"When I started at IBM there was a dress code, that was an informal oral code of white shirts. You couldn't wear anything but a white shirt, generally with a starched collar. I remember attending my first class, and a gentleman said to me as we were entering the building, are you an IBMer, and I said yes. He had a three piece suit on, vests were of the vogue, and he said could you just lift your pants leg please. I said what, and before I knew it he had lifted my pants leg and he said you're not wearing any garters. I said what?! He said your socks, they're not pulled tight to the top, you need garters. And sure enough I had to go get garters."

http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.html

It wasn't just the US, the UK was also very puritanical.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Conviction_for_inde...

Claiming that these things were restricted to teachers, or have changed because of teachers unions is nothing but the post-hoc fallacy.

The difference is that you don't have the entire town calling the CEO of IBM to get an employee fired for explaining what a condom is. While the same social norms were behind both corporate rules and also rules for school teachers, the rules for school teachers were many times stricter because of much greater pressure from the community. And if you look at the union rules for firing teachers, it's pretty clear that they were crafted in part to make it more difficult for a teacher to get fired due to a few parents putting pressure on the principal. Because if these rules didn't exist, then most principals would take the easy out and fire that teacher every time regardless of whether or not they actually did anything wrong. Because unlike at IBM, the principal doesn't lose any money for firing a good teacher; all that happens is they get rid of a headache, so the incentives are aligned to reward principals for harming students. That's why the protections currently offered by the unions are needed.

In the same era he is discussing (most likely < 1967 [1]), no one would tolerate interracial dating from a newspaper columnist, homosexuality from a money manager or non-whiteness from the CEO of the #3 Bank in the US. In the present era, Paul Krugman, Peter Thiel and Vikram Pandit all have jobs. Can we attribute that to teachers unions as well?

As for firing the occasional good teacher, it's true that schools currently have no incentive to do a good job teaching students. This is a much bigger problem than firing unpopular teachers. Guess which organizations are the biggest proponents of keeping things that way?

[1] Pre 1967, interracial marriage was illegal in some states (Virginia, at least). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_v._Virginia

They applied to all professions, but not at the same time. Check out this possibly-false-but-accurate set of rules for teachers from 1915: http://www.pchswi.org/archives/schools/teacher_conduct_1915....

Sure these rules applied to every other profession as well. The difference is that they probably stopped applying to other professions 200 years earlier than they stopped applying to teaching.

"Guess which organizations are the biggest proponents of keeping things that way?"

No argument there, I'm not defending the unions, just pointing out that historically schools have been extremely abusive toward their employees. Sure the value are different today, but the psychology, social pressures, and incentives are all the same. So if the protections given to teachers were completely repealed teachers might get screwed over for different things, but there would be much injustice nonetheless. But yeah, obviously I don't agree with making it impossible teachers who are bad at teaching, I just think that if there were no protections at all then firings for social or political reasons would become so commonplace that it would drive talented people away from the field. (Granted, talented people are already kept out of teaching today by the unions and a million other policies, but still.)

http://www.autotropolis.com/wiki/index.php?title=Ford

As I pointed out, the rules concerning interracial dating applied until 1967 in Virginia to people of every profession. The rules concerning men wearing garters at IBM applied in the 60's. And according to my late grandmother, you could be fired from a job on the police force for marrying a Jew (I'm not sure of the exact date, but it was definitely post 1915).

So no, the rules didn't stop applying to other professions 200 years earlier than to teaching. Things were just really different in 1915 and even 1970 than today.

If you look back through the primary documents relating to education though it's pretty crazy how much of a role religion plays. For example, the first compulsory education law in the United States was the Ye Old Deluder Satan Act, the first half of which I'll paste below:

"It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures, as in former times by keeping them in an unknown tongue, so in these latter times by persuading from the use of tongues, that so that at least the true sense and meaning of the original might be clouded and corrupted with love and false glosses of saint-seeming deceivers; and to the end that learning may not be buried in the grave of our forefathers, in church and commonwealth, the Lord assisting our endeavors. It is therefore ordered that every township in this jurisdiction, after the Lord hath increased them to fifty households shall forthwith appoint one within their town to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and read, whose wages shall be paid either by the parents or masters of such children, or by the inhabitants in general, by way of supply, as the major part of those that order the prudentials of the town shall appoint; provided those that send their children be not oppressed by paying much more than they can have them taught for in other towns."

Essentially the reason why it started becoming compulsory for town to build schools is that the government thought that children, if left to their own devices, would be corrupted by satan. And these same beliefs are also the basis of how we treat not only our children, but also our school teachers right up to this day. Hardly a week goes by in the US where there isn't a story about a teacher being fired for having a picture of themselves drinking on Facebook, breaking up an assault on a gay student, assigning a book that mentions sex, etc. Of course this mostly happens in small towns in the south; the more 'enlightened' areas of the country have already mostly switched to having their teachers teach f om entirely pre-made curricula geared toward passing standardized tests, a system which was implemented partly to prevent these 'problems' from occurring.

Also, if I remember correctly even pg once commented that the reason he wasn't allowed to give his high school graduation speech is that the principal wouldn't have been able to get him fired if the parents complained.

What's striking to me is the unions of government employees is legal in any way, shape, or dorm.

I'm pretty sure that private schools here in the US remain non-unionized.

The key point was that this wasn't his idea. He solicited topics for debate from the students in the class, those two were chosen as the topics.

This got misconstrued by some parents who were offended as he pushed us to consider these questions becuase he was liberal, and thus was bringing his political beliefs into the classroom.

I ended up being the lead on the team that defended torture and depleted uranium (and we won), and somehow the more difficult debate actually ended up being the one I had at the school board meeting defending him.

The topic was proposed by a student in the class who had actually thought about it beforehand, no one else had any good ideas.

The "winner" of the debate was determined by a panel of other teachers (part of the reason he got in trouble the teachers were "ruling" on gov't policy). Nobody seems to understand that the people (me and a few others) defending the US's policys could actually win. Everyone assumed that it was biased by his politics such that obviously the result would be anti-American. It was actually quite fun. Though I'd say that the reason my group won was largely becuase in 2006 a lot less was known about Gitmo. We could do a lot of "you can't prove that X Y or Z is happening, that is just conjecture", that we wouldn't be able to do today.

As a side note, I'm firmly in the anti-toture and anti-DU camp, but I always find it more interesting in debate to side with the group you disagree with.

Torture is a topic that lends itself to emotional reasoning. How can you be such a meanie? How can _you_ put children at risk while terrorists are running free?

DU also lends itself to sloppy reasoning. People take for granted that it is a radioactivity problem when it's actually a heavy-metal toxicity problem. Radioactivity is more emotional.

My main point is that there are cases where the private sector can do without unions, whereas the public sector schools cannot[1].

[1] At least in California I haven't heard of a single non-unionized public school.

I have yet to see anything persuasive as to relevance.

That is, why is it any different from any other public employment? My understanding is that civil service jobs have specific legal (aka politically-sourced) protections without resorting to techniques from the private sector.

ETA: Moreover, politically-motivated firings aren't necessarily arbitrary, though they're obviously not based on merit. The unionized system doesn't appear to be merit-based, either.

A regulation of the nature you describe would potentially harm the public - an employee might be harming the public under conditions D, but would be unable to be fired.

I'm not sure why you put your faith in the professional judgement of the teacher rather than the school principal.

Why?

If you're being paid by tax dollars, taxpayers should be able to fire you for any reason that they please. If you don't like those conditions, work for someone else who offers the conditions that you'd like.

Yes, your fellow tax payers may well disagree with you about how to spend tax money. That's how democracy works. If you don't want "those people" to decide how to spend "your" money, perhaps you should carefully consider when you pay directly vs via govt.

I agree. The rub is that it's not usually the taxpayers making that decision, but their elected representatives.

I believe there's already a commonly applied differentiation between appointed and civil service[1] positions.

[1] I don't know if these are the actual terms, so corrections are welcome.

Sorry - you don't get to hide behind representatives.

> I believe there's already a commonly applied differentiation between appointed and civil service[1] positions.

While there is a difference, the "you can't do things that piss off the voters" rule applies to both.

It was called the "spoils system" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system), it turns out to be a major vector of abuse by elected officials, and is the reasons the US civil service has safeguards for dismissing civil servants.

There are no technical fixes for social problems.

Further, we've had teachers' unions for generations. (AFT was founded in 1916) But every now and again, there's a flurry of stories about how education is 'broken', and teachers' unions are the problem.

This is all followed and subsumed by the stories about how we all know schools are broken and teachers unions are the problem (begging two questions in the classical sense), but charter schools (specifically) are the solution.

(Despite studies having shown since the last round of this meme, that while some charter schools are superior most are inferior, and overall their average performance is notably lower than the public schools they're supposed to 'fix'.)

It's enough to make you wonder where it all comes from.