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Over at the Motherblog, Dana makes a useful point on teachers unions:
Just as it's easy to pick out circumstances in which the interests of teachers unions seem antithetical to the interests of children, it's easy to point to times when the two are in sync. Teachers unions advocate for smaller class sizes. Teacher's unions advocate for newer, better supplies, from textbooks, to chairs and desks, to cleaner classrooms. Teacher's unions advocate for more support staff, such as guidance counselors, psychologists to deal with learning disabilities and problems at home, and classroom assistants. All of that is very good for kids.Right. On the one hand, teacher's unions do some genuinely bad things, like make it hard to fire crummy teachers and resist pay bonuses to teach in under-served areas (though they have fallen in line behind ideas that would ease both, in return for better pay across-the-board). On the other hand, they lend lobbying muscle to a variety of priorities that are great for kids, from smaller classrooms to better supplies. Their effect on education is complicated, which is why you don't actually find evidence that removing teacher's unions improves test scores. There may indeed be good reasons to fight them on certain priorities and demand various reforms, but the problems in education are much deeper.The context of all this is that certain conservatives are gleefully suggesting that the post-Katrina improvements in New Orleans schools show the drag of teacher's unions. As Ryan Avent replies, "too many institutional factors changed [after Hurricane Katrina] for us to have a good idea what generated the improvement. And statisticians out there might note that when tracking changes over time, it helps to keep the sample constant. For an economist to look at a city’s educational system, subtract a quarter of a million poor people, then look at it again and suggest that destroying the teachers’ unions made all the difference is…well it’s not exactly a rigorous analysis." It's odd, because I don't really care about teacher's unions and don't want to constantly have this argument, but it's genuinely poisonous for the debate around education to be so infected by right wingers promising massive gains if we just neuter an interest group they find politically troublesome.
