And no, privatization does not usually mean lower costs for taxpayers/consumers of public services. In many, many cases, costs have gone UP as a result of privatization. I’ve addressed this in another thread.
Again, if you can find evidence showing that privatization provides better value for the money, I’d like to see it.
Let’s also hear how the loss of millions of decent-paying jobs that are available to the general public will result in better outcomes for Joe Sixpack.
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“With his legal training and business background, Mr. Brill is expert at chronicling the union’s failings. He documents the growth of the New York City teachers’ contract from 39 pages in 1962 to 200 today, along with work rules that can be used at every turn to obstruct principals from improving schools. He details the case of a Stuyvesant High School teacher who was so drunk that she passed out at her desk, only to have the union claim on its Web site that she was disciplined as part of a scheme to harm senior teachers.
He goes a lot easier on the reformers who have spent recent years pushing the expansion of charter schools and standardized tests. Mr. Brill identifies the millionaires and billionaires who attack the unions and steered the Democratic Party to their cause. There is Whitney Tilson, who parlayed $1 million of his parents’, relatives’ and own money to build a hedge fund that he told Mr. Brill was worth $50 million; Ravenel Boykin Curry IV, who works for the family’s money fund and has homes in Manhattan, East Hampton and the Dominican Republic; and David Einhorn, who at age 38 “was already one of Wall Street’s successful short sellers.”’
“…Reviewers have criticized Mr. Brill for making what seems like a bizarre turnaround in the book’s final chapter. When I asked him about it, he said the two years spent reporting had changed him.
In the book’s first 420 pages, he bashes the union and its president, Randi Weingarten, is dismissive of veteran teachers and extols charters.
Three people seem to have altered that thinking. First, David Levin, a founder of the Knowledge Is Power Program, the biggest charter chain in the country, told him that charter schools would never be able to train near the number of quality teachers needed to populate all public schools.
Second, Jessica Reid, an assistant principal at Harlem Success who worked night and day to improve the lives of poor children, burned out right before Mr. Brill’s eyes and quit midyear.
And third, against the odds, he came to like Ms. Weingarten. “She really cares about this stuff,” he told me.
The book ultimately concludes that only the union can supply quality veteran teachers on the scale needed”.
