"Waiting For Superman"

My wife and I watched Waiting For Superman last weekend, a "documentary" about the sorry state of public schools in the US these days. They talk to several parents and kids, and lay the blame for our "failing" schools squarely on the teachers union. It's a pretty good movie, it all hangs together, the story is believable, and the conclusion seems obvious. One thing I noticed was at the beginning of the movie they show a map of where all the failing schools are, and they weren't any in Oregon, so obviously I have no idea what the problem is, though Portland seems to be having some trouble with a couple of their high schools.

The crux of the matter is that all the public school teachers in the United States belong to one of two unions: either the NEA or the AFT, and they all have contracts that grant them tenure after two years of teaching. So we get all these bad teachers accumulating in the school system and they can't be fired. New York has gone to setting up "rubber rooms" for their troublesome teachers. Bad teachers are relieved of their teaching assignments, but since they can't be fired, they are reassigned to what you might call detention. They have to show up at the rubber room every day and spend all day there. They don't have any duties and they get paid. The best that can be said about this arrangement is that at least they aren't wasting any student's time.

The NEA and the AFT are the biggest, most powerful unions in the country. They give more money to polical candidates than any other organization. Washington DC hired a new superintendent for their schools recently, this makes like the tenth person in ten years or something. Nobody has been able to make any headway because of the unions. The superintendent offered to base teacher pay on performance, and good teachers could get like 50% more money, if they could get rid of the tenure clause in the contract. The union would not even let their members vote on the proposal.

Put this together with the Koch brother's union busting efforts in Wisconsin and you might think that maybe the Koch brothers are on to something. Maybe the teacher's unions are the reason so many schools are such disasters.

I brought the subject up at lunch Thursday, and no one agreed. No one had ever encountered a teacher who wasn't teaching. There were some good teachers, and there were some who weren't so hot. I had a few who bored me to tears (I was going to say "death", but that would be a lie, as after all I'm still here). There is a feeling that there is too much bureaucracy and too much testing, a suspicion that there are some kids who either can't learn or don't want to learn, and the policy of social advancement is a bad one.

I don't really have any answers here. I hear that the much bally-hooed "Charter Schools" are, on average, not having any more success than regular schools. I also heard that high school drop-out rate is still about one-third and has been for as long as we have been keeping track.

And then there were a couple of other issues that bugged me. One was the explicitly stated presumption that a college degree would get you a good job when we know that is not true. Some people will get good jobs, and you may need a college degree in order to even compete in the "good job" sweepstakes, but a degree by itself is not worth much, which prompted someone at lunch to say that all this propaganda is just a campaign by liberal arts colleges to enroll more paying customers.

The other issue was that there aren't enough qualified technical people. Companies in Silicon Valley were having to recruit people from India. I suspect the real reason is that the contracting agencies were not offering big enough kickbacks to the hiring firms when they were hiring US citizens. If you are paying a worker $50 an hour, and charging the customer $100 an hour, why, your margin is only $50 an hour, and you can't be expected to sacrifice any of that. But if you can hire a guy from India for $20 an hour, you can offer a kickback of $20 an hour to the HR manager at the hiring firm, keep your $50 an hour, and get a $10 an hour bonus to boot.