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My friend and I often talk about the analogous situations between police officers and teachers in urban centers. Both really hard jobs that suffer with retenti
by thelock85 3y ago
My friend and I often talk about the analogous situations between police officers and teachers in urban centers.
Both really hard jobs that suffer with retention and recruitment. Both fraught with union agreements that make it really difficult to fire bad actors.
But where the analogy breaks down is around funding vs performance & accountability. Poor crime stats are usually followed by a conversation around policies and lack of funds that hamper police activity, whereas poor test scores are usually followed by school closures, reduced salary negotiations, and state/federal oversight.
It’s interesting that educators always get the blame and providing more resources is met with some version of “we already spend more than X”. But police often get sympathy and no push back for more resources even though US LEO get more funding than any other country and spends a greater % of GDP than most countries. (even in the face of massive police reform protests over the past decade).
I hold the opinion that education produces greater positive network effects on society than incarceration does, so this disconnect is really mind-boggling.
- verall 3y ago> Both fraught with union agreements that make it really difficult to fire bad actors. In many states teachers are not allowed to bargain collectively and the unions have no power to prevent anyone's firing, and these states do not have better education outcomes, so I think for education at least we have to rule out the unions.
- rahimnathwani 3y ago"whereas poor test scores are usually followed by school closures, reduced salary negotiations, and state/federal oversight" Not in San Francisco. Whenever SF public schooling comes up in a f2f conversation, I ask people how much they think SFUSD spends per student per year. People's estimates are usually 1/3 to 1/2 of the actual figure: $22k per year. $1.1bn/year for ~50k students. About half of them can read+write at grade level. Same for math.
- shuckles 3y agoPolice funding is far more suspect to politics than school funding, which is usually set by a state-level formula. Voter support for school bond measures and the like is probably higher at a baseline than police or public safety measures.
- shuckles 3y agoThinking about this more: the reason you might have this impression is that police funding cuts are actually discussed a lot more than school cuts. The Seattle city council actually voted 7-2 during peak BLM to cut the police budget in half before their voters forced them to walk it back in outrage. Imagine a big city politician seriously entertaining cutting the school budget in half. It’d never happen.