Independent Institute Speech - Part 2
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Peter Brimelow
Can I just add, I agree completely with that. You see, the unions are not the whole problem in education. It's got lots of other problems. The problem is the system is not short of problems. [Laughter] Virginia is a government-run school system, and the ethos of the government school system pervades Virginia even though the school boards there have a lot more power than they do elsewhere. The national right to work people will say that. They've talked to employers about unionization.
And in heavily unionized states—well, for example, in Britain where I come from—you've got the phenomenon of employees who kind have become like pit ponies. They never see the light of day. They don't know what it is to be free. And they'll say things like, if we didn't have unions how would we set wages? So the government school system itself is a pervasive problem, and would be a problem regardless of the existence of the union. There are other problems. The weakening of the union is not a panacea, but it is a prerequisite.
David Theroux
There are a number of writers like Ivan Illich and others who've raised the question of whether compulsory education laws are actually state-sponsored child labor. This lady right here?
John Merrifield
The unions aren't the problem. They're blocking change, that's the problem. Politicians and the political process is the problem.
Audience Member #5
Well, every stakeholder in a big bureaucracy is going to block change, it's just a bureaucracy.
Peter Brimelow
That's the point.
Audience Member #5
What I have seen is that there has been a lot of power structure not so much with the teachers' union, they have a lot of power, but also the Superintendents' Association, the School Board Associations. These folks have a lot of power, because when you talk to the rank and file teachers, oftentimes they don't agree with what's going on at the upper end of the teachers' unions. And a lot of the money that's in the educational system, which is over 55 percent of the state budget right now, does not get into the classroom. So I think our biggest thing that we can attack the public government schools with is that so much of the dollar goes to the bureaucracy, the overhead, and not the one-to-one teaching ratio. I think that's where we have to attack this. So the teachers' union, the rank and file, is not that powerful. It's the superintendents.
I have a friend that works for the California State Teachers' Retirement System. People are retiring with millions of dollars from teaching—from being a bean counter in the district office—and that's got to change. And I think if those facts get out there, that will influence a lot of people. Thank you.
David Theroux
Could I sort of just slightly change one of the points that she was making and raise a question for both panelists? If you didn't have compulsory funding of schools, what would happen to the collective bargaining nature of the union's power? Any thought about that? In other words, if people were not compelled to fund public schools, what would happen to the nature of the union participation?
John Merrifield
Well, anything that interjected freedom into the system, where the teachers aren't all treated the same, the union would be destroyed.
David Theroux
This gentleman right there.
Audience Member #7
Making the assumption that you people have your finger on the pulse of this thing, at least more than I do, can you gaze into your crystal ball and tell me what the legal climate of home-schooling might be? I mean they're under assault from the teacher trust, or the whole institutional thing, but at the same time they seem to serve as a safety valve also for kids that just can't fit in the one-size-fits-all education system. But will they survive? And what is the future of home-schooling from a legal perspective?
Peter Brimelow
Well, my impression is that home-schooling—there's been battles for it in almost every state on this question, and essentially the home-schools have won. They have been able to compel the authorities to recognize that there are home-schools and it's legitimate. And they're doing it for a bunch of reasons. The best reason is that they're organized. They're highly organized and use the Internet a lot. They're a very well organized minority. And the evidence is that more and more people are going into it.
Audience Member #8
The one thing you haven't talked about is parent involvement. And I'm a perfect example of that, having lived in San Francisco and moved out because I thought the public schools were so terrible, and I couldn't afford private schools. I went to Orinda, where the public schools are excellent and the children have done well. That's because we're very, very involved. So what do you think about the parent involvement forcing the changes that you want?
John Merrifield
Well, parent involvement is discouraged by our current system. I agree with you that parent involvement is an important ingredient, and if we involve parents in choosing schools and matching children to programs, that can't help but create additional involvement. We definitely need that.
Audience Member #9
I've worked as a teacher, and I've worked in a juvenile hall system for a while, and I come across some 16 year-old kids who commit crimes and go to juvenile hall. We find out that they have disruptive, dysfunctional families, etc. They need counseling and all these other things. And yet I've also met 16 year-old kids who are bored and troublesome in high school, and they want to drop out, and they'd like to join the military where they might be able to come under the government wing and get all these services also. But our present system does not allow that. So what's wrong with this picture and how can we fix it?
John Merrifield
Well, I think we described that, it's to give them some choice in doing some of these things. I don't think there's any reason to force one size—I mean one size doesn't fit all. You can't expect to put children from across the spectrum in one school, much less one classroom.
For instance, these discipline problem children, they should have special services in a school specialized to handle that problem. They shouldn't poison classrooms across the system by being in there, and disrupting, and occupying all of the teacher's time. No one teacher is talented enough to be just that right person across this spectrum of children's interests and needs—although a few miracle workers are out there.
Audience Member #10
Thank you. Have either of you taken on work at the ratio of dollars spent for special education versus the rest of the education population, and how that affects the outcome?
John Merrifield
I haven't looked at that per se, but I know that the choiceless system, like we have, greatly magnifies the perception that there are special education problems. A system of diverse schools that are specialized, where parents would choose, would drastically reduce the number of children labeled by their parents in some way—or labeled by schools that thought to have to get some more money from them.
Peter Brimelow
I have some data on that in Worm, and it's expensive, and it's a major factor in the increase of costs—the decline of productivity of the system.
David Theroux
I mentioned the Oakland schools, originally. That's a major problem.
Audience Member #10
What I really need to know is if it's having an effect upon the outcome of the education of the rest of the children in the school?
John Merrifield
Mainstreaming is a disaster.
Audience Member #10
Because the ratio has gotten so far out of kilter.
Peter Brimelow
Well, we know that the results the rest of the children are producing are not great. So something's doing it. So that's not a bad candidate.
Audience Member #11
Some of the work that I do with a group of people is working with these special students. And the parents choose in our system to come to our services through the public schools. So my question is, are you familiar with, or do you know of any agencies out there, that are currently working with the public schools. Are there any other organizations out there that you're familiar with, with special needs kids, that parents have financial ability to choose in a public school?
John Merrifield
Peter, I'm striking out on this one.
Peter Brimelow
I think there's some provision in No Child Left behind for that, isn't there?
Audience Member #11
Yes. There's a supplemental service provider list that, but none of them are pretty much in the public schools. The service providers on that list have gone through, in the State of California, a series of exam questions, and then you're allowed to come into the system and you're given a certain amount of money. It runs between $400 and $1,200 per student, if the school allows you in. Most schools—Sylvan, Kaplan, other institutions, individuals who run counseling centers—these are some of them that are on the supplemental service provider list for California.
David Theroux
And that's growing.
Audience Member #11
Oh, it's huge. It's growing.
John Merrifield
I remember an article a few years ago by Janet Beales, and she's in an organization around here—I can't remember which one it is.
David Theroux
She was with Reason for a while. She's independent now.
John Merrifield
She wrote an article about all of the children sent by choice by the public school officials to private schools that specialized in particular special needs.
Audience Member #11
And the school system paid for it?
John Merrifield
The school system paid for it.
Audience Member #11
Where was this?
John Merrifield
It was a couple of years ago, in a newspaper, Wall Street Journal.
Audience Member #11
No pervasive programs that are currently taking some foothold for parent choice?
John Merrifield
Not that I know of. Try to get a hold of her though. She sounds like she really knows that area.
Audience Member #11
Well, I run a private school myself, and we have a teacher at our school who is French, and so I have a question for Peter in particular, namely, that the French Left is very different from the American Left, in the sense that they want higher standards. They say that they don't want poor people to be exploited by the rich because the poor people are ignorant. Why do we see so much demand for lower standards on the part of the American Left? And is there any chance of reversing that so they're going for higher standards for the poorest so that the poor don't get exploited? And that competition might be a part of that?
Peter Brimelow
How long do we have? [Laughter]
John Merrifield
The short answer to that is we need to get the standards-setting out of the political process. That shouldn't be a political issue.
Peter Brimelow
Well, the question you're raising about American Left is an extremely interesting one, but it's not easy to answer. It depends what you think their motives are. And the American Left is not rooted in the working class. It's an elite left. Whereas I would say the French, and to some extent, the British Left traditionally came out of the labor movement, and so on, and actually had the interests of the working class at heart and cared about the working class. It's not clear that that's the case in the American Left. It's an elite left.
That's equally true in Britain, by the way, though. The education reforms that the socialist put through during the war in the coalition government were highly competitive, and highly examination-driven, and IQ-driven, and they developed a highly efficient system of socialism. But it was based on selectivity and around competition.
David Theroux
Yeah, also the position of the public school system on what was a common school system—it was a combination of common schools and other schools in the U.S.—was imposed by wealthier people on poor immigrants and so forth. Dick, did you have a question?
Audience Member #12
Yes, sir, thank you very much. How would you modify the current taxation system and the distribution of the taxation to the different schools, private as well as religious and public?
John Merrifield
Well, I haven't thought about that as much. Currently what we need to do is voucherize the existing funding or tax-creditize it if you wish. But at some point, it would help to unify the funding and not have it be some mixture of federal, state, and local. Frankly, I think we need to get away from income taxes. So it probably ought to be some kind of a sales tax. And property taxes as well, get away from those.
Audience Member #12
I just want to comment on the special eds. This Saturday, Hayward Unified is having a board meeting, and they're going to vote potentially to abandon class size reduction. And they have some 340 K-3 classes. That would increase class size from 20 to 32 in a difficult district, with a lot of multiethnic problems in terms of teaching reading and what have you.
And in this district there's an encroachment over $2 million of the special ed into the regular fund. Other districts I'm told in Berkeley had nine million. In Oakland it's even larger. But it seems to be almost an entitlement, writing IEPs, learning disabilities. We have lots of autistics, and they're very expensive, and Hayward's doing a good job attracting more autistics—I don't know where they're coming from—but there's no limit to this. The district seems to be afraid of the lawsuits. And so, imagine giving up class size reduction in 144 classes for little first-graders, kindergartners, because of this thing is out of control that the district is not willing to take on. So it's a real crisis with regard to special ed.
David Theroux
The lady right there.
Audience Member #13
Yeah, a couple of questions. And just in terms of historical perspective, it seems to me that the compulsory attendance laws were put in place because of demands of the labor market. So because the children were working in factories, and so to open the jobs for adult males, that was one of the things—and it seems to me that looking outside the box in a way, that if you were to change that for the demands of our economy today—that would be one question I would have for you.
And the other question is in terms of your political constituencies, it seems that you get interested in education when you have children, and you're interested until they're done, and then you're not interested anymore. And so you have a fluctuating base, and yet, the institution remains and the teachers remain, and the bureaucrats remain. So they're able to have a much more stable sort of lobbying effort.
And then the other question is that my mother taught in Louisiana for 38 years, and they didn't have unions. And when she was in school, you couldn't even chew gum, and they would tell you who to marry, because teachers had to uphold this certain calling—it was not just a job. But it seems to me that somehow, if you don't have collective bargaining, what do the teachers do in their own economic interests, which would seem to be in line with this Institute's mandate? I have cousins who teach in private schools. They have no retirement, they get lower wages. What do you put in place of that, because that's their economic self-interest is at stake. They're not going to go for that. And if you do want to enact this kind of change, you have to offer something else. So those are my three areas.
John Merrifield
Well, teachers would certainly see improved working conditions. Whether they would see improved salaries would depend on how many former teachers would come back into the system after teaching became a profession again, as opposed to more of a blue collar union occupation that it is now. So I don't see any problem in setting wages for true professionals that work with clients that choose them, and that specialize in areas according to wage differentials, and sell themselves as productive team player teachers that somebody would want to hire.
And I know that principals want to be involved in hiring teachers, and that's the way it needs to happen, not school cartels called districts hiring teachers. The teachers need to be in a labor market where they can choose the school that they work in, not the district that they work in, and where they can shop themselves directly among competing schools, public or private.
Peter Brimelow
I agree that it's true that most p