What free society are you referring to?
I thought we were arguing about whether the electorate would have been willing to pay for the plan, not whether the Teachers unions could get the politicians that support the plan kicked out of office. And private donations didn’t subsidize jack crap. There was a law saying that a union plan had to be funded from sources entirely within the district’s control and this delayed the union contract for a few weeks while they figured out how to make the plan NOT dependent on donations that were contingent on Rhee staying in her position…remember?
Right up until Fenty came along, abolished the school board and appointed Rhee, the DC teacher’s union was doing pretty fucking good.
I think the answer in DC was that people who pay most of the taxes in DC were willing to carry the costs of the plan. That’s why they voted overwhelmingly for Fenty rather than Gray. The people who voted for Gray largely don’t pay taxes.
I’ve moved my family out of DC. The school system had a lot more to do with it than taxes. BUT, if I’m gonna pay 10% DC income taxes and get crappy schools I’d rather move to the suburbs, have a crappy commute but a better school system AND lower taxes.
They don’t need to all be Edwin James Olmos.
Why not have the great teacher at the front of MUCH larger classes doing the teaching and a bunch of teachers acting as tutors for kids at different achievement levels? There are all sorts of way to skin the cat.
So when a school chancellor proposes paying them up to 140K/year (in reality its probably more like 100K/year for the best teachers unless they are trilingual math teachers in the most underperforming high schools… well basically unless they are Edward James Olmos in stand and deliver), you think the proper response is to shoot them down because they want the right to fire underperforming teachers?
I believe that the average teacher’s pay was supposed to go up 20%.
I would much rather live in DC than in Virginia. IF the school were any good, I wold be fine with paying more in taxes especially considering that the plan didn’t require more tax revenue. DC has PLENTY of money, they are among the top 5 school districts in terms of money spend per student. When Fenty cleaned out the board of education, they found all sorts of money, I’m surprised noone went to jail for all the crap that was going on there.
THAT WAS TEH EXPERIMENT!!! Pay a lot of teachers and run the school system efficiently and see if we can’t turn around one of the worst school system (which also happens to be one of the richest school systems) and see if improving teachers pay and shifting their incentives won’t make a difference and it seemed to be wroking until the teachers felt that job security was more important than trying something that might change a bad school system country into something better.
I’m told that DC school systems were pretty good until the 1950’s (and not just because of white flight, DC has always been majority black).
Sure, but then why the dramatic improvement when Rhee came along?
Yes. This disparity did not exist in the 1950’s and DC has had a significant black population since its inception, a largely poor black population. Its not like blacks are incapable of being good students. I recognize that its not as easy to teach the children of doctors and lawyers in the suburbs where the stay at home mom has graduate degree and is super engaged in the PTA but thats the challenge that Rhee was attempting to address until they cut her off at the knees.
Maybe I missed this. Do you have a cite? Because all the articles I see like this
This.
And this.
All indicate that private money is funding this. Although they say the money will only provide the initial start-up costs (3 years worth), that remains to be seen. I will note that it is said that Denver and Houston have achieved this on a smaller scale. Either way, I am not sure you memory of the facts is accurate.
Once again, that remains to be seen.
But that’s kinda the point isn’t it? I live in DC now, but plan to move to MD soon for the same reasons. Sure, I could stay and work to improve the schools, but I don’t see think it’s worthwhile. So long as “taxpayers” like you and I move out, the mission to improve schools becomes harder.
I admit my bias here. When someone comes in and says, “cooperation, collaboration and consensus-building are way overrated”, makes their first priority busting unions and attracting attention to themselves, I tend to think they are not good for the system. I admit she has done some good things, and achieved modest results, but she intends to run the schools like a business. It’s an amoral, cold, and calculating approach that I think in ineffective in the long-term.
But the issue has largely been settled. See here (1, 2, 3)
Do you have any evidence of that? How did the schools compare to the overall heath of the city?
Because people knew that would be the new standard by which they would be judged. Also note scores went down this past year after two years of gains. Did Rhee stop trying all of a sudden last year?
I’m not saying what she did was entirely ineffective, I just think using testing as a sole measure is too easy to manipulate.
Who? The voters? Why do their opinions not count just because they may not pay as much in taxes? Honestly, it’s kind of arrogant to think your opinion is the only one that matters, or is reflective of reality. If you are so sure things are so clear cut, why do you think these people voted against their self-interests?
Ahh you are correct but it seems this money was given to the district unconditionally.
Here’s another one by someone who seems to think this is all a conspiracy by big corporations to take over teh school system:
http://dailycensored.com/2010/05/01/billionaire-boyz-club-plans-to-buy-d-c-teachers-hits-a-snag/
The contract is fully funded but I see the point you were making. Three years from now, when the private funding committment lapses the private donors might decide this was a failed experiment and withdraw funding, leaving teachers negotiating for a new contract where the district can no longer afford the high salaries without significant taxpayer buying and will have already bargained awway tenure and will have to negotiate to get it back which will be easier or harder depending on who is in office.
I still think its in the best interests of the kids to try this option (after decades of failure to do anything)
Its a vicious cycle. Thats why someone like Rhee provided some hope that the cycle would be broken…
I admit she is a bit of a attention whore but I think that garnering that attention has been pretty important in her ability to attract the private dollars to fund her expriment, getting some popular support behind her and focusing public attention on the issues. I guess my perspective differs from yours in that I think that the teachers union bascially owned the School board for decades and are responsible for the condition of the system. They cannot walk away from their responsibility for the state of the DC public school system.
I would be much more sympathetic to your concerns about long term issues if the Teacher’s union controlled school board had been implementing long term solutions when they controlled the school board rather than focus on teacher’s benefits to the point of neglecting the school system itself.
The first articles hardly seem to think this is a settled issue. And as the article points out, what is the alternative, do nothing and hope things just get better on their own?
I would also like to point out this experiment wasn’t JUST about merit pay. It was also the ability to fire ineffective teachers. A more hospitable environment for charter schools.
That is approximately when white flight began after the riots.
I admit she is a bit of a attention whore but I think that garnering that attention has been pretty important in her ability to attract the private dollars to fund her expriment, getting some popular support behind her and focusing public attention on the issues. I guess my perspective differs from yours in that I think that the teachers union bascially owned the School board for decades and are responsible for the condition of the system. If Rhee is bad for teh system the teachers union is toxic.
I would be much more sympathetic to your concerns if the school board had been implementing long term solutions when the school board was controlled by the teacher’s union rather than focus on teacher’s benefits to the point of neglecting the school system itself.
The first articles hardly seem to think this is a settled issue. And as the article points out, what is the alternative, do nothing and hope things just get better on their own?
I would also like to point out this experiment wasn’t JUST about merit pay. It was also the ability to fire ineffective teachers. A more hospitable environment for charter schools.
That is approximately when white flight began after the riots.
Which leads me to ask, why the heck weren’t we holding them to these standards (or ANY standards) earlier? Perhaps because the teachers union didn’t want the teachers to be judged at all? The recent drop in test scores was very mild and we were still way above where we were when Rhee first took office.
I can’t guarantee that this is the best way forward but I am pretty sure that the status quo was not and that is all the teachers union seemed to find acceptable.
Its better than nothing which seems to be the alternative being proposed by the teacher’s unions. “its too hard to measure teacher performance accurately (there are too many confounding factors) so we shouldn’t try”
Fenty and Rhee were made out to be racists. Now the union owns the school system.
This is a totally different question, and I’m happy to answer this, as long as we understand that it’s a different question.
The thing is, the idea of a free society is a sham. Any society is necessarily curtailing freedoms. One of those freedoms that gets curtailed is my freedom to use property that you’ve declared is yours.
In a state of nature, there’s no such thing as private property. Rather, there’s shit you’re using currently, and if I fight you for it, it becomes mine. Society sets up rules by which overwhelming force is put on one side of that conflict (yours), preventing the conflict from erupting in the first place. But it is absolutely a curtailment of my freedoms. It’s not necessarily a bad one, but it’s there.
So we’re not looking at what’s acceptable in a free society. We’re looking at where we put that overwhelming force. Sometimes it’s put in a position to maintain the status quo: what’s currently yours is yours, and nobody gets to tell you what to do with it. Sometimes it’s put elsewhere: what you have right now is yours for some purposes, but not for other purposes. Society moves this overwhelming force around according to vastly complicated equations.
In this instance, we’ve decided as a society that folks who currently control certain properties may continue to do so (i.e., we’ll imprison anyone who tries to change that), as long as they follow certain rules. Allowing closed shops is one of those rules.
Don’t like it? Fine–but you’ve got no moral justification for getting rid of it, based on the idea of a free society, unless you also get rid of the notion of private property at the same time. And then I’ll fight you for your stuff.
(Folks responding to this, I hope you’ll either keep this subthread separate from the one about union vs. management voices, or else give a compelling explanation of why the two conversations should be combined.)
In other words the people who complain about closed shops are whining whingers who whine to much?
Not necessarily, Damuri. There may be specific situations in which closed shops are a problem. But the arguments against them that suggest they’re the alternative to a free society are fallacious.
Sure, ANYTHING can be a problem in specific situations but the inidctment of closed shops doesn’t seem to be fact specific, the people whining about clsoed shops seem to be whining about ALL closed shops.