Pretty amusing that the UEA lawyer has the chutzpah to talk about Republicans "destroying people and groups who oppose their policies" when it's been made clear that Utah educators either oppose the UEA's policies, or don't agree with them enough to actually put money towards it.

If a job is so crucial to the public welfare that it must be done by government, then it is too important to be impeded by collective bargaining backed by the threat of work stoppages. Several qualifiers in there, but this old bureaucrat basically agrees. PATCO was Bunker Hill.

This is amazing. I wouldn't have thought any dent whatsoever could be made in the power of the teachers' unions. Of course, Utah is hardly typical, but it's still pretty darn amazing.

Has the Beck decision ever been truly enforced?

Beck can't be enforced because it conflicts with the almost-universally accepted notion that the Union is the agent of its members. Dividing agency from advocacy requires Solomonic wisdom.

So, ghostcat, the workers are simply supposed to accept whatever the government tells them to without the right to representation? And the government won't behave like a complete swine? What planet do you live on?

I see, so it's a travesty of justice to pay just compensation to take property for the public good, but only fair to use the taxing power to extort money from citizens, under penalty of imprisonment, to overpay civil servants to sit around and do nothing. What was it your parents did again, Bart?

Every dollar that a teacher is overpaid is a dollar taken from a productive member of society who had something better to do with it.

Collective bargaining should no more result in people 'sitting around and doing nothing' in the private sector than in the public sector. If you think teaching in an American public school without the benefit of a firearm or at least a whip and a chair is 'sitting around and doing nothing' then you are a complete ignoramus. I suggest you read pretty much any study of stress in the workplace and you'll find out the reality.

I don't object to taking property with just compensation for a legitimate public purpose, I object to government taking people's homes so that they can build shopping malls, stadiums for pro teams or other private projects.

Some public sector workers are overpaid, policemen, lawyers, and bureaucrats from curriculum coordinators to DYFs workers for example. Some are grotesquely underpaid like the military.

bart:

Ever taught? It's rather easy.

Yes, but only at the university level and that is pretty easy if you're serious at it.

I would never teach in a public K-12 school in a million billion years.

Where did you teach? And what did you teach?

South Orange/Maplewood--Special Ed and substitute taught.

So, IOW, you have no serious experience in a standard American public school classroom worthy of mention. My parents have about 70 years between them in NYC schools, I think they have a lot better handle on the situation than you.

If it took them 70 years to learn something they're typical teachers. Anyone of average intelligence and stable personality can figure it out in a few weeks. But I take it you've never taught in public school?

You taught special ed? The mind boggles. Did you try the laying on of hands and command them to read for Jesus?

Bart: Have you ever actually dealt with a union. Every union knows that work rules that require less work are as important as getting more pay. Private sector unions do at least operate under a market constraint, the public sector unions have no constraint. The teacher's unions are particularly egregious at figuing out how to make sure that their members spend as little time as possible with the kids.

There's a reason that secular teachers were always despised in Jewish culture -- any literate person can teach young children and so, in a literate culture, it is the job of at best next-to-last resort.

David,

Then why were the overwhelming majority of NYC teachers Jewish in the 50s-70s? And a kid with a teaching job was a source of pride to Jews of my grandparents' generation. And in traditional Jewish culture, it was always a man's job.

I'm in the AFT, as an old job requirement from my teaching days, but one which I proudly maintain.

Because they couldn't get real jobs.

David:

There are generally two types of kids in Special Ed--unteachables and behavior problems. Both just require some patience.

Because they got turned down by the Post Office.

Lawyers and househusbands should look in the mirror before they criticize other people's job choices.

And Special Ed is just glorified babysitting, a near total waste of scarce resources.

bart;

Yes, that's why I chose not to teach. If you're just a babysitter you may as well sit your own.

The laziest lawyer in private practice works harder than the most industrious public school teacher.

The busiest lawyer on the planet produces far less social utility than the laziest teacher. To call lawyers 'bloodsuckers' is to insult those who suck blood.

Comparing none to zero isn't actually a useful exercise though.

I probably should note that there are, of course, competent teachers and, in particular, special ed teachers -- the only teachers of young children who are sometimes actually called upon to teach -- to whom I do not begrudge a single cent or benefit they can firk from the school system.

Bart's enlightened affection for public employee unions, on the other hand, boils down to his being willing to tolerate unions extorting money for any number of groups he despises (there has to be a story behind his contempt for police officers, though I have no interest in learning what it is), so long as his union gets to feed at the trough as well.

A nation without lawyers is a tyranny. A nation without public school teachers is pretty much unchanged.

Recently, here in the Upper Left Washington one of the teacher's unions negotiated five more days off during the school year without an increase in length. To meet the state minimum requirements for total time spent in class teaching, the school day is going to be lengthened by three minutes a day.

Teaching may be important but has always attracted second rate people on the whole. People more interested in summers off for instance.

Government service tends to attract 2 kinds of people: lazy or stupid. (ok, 3 types, lazy and stupid). Why should teaching be different?

When I got furloughed from my airline job, I hoped to teach HS math/physics/computer science.

I thought having a background in those areas far exceeding anything local schools had on their staffs would be sufficient.

Nope. Apparently suffering through a year of nonsense to get a teaching certificate trumps subject matter expertise.

What about Troops to Teachers?

David,

Japan has about 800 lawyers from what I understand. It is hardly tyrannical.

Joe:

Oddly, I couldn't find anything about that around here (Detroit)-- everything was certificate required. I might have been able to work something in inner-city Detroit, and would have welcomed the challenge, but the drive would have been cost-prohibitive.

The teacher's unions in MI, BTW, trumpet the near-universal possession of certificates as a proxy for competence.

As if.

Rather, it is an artificial restriction on the labor supply in order to drive up costs.

Quite disappointing, actually.

Too bad, Jeff. As an aside, I'd be happy to run the betting pool on how Bart acquired his attitude toward cops. My money says he got pulled over by a New Jersey state trooper, and showed him the same social grace he lavishes on us.

Teaching certificates are a complete scam. As my dad says, there's only one education course, they just change the number.

Joe, believe it or not, I am quite capable of displaying almost David Niven-style grace as the need arises. That need is not present here so I can vent my naturally hostile and occasionally sadistic self in ways that would be problematic at work, in the classroom, during a panel discussion at a CAS seminar, or with a cop.

In NJ, and increasingly in suburban areas, policing is about little more than revenue enhancement. The old jokes about Southern speed traps now are more applicable in suburbia. As a result, local police forces hire a different sort of person to be a cop today. They are the same kind of people who work for collection agencies or the IRS, people who have a burr up their derrieres who see a position of authority as a means of getting revenge on perceived enemies. Sheriff Andy need not apply.

So, Bart, cops sound just like you.

Bart: Nomenclature is not your friend. Lawyers, in the Japanese sense, are like barristers in England. They're the people who can appear in court. Every year 20,000 Japanese take the bar exam and only 700 are allowed to pass. There are about 16,000 lawyers in Japan. This is generally recognized as being too few and the government has both loosened the rules a little about who can appear in court and promised to double the number of lawyers in the next 10 years.

All the other legal work done by lawyers in the US are done by various classes of scriveners and by accountants. All in, there is one "lawyer" for every 850 or so Japanese (is that what you remembered?), which is roughly the same rate as Europe and a little better than twice the rate in the US.

Interestingly, Japan also has many fewer teachers than the United States. Average class size in Japan is in the mid-thirties, about ten students per teacher higher than in the United States. Small class sizes have been shown not to be correlated with achievement. Rather, along with meaningless credentialism, it is one of the ways that the teacher's unions use their political clout to screw unnecessary money from the taxpayers.

There isn't a classroom teacher in America who would agree with your assessment about class size.

Also, comparing Japanese educational culture, with its emphasis on conformity and exam-taking, with American educational culture, which sees school as a form of cheap babysitting for the little snotnoses, is a fool's errand.

Cheap? We spend as much on education as we do on the military.

It'll be a great day when we can pay our military what they deserve, and teachers have to work for living.

There isn't a classroom teacher in America who would agree with your assessment about class size.

Sublime.

Y'know, bart, a lot of your mistaken notions about American society stem from living in the wrong area.

Come out West, and you'll see cops that catch bad guys and ignore speeders, and kids that don't need to be threatened with cattle prods to behave themselves in school.

If you agree with your Pappy that skill at teaching is an OJT type of experience, and not something best learned in a classroom, then why don't you agree that teaching is, at best, a semi-skilled profession ?

Michael,

Fair enough and I am moving to Jacksonville, FL in the spring so I'll find out. There certainly are dramatic differences between NJ and NE Wisconsin or the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

If the fact that something is best learned by doing makes it semi-skilled, wouldn't that apply to the practice of pretty much every profession? How much do you really learn in law school after the first year or in medical school after the first two? And wouldn't you be better off in a clerkship/residency position at that point?

Oh, absolutely. It's only anti-competitive guld rules meant to artificially keep down the number of lawyers that put an end to learning by working for a lawyer. Just like with the teachers' unions.

And what goes on in the last two years of law school besides inflating the incomes of law professors and administrators of law schools?

Most reasonably intelligent people can master the material taught in the first year of law school. Since those people need to go on to other areas of human endeavor from molecular genetics to programming to being math geeks, the narrow group of people who intend to specialize in law can find a million places to further their training. Where are they better off, being in the classroom or being trained by lawyers in the real world?

There's no material to master, just a way of analyzing material.

I happened to enjoy the last two years of law school, but it would be perfectly alright with me if law students were allowed to practice with an experienced attorney in lieu of those years. No chance of getting that past my union, I mean guild, I mean the bar association.