This is also not even getting into how much teachers spend of their salary money on the classroom. Which is so prevalent that there’s a tax deduction for it. How many masters professions involve spending salary money for the employer?
Conflating performance with unions is bunk anyways. Japan’s teachers are heavily, heavily unionized, historically far more militant than teachers in the US, and they’re consistently among the highest performing OECD countries.
Seems like the incentives are mostly oriented around getting teachers to stay in one place and grind out another year of experience, round of continuing education, and extra degrees whether they are wise or not.
Otherwise, why don't teachers just quit schools with poor safety records, working conditions, pay, equipment funding, and uncompensated overtime? Because no district really has to worry about being held accountable like that.
I’m not sure what you mean by agency here or how many teachers you actually know. But unions have regularly campaigned for more resources for students outside of themselves, including access to things nurses, counselors, and libraries. Schools in many cities are highly racially and economically segregated in the US because of the country’s broader history of redlining and corresponding deprivation. Teachers unions are one of the only interest groups who have consistently fought against this denial of agency for their students.
As to career choices, I have union member teachers in my family and they change schools as they see fit. There are some problems with state licensing incompatibilities that prevent teachers from being as mobile as they might like and we should probably move to uniform federal standards to correct this.
>Seems like the incentives are mostly oriented around getting teachers to stay in one place and grind out another year of experience, round of continuing education, and extra degrees whether they are wise or not. Otherwise, why don't teachers just quit schools with poor safety records, working conditions, pay, equipment funding, and uncompensated overtime? Because no district really has to worry about being held accountable like that.
Incentives around higher education are perverse in the US in almost every regard, so I’m not sure that teachers are that much of an outlier (especially for their domain, education). As to why teachers stay - I’m not sure if you’re aware but most people tend to live in the regions they’re actually from, where they have family ties and social bonds.
https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2008/12/17/who-moves-who-sta...
Applying some sort of rational actor economic heuristic to civil servants in a service profession seems a foolhardy endeavor. I mean, I’ve worked for big companies across the country, none of which were any better run and some of which were not better resourced than a failing public school, and they all had their fair share of people toughing it out too. What binds people to a place socially and materially, especially among more working class professions, is different from white collar workers.
But also because of the public school system that ties zip codes to affluence and introduces artificial geographical barriers to integration. Something teachers unions have a vested interest in, at least indirectly.
> ...most people tend to live in the regions they’re actually from...
One can switch schools and districts without switching regions. But it should be much easier than that, even.
> Applying some sort of rational actor economic heuristic to civil servants in a service profession seems a foolhardy endeavor.
I'm just saying it's counterintuitive that teachers unions in particular are for teachers without being especially for empowering individual teachers to have leverage with respect to their employment agreements and conditions.
How would one have meaningful 'competition' without privatization?
Possible, yes. Practical? No. Democratic bureaucracies are effectively incapable of learning and adapting. Schooling is basically implemented identically today as it was 100 years ago.
> Schools just have to be allowed the leeway to experiment without threat of privatization
This is a strange statement to me. In what sense is privatization a threat to public schools? If public schools were so great and privatization were so bad, why would people want to send their kids to privately run schools? Wouldn't public schools invite the challenge if they believed their model was superior?
The fact that they even view it as such an existential threat tells you basically all you need to know. Even they believe they'd be outcompeted almost immediately.
> And it’s not as if high-performing countries arrived at their (almost exclusively public) systems without this kind of iteration.
Firstly, the idea of differential country performance of schools is largely a myth. When you disaggregate by ethnicity, most of that disappears. Japanese kids in the US do about as well here as they do in Japan. Which is to say that differential performance between countries is more about who is in those countries than how it is those countries educate.
A good old prisoners dilemma. If you got more resources to spend on education, you don't want to sit in the same class as someone who can only contribute little to the course. Just like worse graduates will ruin the prestige of the school and thus value of your degree. Outcome-base exclusion can be fine, unless it ends up as proxy to select for socio-economic factors and thus make society offer less equal opportunity.
Just looking at "existential threat" -> "outcompeted" only works in a highly simplified world with no market failures and other issues.
> differential performance between countries is more about who is in those countries than how it is those countries educate
I'd like a source on that. I do understand culture will have a significant influence, especially on what value people place on education. But your statement seems to go a lot further into "school doesn't matter" territory. This directly contradicts with earlier statements and e.g. many chines studying in the US.
Let's trace that out a little more. Are you implying that private/charter schools have more dollars to spend per student? Because that's certainly not true for Charter schools. It's probably true for some private schools, but also not all. And if that's not what you're saying, then i'm not sure I understand your argument.
> I'd like a source on that. I do understand culture will have a significant influence, especially on what value people place on education. But your statement seems to go a lot further into "school doesn't matter" territory. This directly contradicts with earlier statements and e.g. many chines studying in the US.
I can no longer find the source where I originally read it, but we can reconstruct the data. I'm going to show it for math, but the results are similar for other subjects.
PISA Rankings by country:
https://www.businessinsider.com/pisa-worldwide-ranking-of-ma...
As you can see, the US looks pretty abysmal, given how rich it is. However, if you look at the math PISA scores for whites and asians, you see this:
https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2015/pisa2015highlights...
Now, the US doesn't jump to the very top, but it does jump to just below Norway and right above Austria. Certainly a solidly high quality education. You'll see the same results across other subjects too.
Of course, that doesn't mean our educational system doesn't have room for improvement. It most certainly does. But the idea that we're severely lagging the rest of the developed world is mostly false, when you adjust for this confound.
It's the old "You don't understand, teachers only work 10 months out of the year!" argument but dressed in some nice statistical clothing. It's asinine to make that argument because teachers can't actually get paid for the other two months. When I was temping in a warehouse unloading shipping containers one summer, there were a few teachers there who were just making ends meet until the school year started.
Vacation has great value, but usually only after basic needs are met. Cutting someones hours is often used as a punishment for a reason. At the same time it also makes total sense that other companies don't want employees reducing their working hours.
Sure but that's a strange point to make given that they know what the benefits of the job are in advance. It's not like summer vacation is something that's sprung on teachers after they've taken the job.
> Vacation has great value, but usually only after basic needs are met. Cutting someones hours is often used as a punishment for a reason. At the same time it also makes total sense that other companies don't want employees reducing their working hours.
Most teachers are not incapable of meeting their own basic needs. They may be paid less than comparable private sector workers, but they're not literally starving. Given that, vacation is unequivocally a benefit. They may prefer the opportunity to work more...but if they preferred that, then they should have taken a different job.
"Teacher salaries are adjusted based on the assumption of a 10-month work year."
...which is a good way to give them a virtual 17% pay raise. I wonder if the same applies to other professions like independent contractors or lawyers, who can only charge for part of their working time.