You have a tendency to write in an angry and extreme manner. I think you should reread some of your postings and consider changing your approach.

A few questions:
1. You write “Granting principals greater power over teachers than Henry the Eighth had over corrupt monks is folly.” Isn’t this an extreme exaggeration? Most reformers just want principals to have the same authority that managers have throughout most of our current society, everywhere from private schools to public companies. Your approach should be to explain why K-12 public schools should be operated differently. Can you explain the difference?

2. For my knowledge, what exactly are you referring to with the phrase “lazy, duty-abrogating parent community”?

3. You write “Most teachers are vastly finer educators than are their principals”. I think it is critical to improve our principals and I think Bloomberg and Klein are working hard on that. However, your statement seems to be quite an exaggeration and not consistent with most peoples view. Is it based on a study you have done or read? Also, if the principals were generally good, would you be comfortable with giving them the authority typically vested in a management role? If you answer “yes” and can convince your peers of this, we might make some great progress down the road.

Nobody would ever consider my position.

Sorry. No union for me now. Not ever again.

And I tell everyone I know not to join.

I feel like I flushed 26 years and thousands of dollars right down the toilet.

I couldn’t help but notice, too, that on this site, one must REGISTER in order to comment. On Ed’s site, the comments are for everybody.

I am not putting down you or this blog. I’m just telling you what my experience with a teacher’s union was. It was worse than bad. I’d rather have the money.

I just read the link from Randi in your posting. Bluntly, it suggests that the problem is a lack of funding: more money for teachers and more money for failing schools. Was I missing something?

I think we should pay teachers more by treating them like professionals in most fields — merit pay, no seniority, no tenure. Great lawyers make more than bad lawyers. Architects aren’t advanced solely by seniority. Incompetent accountants lose their jobs. What do you think of this sort of thing? Why doesn’t it apply to public schools?

1. You write that everyone can “send their children to a private school”. That’s true, but I think you know that the biggest problem is for those who can’t afford a private school. How can you leave that out while making your point? How does this affect your argument?

2. Historically, the union has fought tooth and nail against charters. Now you use them to prove that there is choice? I agree that charters are creating large cracks in the union monopoly. I am very optimistic about the direction we are heading. I am glad that you now support charters implicitly. Can you add your eloquent support to them explicitly on this blog? I hope so.

3. What makes public education different from other services with respect to competition and choice leading to excellent, although surely imperfect, results? How do private schools survive? How can Google, Apple, and other innovative companies do such incredible, complex things without tenure, seniority, heavy government involvement, significant licensing requirements, etc.? What makes public education at the K-12 level so special? You obviously have given this a lot of thought and are an excellent writer, so I look forward to your viewpoint on these things.

Finally, thanks for pointing out Randi’s proposals — I will take a look.

For starters, it doesn’t help to take up the far right wing language that public schools somehow constitute a monopoly. They simply do not. Anyone in the US is free to establish a private school, and to send their children to a private school. Many private schools, especially schools with sponsored by a particular religious body, exist throughout the US, and many parents send their children to those schools.

What is more, many states — the majority of them — have charter schools, public schools independent of the local school district, to which parents can send their children.

And finally, many public school districts have elaborate systems of choice within the school district, providing parents with many different choices of schools to which they can send their children. In NYC, one might complain that there are so many choices in the way of high schools — literally hundreds of options — that only ‘insiders’ with special knowledge have a good handle on how to navigate the high school admissions process.

By any reasonable, non-politicized definition, that is hardly a monopoly. To the contrary, there are a great many choices.

The problem is that choice is no magic bullet for producing quality schools. Aside from the ‘true believers’ on the far right have a deep and abiding faith that the invisible hand of the marketplace will solve all problems, most educators recognize that quality schools must be consciously and deliberately built and nurtured, piece by piece, and supported by government and society. They recognize that such schools rest, above all else, on a foundation of a solid cohort of experienced, accomplished educators. They see as essential an experienced, knowledgable school leadership that understands teaching and learning and works collaboratively with teachers and parents. They understand that such schools have a solid course of study and curriculum, which the educators in the school have had a major hand in shaping. They see the need for the nurturance of a strong, democratic school culture. The ‘invisible hand’ of the market does not magically bring those things into existence.

The real problem here is that quality schools and poor schools are not evenly distributed: students from upper middle class and wealthy backgrounds rarely end up in a struggling or failing school, while students from working class and poor backgrounds all too often do. Far too many parents in inner city neighborhoods look at their neighborhood school, and do not see a quality school. And yet we know that students living in poverty are going to being many more academic and social needs to school. So those who need the most, receive the least.

There is a lot that goes into establishing that pattern. One could say that it reflects the larger political economy, and that is true as a generality, but it makes a rather complex relationship seem too simple. For while it is true that resources are often, as the case is in NY State, not even given to schools serving poorer neighborhoods and districts serving the inner city in the same magnitude as they are given to schools serving wealthier neighborhoods and districts, there are other patterns, such as the constant turnover of novice, unprepared teachers, which are much more mediated expressions of the political economy. Their solution is thus much more complicated.

All of that means that it would take a package of many different measures to turn around low performing schools. About a year and a half ago, Randi Weingarten put together a package of proposals that are a very good start. [ http://www.uft.org/news/president/spring_conferen/index.html ] The DOE has ignored her proposals.

“So teachers unions are the sole reason why some public schools are bad, curious2?” Of course not. I don’t recall writing anything like that.

“How about the public schools that are good? Are those schools good despite teachers unions?” Hard to say, but I don’t recall writing that either.

“Or is the issue a little more complex than teachers unions make for bad public schools and no unions make for good public schools?” It is much different than that, although not much more complex. The current unions promote some organizational structures that generally don’t work very well. That’s why most of our country doesn’t use them. Seniority and tenure rules, for example, generally hurt our schools.

There are good public schools and bad charter schools. There are many truly outstanding teachers in the unions. That, however, doesn’t justify some of the outdated concepts protected almost exclusively by the unions.

My simple question (which you failed to address) remains the same: do you think parents should be given a choice to send their kids to schools other than yours? Or do you feel like you should have a monopoly on educating our kids? I would love to get your viewpoint on this, realitybasededucator, because I think you can be part of the solution to improving our schools.

Or is the issue a little more complex than teachers unions make for bad public schools and no unions make for good public schools?

Sorry, curoius2, the reasons why some schools are bad and some are good go beyond whether they are unionized…and if you don’t think so, take a look at the track record of charter schools. Some are good and some are bad. A few have lost their charters because they were so bad, just the way a few public schools have been closed because they were failing and showing no improvement.

The right-wing has made a concerted effort over the last 25 years to bash unions and create a perception with the public that ALL unionized workers are lazy, ne’er-do-wells who’d be fired without union protections.

This perception is no more true than the similar belief by many right-wingers that the free market is ALWAYS more efficient than government. Take a look at how Halliburton has run its war contracts in Iraq (two hundred dollar gallons of gas; millions of dollars in reconstruction funds missing) and ask yourself if their price-gouging and profiteering is better than if the Pentagon was running the whole thing itself with government workers.

My relationship with the union is a love/hate one. I definintely don’t mind paying my dues to get those awesome benefits and to have people fighting for salary increases, improved working conditions, etc. However, there have been times when I feel the union does more harm than good, namely in not being more cooperative about getting rid of bad teachers and discouraging teachers from putting in work without getting paid. Some of us don’t mind making ourselves available to kids after school, and we shouldn’t be tsk-tsk’d for that.