[quote=EconProf]Now that the unions have come to dominate the teaching profession there is less incentive to be a better teacher, since one’s pay will not likely change. “Step” increases, where teachers get an automatic 2 or 3 percent raise every year just for serving their time, are common for the first five or ten years of teaching. Both the unions and school district administrators want to dodge the touchy subject of evaluating teaching quality and the progress of the teacher’s students in determining pay and promotions. As a result, good teachers get about the same pay as bad teachers, a situation less likely to prevail in the private sector. Incentives matter! Vouchers, private schools, and charter schools are more likely to resemble the private sector in this regard, which is why parents are increasingly demanding them.[/quote]
In the bolded portion of your post, you seem to imply that education was better at some point in time…a time in which unions did not have power. Could you please tell us exactly when this time was so that we can compare outcomes from this utopian, union-free system with the outcomes from times when unions were strongest?
FYI, some history about the teachers’ unions to help you get started on this task:
Teachers care far less about how much other teachers are paid than they do about how much they, themselves, are paid. Getting bonuses for doing special projects that significantly help the students, or getting some kind of financial reward for getting an aphasiac child to speak and verbally reason, or getting a dyslexic child to read fluently, or getting an unmotivated child to become more motivated would be nice, too. These types of rewards would matter a lot more to the “best and brightest” teachers, and I’m willing to bet that the vast majority of these teachers would favor these rewards long before they would advocate for getting rid of unions.
The “best and brightest” teachers tend to be the most opinionated, outspoken teachers. They rely on union protection when they have to fight against stupid, top-down, politically-driven “changes” to the education system that are designed more to provide profits to certain companies in the education industry than to really teach students how to learn. These teachers have no desire, whatsoever, to weaken their unions.
