What this is saying is that workplaces where the employees have more power are more likely to be cautious about returning to work during a pandemic. That makes a lot of sense, as employees are going to be more careful with their own health than employers are going to be with the health of other people. And it shouldn't be very surprising to us high-demand tech workers who are still allowed to work from home due to that leverage.
Unless teachers are somehow very different than the rest of us, regardless of the pandemic, a significant percentage have discovered they prefer to work from home. Those with powerful unions can drag the process of returning far longer than those without.
that's probably true, but what about the students? The learning outcomes of a lesson over zoom seems to be not so good imho. The kids missing social aspects of school can't be good for them either. Their interests needs to be represented here, and seems like it's not.
Most teachers don't seem to particularly like working from home. They became teachers because they like working with children. They can't do that as effectively at the other end of a screen.
Most teachers I know want to get back to the classroom. They just don't want to risk their lives for it. They are often older and often have co-morbidities that put them at serious risk from COVID.
So they're not dragging it out to escape work. Unlike "the rest of us", working from home isn't an opportunity to slack off without the boss watching. They often work even harder. They being cautious because they don't want to die.
Yeah - given the option workers would rather not risk their health for minimal pay, in the absence of an option (or the ability to say no on mass) workers do not “choose” to return to on premise employment they are forced to.
No. It is saying service providers that control the market are more intended to provide poor services, or even deny their duties, no matter how badly the service receivers need.
Are you sure it’s saying that and not “teachers were one of the demographics that did most of the screeching and admonishing on the internet about masks, vaccines, and mandates these past 2+ years, and refused to go back to work until the COVID and vaccine situation improved, but now that basically everyone is vaccinated and the risk to the vaccinated has been near-nil for over a year now, and everyone has been shopping and meeting and eating and living life in public for quite some time now, teachers would still rather stay at home and teach virtually (while not on their 3-month-long summer vacation) while simultaneously claiming they honestly want what’s best for the kids and that they’re not being paid enough for such difficult, demanding work.”
This is part of the reason I’m very much pro school choice. Give a credit to each family to do with what they wish.
It’ll drive down costs and let those who want to do at home teaching stay that way. But I suspect many schools would have immediately switched back to in person. It lets the parents and community decide what’s best, instead of teachers and union heads.
If it’s designed correctly it should increase aptitude and decrease cost. What’s not to like?
Can you elaborate? The general negative sentiment towards teachers is confusing to me.
It seems you trust them enough to take a very major part in raising your child, but not enough to make a decision about what’s best? I’d like you to elaborate because this view makes it seem like parents view teachers as nannies (who, by the way, should also have a say in whether they want to get exposed to a virus or take it home to their own family).
No good parent just "trusts" teachers to raise their children. Good parents are constantly involved: keeping tabs on schoolwork, helping and encouraging their child, meeting with teachers and administrators, volunteering, and sometimes getting their child moved from one class to another when the teacher is bad.
Unions represent the teachers' interests, not the students'. Not only that, but there's more than sufficient evidence that remote learning harms kids, especially the poor or otherwise disadvantaged. At the end of the day, you have to weigh potential risks, which for kids COVID is a very small (though still real) risk.
It is especially hard on parents whose jobs don't allow working remotely- retail, manufacturing, etc. Why should teachers be exempt when parents are not?
Not sure what in GP you think is negative towards teachers. Sounds like you probably don’t have kids of your own.
As a parent and tax payer I’d like to have my child taught in a school by competent people. Not via Zoom by someone who can’t understand that the risks are unbelievably low and kids are being damaged by missing out on school.
These unions have set up a system where it takes 5 or 6 years to fire a bad teacher in LA and SF. How does that benefit children? And you act like parents have much of a choice.
I won't deny the school system has issues, but school choice in many cases is funneling tax dollars to religious schools or allowing other private companies to bilk tax dollars while providing substandard education.
I've worked at public, private and charter schools, and all have issues.
If we’re going to be taking tax dollars anyway to pay for education, I honestly don’t care what type of school they go to as long as the family gets to make that choice. My bet is it probably would be a funnel for religious schools initially and controversially, but it would also open up opportunities for secular private schools to enter the market down the line.
For those in California, there is a School Choice intuitive currently at the petition phase so order a form online if you support this: https://www.californiaschoolchoice.org/
Know any kids with any type of disability? They're screwed. Know any people of color? They're screwed. Know any working poor who can't make the drive to the rich neighborhood school? They're screwed. But I guess I don't know what you like.
You're conflating different things. People can already choose between public, private, and homeschool. The "credit" is a public resource allocated for a certain purpose under certain conditions. A union doesn't unilaterally decide anything.
You're entitled to choose a non-public school, to want to divert a public resource to yourself with fewer strings attached, and to want more leverage to disregard teachers' stakes in delivering education. Not everyone would agree with your conclusion that it "should" make things better, or that it's even necessary to make improvements.
You're entitled to choose a non-public school, to want to divert that public resource to yourself
How is that? In the US schools are paid for via property tax.
You pay the same property tax to the school whether you have 0 kids in the public school system or 100.
If you choose to pay for private school, you still pay the same amount of tax to the public school system even though you aren’t using it. Only some states have a “voucher” system that lets you have your student’s fees redirects from public school to a private school. About 70% of states don’t have any voucher system so there’s no way to redirect your public school funds to a private school.
Most people’s entire education budget is taken up by their taxes that go to public schools. So unless you are giving people their tax money back in vouchers for school this is an elitist and privileged argument.
Ironically, a school-choice-ish program was tried in a metro area near me- the idea was to get some inner city kids out to the burbs, and some suburban kids into the city, to increase diversity.
The opposite happened- almost all of the kids from the city choosing the program were white, and all the kids from the burbs in the program to go to the city schools were black or Latino.
The end result (Which killed the program) was that kids and their families chose an increase in segregation, rather than diversity.
If you want free education, you can go to your neighborhood school. Not everyone _can_ go to whatever school they feel like (feel free to guess which kids can't attend school 30 miles away on a whim).
Opt out if you like (there are always private schools), but not with my taxes.
[edit: I was incorrect on the fee matters, so have removed that]
Charter schools are absolutely for-profit businesses, they scam it by having the "non-profit" running the charter school employ a management company that obviously is a for-profit entity. See https://networkforpubliceducation.org/wp-content/uploads/202...
All the evidence also shows that charter schools do not produce better outcomes than regular public schools.
The real reason certain groups want charter schools (aside from grift) is a desire to indoctrinate and teach nonsense as fact.
> Every “charter” school that actually makes a profit is simply passing on the subsidies to their owners: they get to charge both the government and parents to provide the same service.
No, they don't. Charter schools operate as non-default schools within the public school system, they don't get to charge parents at all.
> Here’s an idea: let charter schools make a profit by “being efficient”: they get exactly the same amount of money as a public school
That would be an increase, charter schools typically only get a reduced amount of the per-pupil funding that the default public school would get, with the remainder retained by the host district even though the charter school itself provides for itself the services the district would provide for public schools.
You would need to add "charter schools are not allowed to declassify special needs students without a third party evaluation by a public school counselor."
Because that's what they typically do. Special needs students who lag behind but are required to be allowed to attend on vouchers get declassified so that schools no longer have to apply resources towards them. They eventually either fail out and thus are no longer their problem, or are withdrawn by parents.
I too have concerns about charter schools and I suspect that they will end up making the American school system better for a few kinds of families but even more unequal, segregated, and expensive.
However, your assumptions about the motivations of charter school proponents seems uncharitable. The proponents I know come by their position honestly -- they truly believe that vouchers and charter schools are good solutions to the problems facing our nation's students.
> This is part of the reason I’m very much pro school choice. Give a credit to each family to do with what they wish.
Sure thing, if the federal "defense" budget would also be split up into credits, and each family could decide whether it wants to fund the various wars or do something else with the money.
> decrease cost. What's not to like?
Everything's not to like - not the least of which being your desire to cut salaries (or perhaps just shove children into shabbier schools? Who knows how you want to cut costs).
The current system is vote based. You (and lots of people without kids) vote on some random person for school board. 99% probably don’t even research this person.
What I described let’s the parents take the money and decide which school is best positioned to educate their children.
Is there hospital choice? In my area anyone who wants to open a new hospital has to get approval from the other hospitals in the area. I don't think this is unique, I believe it's a fairly common practice across the US.
Not sure if any place is doing it for police, but there absolutely do exist private fire services. You can choose to buy a subscription to their service, or not.
My charter school held a lottery to see who gets admitted. This way they avoid the whole elitism via only accepting through test scores. And its standardized results were near the top of the state despite the lottery system. Now it's a different matter of what are the demographics of the applicants.
Applications, some form of interview and or testing, and rejections. Same as a university system - let students compete for spots and let schools compete for students.
I admit that there would have to be a system that forces schools to take "undesirables" who can't get accepted anywhere, which is the hard part.
The biggest problem I have seen is that the local school educational bureaucracy (administrators, teachers, unions) are on covid-time while our children are growing up and developing in real time. If you are on covid-time, your instinct is to delay, seek consensus from a billion parties, and basically act very slowly to adopt to the realities of the pandemic. If your school is on covid-time things change slowly unless there is top down pressure (Florida, etc) or a brave local administrator who is willing to make decisions with ambiguity (very rare).
Meanwhile, children keep growing and developing. My opinion is that because we can't control child development and need for education (and social exposure) we need to make bold decisions with limited information to make sure we don't leave our kids behind. I didn't see this happen in my local public school. But, clearly, many parents have taken the perspective that they can't sit by the sidelines and wait for covid-time people to have events play out and left the public school system.
I don't know if union to blame as much as people not acting with a shared sense of urgency.
> If you are on covid-time, your instinct is to delay, seek consensus from a billion parties, and basically act very slowly to adopt to the realities of the pandemic.
A billion parties, huh?
I sought out three on a covid-related matter. Am I one of the bold heroes in your dichotomy, or does "covid-time" really squelch nine orders of magnitude down to "true?"
What I observed is my local school administrator working to building consensus from the teachers, the unions, the parents, the janitors, the athletic groups, the board of health, etc, etc. Which is a perfectly good approach for a stable system. However, there weren't enough hours in the day to build all this consensus with a deliberate and slow planning process. That's what I meant - so not a billion - but so many parties that here wasn't enough time in the day to align everyone. Meanwhile - kids were stuck in remote learning.
Our unpaid school committee and paid professional clearly worked their butts off. Unfortunately, hard work isn't always good enough if your fundamental slow work mechanisms can't adopt to the reality of child development. And unfortunately, the unions appeared to be a leading group that was seeking to delay and put up road blocks to returning to school.
Seems like a mismatch to equate an individual period of time (development) to a global event (COVID). These two phases are orthogonal--children are going through their development during COVID.
I feel that creates a strawman for people supporting measures to reduce spread; that they don't understand children are developing (I suspect teachers know this better than most, anyhow). Viewing the situation considering only development doesn't change this: if the rate of infection stays above one for a long stretch, there will be mass death from overwhelmed hospitals.
That's been the balancing act that policy makers are striking. We've seen how that works in practice: restrictions have dropped, as vaccination rates have gone up and seasonal waves have passed.
I understand why people might want more support for their children via home or private schooling; that's always been an option for those with means. It highlights that we could definitely use more resources to try to support child development: more teachers for smaller class sizes class, more space in classrooms, better ventilated spaces, expanded remote learning accessibilty, etc.
Where I live, schools are asked to do more with less every year. So it's unsurprising to me that they're not super adaptable to major disruptions.
The analysis seems to be somewhat simple (just rank states by union strength and COVID measures), then conclude what is reported in the title.
The conclusion seems to suffer from severe endogeneity problems as teacher unions are correlated with other factors (e.g., being on a coast) that are also correlated with COVID response. Just making the link between unions and COVID policy is naive (at best) and misleading (at worse).
One thing to keep in mind when doing research in education in the US is that you have to account for its distributed structure. That is, local education agencies (usually school districts) make most of the decisions. For example, there is no California teacher contract; instead, contracts are negotiated between local teacher unions and local district. The California teacher union could have lobbied the California governor to extend school closures, but the eventual decision to how (and maybe when) to go back in person probably fell to the individual superintendents. Another example is to see what happened in Chicago Public Schools. The local union went on strike to negotiate covid-related measures. Those had nothing to do with the larger Illinois education policy.
A better design for this study would have been to try to measure the strength of local unions at the district level (maybe % of membership that contributes to the political fund now that teachers can opt out from that) and try to correlate it with local COVID restrictions (like more days of teacher paid leave, mask policies, possibility of online or hybrid instruction). I suspect that there is a patchwork (read, heterogeneity) of policies that were negotiated between the union and the district that could give a better picture than what is reported in the paper. As a secondary result, you could even observe whether strong and weak unions have different preferences. Maybe strong unions prefer a safer work environment (i.e., less in person, more masks) while weaker unions prefer one-time bonuses?
The problem is that unions are only empowered to point out problems but administration has to solve them. In both Union and non Union states the administrations have failed to take adequate measures to address covid safety concerns using the practical means available. instead focusing on things that provide the illusion of doing something or doing nothing at all.
In non Union states they can simply steamroll the teachers were as in Union states they can’t but in the end in none of the situations are administrators capable of providing meaningful safety measurements based on what’s known and available.
This is in a large part because the federal guidance on covid is shit and state guidance is only marginally better or also shit.
The guidance can’t really be anything but shit if e we don’t admit that covid is airborne.
The irony of technology workers who constantly express their unhappiness and frustration with being micromanaged telling a discipline (teaching) how they should be doing things.
In-person learning does, too. Districts with more minority students tend to have larger class sizes. Fewer technology resources. Less property tax to draw upon.
> Hailey is not alone. As the U.S. reaches the second anniversary of the pandemic, a growing number of parents and psychiatrists report that a return to in-person learning was not the magic bullet many had hoped it would be for school-age children and that the pandemic has resulted in a host of mental health challenges even for those young people who seemed as recently as a year ago to be faring relatively well.
>The irony of technology workers who constantly express their unhappiness and frustration with being micromanaged telling a discipline (teaching) how they should be doing things.
I know that was an attempt at a zinger but deciding whether to remote school or in person school isn't anywhere close to micromanaging.
If by "right there on the tin" you mean at the bottom of the article then sure.
I understand that all information probably has some intentional and unintentional ideological slant, but my feeling is that HN is a place for intentionally neutral - unadulterated - content. Right wing "think tank" articles don't belong here. It's not that the ideology is wrong necessarily, but the presentation is twisted and designed to mislead.
Readit News
that's probably true, but what about the students? The learning outcomes of a lesson over zoom seems to be not so good imho. The kids missing social aspects of school can't be good for them either. Their interests needs to be represented here, and seems like it's not.
Most teachers I know want to get back to the classroom. They just don't want to risk their lives for it. They are often older and often have co-morbidities that put them at serious risk from COVID.
So they're not dragging it out to escape work. Unlike "the rest of us", working from home isn't an opportunity to slack off without the boss watching. They often work even harder. They being cautious because they don't want to die.
Dead Comment
This is part of the reason I’m very much pro school choice. Give a credit to each family to do with what they wish.
It’ll drive down costs and let those who want to do at home teaching stay that way. But I suspect many schools would have immediately switched back to in person. It lets the parents and community decide what’s best, instead of teachers and union heads.
If it’s designed correctly it should increase aptitude and decrease cost. What’s not to like?
It seems you trust them enough to take a very major part in raising your child, but not enough to make a decision about what’s best? I’d like you to elaborate because this view makes it seem like parents view teachers as nannies (who, by the way, should also have a say in whether they want to get exposed to a virus or take it home to their own family).
It is especially hard on parents whose jobs don't allow working remotely- retail, manufacturing, etc. Why should teachers be exempt when parents are not?
As a parent and tax payer I’d like to have my child taught in a school by competent people. Not via Zoom by someone who can’t understand that the risks are unbelievably low and kids are being damaged by missing out on school.
Deleted Comment
What does that tell you?
Like anyone else, they've mostly chosen the latter.
The point is that teacher unions have too much power, not that teachers are worse or better than other groups - they're not.
I've worked at public, private and charter schools, and all have issues.
Uh what? Do you really not see how racist this is???
You're entitled to choose a non-public school, to want to divert a public resource to yourself with fewer strings attached, and to want more leverage to disregard teachers' stakes in delivering education. Not everyone would agree with your conclusion that it "should" make things better, or that it's even necessary to make improvements.
How is that? In the US schools are paid for via property tax.
You pay the same property tax to the school whether you have 0 kids in the public school system or 100.
If you choose to pay for private school, you still pay the same amount of tax to the public school system even though you aren’t using it. Only some states have a “voucher” system that lets you have your student’s fees redirects from public school to a private school. About 70% of states don’t have any voucher system so there’s no way to redirect your public school funds to a private school.
Is this right? I thought this point was debated, outside the re-introduction of segregation into the school system.
The opposite happened- almost all of the kids from the city choosing the program were white, and all the kids from the burbs in the program to go to the city schools were black or Latino.
The end result (Which killed the program) was that kids and their families chose an increase in segregation, rather than diversity.
Opt out if you like (there are always private schools), but not with my taxes.
Charter schools are absolutely for-profit businesses, they scam it by having the "non-profit" running the charter school employ a management company that obviously is a for-profit entity. See https://networkforpubliceducation.org/wp-content/uploads/202...
All the evidence also shows that charter schools do not produce better outcomes than regular public schools.
The real reason certain groups want charter schools (aside from grift) is a desire to indoctrinate and teach nonsense as fact.
No, they don't. Charter schools operate as non-default schools within the public school system, they don't get to charge parents at all.
> Here’s an idea: let charter schools make a profit by “being efficient”: they get exactly the same amount of money as a public school
That would be an increase, charter schools typically only get a reduced amount of the per-pupil funding that the default public school would get, with the remainder retained by the host district even though the charter school itself provides for itself the services the district would provide for public schools.
>
Because that's what they typically do. Special needs students who lag behind but are required to be allowed to attend on vouchers get declassified so that schools no longer have to apply resources towards them. They eventually either fail out and thus are no longer their problem, or are withdrawn by parents.
However, your assumptions about the motivations of charter school proponents seems uncharitable. The proponents I know come by their position honestly -- they truly believe that vouchers and charter schools are good solutions to the problems facing our nation's students.
Sure thing, if the federal "defense" budget would also be split up into credits, and each family could decide whether it wants to fund the various wars or do something else with the money.
> decrease cost. What's not to like?
Everything's not to like - not the least of which being your desire to cut salaries (or perhaps just shove children into shabbier schools? Who knows how you want to cut costs).
I'm a parent and the idea that other parents will vote on education worries me. They're too stupid to make good education decisions.
What I described let’s the parents take the money and decide which school is best positioned to educate their children.
My sense is that education budgets are pretty variable by the taxes in a region.
Also, it brings competition to teaching... which drives people to work hard(er).
To be clear, I'm in favor of school choice. Just some thoughts.
I admit that there would have to be a system that forces schools to take "undesirables" who can't get accepted anywhere, which is the hard part.
Meanwhile, children keep growing and developing. My opinion is that because we can't control child development and need for education (and social exposure) we need to make bold decisions with limited information to make sure we don't leave our kids behind. I didn't see this happen in my local public school. But, clearly, many parents have taken the perspective that they can't sit by the sidelines and wait for covid-time people to have events play out and left the public school system.
I don't know if union to blame as much as people not acting with a shared sense of urgency.
A billion parties, huh?
I sought out three on a covid-related matter. Am I one of the bold heroes in your dichotomy, or does "covid-time" really squelch nine orders of magnitude down to "true?"
Our unpaid school committee and paid professional clearly worked their butts off. Unfortunately, hard work isn't always good enough if your fundamental slow work mechanisms can't adopt to the reality of child development. And unfortunately, the unions appeared to be a leading group that was seeking to delay and put up road blocks to returning to school.
It turns out, it isn't very good at agility.
I feel that creates a strawman for people supporting measures to reduce spread; that they don't understand children are developing (I suspect teachers know this better than most, anyhow). Viewing the situation considering only development doesn't change this: if the rate of infection stays above one for a long stretch, there will be mass death from overwhelmed hospitals.
That's been the balancing act that policy makers are striking. We've seen how that works in practice: restrictions have dropped, as vaccination rates have gone up and seasonal waves have passed.
I understand why people might want more support for their children via home or private schooling; that's always been an option for those with means. It highlights that we could definitely use more resources to try to support child development: more teachers for smaller class sizes class, more space in classrooms, better ventilated spaces, expanded remote learning accessibilty, etc.
Where I live, schools are asked to do more with less every year. So it's unsurprising to me that they're not super adaptable to major disruptions.
The conclusion seems to suffer from severe endogeneity problems as teacher unions are correlated with other factors (e.g., being on a coast) that are also correlated with COVID response. Just making the link between unions and COVID policy is naive (at best) and misleading (at worse).
One thing to keep in mind when doing research in education in the US is that you have to account for its distributed structure. That is, local education agencies (usually school districts) make most of the decisions. For example, there is no California teacher contract; instead, contracts are negotiated between local teacher unions and local district. The California teacher union could have lobbied the California governor to extend school closures, but the eventual decision to how (and maybe when) to go back in person probably fell to the individual superintendents. Another example is to see what happened in Chicago Public Schools. The local union went on strike to negotiate covid-related measures. Those had nothing to do with the larger Illinois education policy.
A better design for this study would have been to try to measure the strength of local unions at the district level (maybe % of membership that contributes to the political fund now that teachers can opt out from that) and try to correlate it with local COVID restrictions (like more days of teacher paid leave, mask policies, possibility of online or hybrid instruction). I suspect that there is a patchwork (read, heterogeneity) of policies that were negotiated between the union and the district that could give a better picture than what is reported in the paper. As a secondary result, you could even observe whether strong and weak unions have different preferences. Maybe strong unions prefer a safer work environment (i.e., less in person, more masks) while weaker unions prefer one-time bonuses?
In-person instruction - which 95% of American schools were doing in January of this year, and 99% of them in December (https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2021-12-...) - isn't gonna solve these structural problems.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/-person-learning-wasnt-...
> Hailey is not alone. As the U.S. reaches the second anniversary of the pandemic, a growing number of parents and psychiatrists report that a return to in-person learning was not the magic bullet many had hoped it would be for school-age children and that the pandemic has resulted in a host of mental health challenges even for those young people who seemed as recently as a year ago to be faring relatively well.
I know that was an attempt at a zinger but deciding whether to remote school or in person school isn't anywhere close to micromanaging.
Dead Comment
I understand that all information probably has some intentional and unintentional ideological slant, but my feeling is that HN is a place for intentionally neutral - unadulterated - content. Right wing "think tank" articles don't belong here. It's not that the ideology is wrong necessarily, but the presentation is twisted and designed to mislead.