The key here is that they pay no cost for their fanaticism. Their funding is guaranteed. Until now! It will be interesting to see if school choice causes them to moderate.
I always wonder about why teacher's unions are specifically woke. What is it about teaching that makes it more woke than, for example, pharmacists, HVAC repairmen or bank tellers? Originally, I thought is was a public sector problem, but I don't see a lot of fire fighters or EMTs being woke. Could it be that the bulk or at least high percentage of them are female?
They are woke, because colleges became woke and teachers spend an enormous amount of time in college.
So why are colleges woke, I actually have a really good reason for this. WOKE problems are generally problems that can never be fully solved you can always be working at them. The benefit of that is it also seems incredibly difficult to tell if anyone is even remotely productive. If your job is to get the most lawns mowed and mowed well for a specific budget, that can pretty easily be measured and it can be determined if your department is doing a good job. If your job is to end homelessness or racism, good luck measuring that by any standard anyone agrees about. Spend 40 billion on homelessness and there is more homelessness that when you started, well that must be evidence we needed to spend 120 billion.
What utter unsubstantiated rubbish. Tech is male dominated (hence tech bros) and just as woke, if not more. And I can’t think of a more stupidly profligate industry, ever willing to burn millions or billions of dollars on plainly idiotic ventures like WeWork, Juicero, and most recently, the Humane AI pin. Uber’s cumulative losses are $68 billion, with a B, and they’ll never dig out of that hole in spite of their recent profitability. Zuckerberg wasted billions on VR, Bezos on Alexa. I could go on.
I believe this is the most plausible explanation. Having worked in education or adjacent for a decade, (though not in the traditional K-12 public schools), it's interesting to see new ideas, even bad ones, accepted at light speed and promulgated ad infinitum. In male dominated or even moderated domains I've been a part of, individualism provides a bulwark against conformity.
Women are attracted to fields where clear metrics of success are hard to come by. Partly because they like working with "people" and people are less legible than metrics and subject to more social taboos.
My suspicion is that the people who go into ed-school tend to be rather short on intellectual wattage to begin with, and then spend four years being indoctrinated by woke people with postgraduate education degrees. They lack innate resistance to bad ideas, and over their college careers they're repeatedly assured that the premises of wokeness are true, and that part of their special mission as teachers is to fight evil in the forms of racism, sexism, cisgenderism, thisism and thatism...
It'd be interesting to see how strong wokery is among various subgoups of teachers. My suspicion is that it'd be the strongest in fields like elementary ed, and weakest among STEM teachers. But that's only a hypothesis—I don't know where I'd go about finding evidence to support or disprove it.
It’s the educational establishment writ large; step into a college campus 20 years ago and you’d see roughly the same trends as now, if a little less successful. I think the major difference is that in the 20 years interim the most zealous of those students have gained influence in the media (news, entertainment). ESPN and Disney were not explicitly Leftist organizations, now they admit to pushing it. My generation generally did not agree with the broader Lefts narratives, but speaking overall, we certainly did not resist them (typical is when I would argue with a teacher; MANY students would later tell me they agreed but did not want to be seen as challenging the prof). A lot of it goes back to teachers/ the education establishment. I only truly escaped because I loved to read and education *myself*. I never heard of Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Thomas Sowell, in class (the internet was also a huge aid - see attempts to attack YouTube in the New York Times, they had an article claiming you start with Milton, then Ben Shapiro, then turn into a full fledged Nick Fuentes White Supremest).
Without a doubt, the most significant counter to the Leftist Teacher Regime would be a fully private system. Preferably without ANY government aid, but a voucher system is certainly better than what we have now. Unfortunately, even if vouchers became widespread, the next fight would be over who qualifies for the vouchers. I know how this bureaucratic milieu thinks, they’d just pass all type of laws, regulations, and sic their inspectors on anyone who dissents to block schools they dislike from receiving funds. So I think ultimately vouchers are just a temporary dodge. We need a 100% private schooling system.
The core woke/leftist belief is that nurture trumps nature. Almost all other points of woke orthodoxy can be seen as downstream of this belief. If you believe this it makes sense that the best way to improve humans is to teach them better.
The fact that teachers are leftist is as unsurprising as the fact that people working in the field of eugenics(embryo selection, compiling polygenic scoring functions for various traits) believe in human biodiversity.
This seems to me to be the most likely reason. They might think, we are doing great work but not getting the results that we are working for, so it must be some outside force like systemic racism that is impeding us.
I don't think the nurture-trumps-nature belief is quite as foundational as you suggest. Most notably, wokery insists that sexual orientation and gender identity are innate rather than learned, and not subject to revision.
Commies used to be quite reliably anti-gay, much more so than the Capitalist Occident, because they DIDN'T believe sexual orientation was innate, nor that gender identity exists at all. Though for some reason this didn't seem to be a barrier for gays to be either outright Commies or Commie supporters. (Angela Davis, Bayard Rustin, Harry Hay, Jim Jones, Harvey Milk.)
You get what you elect. I looked at my local city for instance. If you ask people what they want in the city, they want more small businesses(employment), more housing (lower cost housing), less traffic. Not one of our city council members has any experience in the private market to any reasonable degree, one of them claims they had two small businesses in their life, I researched it, they were both one person marketing entities that mostly lobbied for non profits to the city. That isn't an experience with the bureaucracy of building a business, having a location, hiring staff and fighting through regulation.
One of the other city council members was elected because she said she was poor, a single mother, and her kid was special needs (has ADHD). So somehow her failed life (not judging but in general if life was a game if your poor, miserable, living on government aid and your kid can't pay attention I imagine you would not consider that a win), is evidence she knows what a city needs.
There is a bakery in town, opened up in a small retail outlet strip, is licensed to bake food and sell it but somehow they are not licensed to sell it at their bakery, they can deliver it to people from that bakery but people are not allowed to walk in and buy it. Some other license is needed that they weren't aware of. This is a local story and our terrible local news has reported on how much the community is bothered by this as they liked the bakery. This has been going on for three months and I posted on the most recent news article about this that we should vote out the city council and people wildly defended the city council and so did the city council themselves take time to chime in and say they really support the bakery and are spearheading a commission to make a new small business organization to help small businesses.
I read all of this and I stated, you are the city, find out what license this business somehow doesn't have that has a retail shop on both sides of it and is in a retail center, but somehow can't sell its goods retail, then find out what person in the city hands out these licenses and tell them, give this business a license or have a city council vote and change the law so that a bakery that is already gone through the hassles and regulation of proving they are safe to sell food, by default has a license to sell at their place of business the goods they produce.
School boards are the same, they are an olympics of who can pretend they care about issues the most. That is what all the woke stuff is about, its a distraction so they never have to do work. Work is looking through a schools budget and not just reading oh they spent 20 million on teacher education, but to actually see literally what that 20 million bought and then to try to find a way to measure the results of that 20 million spend.
School boards and all local politicians should probably be basically the best middle upper management people in the country with a strong understanding of book keeping and at least a passing understanding of law as they have lawyers they can consult.
"So somehow her failed life" is called "lived experience" in the social services / education / NGO world and it's highly sought after as a way to prove your "cred" and it can be directly substituted for a degree in most positions, i.e. "must have masters in social work OR four years of a abusive relationship while on welfare; or just be a homosexual". BTW 'lived experience " doesn't count if you are a straight white male even if you lived the sort of experience the organization is seeking, i.e. your chance of getting a job at a battered person's shelter is zero even if your wife beat you.
Public Education relies on certain ideological priors. If you concede those ideological priors, it's indefensible.
And so it's very hard for teachers unions to negotiate when it has the potential to discredit the fundamental ideological basis of their business model.
If Bryan Caplan is correct and public education is just babysitting, then there is a huge funding gap between the cost of babysitting and the cost of education. The ideology justifies that gap, and if you "negotiate" the ideology in such a crass way it might collapse entirely and then your lose everything.
For instance, public education claims that vouchers and homeschooling will damage the students because they don't have "standards". If they accepted "You want school choice? Sure, as long as schools can keep half the state funding for every student they lose," then what happens when lots of parents choose an option that costs 50% as much and are satisfied with it? Won't that discredit the entire ideology behind public schools? Why not give parents 100% if they used 50% better than the school district did?
Ideological indoctrination is the same. There are a lot of leftists motivated by the idea of indoctrinating children with their ideology. They hate hate hate the idea that some kid might go to a religious school. For them the brainwashing is the point.
Do schools sometimes overreach? Do they take the ideological suppositions of "moderate" insanity to their logical conclusion in "total insanity". Sure. They are people working within a worldview. But the "moderate" insanity assumptions are the justification for their racket and it's very hard to firewall people away from the (insane) logical conclusions of their ideas.
My personal belief is that schools got more insane because:
1) The median voter has drifted left
2) A majority of public school kids are now non-white
3) Education "reform" failed and we are too far away from civil rights to have any good excuses for why public education hasn't succeeded. With the center left explanations exhausted, people turn to far left ones (at a minimum the people who spend all day long working on this as administrators do).
The sex/gender stuff is just slotted in with the race stuff in the same civil rights ideological narrative.
4) The cost gap between modern K-12 spending and babysitting has widened considerably in the last generation, leaving a lot of money at stake
Lastly, I would consider the following. School choice doesn't require people to believe that vouchers would be better than not vouchers. It requires them to believe that vouchers would be MUCH better than not vouchers. Getting vouchers passed requires overcoming strong institutional powers. That's hard work. If there isn't much of a difference. If all education is fake and kids will turn out the same no matter what (Bryan Caplan view) then its not worth the effort to try and change the status quo. Only if the child's soul is at stake, if the school will make them miserable, teach then to hate you, or mutilate themselves, does it make sense for a parent to put the effort into changing the system.
Yes, it is true that unionized teachers are not maximizing their monetary compensation with the more bizarro elements of their agenda, but that's not the point of it. These teachers are better understood as being Gramsci-style political activists who have gravitated towards teaching, in part because their highly politicized academic degrees aren't in much demand elsewhere, but also because schools happen to be a prime target for their activism. They are willing to sacrifice some of their personal income in order to advance their political goals.
The basic demographic problem confronting "progressives" is that the opposition has much higher fertility rates. They can't simply let parents retain control over the propagation of core cultural/political values to the next generation, so it is a matter of long-term political survival for them to use public schools not only to indoctrinate the opposition's kids with their political values, but also to undermine parental influence over their kids more generally by setting kids and parents against each other even on matters that aren't explicitly political (but that parents care deeply about), notably cultural choices involving religion, national identity, and sex. Wokeism is made to order for this purpose.
You are giving these people waayyyy to much credit. They are not coordinated or forward-thinking enough to even conceive of thoughts like that they need to pass their values to future generations with indoctrination.
Psychologists who have studied totalitarian-oriented organizations would say that at a mature stage of organizational development the core leadership consists mostly of high-functioning psychopaths who do carefully think through issues like this. They aren't suckers for their own professed ideology; they know exactly what they are doing.
Once such people create or take over an organization, they rope in others who have various personality disorders or who are weak-minded opportunists. The rank-and-file who get manipulated by predatory leaders under cult-like conditions aren't particularly wise or smart; they are just useful idiots for realizing the agenda of the psychopaths.
"If teachers’ unions cared only about the well-being of their dues-paying members"
Why would the teachers union be any different then any other union?
The Union bosses work for the Union bosses. They do what's in their own interest. If doing what it best for the teachers (or at least what teachers think is best) is in their interest they will do it.
But what if there is a conflict between the teachers interest and the union bosses interest? Guess who wins.
How many of these "dues paying members" even have a choice about whether or not to pay dues? I'm guessing it's very low. I bet those dues are automatic. And I bet a lot of the things that come with the union also come with lots of sinecures on the public dime too.
I think your average administrator looks at it like this:
"If I expel this kid, it's a hassle for me, both because of what the parents will do and because it might look bad in other ways (expelling too many black kids, etc). Easier to just kick the can."
The teacher says:
"I don't like this, but I'm not going to quit. I'm not going to give up my pension. It's annoying that this kid is so disruptive, but do I care? Do I care if anyone learns anything? What's going to happen to me if they don't? How will it affect my life? Parents are going to send their kids here anyway because its free and my job is safe."
Everyone does what's in there interest, but the system produces incentives that nobody likes.
Your overall point about distributed incentives is correct, but actually disruptive pupils is the top reason teachers leave the profession. I don't know how common this is in America, but in Israel, 50% leave within 2 years. It's definitely true, though, that for those who don't quit it's a lot easier when you just stop caring.
I don't know about Israel, but in America teaching a standard union racket where it sucks in the beginning and has high turnover, but eventually becomes a lucrative sinecure for those that stay. Pay, and most importantly benefits and pension, rise with seniority. It's common in America for teachers to achieve two 20 year pensions before retirement in teaching. Retirement benefits for teachers are ludicrously rich, pretty much the whole point of being a teacher is to reach the pension.
So when your ten years in and some kid is getting rowdy in your class you aren't going to walk away, you're going to check out spiritually. If your a new hire with less to lose from walking away maybe you do, but you can always be replaced.
I wonder to what extent some of the union's "woke" intransigence can simply be explained by viewing the children as the "consumers" of the educational system rather than the parents.
For example, in the case of biological males using the girl's room, one pattern you'll quickly recognize if you read about these cases is that generally all the other girls like and accept the biological male in question and are quite happy to let her use the same restroom. Generally the people who get upset about it are parents, and if a child does act upset about it it is because a parent/guardian egged them on. For example, in Amy Nutt's account of raising her trans daughter, all the kids were totally fine with Nicole using the girl's room until one boy's grandpa heard about it and encouraged him to start bullying her. If I was a teacher I'd probably want to fight back if some parents were freaking out about something none of the kids were bothered by at all. Your "customers" are the kids, not their parents.
Similarly, a lot of "woke indoctrination" makes sense if you believe that it will be beneficial for children to learn it, regardless of whether their parents want them to or not. If you genuinely, sincerely believe woke ideas are true and important, you'll genuinely believe it is beneficial for kids to learn them. Your job is to benefit kids, not do whatever their parents say.
Leaving books that some parents disapprove of in the school library is another good example. Why should you restrict a child's freedom to learn because their parents don't want them to learn something? The parents are not your customers. It would be like if I went to McDonald's and ordered a Big Mac, and they told me that I was getting a Filet O'Fish instead because that was what my parents thought I should get.
For questions like this I am torn. I don't like it when schools teach controversial ideas as if they are facts, like in "woke indoctrination." But allowing kids to check out books their parents disapprove of seems obviously correct. If you apply the Golden Rule, you'd hate it if your parents tried to control what books you read. Similarly, it seems wrong to stop some poor kid from using the bathroom because some parents are bullies. This is a case where union intransigence is sometimes bad and sometimes beneficial.
Children don't have a fucking clue what's good for them. They would stay up all night every night eating ice cream for dinner and watching TV all day. That's what parents are for.
We had a "trans" kid rape a bunch of girls in the bathroom and get passed around from school to school to cover it up. When the father of one of the raped girls spoke up he was arrested and harassed by the school board along with anyone else that questioned it.
Children not knowing what's good for them, unfortunately, has become a blanket excuse for authoritarian parents to demand powers over their children's lives that would make the most authoritarian dictator blush. It's pretty clear that when most people argue for more parental authority they are just authoritarian psychos reaching for a convenient argument, protecting children from their own impulsively is just a convenient pretext. "Children are impulsive, therefore I should be able to control what books they read" doesn't make sense if you consider that in this day and age, sitting down and reading a book is a sign you aren't impulsive.
I'm also not even sure "children are impulsive" is even true. I recently read an anthropology book about child rearing in traditional cultures and was shocked at the descriptions of children putting themselves to bed of their own volition, eating until they were full and stopping, and gleefully helping with chores, all without being ordered to. It might be that authoritarian parenting styles actually cause impulsivity in children by sapping them of intrinsic motivation!
If the case of the trans rapist you are talking about is the same one I read about, it doesn't fit the anti-trans narrative at all. The student and a girl had been meeting in a bathroom for sex and the student raped her because she wanted to break up and had just met in the bathroom this time to talk about that, rather than to have sex. It's a far cry from the horror story that rapists will go into girls bathrooms to attack stranger and could have easily have still happened if the student had been cis. Anti-trans activists just seized on it because they can't find any real stories that support their narrative, because they are very dishonest people.
(Incidentally, have you ever noticed that anti-trans activists seem incapable of writing or saying anything that doesn't seem to drip with evil? Richard Hanania is the only one I've ever read who doesn't sound like he was recently awoken by dwarves digging too deep for mithril. What is up with that?)
You are an ideologue who thinks you can blather your opponents into submission. Very common amongst the woke. You’re making the same types of arguments pedophiles make.
“Children would be better off without their parents controlling them” “Actually children are just miniature adults who deserve to experience the world”
You have it backwards. Children with extreme authoritarian parents are more vulnerable to pedophiles because they are taught to avoid questioning adults and to avoid looking to authority figures outside the family for help. Teaching children to think for themselves helps them recognize pedophiles for what they are and resist them.
Children aren't just miniature adults and they do need parents and other adult authority figures. However, the authority of parents should be limited to what is strictly neccessary to keep their children safe and help them learn. It shouldn't be unlimited.
Most apologists for parental authority remind me of statists. A statist will use the fact that some government is required to preserve safety and keep order to argue that the government should have vast and unlimited powers. It never occurs the either group that limited power is a possibility.
There are lots of ways to limit parental authority without just replacing it with government authority. One example is what I discussed earlier, making books and similar resources available to children in public and school libraries. Don't mandate the children read them, that would just be replacing one authority with another. Just allow them to check out the books if they wish. Another option is making it easier for children to emancipate themselves or otherwise leave home if they found their situation intolerable. Give them limited property rights so parents couldn't threaten to punish them by destroying their possessions. Allow them to work safe part-time jobs so they aren't financially dependant on their parents. That sort of thing.
"Mind your own business" is the kind of thing a pedo would say if they don't want someone to look too closely into their family. Again, strong parental authority enables pedos, it doesn't protect from them.
I know, I'm not much of a fan of either side. I hate woke brainwashed, but I'm also suspicious of the kinds of parents that like to challenge books and do things like that. Some parents are opposed to brainwashing on principle, but there are others who are only upset that they aren't the ones who are doing it.
You know where you stand with greedy bastards; you can always arrange for the right incentive (or to put it more bluntly - bribe) to get them to act in the public interest.
But people driven by a sense of higher purpose - you can't do business with them.
The key here is that they pay no cost for their fanaticism. Their funding is guaranteed. Until now! It will be interesting to see if school choice causes them to moderate.
I always wonder about why teacher's unions are specifically woke. What is it about teaching that makes it more woke than, for example, pharmacists, HVAC repairmen or bank tellers? Originally, I thought is was a public sector problem, but I don't see a lot of fire fighters or EMTs being woke. Could it be that the bulk or at least high percentage of them are female?
They are woke, because colleges became woke and teachers spend an enormous amount of time in college.
So why are colleges woke, I actually have a really good reason for this. WOKE problems are generally problems that can never be fully solved you can always be working at them. The benefit of that is it also seems incredibly difficult to tell if anyone is even remotely productive. If your job is to get the most lawns mowed and mowed well for a specific budget, that can pretty easily be measured and it can be determined if your department is doing a good job. If your job is to end homelessness or racism, good luck measuring that by any standard anyone agrees about. Spend 40 billion on homelessness and there is more homelessness that when you started, well that must be evidence we needed to spend 120 billion.
What utter unsubstantiated rubbish. Tech is male dominated (hence tech bros) and just as woke, if not more. And I can’t think of a more stupidly profligate industry, ever willing to burn millions or billions of dollars on plainly idiotic ventures like WeWork, Juicero, and most recently, the Humane AI pin. Uber’s cumulative losses are $68 billion, with a B, and they’ll never dig out of that hole in spite of their recent profitability. Zuckerberg wasted billions on VR, Bezos on Alexa. I could go on.
I believe this is the most plausible explanation. Having worked in education or adjacent for a decade, (though not in the traditional K-12 public schools), it's interesting to see new ideas, even bad ones, accepted at light speed and promulgated ad infinitum. In male dominated or even moderated domains I've been a part of, individualism provides a bulwark against conformity.
Women are attracted to fields where clear metrics of success are hard to come by. Partly because they like working with "people" and people are less legible than metrics and subject to more social taboos.
My suspicion is that the people who go into ed-school tend to be rather short on intellectual wattage to begin with, and then spend four years being indoctrinated by woke people with postgraduate education degrees. They lack innate resistance to bad ideas, and over their college careers they're repeatedly assured that the premises of wokeness are true, and that part of their special mission as teachers is to fight evil in the forms of racism, sexism, cisgenderism, thisism and thatism...
It'd be interesting to see how strong wokery is among various subgoups of teachers. My suspicion is that it'd be the strongest in fields like elementary ed, and weakest among STEM teachers. But that's only a hypothesis—I don't know where I'd go about finding evidence to support or disprove it.
It’s the educational establishment writ large; step into a college campus 20 years ago and you’d see roughly the same trends as now, if a little less successful. I think the major difference is that in the 20 years interim the most zealous of those students have gained influence in the media (news, entertainment). ESPN and Disney were not explicitly Leftist organizations, now they admit to pushing it. My generation generally did not agree with the broader Lefts narratives, but speaking overall, we certainly did not resist them (typical is when I would argue with a teacher; MANY students would later tell me they agreed but did not want to be seen as challenging the prof). A lot of it goes back to teachers/ the education establishment. I only truly escaped because I loved to read and education *myself*. I never heard of Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Thomas Sowell, in class (the internet was also a huge aid - see attempts to attack YouTube in the New York Times, they had an article claiming you start with Milton, then Ben Shapiro, then turn into a full fledged Nick Fuentes White Supremest).
Without a doubt, the most significant counter to the Leftist Teacher Regime would be a fully private system. Preferably without ANY government aid, but a voucher system is certainly better than what we have now. Unfortunately, even if vouchers became widespread, the next fight would be over who qualifies for the vouchers. I know how this bureaucratic milieu thinks, they’d just pass all type of laws, regulations, and sic their inspectors on anyone who dissents to block schools they dislike from receiving funds. So I think ultimately vouchers are just a temporary dodge. We need a 100% private schooling system.
Government funding for private Nazi schools too? Lol!
The core woke/leftist belief is that nurture trumps nature. Almost all other points of woke orthodoxy can be seen as downstream of this belief. If you believe this it makes sense that the best way to improve humans is to teach them better.
The fact that teachers are leftist is as unsurprising as the fact that people working in the field of eugenics(embryo selection, compiling polygenic scoring functions for various traits) believe in human biodiversity.
This seems to me to be the most likely reason. They might think, we are doing great work but not getting the results that we are working for, so it must be some outside force like systemic racism that is impeding us.
I don't think the nurture-trumps-nature belief is quite as foundational as you suggest. Most notably, wokery insists that sexual orientation and gender identity are innate rather than learned, and not subject to revision.
Commies used to be quite reliably anti-gay, much more so than the Capitalist Occident, because they DIDN'T believe sexual orientation was innate, nor that gender identity exists at all. Though for some reason this didn't seem to be a barrier for gays to be either outright Commies or Commie supporters. (Angela Davis, Bayard Rustin, Harry Hay, Jim Jones, Harvey Milk.)
You get what you elect. I looked at my local city for instance. If you ask people what they want in the city, they want more small businesses(employment), more housing (lower cost housing), less traffic. Not one of our city council members has any experience in the private market to any reasonable degree, one of them claims they had two small businesses in their life, I researched it, they were both one person marketing entities that mostly lobbied for non profits to the city. That isn't an experience with the bureaucracy of building a business, having a location, hiring staff and fighting through regulation.
One of the other city council members was elected because she said she was poor, a single mother, and her kid was special needs (has ADHD). So somehow her failed life (not judging but in general if life was a game if your poor, miserable, living on government aid and your kid can't pay attention I imagine you would not consider that a win), is evidence she knows what a city needs.
There is a bakery in town, opened up in a small retail outlet strip, is licensed to bake food and sell it but somehow they are not licensed to sell it at their bakery, they can deliver it to people from that bakery but people are not allowed to walk in and buy it. Some other license is needed that they weren't aware of. This is a local story and our terrible local news has reported on how much the community is bothered by this as they liked the bakery. This has been going on for three months and I posted on the most recent news article about this that we should vote out the city council and people wildly defended the city council and so did the city council themselves take time to chime in and say they really support the bakery and are spearheading a commission to make a new small business organization to help small businesses.
I read all of this and I stated, you are the city, find out what license this business somehow doesn't have that has a retail shop on both sides of it and is in a retail center, but somehow can't sell its goods retail, then find out what person in the city hands out these licenses and tell them, give this business a license or have a city council vote and change the law so that a bakery that is already gone through the hassles and regulation of proving they are safe to sell food, by default has a license to sell at their place of business the goods they produce.
School boards are the same, they are an olympics of who can pretend they care about issues the most. That is what all the woke stuff is about, its a distraction so they never have to do work. Work is looking through a schools budget and not just reading oh they spent 20 million on teacher education, but to actually see literally what that 20 million bought and then to try to find a way to measure the results of that 20 million spend.
School boards and all local politicians should probably be basically the best middle upper management people in the country with a strong understanding of book keeping and at least a passing understanding of law as they have lawyers they can consult.
"So somehow her failed life" is called "lived experience" in the social services / education / NGO world and it's highly sought after as a way to prove your "cred" and it can be directly substituted for a degree in most positions, i.e. "must have masters in social work OR four years of a abusive relationship while on welfare; or just be a homosexual". BTW 'lived experience " doesn't count if you are a straight white male even if you lived the sort of experience the organization is seeking, i.e. your chance of getting a job at a battered person's shelter is zero even if your wife beat you.
Public Education relies on certain ideological priors. If you concede those ideological priors, it's indefensible.
And so it's very hard for teachers unions to negotiate when it has the potential to discredit the fundamental ideological basis of their business model.
If Bryan Caplan is correct and public education is just babysitting, then there is a huge funding gap between the cost of babysitting and the cost of education. The ideology justifies that gap, and if you "negotiate" the ideology in such a crass way it might collapse entirely and then your lose everything.
For instance, public education claims that vouchers and homeschooling will damage the students because they don't have "standards". If they accepted "You want school choice? Sure, as long as schools can keep half the state funding for every student they lose," then what happens when lots of parents choose an option that costs 50% as much and are satisfied with it? Won't that discredit the entire ideology behind public schools? Why not give parents 100% if they used 50% better than the school district did?
Ideological indoctrination is the same. There are a lot of leftists motivated by the idea of indoctrinating children with their ideology. They hate hate hate the idea that some kid might go to a religious school. For them the brainwashing is the point.
Do schools sometimes overreach? Do they take the ideological suppositions of "moderate" insanity to their logical conclusion in "total insanity". Sure. They are people working within a worldview. But the "moderate" insanity assumptions are the justification for their racket and it's very hard to firewall people away from the (insane) logical conclusions of their ideas.
My personal belief is that schools got more insane because:
1) The median voter has drifted left
2) A majority of public school kids are now non-white
3) Education "reform" failed and we are too far away from civil rights to have any good excuses for why public education hasn't succeeded. With the center left explanations exhausted, people turn to far left ones (at a minimum the people who spend all day long working on this as administrators do).
The sex/gender stuff is just slotted in with the race stuff in the same civil rights ideological narrative.
4) The cost gap between modern K-12 spending and babysitting has widened considerably in the last generation, leaving a lot of money at stake
Lastly, I would consider the following. School choice doesn't require people to believe that vouchers would be better than not vouchers. It requires them to believe that vouchers would be MUCH better than not vouchers. Getting vouchers passed requires overcoming strong institutional powers. That's hard work. If there isn't much of a difference. If all education is fake and kids will turn out the same no matter what (Bryan Caplan view) then its not worth the effort to try and change the status quo. Only if the child's soul is at stake, if the school will make them miserable, teach then to hate you, or mutilate themselves, does it make sense for a parent to put the effort into changing the system.
Yes, it is true that unionized teachers are not maximizing their monetary compensation with the more bizarro elements of their agenda, but that's not the point of it. These teachers are better understood as being Gramsci-style political activists who have gravitated towards teaching, in part because their highly politicized academic degrees aren't in much demand elsewhere, but also because schools happen to be a prime target for their activism. They are willing to sacrifice some of their personal income in order to advance their political goals.
The basic demographic problem confronting "progressives" is that the opposition has much higher fertility rates. They can't simply let parents retain control over the propagation of core cultural/political values to the next generation, so it is a matter of long-term political survival for them to use public schools not only to indoctrinate the opposition's kids with their political values, but also to undermine parental influence over their kids more generally by setting kids and parents against each other even on matters that aren't explicitly political (but that parents care deeply about), notably cultural choices involving religion, national identity, and sex. Wokeism is made to order for this purpose.
You are giving these people waayyyy to much credit. They are not coordinated or forward-thinking enough to even conceive of thoughts like that they need to pass their values to future generations with indoctrination.
Psychologists who have studied totalitarian-oriented organizations would say that at a mature stage of organizational development the core leadership consists mostly of high-functioning psychopaths who do carefully think through issues like this. They aren't suckers for their own professed ideology; they know exactly what they are doing.
Once such people create or take over an organization, they rope in others who have various personality disorders or who are weak-minded opportunists. The rank-and-file who get manipulated by predatory leaders under cult-like conditions aren't particularly wise or smart; they are just useful idiots for realizing the agenda of the psychopaths.
"If teachers’ unions cared only about the well-being of their dues-paying members"
Why would the teachers union be any different then any other union?
The Union bosses work for the Union bosses. They do what's in their own interest. If doing what it best for the teachers (or at least what teachers think is best) is in their interest they will do it.
But what if there is a conflict between the teachers interest and the union bosses interest? Guess who wins.
How many of these "dues paying members" even have a choice about whether or not to pay dues? I'm guessing it's very low. I bet those dues are automatic. And I bet a lot of the things that come with the union also come with lots of sinecures on the public dime too.
I think your average administrator looks at it like this:
"If I expel this kid, it's a hassle for me, both because of what the parents will do and because it might look bad in other ways (expelling too many black kids, etc). Easier to just kick the can."
The teacher says:
"I don't like this, but I'm not going to quit. I'm not going to give up my pension. It's annoying that this kid is so disruptive, but do I care? Do I care if anyone learns anything? What's going to happen to me if they don't? How will it affect my life? Parents are going to send their kids here anyway because its free and my job is safe."
Everyone does what's in there interest, but the system produces incentives that nobody likes.
Your overall point about distributed incentives is correct, but actually disruptive pupils is the top reason teachers leave the profession. I don't know how common this is in America, but in Israel, 50% leave within 2 years. It's definitely true, though, that for those who don't quit it's a lot easier when you just stop caring.
I don't know about Israel, but in America teaching a standard union racket where it sucks in the beginning and has high turnover, but eventually becomes a lucrative sinecure for those that stay. Pay, and most importantly benefits and pension, rise with seniority. It's common in America for teachers to achieve two 20 year pensions before retirement in teaching. Retirement benefits for teachers are ludicrously rich, pretty much the whole point of being a teacher is to reach the pension.
So when your ten years in and some kid is getting rowdy in your class you aren't going to walk away, you're going to check out spiritually. If your a new hire with less to lose from walking away maybe you do, but you can always be replaced.
Good point. In Portland, OR, the teachers unions published a handbook on “Teaching and Organizing for Palestine.” (https://www.wweek.com/news/schools/2024/06/03/portland-teachers-union-publishes-handbook-on-teaching-and-organizing-for-palestine-in-the-classroom/)
No way did the union leaders strategize about whether this was the best approach to extract more money or benefits for teachers.
"The best way to deal with true believers… is not to deal with them at all."
Harsh, but often the only way to get on. And the most-peaceful.
I wonder to what extent some of the union's "woke" intransigence can simply be explained by viewing the children as the "consumers" of the educational system rather than the parents.
For example, in the case of biological males using the girl's room, one pattern you'll quickly recognize if you read about these cases is that generally all the other girls like and accept the biological male in question and are quite happy to let her use the same restroom. Generally the people who get upset about it are parents, and if a child does act upset about it it is because a parent/guardian egged them on. For example, in Amy Nutt's account of raising her trans daughter, all the kids were totally fine with Nicole using the girl's room until one boy's grandpa heard about it and encouraged him to start bullying her. If I was a teacher I'd probably want to fight back if some parents were freaking out about something none of the kids were bothered by at all. Your "customers" are the kids, not their parents.
Similarly, a lot of "woke indoctrination" makes sense if you believe that it will be beneficial for children to learn it, regardless of whether their parents want them to or not. If you genuinely, sincerely believe woke ideas are true and important, you'll genuinely believe it is beneficial for kids to learn them. Your job is to benefit kids, not do whatever their parents say.
Leaving books that some parents disapprove of in the school library is another good example. Why should you restrict a child's freedom to learn because their parents don't want them to learn something? The parents are not your customers. It would be like if I went to McDonald's and ordered a Big Mac, and they told me that I was getting a Filet O'Fish instead because that was what my parents thought I should get.
For questions like this I am torn. I don't like it when schools teach controversial ideas as if they are facts, like in "woke indoctrination." But allowing kids to check out books their parents disapprove of seems obviously correct. If you apply the Golden Rule, you'd hate it if your parents tried to control what books you read. Similarly, it seems wrong to stop some poor kid from using the bathroom because some parents are bullies. This is a case where union intransigence is sometimes bad and sometimes beneficial.
Children don't have a fucking clue what's good for them. They would stay up all night every night eating ice cream for dinner and watching TV all day. That's what parents are for.
We had a "trans" kid rape a bunch of girls in the bathroom and get passed around from school to school to cover it up. When the father of one of the raped girls spoke up he was arrested and harassed by the school board along with anyone else that questioned it.
Children not knowing what's good for them, unfortunately, has become a blanket excuse for authoritarian parents to demand powers over their children's lives that would make the most authoritarian dictator blush. It's pretty clear that when most people argue for more parental authority they are just authoritarian psychos reaching for a convenient argument, protecting children from their own impulsively is just a convenient pretext. "Children are impulsive, therefore I should be able to control what books they read" doesn't make sense if you consider that in this day and age, sitting down and reading a book is a sign you aren't impulsive.
I'm also not even sure "children are impulsive" is even true. I recently read an anthropology book about child rearing in traditional cultures and was shocked at the descriptions of children putting themselves to bed of their own volition, eating until they were full and stopping, and gleefully helping with chores, all without being ordered to. It might be that authoritarian parenting styles actually cause impulsivity in children by sapping them of intrinsic motivation!
If the case of the trans rapist you are talking about is the same one I read about, it doesn't fit the anti-trans narrative at all. The student and a girl had been meeting in a bathroom for sex and the student raped her because she wanted to break up and had just met in the bathroom this time to talk about that, rather than to have sex. It's a far cry from the horror story that rapists will go into girls bathrooms to attack stranger and could have easily have still happened if the student had been cis. Anti-trans activists just seized on it because they can't find any real stories that support their narrative, because they are very dishonest people.
(Incidentally, have you ever noticed that anti-trans activists seem incapable of writing or saying anything that doesn't seem to drip with evil? Richard Hanania is the only one I've ever read who doesn't sound like he was recently awoken by dwarves digging too deep for mithril. What is up with that?)
You are an ideologue who thinks you can blather your opponents into submission. Very common amongst the woke. You’re making the same types of arguments pedophiles make.
“Children would be better off without their parents controlling them” “Actually children are just miniature adults who deserve to experience the world”
🚩 🚩 🚩
You have it backwards. Children with extreme authoritarian parents are more vulnerable to pedophiles because they are taught to avoid questioning adults and to avoid looking to authority figures outside the family for help. Teaching children to think for themselves helps them recognize pedophiles for what they are and resist them.
Children aren't just miniature adults and they do need parents and other adult authority figures. However, the authority of parents should be limited to what is strictly neccessary to keep their children safe and help them learn. It shouldn't be unlimited.
Most apologists for parental authority remind me of statists. A statist will use the fact that some government is required to preserve safety and keep order to argue that the government should have vast and unlimited powers. It never occurs the either group that limited power is a possibility.
Are you a child or a woman? Who is going to be limiting this parental authority and how are they going to do it?
And then to call your opponent a statists after you implicitly suggest that the government should be mediating every parent-child reaction.
Fuck off with your Soviet double-speak. Mind your own business. Stop worrying about “children’s rights”, pedo.
There are lots of ways to limit parental authority without just replacing it with government authority. One example is what I discussed earlier, making books and similar resources available to children in public and school libraries. Don't mandate the children read them, that would just be replacing one authority with another. Just allow them to check out the books if they wish. Another option is making it easier for children to emancipate themselves or otherwise leave home if they found their situation intolerable. Give them limited property rights so parents couldn't threaten to punish them by destroying their possessions. Allow them to work safe part-time jobs so they aren't financially dependant on their parents. That sort of thing.
"Mind your own business" is the kind of thing a pedo would say if they don't want someone to look too closely into their family. Again, strong parental authority enables pedos, it doesn't protect from them.
Like I said in my other comment, leftists ideologues consider brainwashing a plus rather than a detriment.
I know, I'm not much of a fan of either side. I hate woke brainwashed, but I'm also suspicious of the kinds of parents that like to challenge books and do things like that. Some parents are opposed to brainwashing on principle, but there are others who are only upset that they aren't the ones who are doing it.
You know where you stand with greedy bastards; you can always arrange for the right incentive (or to put it more bluntly - bribe) to get them to act in the public interest.
But people driven by a sense of higher purpose - you can't do business with them.
My question will true believers leave you alone or will they find a new way to enforce their vision and will it be worse than what we have now ?
The Teachers Unions are the priesthood of our Postmodern Woke State religion.
Unions represent teachers. Not students. And they have done very well.
Unions represent teachers. Not students. And they have done very well.
Unions represent teachers. Not students. And they have done very well.
Unions represent teachers. Not students. And they have done very well.