kids consider their teachers to be their enemies?
  - smegsicle 5y ago
    do you really consider teachers unions to represent the aspect of teachers that cares for students? job security for the lowest common denominator, and 'caring for kids' somehow as well? how would the meetings go?
    - scionthefly 5y ago
      Teachers unions generally work for better teacher working conditions, which means better student learning conditions. They work for a strong contract and enforcement of that contract, which protects all worksers. They work for improved professional practice and improved outcomes for students. When you discuss the "lowest common denominator" teacher as being protected, what is really being protected is the contract. We MUST enforce the contract or it is weakened. The teacher's unions want highly effective, highly skilled teachers providing excellent public education for every child. We work for due process so that teachers have the opportunity to improve, but if they don't improve and the administrators do their jobs then they are let go, all within the scope of a well formed contract.
  - baggy_trough 5y ago
    An individual teacher is not the same as a body that represents the collective interests of teachers, and neither of those are necessarily aligned with the interests of children. For example, it would be in the interest of that body to make it as hard as possible to fire hopeless teachers.
harshaw 5y ago
The biggest problem I have seen is that the local school educational bureaucracy (administrators, teachers, unions) are on covid-time while our children are growing up and developing in real time. If you are on covid-time, your instinct is to delay, seek consensus from a billion parties, and basically act very slowly to adopt to the realities of the pandemic. If your school is on covid-time things change slowly unless there is top down pressure (Florida, etc) or a brave local administrator who is willing to make decisions with ambiguity (very rare). Meanwhile, children keep growing and developing. My opinion is that because we can't control child development and need for education (and social exposure) we need to make bold decisions with limited information to make sure we don't leave our kids behind. I didn't see this happen in my local public school. But, clearly, many parents have taken the perspective that they can't sit by the sidelines and wait for covid-time people to have events play out and left the public school system. I don't know if union to blame as much as people not acting with a shared sense of urgency.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  We optimized the public school system, by design, for stability. It turns out, it isn't very good at agility.
  - mwint 5y ago
    They were incredibly agile two years (!) ago when deciding to stop working. Reversing that has been a lot harder.
    - scionthefly 5y ago
      Having worked through that, I'm wondering when exactly we stopped working. Was it when we spent long hours for a week in mid-March 2020 figuring out how to deliver instruction virtually for an undetermined period of time? Or was it summer 2000 when we were attending virtual seminars and creating collaborations among teachers and researchers, and researching how to provide hybrid instruction, and working with our tech departments and communities to figure out how to make it work? Or was it the 2020-2021 academic year when we simultaneously taught students in class and at home, trying to provide equivalent experiences in each lesson? Or was it in the beginning of the 2021-2022 school year, when we were fully in person with no legal option to teach remotely regardless of conditions, and watched rising infection rates but had no recourse because the anti-mask anti-vax crowd were packing school board meetings to protest the only protection we still had and accusing us of "not working"?
blunte 5y ago
This is a garbage site. Just because it ends in .org doesn't mean it's neutral. This might as well be a Sinclair or Fox associate site.
- HarryHirsch 5y ago
  It's the Manhattan Institute, it says right there on the tin.
  - blunte 5y ago
    If by "right there on the tin" you mean at the bottom of the article then sure. I understand that all information probably has some intentional and unintentional ideological slant, but my feeling is that HN is a place for intentionally neutral - unadulterated - content. Right wing "think tank" articles don't belong here. It's not that the ideology is wrong necessarily, but the presentation is twisted and designed to mislead.
    - HarryHirsch 5y ago
      Yes, City Journal has no place here. Everything that's on there is not designed to be intellectually stimulating, it's oh-so-predictable and just tiring.
pacbard 5y ago
The analysis seems to be somewhat simple (just rank states by union strength and COVID measures), then conclude what is reported in the title. The conclusion seems to suffer from severe endogeneity problems as teacher unions are correlated with other factors (e.g., being on a coast) that are also correlated with COVID response. Just making the link between unions and COVID policy is naive (at best) and misleading (at worse). One thing to keep in mind when doing research in education in the US is that you have to account for its distributed structure. That is, local education agencies (usually school districts) make most of the decisions. For example, there is no California teacher contract; instead, contracts are negotiated between local teacher unions and local district. The California teacher union could have lobbied the California governor to extend school closures, but the eventual decision to how (and maybe when) to go back in person probably fell to the individual superintendents. Another example is to see what happened in Chicago Public Schools. The local union went on strike to negotiate covid-related measures. Those had nothing to do with the larger Illinois education policy. A better design for this study would have been to try to measure the strength of local unions at the district level (maybe % of membership that contributes to the political fund now that teachers can opt out from that) and try to correlate it with local COVID restrictions (like more days of teacher paid leave, mask policies, possibility of online or hybrid instruction). I suspect that there is a patchwork (read, heterogeneity) of policies that were negotiated between the union and the district that could give a better picture than what is reported in the paper. As a secondary result, you could even observe whether strong and weak unions have different preferences. Maybe strong unions prefer a safer work environment (i.e., less in person, more masks) while weaker unions prefer one-time bonuses?
rdtwo 5y ago
The problem is that unions are only empowered to point out problems but administration has to solve them. In both Union and non Union states the administrations have failed to take adequate measures to address covid safety concerns using the practical means available. instead focusing on things that provide the illusion of doing something or doing nothing at all. In non Union states they can simply steamroll the teachers were as in Union states they can’t but in the end in none of the situations are administrators capable of providing meaningful safety measurements based on what’s known and available. This is in a large part because the federal guidance on covid is shit and state guidance is only marginally better or also shit. The guidance can’t really be anything but shit if e we don’t admit that covid is airborne.

96 points by lxm 5y ago

The irony of technology workers who constantly express their unhappiness and frustration with being micromanaged telling a discipline (teaching) how they should be doing things.

chelical 5y ago
It's not ironic at all to realize that remote learning is worsening racial and economic disparities in education. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/our-insights/covid-19-and-learning-loss-disparities-grow-and-students-need-help https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector...
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  In-person learning does, too. Districts with more minority students tend to have larger class sizes. Fewer technology resources. Less property tax to draw upon. In-person instruction - which 95% of American schools were doing in January of this year, and 99% of them in December (https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2021-12-15/nearly-100-of-students-back-to-school-full-time-and-in-person https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2021-12-...) - isn't gonna solve these structural problems. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/-person-learning-wasnt-magic-bullet-many-hoped-teens-are-still-sufferi-rcna16878 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/-person-learning-wasnt-... > Hailey is not alone. As the U.S. reaches the second anniversary of the pandemic, a growing number of parents and psychiatrists report that a return to in-person learning was not the magic bullet many had hoped it would be for school-age children and that the pandemic has resulted in a host of mental health challenges even for those young people who seemed as recently as a year ago to be faring relatively well.
  - chelical 5y ago
    Remote learning makes these gaps wider. Yes, they already exist. But making things worse for minorities isn't the solution imo. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/covid-19-has-left-millions-of-students-behind-now-what/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/covid-19-has-left-milli...
  - thethimble 5y ago
    The claim is not that in person learning fundamentally solves these problems. The claim is that remote learning makes these problems worse, offering a clear rationale to return back to in person learning.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      The causes for the inequity in remote learning are the same ones causing the inequity in in-person learning, though.
Clubber 5y ago
>The irony of technology workers who constantly express their unhappiness and frustration with being micromanaged telling a discipline (teaching) how they should be doing things. I know that was an attempt at a zinger but deciding whether to remote school or in person school isn't anywhere close to micromanaging.

lettergram 5y ago

Is that a surprise? This is part of the reason I’m very much pro school choice. Give a credit to each family to do with what they wish. It’ll drive down costs and let those who want to do at home teaching stay that way. But I suspect many schools would have immediately switched back to in person. It lets the parents and community decide what’s best, instead of teachers and union heads. If it’s designed correctly it should increase aptitude and decrease cost. What’s not to like?

saagarjha 5y ago
Families and students are not the only people exposed to COVID. Why shouldn’t teachers have a say in the risk they are asked to deal with?
- colordrops 5y ago
  Because no one else has a say. Seems like all groups should have a say, including teachers, students, and parents.
  - jounker 5y ago
    Well that’s bullshit.
    - britch 5y ago
      Can you elaborate a bit?
  - britch 5y ago
    Seems like some parents are heard pretty loudly. High Schoolers have staged walkouts in response to omicron in some cities. Seems disingenuous to say only teachers have been heard.
  - Pulcinella 5y ago
    You do have a say! School board meetings are usually public and the board elections are democratic (usually. Some districts, usually in the south still have some at-large boards seats for racism reasons). When I was a teacher and blamed for things by parents I had no power over (e.g. standardized tests mandated by the state) I wished parents would direct their (justified & righteous) rage at the school board and state politicians instead. “School choice” isn’t school choice unless I’m free choose to send my kids to the rich district across town or the private school the politicians and elites send their kids to.

lsy 5y ago

What this is saying is that workplaces where the employees have more power are more likely to be cautious about returning to work during a pandemic. That makes a lot of sense, as employees are going to be more careful with their own health than employers are going to be with the health of other people. And it shouldn't be very surprising to us high-demand tech workers who are still allowed to work from home due to that leverage.

olliej 5y ago
Yeah - given the option workers would rather not risk their health for minimal pay, in the absence of an option (or the ability to say no on mass) workers do not “choose” to return to on premise employment they are forced to.
civilized 5y ago
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  > Public sector employees don't get to suck up my tax dollars and then only work if they feel like it. Does your position on this extend to police unions?
  - nradov 5y ago
    Yes. All public employee unions including police should be decertified. If they want better pay or working conditions then they should ask their elected politicians just like any other citizen.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - civilized 5y ago
    If someone wants to work out the logistics of "charter police" I'll hear them out, but right now the option doesn't exist.

baggy_trough 5y ago

markdown 5y ago
The teacher's union represents teachers. Do you really consider teachers to be the enemy of your kids? Do you place your children into the care of their enemies five days a week? Do your kids consider their teachers to be their enemies?
- smegsicle 5y ago
  do you really consider teachers unions to represent the aspect of teachers that cares for students? job security for the lowest common denominator, and 'caring for kids' somehow as well? how would the meetings go?
  - scionthefly 5y ago
    Teachers unions generally work for better teacher working conditions, which means better student learning conditions. They work for a strong contract and enforcement of that contract, which protects all worksers. They work for improved professional practice and improved outcomes for students. When you discuss the "lowest common denominator" teacher as being protected, what is really being protected is the contract. We MUST enforce the contract or it is weakened. The teacher's unions want highly effective, highly skilled teachers providing excellent public education for every child. We work for due process so that teachers have the opportunity to improve, but if they don't improve and the administrators do their jobs then they are let go, all within the scope of a well formed contract.
- baggy_trough 5y ago
  An individual teacher is not the same as a body that represents the collective interests of teachers, and neither of those are necessarily aligned with the interests of children. For example, it would be in the interest of that body to make it as hard as possible to fire hopeless teachers.

harshaw 5y ago

The biggest problem I have seen is that the local school educational bureaucracy (administrators, teachers, unions) are on covid-time while our children are growing up and developing in real time. If you are on covid-time, your instinct is to delay, seek consensus from a billion parties, and basically act very slowly to adopt to the realities of the pandemic. If your school is on covid-time things change slowly unless there is top down pressure (Florida, etc) or a brave local administrator who is willing to make decisions with ambiguity (very rare). Meanwhile, children keep growing and developing. My opinion is that because we can't control child development and need for education (and social exposure) we need to make bold decisions with limited information to make sure we don't leave our kids behind. I didn't see this happen in my local public school. But, clearly, many parents have taken the perspective that they can't sit by the sidelines and wait for covid-time people to have events play out and left the public school system. I don't know if union to blame as much as people not acting with a shared sense of urgency.

ethbr0 5y ago
We optimized the public school system, by design, for stability. It turns out, it isn't very good at agility.
- mwint 5y ago
  They were incredibly agile two years (!) ago when deciding to stop working. Reversing that has been a lot harder.
  - scionthefly 5y ago
    Having worked through that, I'm wondering when exactly we stopped working. Was it when we spent long hours for a week in mid-March 2020 figuring out how to deliver instruction virtually for an undetermined period of time? Or was it summer 2000 when we were attending virtual seminars and creating collaborations among teachers and researchers, and researching how to provide hybrid instruction, and working with our tech departments and communities to figure out how to make it work? Or was it the 2020-2021 academic year when we simultaneously taught students in class and at home, trying to provide equivalent experiences in each lesson? Or was it in the beginning of the 2021-2022 school year, when we were fully in person with no legal option to teach remotely regardless of conditions, and watched rising infection rates but had no recourse because the anti-mask anti-vax crowd were packing school board meetings to protest the only protection we still had and accusing us of "not working"?

blunte 5y ago

This is a garbage site. Just because it ends in .org doesn't mean it's neutral. This might as well be a Sinclair or Fox associate site.

HarryHirsch 5y ago
It's the Manhattan Institute, it says right there on the tin.
- blunte 5y ago
  If by "right there on the tin" you mean at the bottom of the article then sure. I understand that all information probably has some intentional and unintentional ideological slant, but my feeling is that HN is a place for intentionally neutral - unadulterated - content. Right wing "think tank" articles don't belong here. It's not that the ideology is wrong necessarily, but the presentation is twisted and designed to mislead.
  - HarryHirsch 5y ago
    Yes, City Journal has no place here. Everything that's on there is not designed to be intellectually stimulating, it's oh-so-predictable and just tiring.

pacbard 5y ago

The analysis seems to be somewhat simple (just rank states by union strength and COVID measures), then conclude what is reported in the title. The conclusion seems to suffer from severe endogeneity problems as teacher unions are correlated with other factors (e.g., being on a coast) that are also correlated with COVID response. Just making the link between unions and COVID policy is naive (at best) and misleading (at worse). One thing to keep in mind when doing research in education in the US is that you have to account for its distributed structure. That is, local education agencies (usually school districts) make most of the decisions. For example, there is no California teacher contract; instead, contracts are negotiated between local teacher unions and local district. The California teacher union could have lobbied the California governor to extend school closures, but the eventual decision to how (and maybe when) to go back in person probably fell to the individual superintendents. Another example is to see what happened in Chicago Public Schools. The local union went on strike to negotiate covid-related measures. Those had nothing to do with the larger Illinois education policy. A better design for this study would have been to try to measure the strength of local unions at the district level (maybe % of membership that contributes to the political fund now that teachers can opt out from that) and try to correlate it with local COVID restrictions (like more days of teacher paid leave, mask policies, possibility of online or hybrid instruction). I suspect that there is a patchwork (read, heterogeneity) of policies that were negotiated between the union and the district that could give a better picture than what is reported in the paper. As a secondary result, you could even observe whether strong and weak unions have different preferences. Maybe strong unions prefer a safer work environment (i.e., less in person, more masks) while weaker unions prefer one-time bonuses?

rdtwo 5y ago

The problem is that unions are only empowered to point out problems but administration has to solve them. In both Union and non Union states the administrations have failed to take adequate measures to address covid safety concerns using the practical means available. instead focusing on things that provide the illusion of doing something or doing nothing at all. In non Union states they can simply steamroll the teachers were as in Union states they can’t but in the end in none of the situations are administrators capable of providing meaningful safety measurements based on what’s known and available. This is in a large part because the federal guidance on covid is shit and state guidance is only marginally better or also shit. The guidance can’t really be anything but shit if e we don’t admit that covid is airborne.