Replying to Megan’s offer of a bargain on school choice—liberals support vouchers, and we’ll support higher education spending for them—Kevin Drum writes:
Double spending per student, for all I care. Sure, sure, this is hyperbole, but even so it represents a pretty straightforward admission of what many of us have always suspected: voucher proposals are really just a stalking horse to bust teachers unions. It implicitly assumes that the biggest contributor to poor public education in America — so big that it’s worth literally anything to get rid of them — is the existence of grievance procedures and seniority.
In the immortal words of Tocqueville: Whiskey tango foxtrot? The union stranglehold on public schools is one problem with that system, and one reason to look favorably on vouchers. But it’s not the whole case for vouchers: It’s one among many ways that a quasi-monopoly system suppresses accountability, innovation, variety, and performance incentives. If Kevin thinks this is just about unions, I guess we’ve been doing a poor job presenting our case.
Slightly orthogonal: John Samples checks the poll data in search of the elusive Libertarian Democrat and comes up empty handed, on the grounds that Dems support more spending for just about anything government might spend money on by huge majorities:
To believe in the liberal-libertarian proposal, you have to believe that huge, unprecedented numbers of Democrats are going to change their minds about increasing government spending or that libertarians are going to stop caring about increases in government spending.
John certainly makes a strong point, but there are, at least, a few places like this where the conflict is less sharp, because structural changes are possible that would permit both more spending and “smaller government” in the sense that the scope of government control over important aspects of people’s lives is reduced. Now, I also suspect we could be getting significantly better results for less than we’re currently spending, but within a pretty wide range, I’m happy to accept more spending if it gets those who think it will make a big difference to sign onto the structural changes that might actually make a difference. Presumably there are other areas like this, and still others where the preference for higher spending is relatively weak relative to other priorities, which isn’t captured by simply asking people whether they like the idea of spending more on X. People will be in favor of free ponies for a wide variety of pony breeds; this doesn’t necessarily prefigure a catastrophic boom in the equine population.
15 responses so far ↓
1 Consumatopia // Mar 19, 2007 at 10:03 pm
If Kevin thinks this is just about unions, I guess we’ve been doing a poor job presenting our case.
I think that was Drum’s point. If you’re willing to double student spending and accept onerous federal regulations of voucher-receiving schools–any regulations other than unions–well, that’s telling.
2 Julian Sanchez // Mar 19, 2007 at 10:27 pm
No, it really isn’t. Because all of the other benefits of increasing competition in education markets still hold.
3 Consumatopia // Mar 20, 2007 at 9:06 am
But if the feds are regulating everything BUT unions, what variety do you have to compete with?
4 Consumatopia // Mar 20, 2007 at 9:41 am
Note that I’m not saying that your point of view is inconsistent or dishonest, but the grand bargain Megan proposes isn’t well thought out from either end–it’s politically impossible, and it would probably receive way more support from the left then from either the right or libertarians.
It doesn’t even bust up the unions–there would probably be a shortage of teachers under that plan.
5 opit // Mar 20, 2007 at 10:32 am
This is the sort of ideological reflex dominated “argument” that wastes intellectual resources. Any decent manager wants a system to accomplish real goals in the most efficient way possible. Denying the potential for “mix and match” solutions which play on the relative strengths of government and business is flatly counterproductive. Those who decry private participation as prejudicial should remember the blindingly obvious current example that politics is not immune from bias.
6 Scott Lemieux // Mar 20, 2007 at 10:43 am
The union stranglehold on public schools is one problem with that system
The thing is, the empirical evidence that busting unions improves educational outcomes is pretty scant, unless you’re aware of some I haven’t seen. And what’s the underlying theory here–there’s a large pool of brilliant teachers just waiting to teach in bad schools without any labor protections? Really?
7 Michael B Sullivan // Mar 20, 2007 at 1:07 pm
Scott:
I think that the underlying theory is that teacher’s unions stand firmly athwart any efforts to locate or reward the good teachers, and/or fire the bad ones. Which they clearly do — check out the full-throated opposition from the unions to any kind of merit pay, any kind of data-collection with an eye towards assessing the actual educational results from teachers, anything which smacks of standards.
It kind of strains the imagination to suggest that education is the only industry in the entire world which would be harmed by knowing more about who’s doing a good job and who’s doing a bad one, and rewarding the people doing the good job. But that’s the position that the unions take. (Check out http://www.quickanded.com, http://www.edwize.org, and their respective blogrolls to see this debate play out over and over again).
On the other hand, as you imply, this is only half the story. Clearly, right now, there is not a large pool of brilliant teachers just waiting to teach in bad schools. One might suppose that the current system frustrates and drives away a certain number of good teachers who rankle at the seniority system, and that eventually a merit-based system would allow them to bubble to the top, where they might serve as good mentors and role-models to mediocre but improveable teachers, and the system might capture more new good teachers for longer… But that does depend on the idea that, in the absense of the opposition of the unions, school administrations can put policies into place which successfully reward good teachers.
Honestly, I’m pretty dubious about that. In the short term, at least.
8 micahd // Mar 20, 2007 at 4:31 pm
Michael B. Sullivan wrote:
It kind of strains the imagination to suggest that education is the only industry in the entire world which would be harmed by knowing more about who’s doing a good job and who’s doing a bad one, and rewarding the people doing the good job.
–
[By the way, Michael, I am objecting to this paragraph in your post, not to you who I do not know or to your overall view on education which I do not know.]
Strain the imagination it might, but the huge mistake in reasoning that people make is leaping logically from this propostion to the proposition that merit pay will substantially improve an industry people do not choose to enter because of its pay or that there will be adequate funds for meaningful and incentivizing merit bonuses without a prohibitively damaging drain on overall resources (which are already strained).
It also assumes that there are loads of underperforming teachers in a market with other more motivated, better qualified teachers just chomping at the bit to enter the union-locked schools. You need not deploy your imagination to find out whether there are a glut of people demanding to teach in dangerous conditions for low pay (and we’ll add to that “no tenure”) in our nation’s inner city schools. You can look up the facts. They’re aren’t.
Further, there are trade-offs involved. Many people *do* join the teaching profession in great part because of its job security. So you might incentivize certain individuals to perform somewhat better at a job they have chosen to do primarily for other reasons. But what you would get for your trouble would be a smaller overall pool of people interested in the profession in general.
As was referenced above, we can sit here all day talking out of our asses about what we would like the facts about the world to be: some think that evil teachers’ unions have a stranglehold on the education industry and the Democratic Party (in spite of the fact, as Kevin Drum pointed out, the presidential candidates for the Democrats proposed merit pay in both 2000 and 2004).
But if you bother to look at the actual evidence, the vast majority of studies supports the benefits of unions and almost no studies have shown unions to have negative impacts. (I’m actually aware of none but I’ll say “almost no” to be fair.) The (albeit limited) evidence on vouchers and school choice is inconclusive at best in terms of whether they improve academic performance. And the track record of privitized public education is abominable. Google “Edison”.)
9 Michael B Sullivan // Mar 20, 2007 at 4:49 pm
Micah: No problem, no offense taken.
I tend to agree with a lot of what you said. Let me pick a few nits, though:
Strain the imagination it might, but the huge mistake in reasoning that people make is leaping logically from this propostion to the proposition that merit pay will substantially improve an industry people do not choose to enter because of its pay or that there will be adequate funds for meaningful and incentivizing merit bonuses without a prohibitively damaging drain on overall resources (which are already strained).
While teachers don’t enter the field in order to make mad boatloads of cash, everyone needs money. You don’t need to be a powermad CEO to respond to economic incentives.
As to straining the system, to a certain extent, we’re talking about reapplying monies from underperforming, highly experienced teachers to highly achieving, inexperienced teachers. To another extent, the hypothetical grand compromise that kicked off this debate was an influx of money with the proviso of kicking out the unions.
It also assumes that there are loads of underperforming teachers in a market with other more motivated, better qualified teachers just chomping at the bit to enter the union-locked schools.
I think it’s fair to say that there are a noticeable number of underperforming teachers in just about every market. I think that anecdotal evidence is so pervasive that it becomes evidence in this case. That’s not to say that there aren’t a lot of well-performing teachers, of course.
Micah goes on to note that there aren’t a lot of teachers who want to work in the worst schools, and that good job security is a draw to many teachers, both of which I agree with.
So you might incentivize certain individuals to perform somewhat better at a job they have chosen to do primarily for other reasons. But what you would get for your trouble would be a smaller overall pool of people interested in the profession in general.
I don’t think that there’s evidence to support the idea that merit pay would create a smaller overall pool of teachers. If there were more merit pay, but less job security, you’d presumably lose some of the teachers who are attracted to job security, and gain or retain some people who are interested in teaching but would like to be rewarded for their abilities.
It’s hard to say if this would be a net gain or loss. It would be a change.
But if you bother to look at the actual evidence, the vast majority of studies supports the benefits of unions and almost no studies have shown unions to have negative impacts.
Benefits of unions to teaching outcomes, or to teacher’s working conditions? If the former, can you cite?
If the proposition put forward is that “teachers unions are the only things standing in the way of great outcomes from American public schools, and killing them would be a magic bullet,” then I firmly disagree.
I do think that the American public school system could be improved (somewhat) by a well-implemented program to assess the progress of students and reward teachers who are doing a great job. It would probably also be improved by a well-implemented program to fire the bottom, say, 1% of teachers, the rare useless lump who just doesn’t do anything useful. And teaching unions are categorically opposed to both of those. That doesn’t mean that naively removing the teaching unions will lead to fairies, rainbows, and magical unicorns.
10 micahd // Mar 20, 2007 at 6:13 pm
I am no pro-union kneejerker and had to come around to my current pro-teachers’ unions stance after being confronted with the evidence.
I agree that we agree on most everything, Michael. But I just don’t know whether you are being realistic about the tradeoffs. Giving principals the ability to fire the bottom 1% of teachers means greatly increasing their ability to fire all teachers. So there is little payoff for a very large hit to job security.
Also, I just don’t think that there is enough money in the kitty for these greatly incentivizing merit bonuses taken from experienced underperforming teachers … particularly in a non-union world in which there aren’t as many experience underperforming teachers. Reactionary rhetoric to the contrary, our schools are just not filled with lazy underperforming idiots.
But to get away from rhetoric, it is probably worth checking out the comment section to Kevin Drum’s post, “Bad Teachers Cont’d” for a good rundown of the debate. (I’d provide the link here but I think it crashed my comment last time.) The most compelling evidence comes from this study:
http://whatcheer.net/ripr/wri-startline.pdf
It’s key passage is:
There has been good quantitative research done
that looked at the school level, instead of the state
level. The most extensive review of the effects of
unions in education was done by Eberts and Stone
(1987). Using math and verbal achievement scores
as their measure, their research demonstrated that
unionized schools perform significantly better
overall than their non-union counterparts, even
after discounting such effects as class size and
teacher experience. These finding have been
replicated by others, including Milkman (1997)
and Argys and Rees (1995).
–
In fact, you should read the whole study if you’re interested in education policy. It is quite thorough and well researched.
Of course, correlation is not causation so this does not represent definitive proof that teachers unions are the solution to our educational woes. But they CERTAINLY do not seem to be the problem. So perhaps confronting things we know are problems would be a better idea (lack of physical classroom space and teaching resources for inner city schools, poorly conceived and implemented federal programs such as NCLB that handicap the educational experience, economic inequities that lead to inadequate parental involvement in lower-income communities, etc.)
I’m no kneejerk anti-market guy either. But – as with health care – we’re not talking about widgets here. Don’t let the widgetarians confuse you with their overly reductionists first day of economics 101 unproven assumptions.
11 Julian Sanchez // Mar 20, 2007 at 8:17 pm
C’mon, Micah, are you really trotting out the “economics 101” play from the paint-by-numbers book of libertarian rebuttals? Whose level of economic understanding is that supposed to characterize? Milton Friedman’s?
12 micahd // Mar 20, 2007 at 9:20 pm
Ooh, did I hit a nerve there Julian?
Widgetarians is actually not a synonym for libertarians.
Just a description of that particular brand of folks referenced in an earlier conversation who answer “supply and demand” to any question about the provision of goods regardless of the characteristics of these goods. Let’s leave Milton Friedman out of this for the time being but we could break out the fisticuffs to review his legacy if you’d like.
But it would include pretty much anybody who thinks that teachers unions are on the top 10 list of problems with our educational system.
(And, anyway, I painted by numbers here only after I drew a very pretty outline of a picture with little numbers in it! *grin*)
13 Bill Korner // Mar 21, 2007 at 4:46 pm
Micahd said:
(And, anyway, I painted by numbers here only after I drew a very pretty outline of a picture with little numbers in it! *grin*)
Exactly! Micahd DID cite a piece of statistical research and call attention to what he saw as its main insight. Then Julian latches on to Micahd’s unfortunate rhetorical flourish and dismisses his whole post. That’s poor form.
Now, there are probably a lot of differences between unionized and non-unionized schools, of which class size and teacher experience are not obviously the most important. Also, we should surely take into account the length of time schools have been unionized. Further, we should acknowledge that there are lots of differences in what constitutes “unionization”. But the purported evidence has not been addressed, rather it has been dismissed.
And Milton Friedman WAS given to widgetarianism, a temptation to which many economists do in fact fall prey. Read his classic essay “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Make Profit” (or something like that). If you hope to find data to support the conclusions that (a) businesses that most ardently seek to maximize quarterly earnings maximize mid-term profitability, (b) that businesses that maximize mid-term profitability contribute most to GNP, or (c) that contributing most to GNP means contributing most to social welfare, you will be sorely disappointed.
14 Stuart Buck // Mar 22, 2007 at 11:48 am
If you want to know how unionization affects schools, you can’t just read policy papers put out by a teachers’ unions (which seem invariably to emphasize only one side of any debate). You’d also have to consider, for example, Harvard economics professor Caroline Hoxby’s paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, in which she found that teachers’ unions increase school inputs but “reduce productivity sufficiently to have a negative overall effect on student performance.”
15 Stuart Buck // Mar 22, 2007 at 12:25 pm
The thing is, the empirical evidence that busting unions improves educational outcomes is pretty scant, unless you’re aware of some I haven’t seen.
See the paper I cited above.
And what’s the underlying theory here–there’s a large pool of brilliant teachers just waiting to teach in bad schools without any labor protections? Really?
No. The theory would be more like this: Teachers of low quality have a large impact on the students that pass through their classrooms. (See Hanushek, Kain, and Rivkin’s Econometrica article here.) Current protections make those teachers too difficult to fire. Instead, they end up teaching minorities who are already underserved by the school system. (See, for example, this paper.)
If (maybe this is a big “if”) there is a way to identify the worst 10% of teachers and fire them, the average quality of the remaining teachers would increase. Thus, no need to posit an extra supply of “brilliant” teachers.