Break Up the Teachers' Unions

Michael Bloomberg does not mention it, but when it comes to supporting charter schools he has been putting his money where his thoughts are. He is providing considerable funding for New York’s Success Academies, charter schools that have had an outstanding record of success-- in teaching children from low income neighborhoods.

In a new essay (via Maggie's Farm) Bloomberg argues that the government should amp up funding for charter schools, because public schools have been a disgraceful failure. Sensibly, he blames the teachers’ unions and the politicians they control. He might have added that the push toward diversity and equity has seriously damaged several outstanding public schools, in Virginia and in San Francisco. Eliminating the use of standardized testing for admission into the best public high schools is going to damage all the children in those schools. When a third of the class cannot read or cannot do algebra, this will require remedial course work, and will either split the schools into different tracks or to dumb down the academic requirements.

From MIT to the University of Tennessee system, universities have discovered that it choosing applicants by lottery fills the student ranks with young people who are too far behind to do the work. Thus, the schools must institute remedial programs, or else, they must funnel all the underperforming students into Humanities courses or ethnic studies programs. 

Anyway, Bloomberg looks at secondary American education, and he remarks, sagely, that more and more parents are taking their children out of public schools:

The message to educators and elected officials could hardly be clearer: Too many public schools are failing, parents are voting with their feet, and urgent and bold action is needed. Until now, however, the only governmental response has been to spend more money — too much of which has gone to everyone but our children.

The problem is not funding. The problem is what the schools are doing with the money:

Since 2020, Congress has sent an additional $190 billion to schools, in part to help them reopen safely and stave off layoffs. But in many districts, union leaders resisted a return to in-classroom instruction long after it was clear that classrooms were safe. And by and large, remote instruction was a disaster. By one analysis, the first year of the pandemic left students an average of five months behind in math and four months behind in reading, with much larger gaps for low-income schools.

Where is the money going? To sports?? But, it is also going to the misguided project of promoting social justice and diversity. Bloomberg does not mention the latter, so we will emphasize it.

The U.S. spends more per pupil on public education than virtually any other country, and many districts have struggled to spend all the federal funds they’ve received. Others have splurged on sports.

Now, after students have fled public schools in record numbers, states are paying more to educate fewer children. That might have been acceptable if students were showing great improvement. Instead, we are paying more for failure.

With less money the charter schools are doing an outstanding job.

Meanwhile, enrollment at public charter schools has been moving in the opposite direction, thanks to their success, even as their federal funding has not risen in the last four years. From 2020 to 2021, nearly 240,000 new students enrolled in charter schools, a 7% increase year over year. Many charter schools around the country have long waitlists, and no wonder. In states and cities with strong accountability laws, charters have a proven academic track record of outperforming district schools. 

One recent nationwide analysis found that districts with a higher share of charters yield higher reading and math scores as well as higher graduation rates on average. Other research has found that the benefits are especially pronounced for Black, Latino and low-income students.

The only people who have a problem with that are teachers’ unions. Doesn’t this mean that we ought to disband the teachers’ unions? Doesn’t it mean that the parents who are voting for the Democratic politicians who support the teachers’ unions ought to wake up and figure out what is going on:

The idea that we would allow public charter-school students from disadvantaged backgrounds to be deprived of great teachers so that we can staff schools with declining enrollments as though they were full makes no sense whatsoever — until factoring in politics. And then it makes perfect sense, because so many elected officials are beholden to union leaders who oppose charters.

One mentions that these ideas are not new. They are not original. We applaud Michael Bloomberg’s leadership on this issue, because he is doing more than just talking the talk.