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Every tax is a pay cut. Every tax cut is a pay raise.
Citizens for Limited Taxation |
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| The National Education Association | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has 1.1 million members.
The National Education Association (NEA) was established in 1857 and currently
has a membership of 2.6 million, and a budget of $1.25 billion.
Almost three quarters of the NEA are women while the NEA's officers
are typically a half to two thirds male.
The NEA is a political science textbook case exemplifying the iron law of oligarchy, the tendency of organizations with large memberships to degenerate from democracies into elite-driven groups, captured by their career staffs and serving the interests of their professional leaders. Public sector unions were not allowed until John Kennedy, in return for union support, issued an executive order allowing collective bargaining for federal employees. The government is in itself a monopoly and education is a government provided service. Compulsory attendance laws make government schools a third level monopoly, since parents have to accept this government service. After being taxed for it, most cannot afford private schools. From an economic point of view, all labor unions are engaged in trying to monopolize the supply of labor in their particular industries in order to increase its price in the form of wages. The US Supreme Court has established the consitutional principle that Americans cannot be forced to join a union - or to keep a job.
Most NEA delegates are liberal ideologues There really was a decline in the quality of education, a phenomenom that education commentators now call the "Great Decline". The mounting public distress that eventually provoked "A Nation at Risk" was indeed justified. The NEA responded by calling for the abolition of standardized testing. It is a very awkward fact for the NEA that the "Great Decline" occurred at exactly the time the teachers were becoming unionized. There were no teachers in collective bargaining units in 1962 when average SAT scores stood at their highest.
The assumption that everyone should graduate from high school is quite new. In the 1899-1900 school year, only 6.4% of America's seventeen year olds (i.e. potential seniors) got a high school diploma. After that, the proportion started increasing dramatically, but at the beginning of World War II, it had only just exceeded 50 percent. However, the high school rate continued to climb until 1968-1969, when it reached 77.1 percent. And there it appeared to run into a ceiling. In 1997-1998, it was down to 69.3 percent.
Public universities and colleges spend about $1 billion a year on "remedial education", teaching students things that they should have learned in high school. All community colleges, four out of five public four year colleges and even more than six out of ten private four year colleges feel compelled to do this. The American government school system is huge and complex. It embraces 5.4 million adults and 47 million children, nearly a fifth of its population. It's spending in 1999 amounted to $389 billion or 4.2% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Annual current spending per pupil was $275 in 1890 and $7,086 in 2000, adjusted for inflation and expressed in year 2000 dollars. That's more than twenty-five fold or an increase of 3% a year. By comparison, the US inflation adjusted GDP has increased only about 8.2 times, or an average of 1.9 percent a year. In 1900, every teacher was facing 36.7 students. As late as 1930, for every teacher, there were still 30.5 students. But by 1970, there were only 22.6 students. By 1980, there were 18.7. By 1990, each teacher was facing 17.2 students. In 1998, the last year for which numbers are available, the teacher/student ratio was 1:16.5.
Class size is not a theoretical issue. Beginning in 1996, California's Class Size Reduction (CSR) Initiative actually did attempt to boost student acheivement by reducing the size of K-3 classes from an average of thirty to a target of twenty or fewer students. With a price tag in its first year alone of $1 billion, or $800 for every participating K-3 student, "CSR was by far the largest education reform in the history of this, or any other state" - in the words of the CSR Research Consortium, which was commisioned to provide an evaluation of the program. The consortium consisted of educational establishment organizations like American Institutes for Research, RAND, Policy Analysis for California, WestED, and EdSource. The consortium's conclusion in 2002: The researchers found no relationship between statewide student achievement and statewide participation in class size reduction. Teachers are not the only adults sucked into the Black Hole of the government school system. Non-teaching staff - administrators, supervisors, librarians, guidance counselors, secretaries, bus drivers, building/ground maintenance personnel are being sucked in even faster. In 1949-1950, there were 2.36 teachers for every non-teacher; in 1969-1970 there were 1.5 teacher for every non-teacher; in 1998-1999 there were 1.09 - almost parity. And remember, the teacher/pupil ratio had been falling thoughout this period. So the number of students for each member of the educational staff, teachers, and non-teachers together has fallen even faster from 19.3 students to 1 staff member (a.k.a., adult) in 1949 to 8.6 students to 1 staff member in 1998-1999. In other words, there is now one adult for every eight or nine students in the government school system.
The government school system is simply the most prominent outbreak of socialism on the American scene. (Unemotionally defined, socialism is the government ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange.) There are rules, of course, about pay and fringe benefits. But there are rules about hiring, layoffs, and promotions. Rules about how teachers are to be evaluated, and how the evaluations can be used. Rules about the assignment of teachers to classrooms, and their (non)assignment to yard duty, lunch duty, hall duty, and after school activities. Rules about how much time teachers can be required to work, and how much time they must get to prepare far class. Rules about how students are to be disciplined. Rules about homework. Rules about class size. Rules about the numbers and uses of teacher aides. Rules about the school calendar. Rules about the role of teachers in school policy decisions. Rules about how grievances are to be handled. Rules about staff development and time off for professional meetings. Rules about who has to join the union. Rules about whether their dues will be automatically deducted from their paychecks. Rules about union use of the school facilities. And more..... The Hoover Institution's Terry M. Moe makes this shrewd point: ...the teacher unions greatest power is not the ability to get what they want, but rather the the ability to block what they don't want - and thus stifle all education reforms that are somehow threatening to their interests.
The District of Columbia schools has the highest per-pupil spending in the nation and the second lowest scores in the nation. The New York City Board of Education, with over seventy-two thousand teachers, sought to dismiss only three of them for incompetence over a period of two years. The idea that the rest of us are not competent to judge what goes on in the public schools is an article of faith within the teachers unions. "We must work together with a display of unity that we, the professional educators, know what is best for our students; that we know what is best for our schools and colleges; and, yes, we know what is best for ourselves," wrote the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) president Stephen E. Gorrie, in an editorial to his members. The vocabulary of the average American fourteen-year-old has reportedly decreased from 25,000 words to 10,000 words in the last fifty years. Overall, teacher licensure candidates had an average combined SAT score of 1029, significantly lower than the combined score of 1085 averaged by all college graduates. In the career selection process that takes place during college, the group of students who choose teaching as a career, taken as a whole, are not as high achieving as their college peers with respect to SAT scores. The NEA union's ruthless and insatiable drive for power and perquisites should earn it a new name -- the National Extortion Association. Many legislators across the country, in state houses or in the US Congress, are current or retired education employees, and as such yield tremendous power for the NEA. Regardless of its needs, the teachers union's dues are a fixed proportion of the average teacher's salary. Teacher unions understand that the public is clamoring for reform. So it preemptively generates it's own reform proposals. You can always identify a teacher unions proposal for reform by three characteristics:
Disclosure of union operations and finances to the public and its membership could be instituted by legislation. But internal union reform is also necessary. The government cannot, and should not dictate to unions how they may generate revenues - provided the unions abide by existing statues against fraud, embezzlement, extortion, etc. But simply the fact that unions tie their income to increases in teacher salaries - funds extracted from the taxpayer - necessitates greater public scrutiny. Union staff compensation is a critical component in the problem of the government school system. Garages must tell customers how their automobile repair bill was computed. Attorneys must account for time spent on a client's case. Salaries of government school superintendents and other officials are matters of public record. The NEA and AFT are in the business of providing a service to those who pay dues. They are not charities. Members should be granted the opportunity to judge truthfully whether they are getting their money's worth. So should the public. The NEA on School Vouchers Another controversial proposal has dominated debate in recent years: school vouchers. School vouchers were the brainchild of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman in a famous essay published in 1955. The idea simply put is that, if there is going to be a government subsidy to K-12 students, it would be more efficient to give some or all of it to the student and his family in the form of a voucher to be spent in the school of their choice - public, private, or religious. After all, the government fights hunger by distributing food stamps, not by owning supermarkets. The alleged reason for the unions' opposition to vouchers is the indirect passing of public funds to private schools. This, union officials say, cannot be tolerated. But public funds are being passed to private schools at this very moment, and have been for many years - with the full knowledge, and even the support, of these same teacher unions. Hard to believe? Here is a lengthy quote from NEA president Keith Geiger, extolling the virtues of America's largest "voucher" program - the G.I. Bill: "While the war still raged, President Roosevelt, with a nudge from his wife Eleanor, pushed through Congress the Servicemen's Readjustment Act, which we all know today as the G.I. Bill. This bold measure really launched the postwar education boom. Under the G.I. Bill, the federal government, yes, the federal government paid for the education of returning veterans. Specifically, the government paid their tuition and provided them with a weekly living allowance. For many veterans, the G.I. Bill meant something they had dared dream of - it meant going to college. And they went in droves. American colleges and universities would never again be the same. To accomodate the bright-eyed, they had to grow faster than ivy. What's more, the G.I. Bill changed, fundamentally and forever, how Americans think about a college education. Before the war, college had been considered an elite pasttime, like belonging to a country club. But, by the early 1950s, one in four young Americans was attending college - almost double the prewar rate. It must also be noted that for the sixty percent of the veterans who had not completed high school, the G.I. Bill paid for remedial, vocational, and technical education. In all, eight million of twelve million veterans took advantage of the G.I. Bill. The program ended up costing, in today's dollar, $119 billion. Now that's what I call a national commitment to education! The G.I. Bill turned out to be one of the wisest investments the United States has ever made. It provided the brainpower for America's incredible economic surge that began after the war and carried on right through the 1950s, the '60s and early '70s." This is a remarkable speech to be coming from the leader of an organization unalaterally opposed to school vouchers. In 1955, when Milton Friedman first introduced the voucher program in his famous essay, he used the G.I. Bill as an example of what he meant. They claim that, with limitted space, private schools will refuse to admit students with low academic achievement, discipline problems, or disabilities -- a practice known as cherry picking. Admission to the government school comes only with the price of the house. Real estate prices are their "private school tuition". When asked why vouchers are bad, Carole Shields of People for the American Way replied: Fairness: You just can't pluck some kids out of a school and give them more hope and more opportunity and leave the rest behind. This means she thinks parents have some sort of obligation to inflict a miserable education on their children. It's a species of moral backmail. The government school system's inability to pay good teachers more than bad ones irks the public even more than its inability to get rid of bad teachers. The unions are good at sidestepping accountability. Opposing every reform that comes down the pipeline might be acceptable if government school systems were exceptionally good. But it is obviously untenable if they are not. Union officials recognize this. Periodically, they launch campaigns to persuade Americans that they are not the Abominable Nopersons that the casual observer might conclude. The teacher unions exert inordinate control in the certification process. They have extensive representation in the dominant Education School accrediting organization -- NCATE, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, and also in the national teacher certification organization, NBPTS, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Moral: it's really tricky, this Teacher Trust. If it can't get in through the door, by getting it's rented politicians to vote mandatory monopoly bargaining, it tries to get in through the window by controlling the teacher certification process. Not only is there power to be had but there is money to be made by controlling America's teacher accrediting system. Controlling the certification process can create barriers to entry. By reducing the supply of teachers able to enter the business, the union will be able to increase their proce (salaries). Combined with the extensive monopoly the NEA already has though the collective bargaining process, this would really be unprecented concentration of economic power. Not only should propective barriers to entry into reaching be stopped, the current barriers should be relaxed. Why should former Vice President Al Gore teach journalism at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, when he can't teach a high school English composition class without a credential and a year of student teaching. There are a lot of people who would make excellent teachers but are discouraged by the bureaucracy of the certification process. Breaking up large school districts will increase the relative influence of parents and the community on the district's actions, and in the process will lessen the power of the unions in the process. "We're in the business of education", says Chuck Essigs, Mesa schools assistant superintendent of business services. "Anything we can do to be more efficient in support areas puts more money into the classroom." The Detroit Public Schools have discovered the same thing. "Our core competence is education. It's not food service. It's not transportation. It's not information technology," says district chief information officer Thomas Diggs. The opposition of union activist to charter schools is visceral and probably insurmountable. In "The Bell Curve", Murray and Herrnstein noted that all whites in the top quarter of the intelligence range were completing high school. BY contrast, only about three fifths of whites in the bottom quarter of the intelligence range were completing high school. But it's also thought provoking to consider how many are not dropping out. Murray and Herrnstein estimated that over 60 percent of white teenagers with IQs below 90 were completing high school. And so were nearly half of those with IQs below 75, despite being at or below what is considered to be the threshhold of retardation, according to its clinical definition. Teacher unions have resisted merit pay for teachers, preferring to pay them based simply on seniority. |
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Education Next, Cambridge, MA., 617-495-6954 http://www.educationnext.org Quarterly publication on school reform
National Council on Teacher Quality, Wash DC,
Landmark Legal Foundation, Hherndon, VA, 703-689-2373
Pioneer Institute for Public Institute for Public Policy Research,
Boston, MA
PTOToday, Wrentham, MA, 800-644-3561
The Heritage Foundation, Washington DC, 202-546-4400 |
Send comments to:
hjw2001@gmail.com
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