Intercepts
A listening post monitoring public education and teachers’ unions.

Hey everyone! Mike here. We’re currently working our way through the Straits of Magellan. Still hoping to get to the Falklands on Saturday but the weather and sea conditions are iffy. It looks as though things are going along swimmingly here on the blog, so have fun and I’ll see you (figuratively) when I get back.

By Ryan Boots

While the teachers unions are hardly new to criticism, they’ve recently caught flak from some unlikely sources. Überliberal Eric Alterman recently took a swipe (:09 – “I don’t like the teachers union, but I like every other union”), and really dropped the hammer here. Mickey Kaus then took the baton: “Why does the pro-teachers’ union blog read like something a General Motors executive might have written in, say, 1985? Our cars are as good as any in the world! The critics all have evil motives!” And then, of course, it was all downhill from there.

If notable liberals like Alterman and Kaus are joining the chorus, I’d say it’s a sign that the nation’s biggest organized labor organizations are fast wearing out their welcome. But while I look to the day when union clout becomes good and humbled, this school choice supporter doesn’t think an irrelevant union is necessarily a good thing. As this guest blogger during Mike’s vacation last year pointed out, teachers need a safety net in our litigious society. And merely being a good teacher won’t necessarily protect one from a heavy-handed administrator, as illustrated by the firing of a beloved English teacher from a charter school by the alleged union-busting school founder last June.

But the operative word is good teachers. One way the unions can start rehabilitating their image is to begin visibly and aggressively supporting policies that support good teachers, even if–especially if–those policies come at the expense of their incompetent colleagues. I’d really like to see the union embrace tenure reform, but if this post from Edwize is any indication (“tenure is a line in the sand for us”), that’s out of the question.

So how about merit pay? In nearly every other sector of our society, rewarding superior job performance is a fact of life. Given recent experiences in Little Rock, where teachers agreed in advance to the compensation formula, merit pay could easily be pitched as a win-win for schools and teachers, especially if struggling students are seen as an opportunity rather than a burden. And we’ve seen the unrest that can result when, as in Houston, teachers had no input in the design of the program, so the union could easily portray itself–accurately–as a partner in improving the process.

Alterman himself said he’s fed up watching the teachers’ unions oppose common-sense reforms. If the unions want to improve their public standing–not to mention mend fences with people like Alterman, who should be their natural allies–embracing merit pay wouldn’t be a bad way to go.

By John Stallcup

From the early days of the United States, with minimum regulation, over 1,600 state-chartered, private banks issued paper money. These bank notes, with over 30,000 varieties of color and design, were easily counterfeited, causing widespread confusion and mistrust. With no common national currency there was no confidence in the value of any given dollar.

After nearly 100 years the anti-federal-control politicians finally threw in the towel. Teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and pressed to finance the Civil War, the 37th Congress authorized the U.S. Treasury to issue paper money and the U.S. finally got what it desperately needed: a common currency.

What makes any currency (or diploma) valuable? The perception and confidence in it based on the belief that its exchange value is at parity at the time of the exchange. Today, one $10 bill has the exchange value of any other $10 bill – not so for a high school diploma.

In the United States, the power to define what standards a student must meet or exit exam they must pass in order to receive a high school diploma has been the responsibility of the states. With few exceptions the states have failed miserably. Until we have specific national content standards and a national high school exit exam the high school diploma will continue to be a counterfeit currency and an outright shame.

By Steve Schuck

In September 2005, James Duncan Davidson introduced the idea of “management by fiction.” His premise – businesses, corporations, and organizations many times plan their strategies on lies even when truth is available.

For example: “Who would have thought that the levees would break?” For decades, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers presented scenario after scenario that a catastrophe of Biblical proportions could occur. However, the fiction seemed to be that disasters on that scale only happened in Third World countries.

We in the school choice movement seem to have applied the principles of management by fiction to our strategies in hopes of moving the needle. We love to gather and speak of choice, graduation rates, test scores, low-income students, and the like. We expend millions of dollars on scholarships, school board elections, and all types of lobbying efforts. Yet all of our strategies are based on the lie: Teachers’ unions don’t matter.

Is it just me, or isn’t there an elephant in the room? The single most formidable obstacle to improving education in America is the teachers’ union. When will we have the stomach to take them on? Unless we address the strongest protectors of the status quo in education, our efforts to help kids, particularly those who are poor, will be for naught.

Criticism was plentiful when NASA would not listen to its engineers concerning the shuttle’s O-rings. Will there be any less criticism for those of us who advocate educational choice but fail to deal with the teachers’ union?

By Gordon Jones

Twenty-five years ago I wrote an essay for the Institute of Political Economy at Utah State University on Utah and school choice. This year, the Utah House of Representatives and Senate passed a statewide voucher bill, which was signed by Governor Huntsman.

In my original essay, I thought that school choice was a no-brainer for Utah. The state was conservative (though not as one-party as it is now), and the student body relatively homogeneous.

How wrong could you get!

My basic error, I think, was in not realizing that Utahns essentially regard their schools as private anyway. For the most part, Utah parents were (and are) happy with the schools. The teachers are mostly Mormon, mostly teaching with the prevailing values of the community. School choice offered very little to the vast majority of Utah families. Few of them were going to use private schools no matter what happened. Private school enrollment in Utah is the lowest in the nation.

An influx of Hispanic students has demonstrated that there are problems in the Utah schools, and budget surpluses this year bought enough votes to get the bill through.

There will be lawsuits, no doubt, but after 25 years, the first definitive step has been taken.

Bill: “Look, we left ourselves a note!”

Ted: “Whoah, that was nice of us!”

By Mike Antonucci of 18 months ago

No matter your position on the No Child Left Behind Act — I happen to think it’s a federal power grab but that many of its opponents are hypocritical — you should read this piece by Linda Shaw of the Seattle Times.

The implicit suggestion in the article is that — in Washington State anyway — NCLB will neither work wonders nor utterly destroy public schools. In fact, school districts will simply do what they have always done without much concern about it one way or the other.

“I don’t have the time to worry about it,” said William Miller, superintendent of Wahluke, a small district in Grant County.

I believe this is the default position of any bureaucracy as large as America’s public school system. The people who want reform institute it without federal insistence. The people who don’t want reform won’t institute it no matter who insists. If forced to reform, they will undermine it.

So, as with so many education issues, it devolves to winning or losing the political battle, without any regard for the ultimate outcome.

By Greg Forster

As I write this, the Utah House has just passed a bill to offer school vouchers to almost every student in the state. That’s a huge breakthrough for Milton Friedman’s vision of universal vouchers.

Whatever the outcome of the Utah bill, the political landscape will never be the same. For years even the school choice movement has dismissed the prospects for universal vouchers. They’ve stuck to limited voucher programs which, while they do help, are too small to spur revolutionary market innovation.

Right up to the end of his life, Dr. Friedman was convinced that at least one state would pass universal vouchers before long. To those who said it could never happen, he argued that big policy reversals don’t come a little at a time. As a policy becomes increasingly dysfunctional, policymakers seek to preserve it – first by tinkering, then by stronger and stronger measures. Only after extended failure brings on a crisis do they look at other options. Then, if there’s a credible alternative it can be rapidly implemented.

It’s easy to see this pattern looking back on Dr. Friedman’s experience with the crisis of Keynesianism in the 1970s. A similar crisis is upon us in education. Right now people are doubling down on the government school monopoly, trying to save it. But you can’t keep doubling down forever – just as Nixon’s increasingly desperate wage and price controls couldn’t save Keynes. Eventually, at least one state was bound to see reality. Looks like Utah has chosen to be the winner.