I don't want to get into listing this or that counter-example, because you'll just say something along the lines of "but that's not the same at all!" I just wanted to point out that in some communities, there's a whole slew of commonly accepted examples of less money being used, less staff, teachers working without unions, and so on. In situations like that you're going to need to up your game a bit.
That's ok, there is already a mismatch between supply and demand in teaching. Apparently there is a surplus of at least 280,000 teachers, according to the Department of Education [1].
This indicates that teachers are currently overcompensated - if comp were reduced, supply would come closer to meeting demand (at least if Keynesians/Monetarists/Austrians are to be believed).
Further, if union influence were reduced, then administrators would be able to force out the low performance and keep the high performers, rather than merely keep the teachers with seniority.
[1] http://www.ed.gov/blog/2011/10/keeping-teachers-off-the-unem...
The American Jobs Act proposes a major investment that will modernize at least 35,000 public schools, and support 280,000 teacher jobs nationwide. See what impact the Act will have in your state, and read a complete overview of the American Jobs Act here.
There is nothing about a surplus of 280,000 teachers. This is a libertarian distortion. Disgusting.
The result is that this country's local governments are spending much less on education than they were a few years ago, and therefore employ many fewer teachers. Because they have a mandate to educate basically the same number of children as before the crisis, this means larger class sizes, etc.
To suggest that these unemployed teachers are 'surplus' in this environment is to mis-characterize the situation almost to the point of dishonesty.
If they reduced the compensation of teachers (i.e., reduce price in response to a demand decrease), there would be no need to reduce the number of teachers.
Of course there is - the quantity demanded at a fixed price is set to go down by (according to the DoE) 280,000. I.e., the demand curve has shifted left.
More likely they are undervalued. Your citation makes the point that there are unemployed teachers because educational funding has been cut. It's also not clear from the citation that there are actually 280,000 'extra' teachers, only that the goal of the program is to support that many teachers in the classroom.
Busting unions and destroying bureaucracies isn't going to change the way teaching is done fundamentally. What it will do is make teaching even less attractive as a profession. Most teachers I know value job security in exchange for salary. Take away security and you are left with little economic incentive to stay. And economic incentives are essential:
Some of that [tuition] growth has resulted from a phenomenon called Baumol’s disease, after the economist William J. Baumol, who described it in a 1965 article he wrote with William G. Bowen. The basic idea is that while productivity gains have made it possible to assemble cars with only a tiny fraction of the labor that was once required, it still takes four musicians nine minutes to perform Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 4 in C minor, just as it did in the 19th century.
College instruction more closely resembles a musical performance than an auto assembly line. Although information technologies have yielded some productivity growth in academia, instruction still takes place largely as it always has.
To recruit professors, universities must pay salaries roughly in line with those made possible by productivity growth in other sectors. So while rising salaries needn’t lead to higher prices in many industries, they do in academia and many other service industries.
While the Atlantic story seems to comport with the frightening startup idea to "Replace Universities", it is crucial to recognize and deal with Baumol's disease.