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Public school education is poor in part because it’s darn near impossible to fire bad teachers though. And I don’t see how unions would improve housing affordab

by ein0p 2y ago

Public school education is poor in part because it’s darn near impossible to fire bad teachers though. And I don’t see how unions would improve housing affordability. I’m not against unions per se, particularly for positions which are not as lavishly compensated as a typical white collar FAANG employee. I’m merely pointing out that you need to pick better examples. Otherwise you just undermine your own argument.

walthamstow 2y ago
Neither of you are giving examples, only conjecture. Bad teachers are a noteworthy cause of poor schools. House prices wouldn't be so high if we had unions. Ok, prove it. Or at least give me some reasoning to go off.
- ein0p 2y ago
  What is the mechanism under which houses would be more affordable if employees had more money thanks to the unions? Real estate (and by extension rents) will take up any available slack on income.
  - pera 2y ago
    I think gp was referring to tenants/renters unions: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenants_union https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenants_union They are quite common in the UK.
  - komali2 2y ago
    > Real estate (and by extension rents) will take up any available slack on income. Only if allowed to do so - but yes, landlord are leeches who do nothing and in return soak up every penny of income they can from their tenants. However, isn't the typical market-capitalist argument to this, "if they could be making more money now, they would?" Don't "markets" set the price of real estate? Markets don't, but it's really funny to me when people argue against good things, such as increasing minimum wage, with absurdities, like somehow a minimum wage increase is simply a subsidy for landlords.
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    > What is the mechanism under which houses would be more affordable if employees had more money thanks to the unions? Employees have more money thanks to unions -> those deriving income from capital have less money -> narrower distribution of wealth -> goods (including housing) which both classes pursue are more affordable to the working class. QED.
  - diffeomorphism 2y ago
    Housing prices rose much, much faster than inflation or rises in wages. So they are obviously not driven by income. Try again.
    - randomdata 2y ago
      If people normally paid cash for houses, that might be an interesting point. But most people rent money to buy a house (even while ironically trumpeting "renting is throwing money away"). Like the previous commenter pointed out, real estate-related rents will expand to take up any available slack in income. Now, save recently, the cost to rent money for real estate was in steady decline. That means even a constant income could afford to rent an increasing amount of money. As a result, the price of housing was able to rise disproportionally to income, but proportionally to rent.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  > Bad teachers are a noteworthy cause of poor schools You have that completely backward. Virtually all bad teachers start out hopeful and excited to teach kids, that's why they become teachers in the first place. They are then worn and beaten down by bad schools. Bad schools are mostly caused by bad students, who are disrespectful, disruptive, get into fights, etc. Bad students are mostly caused by bad parenting. If they aren't raised to respect adults, education, authority and their peers, then there is little that teachers can do about it. The reason "bad schools" have trouble keeping enough teachers despite high levels of state and federal funding is because the students burn through the teachers quickly. The teachers who hang on for a long time at those schools are often ones that develop coping strategies like not giving a shit, finding pleasure in yelling at kids, etc.
  - walthamstow 2y ago
    Read the thread in its entirety please, you are quoting me quoting someone else.
- pbmonster 2y ago
  > House prices wouldn't be so high if we had unions. In Switzerland, all the large unions (railroad workers, public service workers, ect.) have so much money and so much access to cheap credit, they can (and frequently did in the past) start housing co-ops for their members. This results in large developments in the middle of the most expensive cities, where only union members have a chance to rent. And even those have year-long waiting list on every new development. Since the housing co-op is non-profit and pays rock bottom interest rates on its loans, rent is frequently around half the fair market rate.
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    Where did those unions get so much money from?
    - pbmonster 2y ago
      Dues, I imagine. If you don't strike very often, the war chest keeps filling... That war chest, in combination with it being unthinkable that a big union goes bankrupt, and the fact that they are building real estate, pretty much means they can borrow more money dirt cheap.
      - lupusreal 2y ago
        I guess it just seems strange to me for a union to be so rich, yet their members can't afford to live in regular housing. I grew up in a factory town in America with a unionized workforce and despite the things people say about American unions, the workers there all did very well. At least until the plant was sold to private equity about 10 years ago... I hear bad things now... but for several generations the union succeeded in getting the workers paid enough to be regular members of the community, not some sort of second class living in company/union housing.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        deleted 2y ago
raverbashing 2y ago
It would be better if they could fire the bad students as well
- ein0p 2y ago
  Until recently they could. There were programs for gifted kids. But then DEI ruined that as well.
komali2 2y ago
> impossible to fire bad teachers though. It's impossible to fire bad teachers (it really isn't, btw, at least not in Texas) because there are no teachers because teachers wages are pathologically low because every education department in the country is underfunded.
- lostlogin 2y ago
  That’s causing the same problem then. If there are no teachers to hire, you’re less likely to fire
- nox101 2y ago
  IIUC the USA spend near the top per student of all countries. Why is it other countries get better results with less money? https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-expenditures-by-country https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
  - geraldwhen 2y ago
    White and Asian students, if stratified separately, rank in the top 10 academically world wide. Everyone else brings down the average, and it has nothing to do with teachers or how good they are. Teachers in my county are assigned to schools randomly, and yet some schools score 9/10 and others score literally 1/10 and 2/10 on great schools for academic performance. Funding between schools is the same. Teachers assigned are from the same pool. It’s not the money. It’s not the teachers. Anyone who talks about “education in the USA” without addressing the giant disparity in academic performance that begins in kindergarten for black and Hispanic students is ignoring the single largest factor on student outcomes.
    - MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
      Why do black and hispanic students score worse?
      - geraldwhen 2y ago
dragonwriter 2y ago
> Public school education is poor in part because it’s darn near impossible to fire bad teachers though. The funny thing is that public employment (in the US) is where unions have the least impact on firing difficulty, because employees have a property interest in their employment which means government — even as their employer — cannot deprive them of it without due process under the 5th (for the federal) or 14th (for states and subdivisions) amendments even if they are not unionized. Also, the line you push about teachers is pushed by privatizers (and sometimes administrators as an excuse for their own failures), often supported by one or two anecdotes, so often as to have become an article of faith ib sone circles, but there is no systematic evidence for it.
refurb 2y ago
I’m not anti-union, but I’m not pro-union either. I was in a union, Teamsters in fact. It protected crappy workers, prevented any change to work processes that might save time and put a low ceiling on high performing workers. Not all unions are like that, but they certainly aren’t panaceas to all workers ills (in fact, sometimes they are the cause of new ones).
germinalphrase 2y ago
FWIW, my decade as a high school English teacher indicates otherwise. People weren’t let go in the middle of a semester, but they would absolutely be let go without fuss during the summer break. I never experienced anything like the about “rubber rooms” in NYC (they may exist in NYC, IDK - but the suggestion that they are “business as usual” in school districts across the country is a fantastical lie). If admin wanted a teacher gone, they simply put them on the education version of a PIP, collected evidence of poor performance, and let that person go at a non-disruptive time.

by ein0p 2y ago

walthamstow 2y ago

Neither of you are giving examples, only conjecture. Bad teachers are a noteworthy cause of poor schools. House prices wouldn't be so high if we had unions. Ok, prove it. Or at least give me some reasoning to go off.

ein0p 2y ago
What is the mechanism under which houses would be more affordable if employees had more money thanks to the unions? Real estate (and by extension rents) will take up any available slack on income.
- pera 2y ago
  I think gp was referring to tenants/renters unions: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenants_union https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenants_union They are quite common in the UK.
- komali2 2y ago
  > Real estate (and by extension rents) will take up any available slack on income. Only if allowed to do so - but yes, landlord are leeches who do nothing and in return soak up every penny of income they can from their tenants. However, isn't the typical market-capitalist argument to this, "if they could be making more money now, they would?" Don't "markets" set the price of real estate? Markets don't, but it's really funny to me when people argue against good things, such as increasing minimum wage, with absurdities, like somehow a minimum wage increase is simply a subsidy for landlords.
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  > What is the mechanism under which houses would be more affordable if employees had more money thanks to the unions? Employees have more money thanks to unions -> those deriving income from capital have less money -> narrower distribution of wealth -> goods (including housing) which both classes pursue are more affordable to the working class. QED.
- diffeomorphism 2y ago
  Housing prices rose much, much faster than inflation or rises in wages. So they are obviously not driven by income. Try again.
  - randomdata 2y ago
    If people normally paid cash for houses, that might be an interesting point. But most people rent money to buy a house (even while ironically trumpeting "renting is throwing money away"). Like the previous commenter pointed out, real estate-related rents will expand to take up any available slack in income. Now, save recently, the cost to rent money for real estate was in steady decline. That means even a constant income could afford to rent an increasing amount of money. As a result, the price of housing was able to rise disproportionally to income, but proportionally to rent.
lupusreal 2y ago
> Bad teachers are a noteworthy cause of poor schools You have that completely backward. Virtually all bad teachers start out hopeful and excited to teach kids, that's why they become teachers in the first place. They are then worn and beaten down by bad schools. Bad schools are mostly caused by bad students, who are disrespectful, disruptive, get into fights, etc. Bad students are mostly caused by bad parenting. If they aren't raised to respect adults, education, authority and their peers, then there is little that teachers can do about it. The reason "bad schools" have trouble keeping enough teachers despite high levels of state and federal funding is because the students burn through the teachers quickly. The teachers who hang on for a long time at those schools are often ones that develop coping strategies like not giving a shit, finding pleasure in yelling at kids, etc.
- walthamstow 2y ago
  Read the thread in its entirety please, you are quoting me quoting someone else.
pbmonster 2y ago
> House prices wouldn't be so high if we had unions. In Switzerland, all the large unions (railroad workers, public service workers, ect.) have so much money and so much access to cheap credit, they can (and frequently did in the past) start housing co-ops for their members. This results in large developments in the middle of the most expensive cities, where only union members have a chance to rent. And even those have year-long waiting list on every new development. Since the housing co-op is non-profit and pays rock bottom interest rates on its loans, rent is frequently around half the fair market rate.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  Where did those unions get so much money from?
  - pbmonster 2y ago
    Dues, I imagine. If you don't strike very often, the war chest keeps filling... That war chest, in combination with it being unthinkable that a big union goes bankrupt, and the fact that they are building real estate, pretty much means they can borrow more money dirt cheap.
    - lupusreal 2y ago
      I guess it just seems strange to me for a union to be so rich, yet their members can't afford to live in regular housing. I grew up in a factory town in America with a unionized workforce and despite the things people say about American unions, the workers there all did very well. At least until the plant was sold to private equity about 10 years ago... I hear bad things now... but for several generations the union succeeded in getting the workers paid enough to be regular members of the community, not some sort of second class living in company/union housing.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 2y ago

raverbashing 2y ago

It would be better if they could fire the bad students as well

ein0p 2y ago
Until recently they could. There were programs for gifted kids. But then DEI ruined that as well.

komali2 2y ago

> impossible to fire bad teachers though. It's impossible to fire bad teachers (it really isn't, btw, at least not in Texas) because there are no teachers because teachers wages are pathologically low because every education department in the country is underfunded.

lostlogin 2y ago
That’s causing the same problem then. If there are no teachers to hire, you’re less likely to fire
nox101 2y ago
IIUC the USA spend near the top per student of all countries. Why is it other countries get better results with less money? https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-expenditures-by-country https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
- geraldwhen 2y ago
  White and Asian students, if stratified separately, rank in the top 10 academically world wide. Everyone else brings down the average, and it has nothing to do with teachers or how good they are. Teachers in my county are assigned to schools randomly, and yet some schools score 9/10 and others score literally 1/10 and 2/10 on great schools for academic performance. Funding between schools is the same. Teachers assigned are from the same pool. It’s not the money. It’s not the teachers. Anyone who talks about “education in the USA” without addressing the giant disparity in academic performance that begins in kindergarten for black and Hispanic students is ignoring the single largest factor on student outcomes.
  - MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
    Why do black and hispanic students score worse?
    - geraldwhen 2y ago

dragonwriter 2y ago

> Public school education is poor in part because it’s darn near impossible to fire bad teachers though. The funny thing is that public employment (in the US) is where unions have the least impact on firing difficulty, because employees have a property interest in their employment which means government — even as their employer — cannot deprive them of it without due process under the 5th (for the federal) or 14th (for states and subdivisions) amendments even if they are not unionized. Also, the line you push about teachers is pushed by privatizers (and sometimes administrators as an excuse for their own failures), often supported by one or two anecdotes, so often as to have become an article of faith ib sone circles, but there is no systematic evidence for it.

refurb 2y ago

I’m not anti-union, but I’m not pro-union either. I was in a union, Teamsters in fact. It protected crappy workers, prevented any change to work processes that might save time and put a low ceiling on high performing workers. Not all unions are like that, but they certainly aren’t panaceas to all workers ills (in fact, sometimes they are the cause of new ones).

germinalphrase 2y ago

FWIW, my decade as a high school English teacher indicates otherwise. People weren’t let go in the middle of a semester, but they would absolutely be let go without fuss during the summer break. I never experienced anything like the about “rubber rooms” in NYC (they may exist in NYC, IDK - but the suggestion that they are “business as usual” in school districts across the country is a fantastical lie). If admin wanted a teacher gone, they simply put them on the education version of a PIP, collected evidence of poor performance, and let that person go at a non-disruptive time.