Fred Siegel on Public Sector Unions Displacing Old-Style Democrait Machines

Here are some key passages from the Wall Street Journal's weekend edition interview. Matthew Kaminski sat down with Fred Siegel, producing the following insights.

Excerpts from the Interview

A former editor of the left-leaning Dissent magazine, Mr. Siegel has written several well-received books on New York, including the 1997 "The Future Once Happened Here." He calls his hometown "the model for cross subsidies" in America. "Wall Street makes money off the bonds that have to be floated to pay the public sector workers in New York."



Born in 1945 and raised in the Bronx, Mr. Siegel got his first political education by listening to feverish debates at home about Bundists and Bolsheviks. His grandfather, a militantly anti-Communist socialist, was vice president of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and a strong influence on him. In 1972, Mr. Siegel worked on the McGovern campaign—"you shouldn't print that!"—and calls his discussions with the Democratic candidate "enormously consequential" in shifting his world view. "I like to say I was center left before I became center right," he says.



Thanks to union clout, he notes, salaries and benefits for teachers, bus drivers and city secretaries have outgained the private sector during this sluggish economy. "Spending is never ratcheted down. It's unconnected to productivity. That can only be sustained by a boom or these extraordinary subsidies we're getting now from the Federal Reserve. But that's gonna stop at some point. And then what happens?"


And the ground may already be moving. Many American localities are already at the crisis point. Rhode Island's legislature last week sharply cut retirement benefits for current and retired public workers. "A 300% Democratic state!" marvels Mr. Siegel, who was one of the first to sound the warning on the public pensions crisis.



In Mr. Siegel's estimation, only Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has tried the needed fix after last year's elections. "Part of the reason Walker has become such a lightning rod" is that he pushed "straight up, unambiguous structural reform." His move to restrict collective bargaining for state employees isn't as important, says Mr. Siegel, as ending the requirement that state workers pay union dues. On his first day in the governor's mansion in 2005, Indiana's Mitch Daniels also stopped deducting dues automatically; most workers chose not to pay. "The union has a guaranteed flow of income, which they then use to lobby the government," says Mr. Siegel. This reform, he adds, "evens the playing field."


Dues money is the coin of political influence for organized labor. So not surprisingly, it is bankrolling the pushback. Mr. Walker faces a recall campaign. Ohio voters this month overturned Gov. John Kasich's legislation to limit collective bargaining for state workers. Mr. Kasich should have eliminated the dues "check off" instead, according to Mr. Siegel, and worked harder to connect with voters. "Too many Republicans treat workers as if they are their employees," he says. "The virtue of Ronald Reagan is he talked to workers as one of them."


It is often forgotten how many New Deal Democrats were skeptical about public-sector unions. Franklin Delano Roosevelt called the idea of strikes by government workers "unthinkable and intolerable." New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia said, "I do not want any of the pinochle club atmosphere to take hold among city workers." But union organizers would eventually tap into the language of the civil rights movement to present collective bargaining as another overdue "right."



New York Mayor Robert Wagner extended collective-bargaining rights to government employees in 1958. He saw early that, says Mr. Siegel, "public sector unions are displacing political machines as the turnout mechanism for the Democratic Party. They are the new Tammany Hall." Coming off a nail biter of an election, President John F. Kennedy saw this future as well. In 1962, he signed Executive Order 10988 to give federal workers the right to unionize, though not to collectively bargain. By 1980, half of all delegates to the Democratic convention worked for the government. Government-employee rolls kept growing through the Reagan years. During the presidency of George W. Bush, the number of government workers who belong to a union surpassed the number of unionized private workers.


Mr. Siegel observes that public-sector unions have "become a vanguard movement within liberalism. And the reason for that is it's the public sector that comes closest to the statist ideals of McGovern and post-McGovern liberals. And that is, there's no connection between effort and reward. You're guaranteed your job. You're guaranteed your salary increase. There's a kind of bureaucratic equality."


In turn, he continues, "this vanguard becomes in the eyes of many liberals the model for the middle class. Public-sector unions are what all workers should be like. Their benefits are the kind of benefits everyone should get."


Government workers make up a growing share of the middle class. And perversely, says Mr. Siegel, unions can justifiably claim to defend the interests of the middle-class worker. "That's because the costs that they've imposed have driven out the private-sector middle class. They are the disease of which they proclaim themselves the cure."



I've highlighted in red what I consider to be among the most essential comments by Siegel, among others which are also valuable to understand.

Don't you find it chilling to hear, from a former leftist, the straight scoop on just who did what, when, and to whom in this sordid mess?

Regarding Public School Teachers' Compensation

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal published this an important editorial entitled Public School Teachers Aren't Underpaid. Written by Andrew G. Biggs, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Jason Richwine, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation. It is drawn from a new paper, "Assessing the Compensation of Public School Teachers" (aei.org/paper/100259).




The Journal piece carried the rather shocking subheadline,
"Our research suggests that on average—counting salaries, benefits and job security—teachers receive about 52% more than they could in private business."

Because I feel so strongly about this issue and this article, I'm going to simply repost it in its entirety.

Public School Teachers Aren't Underpaid
 A common story line in American education policy is that public school teachers are underpaid—"desperately underpaid," according to Education Secretary Arne Duncan in a recent speech. As former first lady Laura Bush put it: "Salaries are too low. We all know that. We need to figure out a way to pay teachers more."


Good teachers are crucial to a strong economy and a healthy civil society, and they should be paid at a level commensurate with their skills. But the evidence shows that public school teachers' total compensation amounts to roughly $1.50 for every $1 that their skills could garner in a private sector job.


How could that be? First, consider salaries. Public school teachers do receive salaries 19.3% lower than similarly-educated private workers, according to our analysis of Census Bureau data. However, a majority of public school teachers were education majors in college, and more than two in three received their highest degree (typically a master's) in an education-related field. A salary comparison that controls only for years spent in school makes no distinction between degrees in education and those in biology, mathematics, history or other demanding fields.


Education is widely regarded by researchers and college students alike as one of the easiest fields of study, and one that features substantially higher average grades than most other college majors. On objective tests of cognitive ability such as the SAT, ACT, GRE (Graduate Record Examination) and Armed Forces Qualification Test, teachers score only around the 40th percentile of college graduates. If we compare teachers and non-teachers with similar AFQT scores, the teacher salary penalty disappears.


While salaries are about even, fringe benefits push teacher compensation well ahead of comparable employees in the private economy. The trouble is that many of these benefits are hidden, meaning that lawmakers, taxpayers and even teachers themselves are sometimes unaware of them.


Data on employee benefits from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), for example, do not include retiree health coverage, which for teachers is worth about an additional 10% of their salaries. Because of differing accounting rules between the public and private sectors, BLS data also make teachers' defined-benefit pensions appear only slightly more generous than the typical 401(k) plan found in the private sector.


In reality, a teacher who retired after 30 years of service with an annual salary of $40,000 might receive guaranteed annual pension benefits of about $20,330. Under a typical private 401(k) plan, a guaranteed annual benefit might be only around $4,450 (assuming the money is invested in U.S. Treasuries and the employee buys an annuity).


BLS data on paid leave for teachers count vacation days only during the school year, omitting summer and long holiday breaks. A valid pay comparison should include this extra time off, in which teachers can enjoy longer vacations or earn additional income.


Properly counted, a typical public school teacher with a salary of $51,000 would receive another $51,480 in present or future fringe benefits. A worker in private business with the same salary would receive around $22,185 in fringe benefits.


Finally, despite recent layoffs, teachers still have greater job security than workers in private businesses. While employment in education declined by 2.9% between September 2008 and July 2011, according to BLS data, overall private-sector employment declined by 4.4%. Moreover, from 2005 through 2010 the unemployment rate for public school teachers averaged 2.1%, versus 4.1% for private school teachers and 3.8% for occupations that some consider comparable, such as computer programmers and insurance underwriters.


Job security protects against the loss of compensation suffered by the unemployed, and it also protects a position in which total wages and benefits are on average above market levels. This job security is surely valuable.


Consider that one-fifth of the highest-performing public school teachers in Washington, D.C., recently declined to give up even part of their job security in exchange for base salary increases of up to $20,000. According to our model—which factors in the probability of becoming unemployed, the average duration of unemployment, the level of unemployment insurance benefits, and the risk aversion of public employees—job security is worth about an estimated extra 9% of compensation.


One important caveat: Our research is in terms of averages. The best public school teachers—especially those teaching difficult subjects such as math and science—may well be underpaid compared to counterparts in the private sector.


Nevertheless, most public school teachers would not earn more in private employment. According to our analysis of the Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation, the average person who moves into teaching receives a pay increase of almost 9%, while the average teacher who leaves for the private economy must take a pay cut of over 3%.


This is the opposite of what we would expect if teachers were underpaid. It also helps explain why more people seek teaching jobs—as measured through the number of teaching graduates and applications for teaching positions—than can possibly find them.


In short, combining salaries, fringe benefits and job security, we have calculated that public school teachers receive around 52% more in average compensation than they could earn in the private sector.


The compensation premium is especially relevant today, as states and localities struggle with budget deficits. Restraining the growth of teacher compensation—in particular, pension and retiree health benefits that outstrip what comparable private-sector workers receive—could help balance budgets and perhaps restore school resources lost to rising labor costs. Broader pay reform should give school administrators greater flexibility to reward the best or most-needed teachers with high salaries and benefits, while encouraging the least effective ones to improve or to leave the profession.


Effective reform, however, requires knowing all the facts about teacher pay. Policy makers and the public should not accept at face value that the typical teacher earns far less than he or she would in the private sector. The evidence points to a very different conclusion. (End of editorial)

I sent this editorial via the Journal's email link to a public school teacher friend. She replied that she would now feel better knowing she was being paid above-average compensation for being an above-average teacher. I replied by quoting the passage below and lamenting that she obviously doesn't "get it,"

"However, a majority of public school teachers were education majors in college, and more than two in three received their highest degree (typically a master's) in an education-related field. A salary comparison that controls only for years spent in school makes no distinction between degrees in education and those in biology, mathematics, history or other demanding fields.



Education is widely regarded by researchers and college students alike as one of the easiest fields of study, and one that features substantially higher average grades than most other college majors. On objective tests of cognitive ability such as the SAT, ACT, GRE (Graduate Record Examination) and Armed Forces Qualification Test, teachers score only around the 40th percentile of college graduates. If we compare teachers and non-teachers with similar AFQT scores, the teacher salary penalty disappears."


I am sure my readers do get the point. As it happens, my friend is a walking textbook case of the editorial's point. She has only education-related degrees. Science and math are mysteries to her. If you told her she received her degrees in "one of the easiest fields of study," she'd lash out angrily. But, really, is anyone going to believe that teaching reading requires anything remotely like the education it takes to teach mathematics or science?

By the way, in the school which my daughters attended, it was predominantly math and science teachers who left, frequently in mid-year, either for better teaching positions or more money in private industry. Never, to my knowledge, reading teachers or most run-of-the-mill primary or middle school teachers.

This is the dirty secret I think most thinking citizens understand. The teachers they know are rarely among the most intelligent or best-educated in their social circle. But they wear this 'I'm teaching your kids so back off, buddy' Teflon mantle. As if merely doing this thankless task entitles them to compensation far above parity for their actual skills or educational accomplishments.

The friend to whom I sent this article frequently contends that she is underpaid as a teacher, and should be making much more, because she would have in the private sector. The research cited, of course, shows her belief to be false.

But it's truly shocking to learn that, on average, her kind are paid more than 50% above the compensation they'd receive in the private sector.

That's Incredible! Harry Reid's Attempt To Defend Wonderboy's Jobs Act

"It's very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine; it's the public-sector jobs where we've lost huge numbers, and that's what this legislation is all about."

Just incredible.That's Harry Reid's defense of Wonderboy's public sector union-hiring proposals, according to a recent Wall Street Journal staff editorial.

The piece noted that 111.8MM Americans were employed in the private sector at the end of 2008. As of last month, the number was 109.3MM, a loss of roughly 2.5MM private-sector jobs, and a 2% decline. At the federal level, government employed 1.9MM FTE in late 2008, which increased to 2.1MM at the end of last year, for a 11% gain.

State and local government employment numbers in the editorial don't go back to 2008. Instead, the Journal reports that local governments cut just 210,000 by last month out of 14.28MM a year earlier. For state governments, the numbers were 49,000 and 5.14MM. That's only a quarter of a million state and local government employees cut out of some 19MM, or just a 1.3% decline. Even so, these numbers are polluted by the first stimulus having paid for some of those workers in prior years. That also would make comparisons from the end of 2008 problematic.

What's clear, however, is that the private sector has taken the most pain in terms of job losses.

You would like to think the Senate Majority Leader would at least be able to understand that fact.

The OccupyWallStreet & Related Protests

Is it just me, or does OccupyWallStreet look and sound like something out of a Tom Wolfe novel? Very much like Bonfire of the Vanities. The politicians and unions all lining up behind the scenes to attempt to maneuver for advantage. Major liberal media celebrities and unions are joining in. Even a few apparently risk-oriented House Democrats, like John Lewis and Frisco Nan.


But interviews with the  ordinary crowd members reveal no actual knowledge of what the movement's/event's objectives and demands actually are.


Never the less, some Democratic Congressmen, and even Wonderboy himself speak of common cause with the anarchic crowd.


What disturbs me is that the movement's public calls to echo Egypt's grassroots democracy overlooks the fact that the US has a standing Republic form of government with freely-elected representatives and president.


This entire event seems to be little more than an attempt by the far left to try to take government out of the existing Constitutional institutions and put it into the street, because they don't like the fact that voters rebuked the Democrats last November by cutting their Senate majority and returning the House to GOP control.


It's as if, having had all three key elements of legislation- House, Senate and White House- for two years, they aren't satisfied with the results. So they simply intend to overthrow the Constitutionally-mandated process of federal government by sitting in on Wall Street and elsewhere in major US cities.

To better understand how skewed and out of touch with reality the movement's supporters are, here's an editorial from the weekend Wall Street Journal by SEIU's president, Mary Kay Henry, entitled Why Labor Backs 'Occupy Wall Street.' I've helpfully highlighted Henry's contentions which are seriously at odds with the truth, in red.

"The images of row upon row of stoic airline pilots, fed-up students and thousands of Americans marching through downtown Manhattan have captivated the nation.


Seemingly overnight, the organic, scrappy protests in the financial center of the world have blossomed into a national movement from Chicago to Los Angeles, calling attention to the gross inequality in our society and the unwillingness of our politicians to correct this imbalance.


The Occupy Wall Street actions are a potent example of what is happening across our country as the anger and frustration of ordinary Americans builds. While the media and pundits obsess over what the Occupy Wall Street protester's want, the protesters have already succeeded in shaking our conscience as a nation and forcing a national conversation about everything that is wrong with our economy.


The hard truth is that things are pretty lousy for most Americans right now. And while students, seniors and workers didn't cause our economic collapse, we're the ones paying the price.


It's been three years since Wall Street CEOs crashed our economy. When Wall Street was on its knees, the American taxpayers came to their rescue with trillions of dollars in bailouts and promise from the big banks that they'd invest in our recovery.


Instead, the banks used our hard-earned tax dollars to enrich themselves. They robbed millions of Americans of their jobs and their livelihoods. They refuse to invest in the small businesses that drive America's job creation and growth. And they continue to kick us while we're down by foreclosing on millions of families.


Today, the richest 5% of the population holds 72% of the wealth in our country. We have 25 million Americans looking for full-time work. And those Americans lucky enough to have a job have seen their hours slashed and their benefits cut. I recently met a worker in Chicago who told me he's been forced to feed his family by foraging for food in the dumpsters behind the grocery store by his house. Not because he's out of work but because his hours had been cut back and there simply wasn't enough money to keep a roof over his family's head, pay the electric bill, and put food on the table every night.


We have an entire generation of young people who were promised good jobs if they worked hard, played by the rules and attended college. They kept their end of the bargain and when they graduated they were left with no job prospects and a record amount of debt.


Americans watched in horror this spring as Republican politicians held our country hostage during the debt-ceiling debate to win harmful cuts to our communities and more tax breaks for millionaires. And this week House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor again turned their backs on the American people by refusing to even bring the American Jobs Act up for a vote.


The anger of the American people has been brewing for quite some time, and now that it's boiled over there's no bottling it up. The importance of Occupy Wall Street can't be measured by any set of demands. What's more important to understand are the values that unite the protesters and their authentic understanding of what has gone wrong in our economy.


We can begin to right the wrongs of our economy and respond to the growing demands of the American people by putting our country back to work and by holding Wall Street and big corporations accountable for the damage they've inflicted on us all.


When Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz was asked what one demand on Washington the Occupy Wall Street protesters should make right now, he didn't hesitate a moment before saying: create jobs.


We can't begin to fix what is wrong with our economy without creating good jobs. We have work that needs doing in this country and millions of Americans looking for full-time work. It's time to put the two together to make America a stronger nation. And it's time to use the money being made on Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms across the country to put Americans back to work.


Congress can begin by passing the American Jobs Act and immediately put Americans to work rebuilding our outdated and dangerous roads and bridges and ensuring our kids have first-class schools. We can invest in our communities to keep teachers in our classrooms, police on the beat, health-care workers at our hospitals and clinics, and ensure that we have enough firefighters to protect our communities.


The 2.1 million nurses, janitors, school-bus drivers and other members of the Service Employees International Union stand arm in arm with the peaceful Occupy Wall Street protesters. While unions cannot claim credit for Occupy Wall Street, SEIU members are joining the protesters in the streets because we are united in the belief that our country needs a change.


Nobody can predict what's next for the Occupy Wall Street movement. And no one institution or person should try to exert their pressure on this inspiring collective of people.


The importance of the Occupy Wall Street protests lies in the simple fact that all it takes is a small group of courageous people to light a spark and forever change the arc of history. The auto workers in Flint, Mich., lit that spark in the 1930s through their sit-down strikes and forever changed American industry. The civil-rights activists lit that spark when their sit-ins forced us to confront the racial inequality that poisoned our nation.


We saw that spark in Tahrir Square and across the Middle East this Arab Spring as a few brave people inspired millions of fed-up citizens to challenge their governments and demand better lives. It's what I've witnessed for the past 30 years as a union organizer watching working people stick their necks out and stand publicly for a union to win a chance at a better life for themselves and their families.


And it's what countless Americans see in this growing Occupy Wall Street movement. They see the opportunity to restore the very American notion that each of our citizens deserves a shot at reaching his or her own dreams, of finding a good job, and leaving the next generation better off.


The people are finally speaking. Now it's up to our leaders and CEOs to listen and respond."


I won't refute those highlighted passages point by point. Suffice to say:

-"Wall Street CEOs" did not "crash" our economy. For that, thank Barney Frank, Kent Conrad, and Chris Dodd for pushing Fannie and Freddie to guarantee low-doc, no-doc, low-quality mortgage loans.

-To my knowledge, banks were told to take TARP money, and no managements signed papers agreeing, in exchange, to loan money to questionable businesses at near-zero rates.

-Borrowers of money for mortgages who don't continue to pay those loans knew they'd be in default. They are adults, not children. Nobody 'robbed' them then stole their homes.

-The best, though, is this howler:

"We have an entire generation of young people who were promised good jobs if they worked hard, played by the rules and attended college. They kept their end of the bargain and when they graduated they were left with no job prospects and a record amount of debt."

I can't recall, when I was in college, anyone promising me a "good job" if I worked hard, graduated, whatever. This is a union boss' view of the ideal America- not reality in a free-, or even mixed-market economy.

-Then Henry simply states that it's time to be socialist and forcibly take public company capital for employment, against the shareholders' wills, in the economy as government sees fit.

Of course, that last bit is sort of what Wonderboy & Co. have done with Stimulus I and II (the latter a/k/a The Jobs Act), only instead of taking corporate money directly from those firms, they just borrowed it from China and spent it, expecting to get it through higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy.

-Henry also confuses the early-mid years of American unionism with some sort of utopia, when it was, in reality, an unsustainable money grab in some then-key industrial sectors. One way they 'changed American industry forever' is drove some of it into bankruptcy, taking the union pensions with them, while driving others offshore.

Good job, Mary Kay!

- How about this passage, dripping with entitlement-speak:

"that each of our citizens deserves a shot at reaching his or her own dreams, of finding a good job, and leaving the next generation better off."

What is to prevent anyone from that shot now? Go talk to Herman Cain. Sometimes you have to make your job, rather than sit still while others hand it to you.

Perhaps if some of Mary Kay's precious union workers hadn't spent so much of their high, unionized wages on vacation homes and pickup trucks, while living lifestyles that caused them to require so much expensive medical care later in life, they'd be in better financial shape to weather the current environment. Perhaps not taken on housing debt they couldn't afford.

This is America, folks. Nobody promises you the good life. You have to earn it.

Come to think of it, maybe I have the wrong Tome Wolfe novel. Maybe the appropriate one to cite is much, much older than Bonfire.

Anyone remember Radical Chic and Maumauing the Flack Catchers?

Wonderboy's Rose Garden Speech This Morning

If you happened to catch Wonderboy's Rose Garden appearance this morning to formally send his jobs bill to Congress, you saw vintage campaigning. As well as the man's continuing tin ear/eye when it comes to what concerns the bulk of the nation's voters.

I, of course, turned the volume off. But I saw and heard enough to understand that this morning's carefully-staged event was classic Wonderboy.

He again urged, in contravention of the separation of powers, that Congress simply rubber stamp his bill, with no debate nor changes.

But the visuals were the clue as to how the First Rookie continues to view his mission. Behind him were arrayed, in uniform, all manner of public sector union employees- teachers, firemen, police, etc. The message being, you in the states don't have the right to decide whether to keep or dismiss public union employees. Or to choose to borrow to continue to fund them.

No, the federal government will unilaterally borrow the money for you, then give it to you, provided you continue to employ these public sector union personnel.

Meanwhile, the other spending in his jobs bill is essentially for other union members- those in the construction trades. And at high, Davis-Bacon Act rates, mind you. So you, the taxpayer, will pay the highest amount of money possible to construction workers, thus getting the smallest amount of value for the road, bridges, sewer systems, etc., built with your borrowed dollars.

Wonderboy clearly doesn't care what most voters think of his explicit bias toward union members. Or that he's demanding a second...or third...fourth....how many now?....round of stimulus spending to transfer your tax dollars to favored public and private sector union members.

Interesting how totally insensitive he is to the lesson of last November and the basic complaints of Tea Party members and their kindred voters- that the federal government usurps too much power and money.

Judging by his bill, and his little visual display in the Rose Garden this morning, the First Rookie clearly doesn't care what the bulk of America's voters think of his prejudices.

Teacher Evaluation Trouble in New York State

One of the benefits of our federalist system is that states with wacky policies can actually lose residents, business, etc., to more sane, neighboring states.

Take, for example, the case of New York's recent teach evaluation law. A state supreme court judge ruled against a provision of the law allowing schools to fire teachers "whose students persistently get poor marks on standardized tests and other assessments." In other words, teachers who can't exhibit adequate performance on the one thing we actually expect from our schools- children who demonstrate learning.

Today's Wall Street Journal reported that New York Justice Michael C. Lynch,

"specifically rejected the section allowing schools to give teachers the lowest rating if they fail the student performance part of their evaluation, even if they score higher on other measures."

The law which went into effect last year made "40% of a teacher's review" based on their students' achievements.

Essentially, the teachers' union in New York sued the state, claiming the new process relies too heavily on test scores. It appears they won.

For now.

There are, according to the Journal piece, various aspects of the new process which are still subject to collective bargaining. The state will appeal the ruling.

Looking beyond the problem with the teachers' union, one has to feel sorry for New Yorkers living under such idiotic state supreme court judges.

Can you imagine some of the poorer state residents learning that their own state's court system overturned a basic, sensible notion that teachers who can't manage to educate the children under their care to perform well on standardized tests get a pass to continue harming other children, too?

Maybe the New York teachers won this round. But if the ruling holds up, I'd suspect it's one more reason people will flee New York, as the value of even "free" public education declines.

GOP Wins Wisconsin State Senate Recalls 4-2 & Retains Control

Wisconsin Republicans won 4 of 6 recall elections, retaining control of the Senate. Meanwhile, more recalls are likely, only this time for the Democrats who illegally fled the state to deny the state Senate a quorum during passage of the teachers' union-affecting bill which triggered such outrage.

By the way, if you weren't already convinced of the Huffington Post's overwhelming liberal bias, consider these two stories from Reuters and Huffington.

The latter's headline? "Wisconsin Recall Election Results: Democrats Win Two Seats, Fall Short Of Taking Over Senate," then led with this copy,

"Democrats won two Wisconsin state Senate seats in Tuesday's dramatic recall elections, but they fell short of the three needed to take the majority away from Republicans."



Clearly, Huffington's editors place Democratic fortunes before the actual outcome of the elections.
Reuter's headline was "Wisconsin Republicans stave off recall challenge," with the lead copy reading,

"Republicans narrowly retained their majority in the Wisconsin state Senate on Tuesday, staving off a strong recall election challenge from Democrats and union members angered by a new law curbing the power of organized labor.



Two Democratic challengers ousted incumbent Republican lawmakers in special elections. But Republicans successfully defended four other seats up for grabs, denying Democrats the three victories they needed to seize control of the Senate."


Even ABC's website had a fairly succinct, factual, non-dramatic headline, "Wisconsin Recall: GOP Retains Senate Control."

Meanwhile, this overtly conservative site provided some details on the two GOP losses,

"With four retentions and two losses (one being the Republican in the Democratic district, and the other being the guy with the alleged adultery problem), I think that we can safely bring forth the unofficial Democratic Base Theme Song (Loser by Beck)."



Governor Scott Walker made nice with some empty blah blah about 'the people want us to work together,' but, in reality, the GOP have won renewed voter approval of their actions.

This can't be good news for public sector union chiefs who were hoping for Wisconsin to be the first turnaround in this epic battle for state budgets and the fiscal health of American government at both state and federal levels.

Given how much the unions staked on this recall effort, the Wisconsin GOP win can't be understated for its importance nationwide.

Us Local Government Pension Costs

Steve Malanga wrote a scary editorial in an edition of last week's Wall Street Journal entitled The Local Government Pension Squeeze. For those who don't take Meredith Whitney's warnings of US city, county and town bankruptcies seriously, consider what Malanga reported.

The featured text box for the article stated this,

"Annual retiree costs for Providence, R.I., now amount to an astounding 50% of city tax collections."

New Haven's Democratic mayor John DeStefano calls municipal employee pay and benefits "the Pac-Man of our budget, consuming everything in sight."

To further understand why Whitney focuses not on state bankruptcies, but local governments, consider this passage from Malanga's editorial,

"Wages and benefits account for 30% of state general fund expenditures, according to date from the National Governors Association. But U.S. Census surveys show that in the typical town or school district, employee pay and benefits can consume from 70% to 80% of the budget.

Pensions are an enormous part of the problem. While pension payments now consume about 4% of state budgets, many municipalities are already spending 15% to 20% of their finances on pension costs."

Here are some additional scary data regarding municipal finances and pension costs,

"Costa Mesa, Calif. (population 110,000) made news earlier this year when it sent layoff notices to 43% of its employees. In 10 years, the city's annual pension bill increased to $15 million from $5 million and now consumes 16% of the city's $93 million budget. In nearby Anaheim, pensions already account for 22% of its $252 million budget. San Jose's pension costs for police and firefighters have quadrupled in a past decade. Without reform, the city estimates that its yearly pension costs, $63 million in 2000, will swell to $650 million in 2015."

San Jose was, as of July two years ago, the tenth-largest US city. It's not some quaint little Silicon Valley town anymore. Yet it, too, despite being populated by so many smart technology employees, is on its way to drowning in municipal pension expenses. Then Malanga provides these data on older cities,



"Elsewhere the numbers are even scarier. Chicago's unfunded public pension fund liabilities are estimated by Joshua Rauh of Northwestern University and Robert Novy-Marx of the University of Rochester at $44 billion—nearly eight times annual city tax revenues. New York City's annual pension contributions were $1.5 billion (6% of city revenues) in 2002. They've exploded to an estimated $8.4 billion (18% of city revenues) in 2012."

So Chicago is, like the state in which it is located, a fiscal basket case.

The delicate ballet of state-local financing isn't typically understood by most voters, which is probably why Whitney's predictions meet with such disbelief. For example, read Malanga's remarks on that subject,


"School districts in New York State contributed $900 million last year to the state's teacher pension system, but districts may have to spend as much as $4.5 billion on pensions within five years to meet rising costs, according to a December 2010 study by the Manhattan Institute. Local property taxes would have to increase an average of 3.5% a year just to pay for those added pension costs, the study estimated.



The budget pain is likely to worsen. Since 2008, states have balanced their own budgets in part by reducing the financial aid they send to municipalities and school districts. And although the main source of revenue for many municipalities—property taxes—kept rising during much of 2008 and 2009 because of multiyear property assessments that stretched back to good economic times, collections are now starting to plummet."

Thus, states are cutting contributions to towns and school districts to balance their budgets, as most are obligated to do. This leaves towns with property tax revenues, which ,thanks to the housing bust, are now headed down, on more recent valuations, instead of up. How to cope? Malanga provides some ugly details right up Whitney's alley,



"Many cities that have employed budget gimmicks in the past have run out of alternatives. To balance its 2010 budget, Providence, R.I., borrowed some $48 million (using its fire stations as collateral); it also drained most of its reserve fund, which shrank to $3 million from $17 million in one year. But the city remains under severe budget pressure—its annual retiree costs now amount to an astounding 50% of its tax collections, according to a new study from the Rhode Island Expenditure Council.


After years of hiring increases, officials surveyed by the National League of Cities estimated that they have cut their work forces by about 9% in the last two fiscal years. More reductions are on the way. Cities like New Haven, Detroit and Chicago are all looking at outsourcing jobs in areas like trash collection or custodial services to the private sector, where costs are generally lower."


Imagine that! Cities actually outsourcing routine services because the private sector provides them, on contract, at lower costs. And unlike municipal unions and their workers, who are difficult with whom to deal and to fire, contracts for services can have performance and penalty clauses, and be re-let on explicit schedules, to prevent uncompetitive cost-creep.

But the overall picture Malanga paints ought to scare everyone. Not to mention put a more appropriate backdrop to the current federal debt limit/spending/tax hike debates in place.

We, as a society, have simply lost the ability, it seems, to save for what we want. Instead, we just promise each other unrealistic financial sums, then borrow and spend them without knowing from where and how the real costs of said promises will met.

Doesn't that sound like a game of financial musical chairs? Or, by it's other name, a Ponzi scheme?

Yes, it does.

Wisconsin's Teachers' Union Law Finally Resolved by State Supreme Court

You wouldn't know it by the slim coverage in the media, but earlier this week, the story involving Wisconsin's curtailment of some collective bargaining by teachers had its final resolution.

The Wisconsin state supreme court ruled in favor of the legislature and governor Scott Walker, overturning a lower court decision to stay the new law.

Funny how you haven't seen this happy ending to the Wisconsin public union tale covered as lavishly as the liberal print, network and cable media focused their attention on the initial protests.

But it's great news for Wisconsin taxpayers and a hopeful sign for conservatives elsewhere. Some states are coming to their senses and restoring sanity and limits to public sector employee compensation and negotiation powers.

Public Union Employees Know.....

James Bovard wrote a hilarious editorial in a recent edition of the Wall Street Journal describing his stint with the Virginia Highway Department as a youth, entitled My Summer Road to Perdition.

In it, he quotes his crew's number two man, John, on the subject of the department building a new road,

"Why does the state government have to do this? Private businesses could build the road much more efficiently, and cheaper, too."

The rest of Bovard's editorial detail the shenanigans we all suspect, but rarely actually see, whereby the state employees wasted taxpayers' money while ostensibly doing the public's business.

Ironically, one of my close friends, a public school teacher, echoed Bovard's sentiments regarding a recent local road construction project.

The road in question has been closed or opened for limited usage, with delays, for months. It has, of course, affected nearby roads, completely disturbing pre-existing traffic volumes and patterns and causing huge delays.

What galls my public sector friend is driving by other unionized public sector employees who are doing either nothing, very little, or something at a glacial pace.

As a fellow public sector union employee, he knows what they are doing and told me so,

'They're obviously going slowly to make the project last longer so they are paid more for that work.'

Being a taxpayer, and seeing an activity performed by public sector union employees which could have been bid to private contractors, my friend knows he's paying too much. Of course, as an employee of a monopolized trade- public school teaching- he knows he isn't vulnerable, so he feels safe and entitled to criticize the state and county road crews.

But it's obvious he knows, instinctively, what they are doing. Because he does the same thing.

More Unbelievable Spending On Teachers' Benefits In California

Allysia Finley wrote an editorial in this past weekend's edition of the Wall Street Journal describing the surreal situation in California. A tax revolt for higher rates.
It's an incredible story:


Thousands of California teachers turned out this week to protest potential budget cuts to education and to urge lawmakers to raise taxes. Such activism may be par for the course in Democratic strongholds like Sacramento or Los Angeles, but in conservative Orange County?



Teachers swarmed me, eager to get their message across. "We need to educate our community about the tax extensions," said Elizabeth Hoffman, a member of the California Faculty Association's Board of Directors. "We need a rational budget process, a stable funding source that we can count on," Linda Manion, president of the Placentia-Linda teachers unions, added, only to be cut off by Fola Odebunmi, president of the United Faculty North Orange County Community College District. "We can't take any more!" she said.


These teachers complain that schools are facing a "state of emergency." Perhaps what schools are actually experiencing is a state of withdrawal.


The stock market run-up stuffed state and local coffers—but lawmakers decided not to save any of the surplus cash for a rainy day. Between 2004 and 2007, the state increased K-12 and community college funding to $56 billion from $47 billion. Even as student enrollment declined, schools added 4,000 teaching, 2,100 administrative and 5,200 student-support jobs. Meanwhile, school districts that experienced a boom in property-tax revenue increased teacher benefits and salaries.

Poor fiscal management has resulted in swollen teacher and administrative ranks "even as student enrollment declined." Either the enhanced teaching conditions must be scaled back, or Californians need to admit that they were conned into fueling a rise in teaching labor with no corresponding increase in value or performance.

As Stephen Moore noted in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial, if this were a private sector, productivity improvements would be sought, rather than productivity reductions. And if productivity weren't improving, spending on the line-item would be curtailed until problems were addressed.


Lawmakers should have known that it never rains in California. It pours. Months after the 2008 stock market crash, the state had to confront a $40 billion deficit. Democrats proposed raising taxes to help bridge the gap, but they couldn't do it alone since the state's constitution requires a supermajority vote for tax increases. A few Republican state legislators compromised and agreed to raise income, sales and vehicle taxes for two years in order to reduce cuts to education.


Those taxes expire this year. Democrats want to extend them for another five years, insisting that allowing them to expire won't just jeopardize the state's schools, but California's economic recovery. "Five years is what's necessary to bridge our economic recovery," says State Senate Majority Leader Darrell Steinberg.


In a bow to democracy, Gov. Jerry Brown has pledged to put the taxes on a special-election ballot, which also needs a two-thirds vote of the legislature. All of the parents and teachers I spoke with supported this idea.


The California Teachers Association—surprise, surprise—has a different proposal. The union is urging Mr. Brown to extend the taxes without a vote of the people. David Sanchez, the union's president, says he's afraid that voters will reject the taxes if they're put on the ballot after they expire in June. "The people are pretty clear that they don't want new taxes," says Mr. Sanchez.

Amazing, isn't it? When the views of voters don't suit these unions and their boss, they simply appeal to the governor to ignore them, skip a vote, and unilaterally extend the taxes.


A recent Public Policy Institute of California poll shows that nearly two-thirds of likely voters oppose increasing sales and income taxes to maintain school funding. At the same time, 76% of parents say their child's public school has been affected by recent budget cuts and 68% believe that the quality of education will suffer if more cuts are made. Education has already been cut by about $20 billion in the past three years. "We're at a breaking point," Suzanne Gastreich, a mother of two from Mission Viejo, tells me.

You can bet that most of those parents don't know what Finley's editorial reveals about where the money went from the last decade's education spending orgy.


But the reality is that despite recent cuts, education spending and the student-teacher ratio are about the same as they were in 2004. The real problem is that more and more tax dollars are being diverted for teacher benefits. The Los Angeles Unified School District is paying 11% more for teacher health benefits than it did two years ago.

To me, that passage explains the rest of the reason for the problem. It's not education spending, per se, it's benefits for teachers which were increased in the lush real estate boom years.


Republicans have offered to help "save schools" by extending the tax increases for 18 months in return for pension reforms and a hard spending cap. But Democrats have refused to negotiate on those points. Union chief Mr. Sanchez tells me that pension reform "isn't going to help anything."


Democrats say that ideally they'd like to make the extensions permanent, but know they can't get the votes to do so. A five-year extension would give them two election cycles to win four more legislative seats and achieve a supermajority. Then they could make the taxes permanent—and raise whichever other taxes they want.


So Democrats have decided to take schools hostage in the budget showdown in order to rally public support for higher taxes. Judging by the crowd and the car horns, their strategy has a chance of working.

Being California, you can't make this stuff up, can you? After having looted higher educational spending for their own larger staffs, salaries and benefits, the union and its teacher members now tell voters that the core educational services, which didn't actually receive the extra funding, will be cut if taxes don't remain high. Because, as the union boss claims, pension reform and inquiry into union members' pay and benefits "isn't going to help anything."

I suspect that what the teachers' unions don't yet understand is that people and businesses can leave states- and their union pension liabilities- for cheaper, saner right-to-work states. And, ultimately, the states that don't fix these teachers' union problems will simply lose the tax base to pay promised benefits, resulting in larger problems than now exist.

As one example of how teachers are beginning to understand the situation, my New Jersey public school teacher friend recently told me he no longer wants to have his pension contribution deducted from his compensation. He correctly reasons that his money is funding currently-retired teachers, while shrinking teacher ranks and pay-and-benefits wrangling will not provide him with the same assurances. So he'd like to keep his money, rather than pay for the retirement of teachers he doesn't even know, and find his own promised benefits missing when he retires.

Joel Klein's New York Schools Stories

Joel Klein, former chancellor of New York City public schools from 2002 through 2010, wrote a provocative editorial recently in the Wall Street Journal entitled Scenes From the New York Education Wars.



His observations in the passages below reinforce how obstructive the teachers' union was to his efforts to improve the city's education system.


Teachers are extremely effective messengers to parents, community groups, faith-based groups and elected officials—and their unions know how to deploy them well. Happy unions can give a politician massive clout, and unhappy unions—well, just ask Eva Moskowitz, a Democrat who headed the New York City Council Education Committee when I became schools chancellor in 2002.

Smart, savvy, ambitious, often a pain in my neck and atypically fearless for a politician, Ms. Moskowitz was widely expected to be elected Manhattan borough president in 2005. Until, that is, she held hearings on the city teachers-union contract, an extraordinary document, running for hundreds of pages, governing who can teach what and when, who can be assigned to hall-monitor or lunchroom duty and who can't, who has to be given time off to do union work during the school day, and so on.


The contract defied parody. So when Ms. Moskowitz exposed its ridiculousness, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), then headed by Randi Weingarten, made sure that Ms. Moskowitz's run for borough president came up short. After that, other elected officials would say to me, "I agree with you, but I ain't gonna get Eva'd."


I found that story to be very chilling. As I noted in my recent post concerning Randi Weingarten, union officials attempt to identify themselves with children's education, but they are really just concerned with their own poewr and money. In Weingarten's case, she savagely retaliated against an elected official who merely wanted voters to understand what the teachers' union contract was doing to education in their schools.


Consider Klein's story about Albert Shanker.


Politicians—especially Democratic politicians—generally do what the unions want. The unions, in turn, are very clear about what that is: They want happy members, so that those who run the unions get re-elected, and they want more members, so their power, money and influence grow. The effect of all this? As Albert Shanker, the late, iconic head of the UFT, once pointedly said, "When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of schoolchildren."


When I told my NJ public school teacher friend that story, he flatly refused to believe it. His own union officials have so brainwashed him that he simply can't believe that they don't care about his students. Sometimes denial is hard to accept and acknowledge. To me, Shanker's quote is one of the most telling of any I've heard by a public sector union boss.


Consider the common refrain that "We'll never fix education until we fix poverty." This lets school systems off the hook. Of course money, a stable family and strong values typically make it easier to educate a child. But we now know that, keeping those things constant, certain schools can get dramatically different outcomes with the same kids.


I loved that passage. It's so typical of the liberal mindset to blame society while continuing to pocket taxpayer dollars for poor results. And use an external cause to evade responsibility for their own actions.


At individual schools, differences can be breathtaking. One charter in New York City, Harlem Success Academy 1 (founded by Ms. Moskowitz after she left politics), has students who are demographically almost identical to those in nearby schools, yet it gets entirely different results.


Parents celebrate as they hear that their 4-year-old daughter was awarded a coveted slot at the Harlem Success Academy charter school.


Eighty-eight percent of Harlem Success students are proficient in reading and 95% are proficient in math. Six nearby schools have an average of 31% and 39% proficiency in those subjects, respectively. More than 90% of Harlem Success fourth-graders scored at the highest level on New York State's most recent science tests, while only 43% of fourth-graders citywide did so. Harlem Success's black students outperformed white students at more than 700 schools across the state. Overall, the charter now performs at the same level as the gifted-and-talented schools in New York City, all of which have demanding admissions requirements. Harlem Success, by contrast, selects its students, mostly poor and minority, by random lottery.


Critics try to discredit these differences. Writing last year in the New York Review of Books, the historian Diane Ravitch argued that schools like Harlem Success aren't the answer because, as a group, charter schools don't outperform traditional public schools. Yet even Ms. Ravitch had to acknowledge that some charter schools get "amazing results." If that's the case, shouldn't we be asking why they get much better results—and focusing on how to replicate them?


A full-scale transition from a government-run monopoly to a competitive marketplace won't happen quickly, but that's no reason not to begin introducing more competition. In the lower grades, we should make sure that every student has at least one alternative—and preferably several—to her neighborhood school.


That story and Klein's reasoning about making small steps is a valuable example regarding charter schools. Call them what you will, charter schools are simply affordable private schools. Why wouldn't choice be important? Why wouldn't it make sense to focus on, celebrate and try to replicate even a few charter school successes?


Instead, the union bosses pick on the worst examples of private schools to argue that none should exist. Under that logic, we'd scrap the public school systems and their teachers, too, by focusing on the worst public schools.


As Shanker put it in a surprisingly candid speech in 1993: "We are at the point that the auto industry was at a few years ago. They could see they were losing market share every year and still not believe that it really had anything to do with the quality of the product. . . . I think we will get—and deserve—the end of public education through some sort of privatization scheme if we don't behave differently. Unfortunately, very few people really believe that yet. They talk about it, and they don't like it, but they're not ready to change and stop doing the things that brought us to this point."


I found this, too, to be a chilling quote from Shanker. He must have been quite a capable union boss. He understood reality, but was able to temporarily halt its onset from affecting his union members. Never mind what that did to millions of American children in the process.


My teacher friend expressed at least one reason for the behavior Shanker noted in that passage. My friend notes that he's closer to retirement than he is to commencing his career. So, like the old pilots who favored newer, younger pilots being given a lower starting salary and fewer benefits, he, too, cares little for le deluge after his tenured career is over.


In short, so long as he gets his, he could care less about the fate of his replacements. Trouble is, all of the discussion is in regard to his pension, pay and benefits- not children's education.


Klein's instructive selected quotes from Shanker reveal the simple truth. So long as unions serve their members, unionized teachers won't really care about children's educational success as much as they care about their own economic success.


At least a private school can remedy this flaw by aligning the two for each individual teacher, rather than maximizing average welfare of a group of teachers, regardless of pupil performance

Regarding Randi Weingarten

It's been instructive to read Randi Weingarten's views on teaching and teachers, while attempting to ignore their unions, in recent editions of the Wall Street Journal.

Back in late March, Weingarten was the subject of the Journal's feature weekend edition interview. Jason Riley's piece on the interview allowed Weingarten to damn herself in her own words. Here's an example,

"Ms. Weingarten insists that teachers unions are agents of change, not defenders of the status quo. But in the next breath she shoots down suggestions for changes- vouchers, charter schools, differential teacher pay and so on- that have become important parts of the reform conversation."

Here's another example of Weingarten's blindness to reality in education,

" "We've started some charter schools, but there are studies out there that say 80% of charter schools are no better [than traditional public schools] and 37% are worse." she says. "We've tried merit pay in a few places [but] there's a new study from Vanderbilt University that says it doesn't work." And school vouchers "have never been shown to be successful," she insists, ignoring the results of a study last year by Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas, who found that "students in Washington, D.C., who used a federally funded voucher to attend a private school were more likely to graduate from high school." "
Weingarten dismisses Michelle Rhee's work in Washington, and when reminded that George Meany and FDR were against public sector unions, she replied,

"If Meany and FDR were alive today, they'd have a very different view."

How humble of Weingarten to so radically alter the views of the dead, when their live comments are so inconvenient.

Riley ends his article by reminding readers that teachers unions excel at obstructing progress which can help students learn and perform better. They

 "agitate for laws and regulations that ban means-tested voucher programs or cap the number of charter schools that can open in a state. To protect jobs for their members, they fight to keep the worst instructors from being fired and the worst schools from closing. All the while, they insist that their interests are aligned with those of the kids.

It is this skill set that has made Ms. Weingarten a documentary film star."

One gets the clear sense from the interview that Weingarten tries very hard to erase the distinction between real classroom teachers and their unions.

This is not a trivial point. I have been discussing the New Jersey teaching and teachers' union situation with a friend ever since Chris Christie was elected. From my many conversations with him, I have come to learn several things.

First, he really is motivated to do his job well. And I believe most of his colleagues are, as well.

Second, he is exasperated with his own union. He describes the situation thus,

"I don't have a choice. If I want this job, I must belong to the union. We just vote the way they tell us. I can't do anything about my union or its management."

When I first sent him the Journal interview article mentioned above, he was extremely disappointed in Weingarten's views. He saw how out of touch and provincial her comments are. The conversation turned to her pay, and I sent him this Wall Street Journal article from January of this year concerning her recent compensation,


"Randi Weingarten, the former head of the New York City teachers' union, received $194,188 last year from the United Federation of Teachers for unused sick days and vacation time accrued before she left to become president of the American Federation of Teachers, boosting her total compensation to more than $600,000 for 2010."


Elsewhere, I found that she now earns $350,000 annually as head of the AFT, and passed that information along to my friend. He was outraged.

Perhaps the best evidence of how corrupt and blind Weingarten is was her recent editorial in the April 25, 2011 edition of the Journal entitled Markets Aren't the Education Solution.

In it, Weingarten blasts those who criticize teachers, claiming,

"These countries emphasize teacher preparation, mentoring and collaboration. They revere and respect their teachers; they don't demonize them. Virtually all of them are unionized. In fact, school leaders in these countries work very closely with their unions, and most said they would never introduce changes or legislation without union collaboration."

The countries to which Weingarten referred were Finland, Singapore and South Korea. But we have no idea, from her article, just what the nature of their unions are. Or how much sway those unions have, relative to state-based US teachers' unions, over work rules, pensions, etc.

Weingarten closes her impassioned beat-down of market-oriented school reforms by wrapping herself in the flag and calling for the US to not fail to "prepare our children for the new world they will inherit."

However, having read Riley's article first, one discounts the so-called evidence against charter schools, reforms, etc., that Weingarten includes in her own editorial. Not to mention that she goes even further to virtually co-identify teachers and Weingarten's union.

But, thanks to comments by my teacher friend, I know that's not how Weingarten's union members actually see the world. In fact, when I asked my friend about the Wisconsin legislation which would end the state's collection of teachers' union dues directly from their paychecks, he confirmed that, if those dues were not involuntarily deducted from his pay, he'd never bother contributing them voluntarily to his union.

Weingarten preys on a presumed ignorance by other parties of the realities of teaching and schooling in America. Teachers aren't unions- they are forced to belong to them. Unions don't teach- they extort taxpayers, pay their own executives lavishly, and obstruct reforms, like all unions do, in order to protect current members. Taxpayers know the difference between teachers they respect, and unions which they despise for blocking changes to allow better education for their children.

Just consider how different our education system would be if this single change were made. Suppose your local town/city no longer ran a school system but, rather, vouchered a fixed tuition amount to each family for each child, allowing that family to send each child to any privately-owned and run school which had been certified by some appropriate authority. This wouldn't prevent teachers from belonging to a union, but it would mean that, at least in right-to-work states, teachers would not be forced to belong to a union. Some schools might even pursue a strategy of charging higher tuition, hiring only the best teachers, and paying them far more than union scale wages.

Now that would be innovation! And it could still provide for teachers' unions to exist. But the market would determine which schools prospered, and which did not. But that's a future Weingarten could never accept or tolerate. The potential for failure of the worst unionized teachers would be too high.

As if reading my mind, Donald Boudreaux wrote a tongue-in-cheek editorial in yesterday's Wall Street Journal entitled If Supermarkets Were Like Public Schools, obviously with people like AFT union boss Weingarten in mind. Here are some of the humorous passages,

"Teachers unions and their political allies argue that market forces can't supply quality education. According to them, only our existing system—politicized and monopolistic—will do the trick. Yet Americans would find that approach ludicrous if applied to other vital goods or services.



Suppose that groceries were supplied in the same way as K-12 education. Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties. Nearly half of those tax revenues would then be spent by government officials to build and operate supermarkets. Each family would be assigned to a particular supermarket according to its home address. And each family would get its weekly allotment of groceries—"for free"—from its neighborhood public supermarket.


No family would be permitted to get groceries from a public supermarket outside of its district. Fortunately, though, thanks to a Supreme Court decision, families would be free to shop at private supermarkets that charge directly for the groceries they offer. Private-supermarket families, however, would receive no reductions in their property taxes.



Being largely protected from consumer choice, almost all public supermarkets would be worse than private ones. In poor counties the quality of public supermarkets would be downright abysmal. Poor people—entitled in principle to excellent supermarkets—would in fact suffer unusually poor supermarket quality.



How could it be otherwise? Public supermarkets would have captive customers and revenues supplied not by customers but by the government. Of course they wouldn't organize themselves efficiently to meet customers' demands.


Responding to these failures, thoughtful souls would call for "supermarket choice" fueled by vouchers or tax credits. Those calls would be vigorously opposed by public-supermarket administrators and workers.



Opponents of supermarket choice would accuse its proponents of demonizing supermarket workers (who, after all, have no control over their customers' poor eating habits at home). Advocates of choice would also be accused of trying to deny ordinary families the food needed for survival. Such choice, it would be alleged, would drain precious resources from public supermarkets whose poor performance testifies to their overwhelming need for more public funds.


In the face of calls for supermarket choice, supermarket-workers unions would use their significant resources for lobbying—in favor of public-supermarkets' monopoly power and against any suggestion that market forces are appropriate for delivering something as essential as groceries. Some indignant public-supermarket defenders would even rail against the insensitivity of referring to grocery shoppers as "customers," on the grounds that the relationship between the public servants who supply life-giving groceries and the citizens who need those groceries is not so crass as to be discussed in terms of commerce.



Recognizing that the erosion of their monopoly would stop the gravy train that pays their members handsome salaries without requiring them to satisfy paying customers, unions would ensure that any grass-roots effort to introduce supermarket choice meets fierce political opposition.


In reality, of course, groceries and many other staples of daily life are distributed with extraordinary effectiveness by competitive markets responding to consumer choice. The same could be true of education—the unions' self-serving protestations notwithstanding."


It's not hard to recognize Weingarten and her union in Boudreaux's parody. The sad thing is, it's so easy to see he's right and she's wrong. But, as the second to the last paragraph explains, this is Weingarten's and her union management colleagues' rice bowl. They simply can't afford to let their members experiment with any other approach that might decrease union dues and Weingarten's national power over education.

The more Weingarten speaks and writes, the easier it will be for taxpayers, parents, and, yes, even teachers to realize how misaligned teachers' unions and their union bosses are with better education for children in America.