“Are School Reopening Decisions Related to Union Influence?” (SSRN):
The COVID-19 pandemic led to widespread school closures affecting millions of K-12 students in the United States in the spring of 2020. Groups representing teachers have pushed to reopen public schools virtually in the fall because of concerns about the health risks associated with reopening in person. In theory, stronger teachers’ unions may more successfully influence public school districts to reopen without in-person instruction. Using data on the reopening decisions of 835 public school districts in the United States, we find that school districts in locations with stronger teachers’ unions are less likely to reopen in person even after we control semi-parametrically for differences in local demographic characteristics. These results are robust to four measures of union strength, various potential confounding characteristics, and a further disaggregation to the county level. We also do not find evidence to suggest that measures of COVID-19 risk are correlated with school reopening decisions.
If there is a strong teacher union, does that mean parents are out of luck when it comes to free government-run babysitting? No!
“Schools Reopen to In-Person Learning, but Teachers Work From Home” (Wall Street Journal, September 28) describes a world in which teachers can stay home in their PJs while a newly hired “proctor” risks death or maiming from Covid-19.
Too bad teacher’s age and, oh yeah, experience get in the way. How about hiring Swedish HS students to remotely teach kids stuck at home in the US at a fraction of the cost of civil service employment. This will allow deployment of teachers to create PPE for the coming “twindemic” (flu+covid rebound) and help close the deficit gap. Problem solved!
Older: teachers with some experience are more effective than 22-year-old teachers in their first year. But a plateau is reached after about five years. A Covid-vulnerable almost-retired 55-year-old teacher is not any more effective than a 27-year-old with 4 or 5 years. See https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/33321/1001455-The-Impact-of-Teacher-Experience.PDF for example.
[Sigh]. Well, there’s nothing we can do about it. They’re following the science.
Teacher’s Unions are one of the institutional pillars of (and archetypes for) the United States. It doesn’t matter if the students get smarter, dumber, or stay the same. In fact it doesn’t matter if they go to school or get tested for anything ever again. The point is that the teachers got great pay and benefits.
They’re the biggest legal mafia in America, they’re supported by every level of government, and cannot be touched. Plus, they literally have possession and control of the “family jewels” of virtually every parent in the United States. How can you possibly blame anyone when the kids themselves and their parents are getting worse every year? They’re doing the best they can with what they have!
And they’ve done their job adequately if a kid graduates from high school at a 6th-grade equivalency. At that point they’re as competent as their parents!
https://www.studyfinds.org/average-parent-math-science-sixth-grader/
When we go sifting through the rubble of what used to be the United States, the Teacher’s Union pillar is going to be standing there in the midst of the wreckage like a forlorn monument. A little like the houses that get blasted to smithereens by a hurricane and the toilet is still there.
Even Bill Gates has tried valiantly to mess with the Teachers Union business in TED talks and failed miserably, which is probably why Elon Musk called him a Knucklehead.
https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_teachers_need_real_feedback?language=en#t-65730
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harley-Davidson_Knucklehead_engine
And we all remember that Elon Musk named his child after a process control robot but then had to revert to roman numerals because of laws in California, which are hopelessly outdated.
And Grimes isn’t a Bolshevik, either. Her bourgeois is the ultimate bourgeois. It’s like anti-Bourgeois.
“Elon Reeve Musk FRS is a business magnate, industrial designer, engineer, and philanthropist.”
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/25/entertainment/grimes-musk-baby-name-tweak-scli-intl/index.html
Carycruz Bueno, PhD, (who recently made the news when she freaked out at an AirBnB rental’s pro-Trump signs) wrote a paper on the outcomes of remote teaching. Summary: … attending a virtual school leads to a reduction of 0.1 to 0.4 standard deviations in achievement test scores for students in elementary and middle school. I also find that ever attending a virtual school is associated with a 10-percentage point reduction in ever graduating from high school.
That’s a feature, not a bug!
These comments are so clever. I hope more people are waking up to the hypocrisy going on in the US right now.
I didn’t think the Chinese could be hypocrites.