Teachers unions have been in the news a lot recently. This is a very good thing, since the national unions have long been one of the greatest obstacles to needed educational reforms. The policies they support are often truly horrible.
But I do worry about the public not making the distinction between the unions and the teachers themselves. I’m maybe more sensitive to this issue than others, since I have close relatives in the teaching business. I don’t think teachers are feeling a lot of love and respect these days. I think more than a few are quite demoralized. In some states, teachers pay and benefits packages are quite attractive, but in many others, they are not. No one in my state, for instance, goes into teaching because of the salaries.
Since I have lots of kids, I’ve had interactions with lots of public school teachers. Most of them, I think, are genuinely doing their best in what is a very, very hard job. They often fail to set high enough expectations, and they sometimes take the easy way out (don’t we all?), but they are not bad teachers. They could use better incentives for success, better institutional support, better training, but they are doing well for the most part. I am genuinely thankful for their efforts.
A few of them are outstanding, the kind of people who transform kids’ lives. They do this not because of incentive programs or out of fear of losing their jobs, but just because they have a unique skill set and they care a lot. One of my children is a highly intelligent, very talented boy who is easily distracted and sometimes hard to motivate. He has a teacher this year who is transforming his education experience (maybe his life!) because she sets high expectations and his been able to give him supplemental activities that he is very excited about and engaged in.
So, we need massive reforms in this country, including the ability to get rid of bad teachers and to make OK teachers better. But I hope we come out the other end of this process where those excellent teachers still feel that their efforts are valued and are worth it, and that all teachers feel that what they are doing matters and is worth caring about.
I’m not confident this will happen. If I were a capable young person with a love of kids and a desire to teach, I doubt that I would pick the teaching profession. In fact, the cost savings society might gain by going after the overly-generous benefit plans might be outweighed by the damage we do to the teaching profession if we are not very careful.
Getting this balance right doesn’t seem very likely, I’m afraid.
[Update: On a tangent, I liked this quote from Michael Goldstein in the NY Times: “The big issue, however, remains hidden from public perception. It’s the gritty reality of low student effort — and often decorum — in many schools. Until we can apportion that fairly among teachers, kids, parents, and principals, the public dialogue will bypass the central challenge facing schools, and we’ll talk in circles about teachers.”]
PILEUS 
Clearly there are issues at home that have a lot to do with educational problems here in the US. But I think you cut the teachers way too much slack. There are some great teachers out there who work hard and do right by the students. But far too many have poor subject matter expertise, respond to the incentives they face in ways that work against their students, and help construct dysfunctional schools (especially by overemphasizing things like sports, and socialization while following educational fads at the expense of basic skills). Part of this isn’t entirely their fault — I lay a lot of the blame on education schools that fill their students’ heads with many bad ideas.
In addition to lack of effort, lack of discipline is a huge problem in the public schools. One teacher I know – an excellent and dedicated one – was routinely abused verbally by one student, disrupting the class. The ludicrous solution proposed by the principal was that this teacher should “get more involved in this student’s life.” In other words, the school did not intend to do anything about it.
Bill Gates recently suggested in a Washington Post article that class size really has no effect on results and advocated increasing class sizes in the US. Some countries that get better results than we do, he pointed out, have class sizes as large as 60. You can just imagine American classes of that size without a revolution in how discipline is handled.
Agreed that there are good teachers and bad teachers. But that will always be the case. This is about the police, fire, teacher, and civil servant unions reaching way way too far in exchange for their patronage to a certain political party. Now there is a growing dissent, from those folks paying the bill, and the unions and rank and file don’t like it. Too bad. What about the teachers? Think they are looking at this like a law school case study, and balancing the fairness of their retirement packages against what is being asked of the taxpayer? Most teachers could care less about property taxes in relation to their 100% paid medical benefit packages.
Of course, no one is preventing the unhappy police officer, fire fighter, or teacher from taking their skill set to the open free market. They instead prefer organized protests rather than receive a fair appraisal of their value in the private sector. I wonder why.
For the record, I’m from the state of nj where the civil servants and unions have lost all sense of reality.
What ails the schools is that parents don’t think their school teaches their kid what they think their kid ought to be taught. Furthermore, those parents don’t think the schools don’t teach their kid the way they think their kid ought to be taught. That’s about all their is to it. The problem is, put simply, you can please some of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all the people all the time.
The only real solution to that ailment is to let the schools be whatever kind of school they want to be and let the parents choose the school they want for their kids. The status quo is to make make every school teach the same curriculum the same way. There is not any reason that every kid has to learn the same curriculum. Why bother? There was a time when school districts were quite small. Curriculums and methods were determined locally. The trend away from that is what causes all the grief.
It is odd that so many people think choice is wonderful and/or empowering/liberating – even the choice to terminate a pregnancy – but then they oppose school choice. Huh?