Well-paid Rhode Island teachers get the heave-ho for refusing to work more to improve student outcomes:
A school superintendent in Rhode Island is trying to fix an abysmally bad school system.
Her plan calls for teachers at a local high school to work 25 minutes longer per day, each lunch with students once in a while, and help with tutoring. The teachers’ union has refused to accept these apparently onerous demands.
The teachers at the high school make $70,000-$78,000, as compared to a median income in the town of $22,000…
The school superintendent has responded to the union’s stubbornness by firing every teacher and administrator at the school.
If they won’t do the job that’s asked of them, I’m sure there are plenty of knowledgeable people currently unemployed who will. There is no reason to keep pandering to these teachers unions.
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Not for the first time, a union is targeting volunteering. At Big Government, Liberty Chick reports:
Warren Eschenbach, an 86-year-old a retired Wausau Water Works employee volunteers his time as a crossing guard at the Riverview Elementary School in Wausau, Wisconsin. After the Wausau School District built an area just outside an intersection at the school’s location for parents to pickup their kids from the school, the intersection became busier than usual for a short time every day. So, Eschenbach did a noble thing. He went over to the school and spoke with parents, kids and administrators, and he volunteered to patrol the area at pickup time to make sure kids got to their parents’ cars and that others crossed the streets safely. After all, he worked for five years as a crossing guard at the Franklin Elementary School up until three years ago. He lives two doors down and it’s for a half hour every day. Who could take issue with that?
Well, apparently union bosses can.
John Spiegelhoff, a local union rep for American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Local 1287 (AFSCME) wants to know if the 86-year-old retiree has undergone a background check. And if he has liability insurance. AFSCME insists that Eschenbach is “undermining the union” and has demanded that the city get rid of him and replace him with a paid union worker at $12.65 an hour. The city has been cutting back crossing guard hours from 15 hours a week to 10 a week. Of course, the elderly volunteer isn’t a volunteer with the city, he volunteers with the school. Since the pickup location is newly restructured, there hadn’t ever been the need to have a crossing guard there. There was no prior job this gentleman has taken away from the union. Really, the guy just lives right there and thought he’d help out.
Unions are about ensuring jobs, regardless of whether they are actually productive or can be fulfilled by another means. They will also use the tools of the nanny state (background checks! liability insurance!) to ensure that no good deed goes unpunished.
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You can bet that any legislation which requires this many despicable, backroom deals is bad for America:
Leave a commentIn their latest effort to pass a health care bill by any means necessary, Democrats have struck a “tentative deal” with their big labor allies to exempt union benefits from a tax on high value health care plans, CongressDaily reports.
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If this policy is adopted, it would mean that there could be two Americans receiving the exact same benefits, but one American may be taxed and one wouldn’t, and the only difference would be one of them being a member of a union…
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These people are despicable:
In pursuit of an Eagle Scout badge, Kevin Anderson, 17, has toiled for more than 200 hours hours over several weeks to clear a walking path in an east Allentown park.
Little did the do-gooder know that his altruistic act would put him in the cross hairs of the city’s largest municipal union.
Nick Balzano, president of the local Service Employees International Union, told Allentown City Council Tuesday that the union is considering filing a grievance against the city for allowing Anderson to clear a 1,000-foot walking and biking path at Kimmets Lock Park.
“We’ll be looking into the Cub Scout or Boy Scout who did the trails,” Balzano told the council.
Balzano said Saturday he isn’t targeting Boy Scouts. But given the city’s decision in July to lay off 39 SEIU members, Balzano said “there’s to be no volunteers.” No one except union members may pick up a hoe or shovel, plant a flower or clear a walking path.
Are we not told by the leftists, ad nauseum, that unions are a great blessing to modern society? Hogwash. Their thuggish tactics and myopic agenda are a cancer on our once flourishing civil society. They ought to be banished to the ash heap of history.
That’s a nice Boy Scouts program you got there…shame if something were to happen to it.
Union thug Balzano eventually admits that, “we are probably going to let this one go.” But don’t expect such favors in the future! Let this be a warning to you all: no positive social action without subsequent lining of our mobster pockets will be tolerated. Capiche?
Hat tip: Michelle Malkin
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Michelle Obama is warning of a coming teacher shortage. Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute disagrees, noting that even if a million teachers retire in the next four years, we’d still have a lower pupil/teacher ration than we had in the 1970’s. I agree with him that a shortage of total teachers is not one of the problems we face in education, but there is a shortage of good teachers.
There are several reasons why there are not enough quality teachers. Because public schools operate outside of normal markets, the provision of education is highly inefficient. A lot of money is wasted on things that do not increase education outcomes, while there is little pressure to invest in the most promising areas for increasing performance. One such area is teacher quality.
Good teachers improve student performance, yet those with the best skills and experience find teaching salaries to be woefully inadequate compared to what they can make in the private sector. School systems looking to hire teachers also undervalue subject matter knowledge and overvalue education degrees. A system of choice would encourage schools to place more appropriate value on the importance of quality teachers. The result would be greater competition to attract and retain high performing teachers. As an example, The Equality Project Charter School recently opened in New York and offers a starting salary of $125,000 for its teachers. Impressively, the new charter is able to do this while receiving the same per pupil funding as the city’s public schools.
Another obstacle to filling schools with quality teachers is the unparalleled political clout wielded by teachers’ unions. In many places it is simply impossible to fire teachers for incompetence. Thanks to union influence, teacher rating systems – where they even exist – are a joke, routinely finding the most incompetent teachers to be “satisfactory.” Unions also strongly oppose merit pay, so despite the compelling evidence that shows the importance of effective teachers, the current system does next to nothing to reward effective teaching.
Unions are only able to dictate school policy because schools are governed through a political process. With a more market oriented system, where parents held the power of accountability instead of politicians and their appointees, union influence would wane, good teachers would be offered more competitive salaries, and students would be eminently better off.
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The first shots in a trade war – guaranteed to produce heavy economic casualties right here at home – have been fired by Barack Obama. In order to secure a Pyrrhic victory for narrow union interests, President Obama has sent unarmed and ill-prepared consumers to the front lines.
Obama has slapped Chinese tire imports with a three-year tariff – at rates of 35 percent the first year, 30 percent the second and 25 percent the third. The justification for this action is a law passed in 2000, as part of the negotiations to Chinese admittance into WTO, that says the U.S. can impose tariffs if “a surge in Chinese imports damages a U.S. industry.”
A surge? Are Chinese tires storming the beaches of Florida?
Basically, some union official decided that China was selling too many tires and came whining about it to the U.S. government. All of a sudden it’s protectionism time.
Unfortunately, protectionism doesn’t actually do any protecting. It doesn’t protect consumers who will have fewer choices at higher prices. It doesn’t protect tire importers who will also pay higher prices which, when they necessarily pass them on to consumers, will cost them business.
It doesn’t even help the particular domestic industry ostensibly being protected. Without competitive pressures, industry will grow in an inefficient and wasteful manner. Numerous countries, particular in Latin America, have tried to develop economically by protecting domestic industries. It has never worked. You can no more protect an industry through tariffs than you can protect a child by locking him in a closet for twenty years.
Update: Daniel Ikenson at freetrade.org offer a much more detailed analysis.
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I’m concerned that a union is proposing taxes, and apparently people in the government are listening.
After the federal government put up hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out Wall Street, the largest labor union in America wants those firms to return the favor.
The AFL-CIO reportedly is promoting a proposal to tax every single stock transaction, and it’s gained some support among Democrats.
According to The Hill, the tiny tax would be about a tenth of a percent — but it could mean a lot of money for companies, like Goldman Sachs, that are making billions and conducting a high volume of trades.
Union policy director Thea Lee told the newspaper that the tax could raise between $50 billion and $100 billion annually for the federal government, but also serve to discourage “speculative financial activity.” In other words, the kind of lightning-fast trading conducted by mega-firms which critics say leads to volatility.
You know what else all that trading creates? Liquidity. That means that little investors like me can put in a market order and it will execute quickly at something reasonably close to the market price. The only people the intraday volatility possibly hurts is the traders themselves when they’re on the losing side of a swing. So what? That’s the name of the game.
I don’t see the AFL-CIO’s angle in this. What do they stand to gain? How does this benefit the AFL-CIO members?
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Andrew Coulson of Cato has issued a challenge to readers and/or critics to name a field that has suffered the kind of productivity collapse seen in education over the last 40 years. None of the suggestions so far have measured up.
So why has American education both gotten more expensive and less effective? This story (Hat tip: John Stossel’s Take) might give you a hint:
Baltimore’s most successful middle school is laying off staff and shortening its school day to meet demands of a teachers union contract in what is one of the first major disputes over teacher pay between a charter school and a union.
KIPP Ujima Village Academy, based on a model that has forged a successful track record among poor students in more than a dozen states, has been violating a contract requiring teachers to be paid more if they work extra hours, school and union leaders acknowledge.
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Advocates say the confrontation goes to the heart of what they see as a major weakness of Maryland’s charter school law: Teachers must be part of the union in their school district and subject to the contract. If the issue is not resolved, KIPP may ask state lawmakers to allow schools greater flexibility in determining teachers’ pay and workdays.
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Students will attend classes for eight hours in the next school year, and Saturday classes have been canceled. The four layoffs include one music and one art teacher who were recently let go, as well as two staff members who worked with special education and struggling students.
Because education is largely delivered through political mechanisms, rather than the market, teachers unions have been uniquely successful in hijacking the industry. They have supplanted the interests of children with their own.
Some want to emulate this model in other industries, like health care. They should expect the same disastrous consequences – such as continuing price increases despite precipitous productivity declines – with universal health care as we have seen with universal education.
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Supreme Court Halts Chrysler Sale to Fiat
The Supreme Court on Monday granted an emergency appeal asking it to halt the impending government-backed sale of Chrysler to Italian automaker Fiat.
The order stops for now Chrysler’s sale, which the company claims could scuttle the deal.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg signed the order, but it may be only temporary.
A federal appeals court in New York had earlier approved the sale, but gave opponents until 4 p.m. ET Monday to try to get the Supreme Court to intervene. Ginsburg issued her order just before 4 p.m.
The complaint stems from the administration’s decision to favor unsecured debtors (and unions) over secured debtors, who bankruptcy and contract law grants the first place in line. It remains to be seen whether the five Supreme Court members necessary to sign off on hearing the case will act or the temporary halt will expire, but for now we can praise justice Ginsburg for at least feigning an interest in the importance of rule of law and economic rights.
SCOTUSblog on what the stay might mean:
Leave a comment* Ginsburg may have decided to share the decision on what to do with her eight colleagues, and they needed more time to think or talk about it.
* Members of the Court may have decided that they wanted to give some explanation, or perhaps some may have decided to dissent and wanted a chance to prepare a statement saying so. In the meantime, it was her task, as the Circuit Justice, to impose a limited stay.
* Ginsburg or the Court may be waiting to see how the Second Circuit explains its decision to uphold the terms of the sale. The Circuit Court issued no opinion on Friday, indicating that such an explanation would come “in due course,” although the expectation was that one or more opinions would emerge from those judges on Monday.
The wording of Ginsburg’s order — “stayed pending further order” — is the conventional way by which a Justice or the Court carries out an action that is expected to be short in duration, and not controlling — or even hinting at — the ultimate outcome. Any speculation that her order meant the Court was leaning toward a further postponement would be unfounded.
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Some people think the apparent union success at raising millions of dollars, as evidenced by the lavish sums thrown at Barack Obama during the campaign, is evidence that unions developed an “enviable business model.”
It is an enviable business model. It’s also an immoral one. I’m sure many people of unscrupulous character would love to also enlist the force of government in creating a racketeering enterprise. Too bad it’s not in the least bit productive for the rest of the economy.
Holding up rent-seeking as a paragon of successful economic activity misses the forest for the trees. Achieving financial stability by robbing the rest of society is not a model we want, or can afford, to see expanded to the whole of the economy. Eventually you’ll run out of actual producers to take money from.
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I am a libertarian-conservative blogger living in the DC area. I have a Master's degree in Political Science, but please don't hold that against me.
