When I hear people bemoaning the low pay and hard conditions of public school teachers, my reaction is not knee-jerk “b.s.,” but more like a “yes and no – some good and principled and smart ones are underpaid, some lazy corrupt ones are overpaid and taint the well for everyone.”
Now note well that the solution to this disgraceful situation is not to stop paying the teachers for doing nothing, but to shift them to a slightly-less-obviously-ridiculous [maybe – jury’s out for me] form of doing nothing, for full pay.
What possible justification can there be for “educators” to be exempt from the real-world of the workplace (I’ll broaden this to include strict tenure-based promotions, automatic raises for sometimes-meaningless credentials (ed. school grad degrees), and utter resistance to being evaluated on their skills or outcomes)? Add to this the fact that there’s a fairly expensive (to the taxpayer) pension pot at the end of the rainbow under some of these union contracts – yet it’s almost impossible to knock anyone off track even for cause under the tenure system?
I myself believe that the great majority of wrongful discharge/employment discrimination suits are meritless (simply applying a version of Occam, I assume that otherwise-qualified individuals dismissed for no good reason or for irrational bias would shrug, shake the dust from their sandals, and have a new and better job next week, and certainly not have time for months of litigation). But put that aside, and let me embrace for a moment the full panoply of wrongful discharge and discrimination remedies in the courts – why aren’t those sufficient recourse for teachers accused of ineptitude or misconduct to vindicate themselves, after being fired wrongly? What possible good is served by having the lengthy adjudication of suspension/termination that are in many or most cases probably going to prove justified take place before the dismissal, with the public paying a possible miscreant to do nothing?
On a final note, observe the, well, juvenile, ridiculous behavior/statements attributed to several of the teachers in the article. Forget whether our children is going to be able to learning from such types – isn’t there a chilling effect on the desire of mature, smart, motivated professionals to join the ranks of a profession that gladly hosts, nay rewards, such cretins as colleagues?
P.S. I’m no Obama fan, and I’m certainly no believer in federal control of education, but in the gift horse/mouth department I may be having to grit my teeth and welcome what may be a glimmering of hope for breaking the tyranny of the teachers unions – I’ve been reading that the competition for the latest slug of federal funding for schools may end up turning in part on the states’ willingness to push back against the unions on issues such as testing and de-emphasizing pure tenure advancement.
ETA because someone always says, so what’s the debate, can anyone justify (in this economy, etc.) not immediately pressing as one of our highest priorities to undo ridiculous one-sided teachers’ union contracts?
Your post is a little difficult to follow, and from the article I’m not sure I understand your outrage.
The linked article seems to describe a system where teachers accused of misconduct are placed on paid leave or “desk duty” while waiting for a ruling. This would be closely analogous to how police officers are treated while under investigation.
Good point, and I don’t agree with such a broad policy in all cases, as for instance:
A limited rationale for desk jobs for cops involved in incidents is that, one, sometimes policies (probably judiciously) cause for alternative assignment as an automatic matter whenever, say, a gun is discharged, or an accusation of police brutality is made – and that officers will more frequently than most of us be faced with situations in which they take conduct to physically restrain or harm someone that may well be (a) totally cool; or (b) totally uncool. Other than that – I would say that any exception to at-will employment requires a stronger rationale than I’ve heard in support of these broad union-demanded policies.
Especially when it leads to it being difficult to discipline or fire people accused of (in some of the recurrent fact patterns) inappropriate interaction with, uh, children.
So you think that an accusation is all it should take to get a teacher fired?
Then if the fired teacher was really OK they will be able to get another job in a week?
Really?
Some pissed off or troubled kid says, ‘teacher sexually abused me!’ you would just fire the teacher but if the teacher was unjustly accused, they could go to the next school and get a better job in a week after being fired for sexually abusing a child.
They only taint the well for people who have an axe to grind. There are lazy, corrupt people in every occupation, and despite what many like to think, they are often allowed to keep their jobs (sometimes they even get promoted). Try holding corporations to the same standards we hold public officials to, and you will see that incompetence is everywhere.
More importantly, people bemoan the low pay because it exacerbates the problem, creating more “bad” teachers, and allowing more to remain in the field. Why? Because teacher attrition rates rise as a result, costing more than $2 billion/year. Furthermore, it puts a strain on the remaining teachers, some of whom become “bad” teachers, and prevents many districts from firing “bad” teachers because they don’t have anyone more competent to replace them. Half of teachers now quit within 5 years. I’m sure some were great, and others were not-so-great. However, when you have so many people trying something and deciding it’s not worth the effort, many you need to take a hard look at the system rather that individual bad apples.
Please note that some of these teachers have been falsely accused of doing something wrong, or are being railroaded. The “rubber room” is a way of making them do something, rather than sitting at home on paid leave pending a review. More cynically, the point is to make these people quit. That’s why they send them there, so they lash out, or just decide it’s not worth it. Why do you think they call them “rubber rooms”? That’s why they prevent teachers from decorating, prevent them from leaving outside of certain times, have security guards escort them to the rooms, and make them wash their dishes in the bathroom sink. The whole point is to get them to crack. Firing them outright is not an option many times, not only for the reasons mentioned above, but also because nobody would choose an occupation so unstable.
Every employee deserves a way to defend themselves against a charge that they are not doing their job. Particularly when your job security is subject to the opinions of children you have to discipline and critique, and bureaucrats that must pander to any and every one.
Because those rules were negotiated as a form of “compensation”. That’s why many people decide to teach, because of the stability. Why do you think anyone would voluntarily give that up? Even in places where they are trying to phase out those things, you end up having to pay teachers a lot more, often an unsustainable amount. I don’t understand why this is so hard to grasp. People rarely complain about people in white-collar jobs getting severance pay, unnecessary company-paid business trips/dinner/golf outings/etc., or CEOs getting golden parachutes; but give a teacher a $1500 raise, and people go apeshit. I guarantee private sector inefficiencies and “unjustifiable” practices cost you far more than anything “given” to educators.
It’s not impossible. First, teachers (even tenured ones) are fired all the time. You only need just cause. Proving that can be difficult, and costly, but so is doing it in the private sector. However, more often than not, teachers just quit. You rarely need a mechanism to more easily fire people when half of them are quitting anyway.
Second, most teachers (afaik) have to work at least 3 years to get any form of tenure. That means they have 3 years in which they can be fired for nearly anything. Everybody on your side of the fence has 3 years to evaluate the teacher and decide whether they can cut it. Why is their a pressing need to continue this indefinitely? Can you explain to me why you think such a change would result in better teachers?
This is just your unfounded, and irrational bias. Please present some stats to back up your claim.
Do you know many lawyers who would take a case to get a teacher his/her 40k/year job back? How many teachers can afford to higher those lawyers? More importantly, clogging up the court system would be more expensive in the long term because the school would need far more representation as well. You don’t see the folly in trying to save money by involving the courts, and more lawyers? Unless you think more of these people will just walk away, and never teach again, you would just make the situation worse.
Yeah, especially when they could have colleagues like say, Tony Hayward, or any number of the assholes at Goldman Sachs that smile in your face as they sell you worthless investments. Like I said before, how mature would your reaction be to being forced to be in that environment? They make college-educated professionals wash dishes in the bathroom, and require them to be escorted to a drab, isolated room. When you treat people like animals, they tend to meet your expectations.
Sure. The perks you mention are negotiated terms of compensation. Even so, we have trouble attracting our best and brightest to become educators. Removing those perks, which are often non-economic, or are less costly than higher pay, will result in less overall compensation, and fewer desirable applicants. It stands to reason that if being a teacher were such a good deal (tenure, summers off, etc.), more people would want to teach. Yet, that is not the case. Turns out most reason that it is a pretty shitty deal.
Teacher’s Unions, while imperfect, are one of the few things that lends a level of professionalism and dignity to a job that can often be degrading and humiliating. What little respect teachers get is due to the fact that they have an advocate promoting their collective interests and ensuring they have academic freedom and occupational stability. While unions may be bad for businesses in some respects, it’s important to remember that schools aren’t businesses.
Teachers need some kind of fair review when they’re accused of doing something wrong. There were a few objections to rubber rooms: that the teachers are doing absolutely nothing while they are there, and yet they have to show up “for work” (which is, I don’t know, Joseph Heller- or Matt Groening-esque), that they get full pay and benefits, and that they were usually there for years on end. That’s not a fair review, it’s a complete waste of time and money.
The story is long but worth reading, and it demonstrates pretty conclusively that this system was fucked.
Most of what Huerta88 says is still off-base, but yes, a system where you work for three years and then have what is essentially 30 years of guaranteed employment, and often terrific pension and benefits, is screwed up and does not work to the benefit of students or schools. Teachers shouldn’t be fired for no reason, and I’m not willing to accept Huerta88’s idea that if they’re really good, they’ll be fine even if they get screwed by their employer, but this is not right. You shouldn’t be able to work for three years and then mail it in for 30, or get what amounts to a free pass for the rest of your career.
[John Stuart Mill]Any system whatever can be shown to work ill if it is supposed to be conjoined with universal idiocy.[/jsm]
Accusation? Of course not, is that how it works at your job? I’m assuming that as in any other workplace, competent local administrators and higher-ups can and do reasonably expeditiously, make a judgment call about any performance or conduct related accusation or problem. I have a lot of women reporting to me and am very cognizant of avoiding the appearance of impropriety. I’ve seen both genuine and non-meritorious misconduct complaints brought against others by half a dozen women over the time I’ve been where I am. Most were handled right by the local brass, some were botched, and I guess I’d support someone who wanted to sue for being fired on bogus grounds. I certainly would not support or demand a system where I can’t be fired until every avenue of adjudication and appeal had been exhausted. At will employment starts from the assumption that I can fire you (and you can quit!) for any reason at all, including just not liking the cut of your jib.
To be clear, I don’t advocate breaching any contracts, I’d just like municipalities to be a little less supine in future negotiations with any union.
46,000 kids, some presumably among the best and brightest, applied for about 4,600 Teach For America jobs this year. It isn’t difficult to find stories about them leaving within a couple of years, their idealism beaten down by, in part, the bureaucracy. And think about it – how many high-prestige jobs that would traditionally qualify as “professions” are unionized? Doctors? Lawyers? I’d view compulsory membership in a union that is highly politicized as the equivalent of joining the Teamsters (to which I belonged once against my will) – not exactly an ennobling step up from an elite college education.
How would you improve the system? Honestly, how can you fairly adjudicate such claims while paying the teachers less? It clearly shouldn’t take 3 years to evaluate such things, but that is another matter.
First, you don’t have guaranteed employment. You just have a guarantee that someone will have to have just cause to fire you. Second, what makes you think there are vast numbers of teachers out there who work really hard for 3 years to get tenure, then just decide to suck at their job. Is there any data that backs this up? Clearly, there would be some evidence that students do better under newer teachers in that case, right? What bothers me about a supposition like this is that you accept as a predicate that teachers are lazy, dishonest, of bad character, and that they are primarily motivated by tenure or the desire to not be fired. I find it kinda disheartening that such beliefs are common, and wonder if that’s one reason people look down on the profession.
A serious accusation, particularly of sexual impropriety, will result in automatic suspension of a teacher in nearly every case. So yes, a student’s accusation could, in a system without unions, result in dismissal. How fair would that be? Either way, I am sure you would have far more teachers being blackmailed for grades, etc.
Children aren’t in most workplaces. The standards and expectations are very different. Plus, most workplaces are only concerned with the bottom line, and can just find reasons to fire anyone who speaks out for other “unrelated” reasons. That’s why sexual harassment is still so common. Your system doesn’t prevent bad behavior, or ensure competence, it just encourages compliance and secrecy.
Also by the low pay, thankless students, and shitty conditions. Teach for America (a two-year program) is hot right now, but I doubt even they can fully staff all the schools that need help.
You picked two really terrible examples. The AMA and the ABA are both engage rent-seeking type behavior. They essentially function as unions, and likely distort the market far more than teacher’s unions do. In short, several professions are essentially “unionized”, and they don’t receive nearly half the criticism.
The teacher’s unions are only “highly politicized” because one party (primarily) is trying to destroy them. It’s a matter of survival.
They don’t need pay cuts while the claims are adjudicated, they just need to review the claims in a timely fashion. There should be a better and more consistent review process for teacher performance, and districts should have the flexibility to get rid of the ones who can’t hack it. Some teachers get screwed over and need the union’s full protection, but one who repeatedly shows up for class drunk needs to be fired, not given a three-year vacation at full pay. I appreciate the fact that the teachers’ union goes all-out for its members, but when things get to that point it’s not good for the educational process.
It’s not another matter because that was a huge part of the problem with the rubber room system. How long do police departments take to review a questionable shooting - a few weeks, maybe a couple of months? There is no earthly reason there should be years of appeals any time a district wants to get rid of a teacher for incompetence or misconduct. Two or three or five years of appeals where the teacher continues to draw a salary and accrue benefits, no less.
And the effect is that teachers become almost unfireable.
My public school education, where I went to a school that was supposed to be very good and had a few great teachers and a lot of others who weren’t. I’ll guesstimate that I had 30 to 35 teachers between grades 7 and 12 (seven or eight per day). And I didn’t say they decided to suck. I said they mailed it in, which means that after impressing the administrators enough to get hired, they got by with the bare minimum effort.
I said nothing that even vaguely resembles this, so I don’t know what you’re responding to. I didn’t start from the assumption that teachers are bad or lazy. I said there is a major flaw with this system, which is that bad and lazy teachers get more protection than they deserve. That’s to the detriment of the people they are supposed to be teaching. That’s hardly the only problem with the education system but you can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. The job security in teaching is a huge attraction. Granted, it is often balanced by low pay and difficult hours during the school year. But I think the current system is just not flexible enough.
Not sure which behaviors you have in mind. AMA certainly has a lobbying position on healthcare related issues. Couldn’t tell you if the ABA is big on lobbying. Both could be accused of trying to “limit supply” by licensure requirements, I suppose, though at least in the case of the ABA (a) licensure takes place at the state level and no one nationwide coordinates the maximum number of law school slots and (b) God knows there’s no end to the proliferation of lawyers and even new law schools if you read the papers. Does the ABA lobby for complex legislation and regulation to ensure full employment? Don’t know, but I’d need some more flesh on the bones of that. Do lawyers in general thrive on complex regimes that appeal to their nitpicky natures and economic self-interest? Almost certainly, but any big government is going to have those, lawyers or not.
This misses my point, which is that individual citizens/taxpayers are going to be very slow to understand or care about what you allege to be rent-seeking by doctors and lawyers that amounts to more of a critique of overly-cozy relationships between trade associations and government. To my point in the OP, that the public won’t vote for better salaries and working conditions for teachers (as maybe they in principle should, for good teachers) when they read stories like this – your analogy isn’t very useful because however “union like” you think the ABA/AMA are on a national policy level, they are not union like in anything like the rubber room sense. That is, if you’re falsely (or genuinely) accused of a crime, of ineptitude, of failure to develop your skills, of inability to work with others, in a law firm or medical practice, good luck waiting for the ABA/AMA, or anyone, to defend you, to speak up on your behalf, to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement that insulates you from discipline for three years. You will find yourself on the street, and/or before a relevant disciplinary board, all alone, in double time. And your remedy if any will come later in the civil courts. Maybe that’s too harsh, maybe the “fair” outcome is somewhere between that and the rubber room, but if the goal is to get better teachers and better schools, I can guarantee you factually that pointing out alleged structural rent-seeking by lawyers and doctors will inflame public passion about as well as theoretical musings about the military-industrial complex (which were probably on point), whereas pointing out goldbricking money-for-nothing setups will get the goat of anyone who’s ever been mad about paying taxes, or his kids’ crummy education, or having to prop up a lazy co-worker. That’s just human nature, and no one’s making the case for increased spending on schools easier as long as these rubber room stories and other examples of ridiculous union contracts (don’t get me started on the cops retiring at six figure salaries by goosing their overtime in their final years on the job) are front and center (as they need to be).
In my state, since 20 years ago, the number of students has remained roughly the same, teachers as well. However, the number of administrators in the DOE (all teachers escaping the classroom,) has increased by 10X.
There’s a good series on public education at Newsweek that also details how powerful teacher unions are screwing up the nation. (Keyword: Rhee)
However, don’t think this is recent. People who have been paying attention have noticed this problem since the 70’s and the merger of the AFL-CIO.
How would you pay for this review process? How would you consistently evaluate teacher performance?
It is another matter because it hasn’t been demonstrated that they delay is due to the unions themselves. Why do you assume the union is making the arbitrator take 2-5 years to hear a case?
That’s just not true, and even if it were, that’s the cost of the compensation structure we have set up.
Your experience has no bearing on your supposition that this was a common thing; something we should worry about. Even as a general proposition, it fails the smell test. If it were true, no professional baseball or basketball player would ever try after signing a long-term contract. Furthermore, owners would never offer long-term contracts. Yet, they do. Why? Because this is largely not a problem, even when millions of dollars are at stake. Mostly people have integrity, and will not try to get by with the bare minimum effort, even if they knew what that was. It’s not like someone comes to you and says this is the least amount of work you can get away with. Plus, if this were a big issue, principals would just fire teachers after 2 years. Why don’t they do that? If it can be demonstrated that non-tenured teachers are more effective, schools boards could just fire all teachers before they get tenure, and rehire them or others as they see fit.
That’s clearly implied by what you said. Why would you need to create a system that prevents teachers from “mailing it in” after 3 years if you did not already assume that this be a likely consequence of not having such a system? Do you take contention with my characterization of someone who would do that as lazy or bad?
That’s always the cost of taking a principled stance. For example, freedom of speech protects the Fred Phelps’ of the world just as it does you or me. That’s the point. It’s also worth noting that bad and lazy teachers still deserve a right to be heard, and to prove that characterization is false. You can only deem the bad and lazy AFTER their cases have been heard. If there was a better way to determine that while protecting the good teachers, don’t you think the unions would back that as well?
It’s not flexible largely because people don’t respect teaching, and will not pay them more. The rigidity is primarily exerted by the public, not the unions. Non-economic compensation is the deal we’ve struck to placate the tax paying public. Now that tax-increases are almost always off the table, the concessions have to be of the sort that you criticize.
How does Starbucks or a medical practice or the American Cancer Society evaluate their employees’ performances (and yes, they all are big enough or have diverse enough clients/markets that standardization of evaluation is not easy – nonetheless, it gets done).
That this is currently the case is probably true (though I’d dispute characterization of everything the public sector unions get as non-economic – the pensions and healthcare are certainly not free). Nothing about this fact tells us which came first – proliferation of unions and contracts leading to insulation of teacher union members from market forces/job performance standards that most of the rest of us face every day, or public unwillingness to pony up more money for a product that by any number of metrics arguably produces less bang for buck in terms of educational outcomes than systems outside the U.S. public school unionized teacher rubric. I have heard the statement, not from people bashing unions, that “no one in my town will vote to increase the school budget anymore.” I’d need to see some figures (admittedly I don’t have them either) to tease out whether that “anymore” meant that they used to, but then got greedy, or but then got fed up with the schools/teachers/bureaucracy, or . . . .
I may have missed the point your are making here, but I think it’s in part because you have largely switched from a substantive objection (rubber rooms are bad) to a political calculation (stories like this make it hard to justify raises). In that sense, I wholeheartedly agree with you that “rubber rooms” are a bad for teachers in a political sense. However, I think the public has largely embraced the whole Reagan-era government is bad ethos, and that raising teacher pay is politically unattainable even in the absence of stories like this. Tax increases take down mayors and presidents alike, and politicians will rarely enact the type of transparent tax increase that would allow for an across the board pay increase. This isn’t a PR problem, it’s a matter of fiscal priorities and a lack of political will. People won’t even pay to fix bridges or roads, what makes you think they will pay more for schools?
Both organizations are still unlikely to take your license in all but the most egregious cases. That’s why 5% of doctors are responsible for 54% of malpractice payouts. Regardless, you point stands. They will not protect your job per se, but they will protect your livelihood, and your ability to make money using those skills, by allowing you to keep your license. Teacher’s unions must protect “jobs” because losing your job as a teacher often means you lose your livelihood; at least to a greater extent than it does as a lawyer or doctor. Teachers, as a general rule only work for public or private schools. If one avenue is largely closed as a result of a bogus claim, the damage is far greater than that experienced by a doctor or lawyer. Also, as a teacher, they usually only offer jobs at the beginning of the year, and you will become radioactive if your job history indicates that irregularities that cannot be easily explained away.
Comparing teaching to the private sector is not a fair comparison. At most jobs, your work can be evaluated and critiqued. You can learn from your co-workers, and you can get feedback from those around you. Most of that is not available to teachers. Many are evaluated once a year, they rarely get to learn from other teachers, and get only indirect feedback in the form of student testing. Private sector workers can climb the company ladder, and can always look for higher paying jobs in the same field based on their productivity and worth. Teachers cannot do any of that. I guess you can become an administrator, but other than that, you are stuck doing the same job with few opportunities for advancement.
Most private sectors companies are not under the same level of scrutiny that public sector employees are. They don’t have to account for every dollar or every inefficiency, they wouldn’t have to justify spending more money to anyone, nor would they have to seek approval. More importantly, in the private sector, you generally have a work product that can easily be evaluated. This isn’t the case with teachers.
Good point. I think things like that are more easily swallowed because it is delayed compensation. It’s often not on the book immediately, so it doesn’t hurt as much.
The public won’t tolerate tax increases for anything. That’s one reason why 46 states have deficits right now. People don’t want to pay for anything, but want everything to work well (see California).
With the money saved from not paying teachers to sit on their asses for years on end? Money paid to teachers sitting in limbo is money wasted - it’s not generating value, and it’s not staying in your coffers. If the teacher is being paid $X per year to do nothing and a prompt review would get them out of the rubber room Y years sooner, any solution that costs less than $X*Y will improve the school’s financial standing.
And whose fault is it for not giving accused teachers a prompt hearing? I read the article. It doesn’t appear to me that unions or lawyers or the teachers themselves came up with the idea of locking teachers up in a windowless room for “months if not years” to wait for an administrative hearing.
For the record, when my wife was a public school teacher, the district required *seven *years employment before they’d grant tenure. That was seven years in that district – she had taught in private schools (which didn’t grant tenure, period) for seven years before that.
I didn’t feel like I switched – if I look at my OP title, I was trying to communicate that I had two related points:
(1) [very bottom line] No raises, factually, will be favored while this stuff is in the news; and
(2) [IMHO] They probably shouldn’t be, when the system is clearly so broken.
But if that wasn’t clear, yeah, I’m kind of addressing this from the perspective of both what seems right to me, and overall teacher self-interest. On the latter, there is a clear GM-style argument that by locking in awesome protections (for the current teachers, and especially bad ones), legacy union leadership may have hosed good teachers going forward (just as GM’s unions did by guaranteeing uncompetitiveness by pricing in $4500 worth of retiree benefits into each new car on offer today).
Okay, I thought this might be something you were unclear on but did not want to be rude. But . . . your understanding of the nature and function of the ABA and the AMA is just . . . not on the right track at all. To be clear – neither the ABA nor the AMA has the remotest ability to take (or not take) your license. They are trade groups, nothing more – kind of like the National Homebuilders’ Association, which has no authority at all over zoning. Licensure and your livelihood are the sole province of state-by-state law and medical licensing boards (government agencies). The ABA and AMA don’t attempt to influence those boards in particular or general cases.
Actually, that’s probably not true, to the extent that doctors, lawyers, and trade groups are invited to have a voice in the ethical and regulatory standards that state boards apply. Problem is, when they do so, they generally militate for extremely strict, almost punitive, legal and ethical restrictions on doctors and lawyers. The ABA, for instance, has entire subsections who do nothing other than kick around policy ideas on ethics and conflicts of interest. In general (while their recommendations are not binding on state ethics authorities, who operate under the auspices of one of the state courts), the trend is for the private bar groups to recommend ever-stricter ethical restrictions to address new perceived problems.
Do doctors and lawyers take these obligations seriously? Most do, because having the state (not a private trade association) revoke or suspend your license is financial death. And make no mistake – the states do take action. Know what else? Doctors and lawyers who (unlike AFAIK teachers) take binding oaths to execute their job properly and honestly, are affirmatively required by those oaths and the rules that govern them to report their own conflicts or transgressions, and those of others. For instance, a substantial number of reports of conflicts, ethical misconduct, improper advertising, impaired (drunk/drugged) lawyer, reports are filed by concerned colleagues or concerned (okay, maybe competitive/annoyed too) adversary lawyers. I am in a job for which there is a trade association, with no binding oversight but which on your definition is “union like.” I have reported two colleagues for inappropriate behavior, without hesitation. One was promptly fired, one was not when the victim urged restraint. None of this took three years or even three weeks. By contrast, I have seen serial instances of pervy teachers messing with high school girls. It can’t have been a secret to all their colleagues, but I’m unaware of a single instance when the union and its members didn’t close ranks to invoke full procedural rights around the perv when a grievance was filed.
The analogy just doesn’t work. Oh, and by the way, one of the reason that zealous enforcement and self-reporting of conduct, competence, and ethical guidelines works in those professions is that the doctor’s/lawyer’s colleagues and peers could be roped in for professional liability when the miscreant does a bad job or misbehaves. Of course, there is no recovery for educational malpractice, which is another perverse incentive for unions to take the default position that there is no such thing.
I tried to point out some higher-order versions of what you might be thinking of as rent-seeking, some being legitimate. The bar and medical groups do get involved in lobbying and have a substantial voice in the content of regulations and laws that will affect them. To an extent this makes a lot of sense, but to an extent, it creates incentives for them to act in their own self-interest, economic or otherwise. This certainly needs to be looked at though it’s to an extent self-regulating as the “legal lobby” or “medical lobby” will already contain constituents whose interests are somewhat in tension (hospital administrators vs. doctors, law firms vs. in-house counsel).
Some of the comparisons of Catholic schools or in particular charter schools vs. regular public schools suggest otherwise, on a dollars-per-successful-test/graduation outcome.
But this doesn’t answer whether camouflaging monetary and social costs as “non-economic” (which is still a tax expenditure, down the road) is a good expenditure. Maybe the generalized hostility to tax increases is based on an increasing belief that past tax increases/high spending have not linearly tracked with good substantive outcomes. I mean, yeah, the amount of public support for a referendum on Great Society style building of high-rise housing projects is probably a lot lower now than it was in 1968. And for good reason.
If the ratio of per-pupil expenditure vs. academic sucess were evaluated linearly, I can provide a good bit of data showing that unionized U.S. public schools do not look like a very attractive bargain vis a vis other models, such that you’d want to definitely double down your bet on their business model by providing “non-economic” (but actually tangibly costly) benefits such as near-bulletproof tenure. I’d argue in fact that if a teaching system isn’t delivering value for money that you are certain is worth, all in, $1.8x, or whatever, than you are ill-advised to guesstimate or kick the can down the road by giving teachers 1x in cash plus what you guess (wrongly underestimate, in most cases) is .8x in in-kind benefits, not just for transparency of budgeting but because hidden costs are rarely lower than estimated.