A couple of days ago a commenter asked me why we couldn't just cut a deal with the teachers unions: higher pay in exchange for surrendering control over work rules. As it happens, I think that would be a very good deal; I don't see how we can get top notch teachers by turning them into underpaid civil servants. I also don't think we can cut that deal.
The problem is, the union sits in the middle of that transaction. And for the union, this is an unambiguously bad deal. They don't get a commission on the higher salary they win for their members. And dismantling all the dispute-resolution and work rule apparatus would substantially slash their power. Problems like this are the reason that the West Coast ports couldn't cut a deal with the longshoremen to pension off the current workers at full pay in exchange for the elimination of their jobs, even though my understanding is that this is one of the options they explored. Full pay for no work would have been a great deal for the membership, but a death blow for the union.
That's what's at the core of the recently uncovered secret agreements SEIU seems to have made with employers:
Two of the nation's largest labor unions have struck confidential agreements with large employers that give the companies the right to designate which of their locations, and how many workers, the unions can seek to organize.The agreements are raising questions about union transparency and workers' rights. A summary document put together by the unions says it is critical to the success of the partnership "that we honor the confidentiality and not publicly disclose the existence of these agreements." That includes not disclosing them to union members.
The agreements involve workers who provide food, laundry and housekeeping services on an outsourced basis. The employers are Sodexho Inc. and the Compass Group USA unit of London-based Compass Group PLC. The unions are the 1.7 million-member Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, and Unite Here. The unions say they negotiated a similar agreement with Aramark Corp. but that Aramark broke the deal last year, and they're trying to reach a new one. An Aramark spokesman declined to comment on that.
The unions defend the agreements and their secrecy, saying they've helped workers join unions in growing industries at a time of declining union membership in many sectors. Last year, 7.5% of private-sector workers belonged to unions, compared with 17% 25 years ago. The agreements have "resulted in tens of thousands of workers getting unions" and been a major advance for the labor movement, said the president of Unite Here, Bruce Raynor.
This undoubtedly helped SEIU, but the benefit for the workers is more ambiguous. Like a corporation or any other organization, SEIU wants to do good things for its membership--but its first priority is the health of the SEIU. That's why charities find new missions when the old one disappears, rather than dissolve themselves and give the money to an existing group.
SEIU is undoubtedly the most successful union out there right now, in terms of growing its organization. But it seems to be doing this in part by compromising the purpose of the union.
This reminds me of the position that the typesetters union found itself in back in the early 1970s as newspapers started to make the switch from hot lead type to photo offset printing, which made typesetters redundant and reduced the number of jobs needed.
It was very contentious at the daily where I worked. Even though the typesetters were promised somethng roughly equivalent to lifetime employment as individuals, the union wanted what amounted pretty much to a guarantee to maintain the same number of jobs. In the end they caved but as an editorial employee I stepped pretty lightly whenever I had occasion to be in the composing room.
I have the impression that the typesetters union is not exactly a vibrant force today.
Nail on the head. Examine the positions on issues such as performance pay, class size reduction, school choice, NCLB, charter schools, scope of bargaining, homeschooling, etc., and their effects on the union as an organization (instead of teachers, or education in general) and you have a clear explanation of how the lines get drawn.
Organized labor is a third party, so it's futile to assume its interests are the same as those of teachers (although, in all fairness, they do often overlap).
I support the notion that we should make an effort to make it easier to fire teachers that deserve to be fired, and in exchange better remunerate them for their work. The problem with the Mickey Kaus plan, just make it easy to fire teachers, is that we're already trying to make teaching a more attractive profession to talented, intelligent people. How does merely eliminating perhaps the biggest benefit of the profession help us do that? If you do a little digging, by the way, you'll see the NEA is actually tentatively open to certain changes in tenure and the process through which teachers are terminated.
Here's the problem: you still have a conception of education that largely is founded on the notion that students output is dependent on the job of the teachers teaching them. And that distorts the dialog almost unsalvageably. One of the aspects of teaching that is well understood within the profession but not know by many people commenting on it is that, if you simply went by metrics of standardized testing (you couldn't, for obvious reasons, rely on grades), there are not consistently "good" teachers anywhere. What do I mean by that? It's a phenomenon that's seen in school after school, both public and private. The standardized tests for an individual teacher's classes vary wildly from year to year. A teacher who has seen the best growth in her school, or even in her district, may the next year see the worst. Happens all the time. What's more, teachers who are more organically identified as the best by their peers and their administration-- probably a better way of measuring a teacher's worth-- can have classes with very poor test scores or poorly improving test scores. This is a simple thing to understand, once you realize that the vast majority of a particular student's performance is the product of the student, and not the teacher.
When people talk about eliminating teachers based on performance, then, the unions become understandably nervous. If you went around every year firing the teacher from each school who had the worst improvement in test scores, or firing teachers who failed to meet certain testing benchmarks over a 3 or 5 year period, you'd wind up eliminating a lot of talented and dedicated teachers and sparing some ones who deserve firing. And, again, this is because individual students and individual classes have wildly divergent levels of inherent ability, social and familial support, etc.
Again, I support making it easier to fire teachers who really deserve it. But I think that you're assuming that there's more teachers who are incompetent than there really are, based on no data. I think if we had a sweep of the entire nation, eliminating the really bad teachers, we wouldn't come close to having the effect you and Mickey Kaus and similar seem to think it would have. Because, once again, the problems of academic performance in this country are endemic and tied to larger problems of poverty, family breakdown and disenfranchisement-- problems people of your political persuasion, by the way, are deeply opposed to government addressing.
So what else is new? Lord Acton, once again: power corrupts.
Or, interestly, an odd statement from Frank Herbert buried in the Dune books, paraphrased: "[True] democracy consists of distrusting anyone with power over you." A reasonable person distrusts both company managemant and union management. Perhaps the latter a bit more, actually, as the former are pretty open about the plain fact that they serve his (the worker's) interests only when those interests align with those of the company. The latter tend to be more deceptive about the equivalent fact.
A good lesson for the legions of naifs presently swelling Barack Obama's chautauquas, too. If you think the important difference between Obama and Clinton (either of them) is that Obama serves the interests of "the people" and Clinton serves mostly his or her own interests -- hey, I've got a bridge to sell you, young fool.
This is simply another example of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy, which states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.
In this case, you have a union run by people who will insist that the union itself is more important than any, or even all, of it's members.
I agree with Megan that it's not practical to compensate the unions for giving away much of their power. But Njorl's idea, which I had too lightly dismissed initially, is an interesting one. It has a certain economic allure--like trade adjustment assistance and Coasian bargaining.
If you were in regular classes as a kid, you may remember that the bottom student absorbed a lot of the teacher's time. This problem is massively exacerbated at each level you move up (I'm speaking anecdotally). A single troublesome family with a single monstrous child can fill the time of entire boards of education, just as the worst kid in the school usually takes up most of that school's administration's time (because of their uncooperative parents). This has nothing to do with the union conversation (on which I would agree, if I thought my agreement were worth anything). Just some colour commentary.
Gee, I have to respond to Freddie's comment. As a teacher myself (in college, however), you're totally full of it. There's no problem at all measuring the quality of teaching objectively. There are all kind of ways to do it, both methodologically simple and statistically sound.
Such methods obviously don't include anything as boneheaded as firing everyone the student test scores of whom don't go up in a given year. Duh. But just because the simplest straw-man type objective measurement doesn't measure up to common sense doesn't imply that the problem is insoluble. That's just what the unions want you to think: that, as you say, the performance of the student lies almost entirely with the student (or family, or degree of socioeconomic disadvantage, yadda yadda).
One wonders, by the way, how the unions reconcile this position with the argument that "We need to attract talented people to the profession with sky-high salaries." Uh, what for? And, how?
To be precise, if the quality of the teacher doesn't matter so much, then why bother trying to attract the best and the brightest? Clearly investing public money in the quality of teachers has a lower rate of return than investing it in these other factors that (supposedly) matter more in student performance. Maybe we should pay the students to do well in school (or at least attend school every day, do all the homework, whatever), or maybe we should pay families to do a better job at home, or subsidize families with school-age children so one or more adults can spend more time supervising homework and school projects. Who knows? But if teacher quality isn't the major factor affecting student performance, then funding its improvement should not be the first public priority.
Secondly, if teacher quality is unmeasurable anyway, how are you going to find the "best" teachers to whom to offer these wonderful salaries? There's no doubt higher salaries will attract more applicants, far more than for whom you have jobs -- so how are you going to pick the best? You can't even hire people on a temporary basis and get rid of those who don't prove out, because the argument is that there is no reliable, objective measurement of job performance on which you could base that decision.
Personally, I think the teachers unions are too used to dealing with situations (e.g. classrooms) where what The Authority says is simply accepted because the authority says it, and the ol' logical debate facilities have fossilized. If you go to reg'lar folks whose job performance is scrutinized every day -- the teller or loan officer whose books must balance to the penny, the salesman who has sales targets to meet, the CEO who lives or dies by the company's stock price, the doctor who lives in fear of the malpractise suit, the city councilman who knows he'll hear about it if the potholes go unfixed, the major general in Baghdad whose promotion depends on how many GIs get blown to bits during his tour -- and you tell them: gee, there's just no way to measure how good a job we're doing, teaching alone among professions is some ineffable magical unmeasurable thing -- then you should not be surprised if they start muttering bullshit under their breaths.
You've accused me of attacking straw men and then attacked one yourself. The point isn't that teacher performance is entirely unmeasurable; the point is that basing that performance on standardized testing-- which, if you'd actually care to look around and see what people are talking about, is precisely what many of the people attacking tenure are advocating-- is a very poor idea. And I see that you haven't actually disagreed with the most important part of my post, which is that standardized test scores of individual teachers vary wildly from year to year and seem to have very little connection to the actual performance of the teacher in question.
Also, I shouldn't dignify your faux-populist B.S. with a response-- but when did teachers stop being regular folks?
Carl wins.
Freddie,
You have a teacher teaching Algebra. At the end of the year the kids are asked:
2x+3=5 solve for x
x=
a. 5
b. 3
c. 2
d. 1
If the kids can't answer the question the teacher gets fired.
Seems pretty simple to me.
If the kids can't answer the question the teacher gets fired. Seems pretty simple to me.
Pretty simple, and pretty stupid. Now you've made the teacher accountable not only for their own teaching skills, but also the parenting of children over whom they have no legally-allowable mechanisms of strong disciplinary control. The incoming students being something of a lottery assignment, this is merely a way of playing Russian Roulette with one's job. How many potential applicants are going to be interested in that deal?
Carl wins
Again, never said teacher quality doesn't matter. Those who invoke the straw man fallacy would do well to avoid it themselves.
Jmo:
OK. I know you're largely being facetious. Let's expand that suggestion and suppose we give exit testing to students. (Essentially, this is already the proposal of many who would fire scores of teachers, only they would use pre-existing standardized tests.) Teacher A teaches a group of kids with higher natural ability, better economic situations, better familial support, higher percentage of students who attended pre-K, etc. Teacher A passes your test. Teacher B, who's students have significantly worse metrics than Teacher A, does not pass the test. Should Teacher B be fired? Say he gets a second chance and the next year, his students score significantly better than Teacher A's-- should we really now decide that Teacher A's performance is suddenly insufficient? Again, this happens all the time, in actual schools, both public and private.
The point is not to say that there is no way to measure teacher performance, and it is certainly not to say (and I certainly never said) that there is no difference between how teachers perform. The point is that the usual metrics cited by anti-teacher zealots are not very helpful, and that we should go carefully in this direction, instead of taking the usual libertarian path of rhetorical maximalism. Many of the people here of course are not genuinely interested in addressing the issue at all, if the result is anything other than total condemnation for the unions. Because I'm afraid many people around here start from the presumption that the unions must be bashed, and then proceed backwards to whatever argument will get them there.
Mouse,
We all work with people who don't give a s**t and are far more of a hindrance than a help. People with whom we have "no legally-allowable mechanisms of strong disciplinary control" yet we manage to get our jobs done.
It's always the parents, or the students, or the administration, never the teacher's own incompetence.
Carl,
Are you saying that teachers arent regular people? What would you consider yourself then? If the measurements or so simple perhaps you could provide us with some examples so that we could discuss them. Also isnt it interesting that the majority of people who are doing the judging of teachers and school systems know very little about education. That would be like a teacher going to a ER to judge how well the doctors did. Please give us a little more to go on that just generalities.
Jmo,
And yet with you it is all the teachers fault. Dont the students have some accountablity? How about the parents?
Freddie,
No, Teacher A got lucky this year, she got a good group of kids, so she can coast. Teacher B got a rough crew, she got screwed. But, she's got to find a way to make it work or she's out on the street.
I'm a consultant that helps companies set up complex software applications. Some sites I go to are delighted I'm there, "This new system is great and we can't wait to implement it." Other sites are actively hostile and couldn't care if the project ever gets off the ground. In my case I have to make it work, if I don't I get fired.
Why should teachers be any different?
"They don't get a commission on the higher salary they win for their members"
Are you sure about that? My union cetainly does, and I'm almost positive the same is true for the NEA/AFT. Anybody know whether NEA/AFT dues are flat rate or percentage?
Jmo,
Why do you make the comparision to business? Education is not like a business. Business's get to pick their employees and can choose not to do business with whoever they please. Public schools are not so lucky, they have to take every kid who comes thru the door.
To your example, why should Teacher B get fired based on one years results, what if the school decided to put all the learning disabled kids in Teachers B's class? Is that the teachers fault? What if Teacher A had all AP students, are we judging that Teacher the same as Teacher B? Bottom line is this education is not like a business and to compare it to one is a fallacy and not accurate.
J,
In my neck of the woods it is a flat rate. However we pay dues to the state orginazation not the national one. I believe a portion of our dues to the state orginization goes to the national so it may vary state to state.
whats up:
Busineses can chose who to do business with whomever they wish, but their employees can't. If your boss says you're on the Acme Widget account now, and they are a bunch or demanding a**holes, you have to suck it up and make it work.
Life's not fair - and neither is the classroom - deal with it.
sorry about the extra who... and it's Businesses not Busineses :-(
Meghan - the comments section needs a spell checker.
If you think the important difference between Obama and Clinton (either of them) is that Obama serves the interests of "the people" and Clinton serves mostly his or her own interests -- hey, I've got a bridge to sell you, young fool.
Posted by Carl Pham | May 15, 2008 2:25 PM
Cynicism can only go so far. Yes, "the people" can never be perfectly represented, but if you can't see how Obama is ahead of Clinton on this then I would say you're in the dark. And if you can't see how both are miles ahead of McCain, then I would say you are part of the darkness.
just cut a deal with the teachers unions: higher pay in exchange for surrendering control over work rules...The problem is, the union sits in the middle of that transaction.
Casually held belief that isn't true in practice. Cities are unwilling to pay extra to compensate for waving work rules. Private firms are much better when it comes to this, but public organizations seem to lake the management savy to understand the benefits of this trade off. This is my experience.
the problems of academic performance in this country are endemic and tied to larger problems of poverty, family breakdown and disenfranchisement
So...you're saying we need to extend the vote to children to improve their test scores?
Seriously, poverty and disenfranchisement have nothing to do with an unwillingness to listen to your teachers and do your assignment. There are legions of poor kids who do well in school worldwide and in the US, regardless of whether their parents vote or not. The problem is, at bottom, with families, and there's precious little the government can do about that.
But maybe there's a role for the teacher's unions here. Do they have any old-fashioned muscle they could send around to--ahem--persuade parents to make homework a priority?
Other than that, I don't see a lot to disagree with in Freddie's post. Or with SoV's posts over the last couple of threads: the problem is in the parents and the communities, and teachers can't help all that much.
I think the core assumption here that fails is the one that asserts that a union is there to benefit its members rather than to benefit the union (which is to be read as "the union leadership").
I didn't know you worked with me, jmo!
(On spellchecking, jmo, if you use Firefox, I believe there's a spellchecking plug-in you can install. On Macs the Safari browser seems to access the spellchecker automatically.)
Jmo,
However business get to hire whomever they choose, also if you as an employee are not performing they get rid of you. However schools dont get to do that, they cant say since you failed this course you no longer get to go to school. The biggest factor in student success is the parents, not the teachers, but the parents. Perhaps you should lay the blame at their feet instead of blaming teachers all the time.
We all work with people who don't give a s**t and are far more of a hindrance than a help. People with whom we have "no legally-allowable mechanisms of strong disciplinary control" yet we manage to get our jobs done.
No, actually, we don't. Sometimes there are environments where it is not possible to get the job done BECAUSE of people who are too much of a hindrance. Difference is, there are plenty of other companies available at which one may ply their trade, or even ply it independently, if a particular environment is hostile. If the environment is hostile enough to chase off all of its talent, then you get a failed business, which a reasonably free market is very good at clearing out.
It doesn't work quite the same way in public education because the enterprise assumes as a first principle that all students shall receive an education, regardless of how enthusiastic they might happen to be about it.
It's always the parents, or the students, or the administration, never the teacher's own incompetence.
Sometimes it is the teacher's fault. (Whence cometh this "never" you speak of?) Unfortunatley, in the world you propose, it's "always" the teacher's fault, even when it isn't. Why do you think that swinging from irrational absolute, to the other, is going to produce an improvement?
I posit that instead, you'll either get an education industry with employment turnover rivaling fast food, or else merely reinforce the position of the teacher's unions, who will have good cause to make certain you can't pull this off. Are those the outcomes you want? If not, what makes you think you won't get them, instead of what you're hoping for?
I'm a union officer (different union, but representing full-time highly trained professionals not unlike teachers in some ways). Yes it's true that unions, like all organizations, tend to self-preservation. It's one of my frustrations with my own national union.
But I think the real obstacle to the kind of deal Megan is proposing (higher pay in exchange for surrendering control over work rules) is that it wouldn't be very popular with the rank-and-file members who (at least in my union) would get to vote on whether or not to ratify such an agreement. 90% of the work rules in the contracts my union administers come from individual members' bad experiences in the workplace. And Megan's deal would be doubly unpopular if the work rules in question had to do with job security.
Our system of labor laws makes it hard for a union to consistently operate in opposition to the will of a majority of its members, especially on issues of profound concern to those members. Work rules - especially those relating to seniority and job security - are the arbitrary invention of union bureacracies. They get negotiated into contracts because most of the membership wants them there.
The "higher pay - fewer rules" deal would be a wet dream for my local. Our dues income (which is based on compensation) would shoot up and our work load would decrease. But if we made a deal like that, we'd be out of business in not very long, due to a lack of members.
Make that:
Work rules - especially those relating to seniority and job security - are *not* the arbitrary invention of union bureacracies. They get negotiated into contracts because most of the membership wants them there.
Do fingers make Freudian slips? This wasn't one.
To answer the above question about NEA dues: The national dues are tied by formula to the national average teacher salary. Some state affiliates follow this model as well. Others use a flat rate and modify as necessary. Michigan is testing a plan where each teacher would pay dues as a percentage of their individual salaries (sort of like income tax or FICA).
I've heard collective bargaining agreements described as "scabs of old wounds." Robert Levine is partially correct, in my view. Work rules get created because an employee has a problem with something at a specific time, and a rule is created to deal with it for all time. But just like legislation, it's a lot easier to create rules than to remove them.
The problem with union work rules is if you keep building walls to protect your members, pretty soon you've imprisoned them.
Undoubtedly. Take another real-world example. At my daughter's elementary, there were two teachers for each grade, roughly. One year, a whole division of 3M (or maybe SquareD, some manufacturer) packed up and left town. So a lot of people were left unemployed, quite abruptly. Turns out that a lot of kids who had one or more parents that were abruptly laid off were mostly in one teacher's class. Lots of trouble in that classroom that year, and not just of the academic kind. This was a third grade class, so they were all MAPped; big surprise, the scores in one class were a lot lower than in the other.
Now, people like jmo would have us believe that somehow the unfortunate teacher should just suck it up, somehow teach teach better, or teach harder, or smarter, whatever the current set of buzzwords mashed together are(personally, I think he's just plain being dishonest.) But it simply doesn't work that way.
Again, that's not to say that it's not possible to rate the performance of a teacher, but the rating isn't going to be something that can come off of some scored, tabulated sheet (any more than mathematical ability can be scored on a scantron), and it's going to be _expensive_.
No, as I've said before, a lot of teachers are skeptical about a ratings system. Given that it is practically a certainty that there will be poor classes, they think that the intent is to have a club to beat teachers with. I think they're 100% right. Does anyone doubt that jmo's intent, for example?
Myself, I'd like to see some legislation penalizing the _parents_ for poor performance at school. Not going to happen, of course, but that's what I'd like to see. None of this infuriating lip service paid to the notion that 'education is important', but not important enough to actually keep track of their kids progress, or to help them with their homework, or to even see if their homework is being done. Far easier - per jmo - for the parents to simply blame the teachers when their kids don't turn in the homework.
Oh, and let me post my little news item again:
No, there's a lot to dislike about unions, and I'm not a particularly big fan of them. But the alternative is far worse; as someone else as pointed out, as silly as some of the rules seem, they're usually there for a reason, and after Something Bad happened that shouldn't have. Sort of why there's regulations that require containers of water to have things like their LD-50 printed on them (Nobody would sue a company after engaging in some bone-headed stupidity like drinking sterno, right? And certainly no sane jury would find for the plaintiff, right? Wrong. :-( I'm guessing a few of the lawyers here might have some tales to tell.)
SEIU and UNITE HERE aren't trying to preserve themselves as institutions, they're trying to get the foot in the door for service sector workers to have meaningful bargaining power.
The law that workers currently use to organize unions is hopelessly ineffective. To get around that problem, these unions have made these deals with employers so they can at least frame out the beginnings of an organization of Sodexho and Aramark workers.
This isn't a crazy idea if you remember back to how workers used unions to transform terrible jobs in manufacturing to the stable, middle class jobs that characterized manufacturing until globalization made it possible for employers to move those jobs elsewhere -- wiping out tons of jobs in both union and nonunionized sectors.
The first contract that GM workers reached with GM didn't change their work into dependable family jobs overnight. That agreement was basically a one page contract that stated that GM acknowledged that its employees had formed a union.
The Sodexho and Aramark agreements are basically the same thing -- the first step towards making inadequate service jobs into decent jobs.
Megan,
You start from a false premise.
You say that teachers are underpaid. This gets repeated so often that nobody ever questions it.
Average pay for teachers is $47,000/yr and that is according to the teacher's union. Architects, engineers, accountants and other professions (who had to go to real universities and get real educations then pass real licensing exams) make less. We never hear about how underpaid they are.
Why not?
That $47,000 per year does not take into consideration that teachers work many fewer hours per year than most jobs require.
What we need is school boards that will not roll over in union negotiations. Fat chance of that happening. Part of it is lack of competence in negotiation as a commenter noted in another comment thread. A lot of it is, they just don't care. Teachers threaten to strike? "Fine, give them more money. We'll just put up the price of beans" (to quote Clark Gable)
When teachers start getting real educations (not in ed school) and doing their job, I am willing to start listening (maybe not accepting but at least listening) to arguments that they are underpaid.
Not until then.
John Henry
Engineers and architects make more than teachers. Accountants make less. I would bet that accountants have a much more varied distribution than teachers. My brother, who is a tax accountant and a partner in a large firm makes much more than any teacher short of big-named college professors. My sister, who is an auditor, makes less than teachers with similar experience. I see nothing wrong with that.
I don't understand why it's always the fault of the union.
Who negotiated the agreements that made these unions so powerful? Why, management. So is your argument that management is less competent than the union? Well then let's fix management. It's not the union's fault management is incompetent.
Why are there unions in the first place? Because management will mess with you if there is no union or other constraint on their power. We've all seen this happen.
So, why do we assume that if the teacher's union went away education would be better? You would still be left with the education management who, like the union, are interested in their self preservation first rather than the education of the children.
So who is not represented here? Why the children. And who apparently is getting screwed? Why the children.
I'm with the several commenters who called out inadequate parenting as the primary cause of the nation's education woes. Both my parents teach; both firmly believe the single biggest factor in any child's performance is parental involvement.
It's certainly possible to rate teachers, but student performance is the wrong metric. When my dad, a retired Army officer, started teaching, he immediately outshone his "peers" because of his amazing ability to show up on time and keep the children behaved. You get one guess who wound up with all the problem children the next year ...
The proper role of a union is not confined to protecting the limited self-interest of the current membership. Labor solidarity means working towards the best interests of the working class as a whole. That this is the exception rather than the rule is why labor is dying in this country.
The problem is moral hazard exploited in the agency relationship causes other parties to denied the value intended by the original relationship - in the case of school unions this is the value of education delivered to parent's children.
My brother, the Union President at his high school, recently asked where I would move for schools for my kids. My answer was that I didn't intend to move because I didn't intend to use public schools at all. He was quite incensed. I was supposed to be spouting only politically correct answers like benamery21.
But frankly US schools are so bad both as abysmal education institutions and as being more prisons than academies that I have no intention of ever inflicting that on my children. If I were in school today I'd already be in prison at the age of 6 or 7 simply because I was interested in science and I always made that a very practical, hand-on interest which today is essentially illegal or banned in all public schools. There will not be a next generation of American scientists and engineers creating the next phases technology booms.
I've also run the numbers: it's comparable in cost to downsize to an inferior neighborhood with lower taxes and hire personal tutors or home-school as it is to buy into the best schooled neighborhood. Even with the real estate crash this is still true. And the advantage is you avoid the "lock-in" effect of the high budget-share mortgages (you get locked into jobs you hate, locked into the school system which you may come to hate, etc.).
BTW claimed "social" benefits of public school have been repeatedly proven mythical - social development does not require a formal school environment to occur; rigid state-desired conformity does.
US universities face a similar "opt-out" fate - the only things missing to facilitate their obsolescence are accreditation and professional social networking - most everything else is available from other sources.
Everyone should always remember: all transactions of economic value or resource are voluntary! This includes your time and the time of your dependents. You can (and should) always opt-out if the deal is no good. The barriers are usually more psychological than physical or legal.
In the case of schooling, the government doesn't make that easy some times but there is usually a way. If opting-out isn't on the table you've already conceded economic (and political) power of the transactional relationship to someone else before the negotiation has even started. In the union case this is the willingness to strike.
And always there is the ultimate opt-out which, sadly, in recent years has become far more thinkable: opt-out of the country.
"Stern has now largely abandoned on-the-ground organizing – labor’s core principle – in order to pursue cooperative alliances with corporations. These deals often trade the union’s greatest piece of leverage – political clout – for symbolic concessions of little benefit to the union’s members." from http://www.clintreilly.com/?p=185
'nuf said!