What this is saying is that workplaces where the employees have more power are more likely to be cautious about returning to work during a pandemic. That makes a lot of sense, as employees are going to be more careful with their own health than employers are going to be with the health of other people. And it shouldn't be very surprising to us high-demand tech workers who are still allowed to work from home due to that leverage.
Unless teachers are somehow very different than the rest of us, regardless of the pandemic, a significant percentage have discovered they prefer to work from home. Those with powerful unions can drag the process of returning far longer than those without.
that's probably true, but what about the students? The learning outcomes of a lesson over zoom seems to be not so good imho. The kids missing social aspects of school can't be good for them either. Their interests needs to be represented here, and seems like it's not.
Anecdote, sample size = 1, but my third grader constantly complains about return to physical school, now that she got a taste of School From Home. Everything she loves is online now, her friends, Roblox, Minecraft, and so on, so she just thinks it's pointless and unfair to have to sit in a classroom. "It's not fair that dad gets to work from home and I have to go to in person school!" I can't argue because her school performance and grades improved remarkably during the pandemic.
Most teachers don't seem to particularly like working from home. They became teachers because they like working with children. They can't do that as effectively at the other end of a screen.
Most teachers I know want to get back to the classroom. They just don't want to risk their lives for it. They are often older and often have co-morbidities that put them at serious risk from COVID.
So they're not dragging it out to escape work. Unlike "the rest of us", working from home isn't an opportunity to slack off without the boss watching. They often work even harder. They being cautious because they don't want to die.
Yeah - given the option workers would rather not risk their health for minimal pay, in the absence of an option (or the ability to say no on mass) workers do not “choose” to return to on premise employment they are forced to.
No. It is saying service providers that control the market are more intended to provide poor services, or even deny their duties, no matter how badly the service receivers need.
Are you sure it’s saying that and not “teachers were one of the demographics that did most of the screeching and admonishing on the internet about masks, vaccines, and mandates these past 2+ years, and refused to go back to work until the COVID and vaccine situation improved, but now that basically everyone is vaccinated and the risk to the vaccinated has been near-nil for over a year now, and everyone has been shopping and meeting and eating and living life in public for quite some time now, teachers would still rather stay at home and teach virtually (while not on their 3-month-long summer vacation) while simultaneously claiming they honestly want what’s best for the kids and that they’re not being paid enough for such difficult, demanding work.”
It's also in your interest, since the primary effect of posting like this on the fair-minded, persuadable part of the audience is to completely discredit the view that you're arguing for. That's a very poor trade for a little venting, and it's particularly harmful if your view happens to be true (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
Edit: we've had to ask you this kind of thing more than once before. I don't want to ban you, but we need this to stop happening, so please stop doing it.
"suck up your tax dollars"? Ask any public education worker you might know, just how much they get paid. They are grossly underpaid for the societally-important work they do. Further, they absolutely did not take on the job knowing they were going to be risking catching a wildly-infectious deadly disease. Also, no one's talking about "only work when they feel like it", and your disingenuous reframing of not wanting to die from a preventable illness is insulting at best. There's little reason to force in-person teaching when infection rates are at sky-high levels. Them being paid by tax dollars doesn't mean they don't deserve a safe workplace. Think empathically about what you say before you post it next time.
Re: "grossly underpaid."
My son's (NJ) public high school art teacher gets $115k for working Sept-June, plus weeks off in December and April. Retirement at 55 with pension and subsidized health care. Not awful.
Ah, here in greater Vancouver area, you will never reach a 6-digit salary as a public school teacher. The highest you can ever reach (that I could find[0]) in any school district is $97k CAD which is about $76k USD, and that's only after hitting 10 years. You start out as a teacher around $47k CAD or $37k USD. When you also consider our ~SF-levels cost of living... that's pretty low. Staff in other roles such as education assistant make far less than that. Also, to be a teacher here you must have 4 years of post-secondary education and a degree, so you're likely starting out with tens of $thousands of student loans.
Interesting how empathy only goes one way with you. Good luck with that.
(Nevermind that COVID is no longer an unusual hazard to the fully vaccinated, and everyone has had the opportunity to be fully vaccinated for many months now.)
Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Please make your substantive points without such swipes in the future.
Besides not contributing to poisoning this place and setting it on fire, that will also make your point of view more persuasive to others.
Honestly sounds like the pot calling the kettle black here. You're asking hundreds of people to put their health at risk so that ~2c of every tax dollar you pay isn't wasted. Assuming $100k in tax, you're only paying them $2k, or ~$40 a week. If you really value your daily coffee that much, just buy a coffee machine.
> Assuming $100k in tax, you're only paying them $2k
Where are you getting your numbers?
In California, public education is guaranteed >50% of state spending. That's on top of federal and local spending. (Schools in "rich" areas don't get state funding, so they must locally fund. Some of that locally-raised money is taken by the state.)
Grocery store people work and have contact with far more people....
I suspect I had mixed up federal and total tax revenue %. We're still only talking an avg of $4k per working person for the entire system though, if you take the total funding sans property tax and divvy it up by the working population (90bn, ~30% prop tax, 16.9mil working pop).
I realise the avg isn't going to be representative of the general population, but the marginal utility of money should roughly scale with the amount of that paid per-person.
> Grocery store people work and have contact with far more people.
Honestly not entirely sure of your source on this. I'd suspect that having several hundred students in the same building for an entire day with central AC would be more of a petrie dish than your typical grocery store most of the week.
Since property tax is a huge source of school funding, "sans property tax" is like saying that we're going to ignore taxes paid by folks who live in detached houses.
> > Grocery store people work and have contact with far more people.
> Honestly not entirely sure of your source on this.
Several hundred is a fairly large school, such schools don't have a single HVAC system, AND Covid doesn't work that way.
Moreover, you significantly underestimate store traffic. (Far more people go to grocery stores than go to schools.)
Costcos have 750 parking spaces and they turn-over 10-12x times a day. Even with only one person per car, that's 750 different people/day, >5k/week, or >15k/month. (Schools are the same people every day.) Walmarts are comparable.
Yes, Costco is 2-3x bigger than the typical grocery store but there's still no comparison. Grocery store workers have far more exposure than teachers.
Completely made-up tax numbers aside, such strong opinions about the disposable income of strangers and what they should do with it! Sorry, I'm passing on this offer. Don't call back. Thanks.
Please be kind. The topic is worth debate but your comments are crossing a line and come across rather hostile. I’m not a mod, but as a friendly reminder regarding site rules:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
I have no respect for selective scolding based on subjective definitions of kindness.
And I have no hostility towards anyone in this conversation. But I'm not above a sharp retort when I'm being condescendingly lectured to based on flawed premises.
The premise of your argument seems to be that the public school system is flawed, and that you shouldn't have to pay into it, especially if the teachers aren't working.
This implies a lack of care for social responsibility and a lack of respect for the people that are actually having to take the risk.
While I appreciate the point of view that it isn't quite fair, I'd point out that a) teachers should have a right to health and safety in the workplace, b) social mobility would be obliterated if you could opt out of funding public schools, and c) you're likely arguing this from an office where you're at much lower risk.
It's not a great position to be in, sure. But arguing that we're not being kind in our position when yours seems to be "but they're wasting my money" seems to be borderline misanthropic.
I think blindly trusting powerful teacher's unions to define "safe working conditions" when they get paid either way is textbook social irresponsibility. It's "ruinous empathy", the sort of thing that makes you feel kind and good while actually doing harm. It hurts kids, especially the most vulnerable and disadvantaged inner-city students where these unions are most dominant.
COVID is no more dangerous than the flu for vaccinated people, and has been for many months now. But some teacher's unions are still demanding closures, as documented in the article.
I phrased it in terms of my own checkbook because IMO that makes the principle involved most transparent (moral hazard against payors), but personally my schools are fine. The biggest impacts of no choice are on the most disadvantaged.
The fact that you took "teachers should have a right to health and safety in the workplace" as "WFH only or not" is either naive or disingenuous. This isn't a binary, and I'm surprised that someone would assume as such.
What about literally everyone else? You are only making a case for teachers, who else should we be paying to stay home?
Democrats do with teachers what republicans do with cops. This strange do no wrong hero worship. I don't get it. Looking at our stats globally (reading and math scores/police brutality rates) neither deserve praise.
I'm not the op, but it certainly does for me. I'm a strong supporter of unions and a strong opponent of public sector unions. Private sector unions are a critical counterweight to the power that private employers have over their employees. Taxpayers are the employers of public sector employees, which makes public sector unions nothing but political lobbying organizations.
I think that's a valid opinion. But I also appreciate that in some regards the public is the most fickle of employers, the most punitive, the most likely to use their power for evil. If we want to attract well qualified people to work for the public, we need to offer something -- at this time it isn't salary, for sure, so I guess it must be the stability provided by the union representation.
Most public sector workers have benefits, pensions, paid time off and a variety of other means of compensation aside from their salaries - unlike many private sector workers. All of them have the opportunity to vote for the politicians who come up with the policies that govern their public sector jobs. They are also free to form their own associations, coalitions and lobbying groups to further influence whoever they want in their capacity as private citizens. But when it comes to collective bargaining and other, specific legislated rights we have legally granted unions, it is a bridge too far.
I have indirect personal experience with what it's like to be a public employee. My own mother worked for the local community college for most of her career. She went for many years without any raise, instead the politicians improved the retirement perks. So she stuck with it. Just before it was time for her to retire, the voters made a serious attempt to destroy the retirement system for public employees, nevermind all the promises made over the years in lieu of actual cost-of-living increases.
Luckily, they failed to destroy her retirement. With her pension along with social security she is comfortable enough. Nobody's ever going to call her wealthy, not even close, but voters would have stripped her of that pension and made her scrape by on social security.
It's easy to hate on public employees, but I don't think they automatically deserve fewer protections than private company employees enjoy.
No matter who does it, it's absolutely filthy to motivate people to work based on promises of retirement benefits and then try to take those away after the work has been done. It's astounding that such a thing could be legal.
One silver lining of the shift from defined benefits to defined contributions. At least you're putting in your own money and can expect it to be there when you retire.
The issue with public sector unions is they are a monopoly on top of a monopoly. If a private company goes to shit because of its union, people can patronize another company. Not true of the public sector.
Yeah, it's hard to do a direct comparison with private companies and the public sector, given the differing priorities and metrics. Companies put efficiency as the highest metric, governments [should] put effectiveness first.
The public sector has the government as an employer. Taxpayers are not the employer of the public sector.
Lobbying government is one of the functions of unions, regardless which sector they represent. Better pay and conditions don’t come from employers just playing nice.
Yes. All public employee unions including police should be decertified. If they want better pay or working conditions then they should ask their elected politicians just like any other citizen.
Police are an interesting counterpoint, since police are one of the most vaccine-resistent groups. I'd like to see a similar study: do we see the stronger the police union, the lower the vaccination rate? Is there any argument outside the union that refusing the vaccine provides any benefit to the public, or only harm?
Private schools' enrollment got filled up in many places. It did around me.
Meanwhile so many parents have moved away or gone to private schools, we are worried our local elementary school will close due to the enrollment decline. My wife is on the PTA and has an inside scoop on some of this data.
But you're not paying taxes to send your children to school. You're paying taxes so we, as a society, can educate our children. The way we do that is public schools. The money you pay for school taxes is in no way tied to your children, or even whether or not you have children. People who don't have children also pay taxes because, as noted, we're funding for society to educate all children.
I am 100% against the idea of parents being able to redirect the money they pay in school taxes to private schools. There are a number of things that should be communally paid for, with everyone contributing whether they need it right now or not; education is one of those things in my opinion. Police, Fire Departments, etc are also in that category; you _can_ have them be individually contracted, but it's a bad idea.
> I am 100% against the idea of parents being able to redirect the money they pay in school taxes to private schools.
Curious on the motivation for this carve-out. There's a bunch of other basic service needs that apply to all children but yet we don't have government-run grocery stores, clothing manufacturers, hair salons, toy makers or book publishers.
Disadvantaged groups are government-subsidized (state-provided health insurance, food stamps, housing subsidies) but the recipients of those funds are typically privately-run.
Is it the concern that in a voucher system private providers will churn out shoddier end product?
between conservative revisionists, woke indoctrinators, bored resource officers looking to make minor situations a legal issue, politicians pushing standardized tests then making schools essentially teach to the test (which i could rant for hours about), all the bad teachers who sit aroubd collecting paychecks bc its too hard to fire them, our schools are a f-ing dumpster fire.
i want to believe in the public instituion..
but its been ripped up by conservatives, liberals, unions, beaucrats of all kinds, crime, over the top fear responses to crime, and system that acts more out of the protecting itself from legal liability than by a system actually good for kids - with moronic zero tolerance polices and policies that punishes self defense.
its a lost cause. and the public funds should follow the kid.
if public schools cant compete and have to close ? then good.
schools are rotten from the inside out and are beyond fixing.
school boards are ran by motivated, bored assholes with too much free time on their hands and unhealthy obsessions with trendy political agendas.
This will force public schools to compete with what parents actually want for their kids.
If public schools can't attract the funds with making moronic policy, then it's gutted.
If they respond to parental demand, then they stay alive and vital.
But as it stands, most parents are pretty helpless against shitty policy. Schools choice adds some democracy into the situation where beucracy, unions and politicians have eroded it.
I'm done being invested in the noble idea of the institution.
Reality is reality. And public schools are shit holes.
I'm still advocating we educate all children.
I just advocate that the money follows the kid and that the state and teachers union don't get a monopoly control of it.
i hear this argument a lot (see what i did there?) and it makes some sense. however, i’d like for people to step back and consider education as something more than a commodity. an educated society seems like a healthier society across all dimensions.
This is part of the reason I’m very much pro school choice. Give a credit to each family to do with what they wish.
It’ll drive down costs and let those who want to do at home teaching stay that way. But I suspect many schools would have immediately switched back to in person. It lets the parents and community decide what’s best, instead of teachers and union heads.
If it’s designed correctly it should increase aptitude and decrease cost. What’s not to like?
Can you elaborate? The general negative sentiment towards teachers is confusing to me.
It seems you trust them enough to take a very major part in raising your child, but not enough to make a decision about what’s best? I’d like you to elaborate because this view makes it seem like parents view teachers as nannies (who, by the way, should also have a say in whether they want to get exposed to a virus or take it home to their own family).
No good parent just "trusts" teachers to raise their children. Good parents are constantly involved: keeping tabs on schoolwork, helping and encouraging their child, meeting with teachers and administrators, volunteering, and sometimes getting their child moved from one class to another when the teacher is bad.
Unions represent the teachers' interests, not the students'. Not only that, but there's more than sufficient evidence that remote learning harms kids, especially the poor or otherwise disadvantaged. At the end of the day, you have to weigh potential risks, which for kids COVID is a very small (though still real) risk.
It is especially hard on parents whose jobs don't allow working remotely- retail, manufacturing, etc. Why should teachers be exempt when parents are not?
If we had European style unions, more might be inclined to agree. American unions are substantially less effective (in both outcomes and usage of dues), and their declining enrollment shows.
Not sure what in GP you think is negative towards teachers. Sounds like you probably don’t have kids of your own.
As a parent and tax payer I’d like to have my child taught in a school by competent people. Not via Zoom by someone who can’t understand that the risks are unbelievably low and kids are being damaged by missing out on school.
GP is a fairly standard anti union stance against teachers.
And, honestly, your post seems further in that direction. That is, you are furthering the narrative that many teachers are not competent, since they "can't understand the risks.". If they are that incompetent, why are they still teaching?
We've arrived in a weird situation where we pay so little to teachers and yet require a high level of education, that we aren't attracting our best & brightest to the profession. I've still met some great teachers, but I've met a lot of glorified babysitters. It's infuriating.
Salary isn't based on which degrees you have, it's based on what job you're doing. It's inane to compare a computer programmer's salary to a teacher's salary.
That aside, 68k is perfectly reasonable for a job with fantastic security, summers off, lots of vacation time where you get to work with children. Also, when I started working as a programmer, my salary was ~72k which is not much more and I had no trouble living off it. Of course the ceiling is higher for me but that's the market's doing.
This comes at the expense of having absolutely no flexibility during the school year and usually plenty of long days & weekends, and summer has things like professional development / continuing education keeping it from being a long work-free block.
It’s not bad but it’s not a compensation game changer. One other thing to remember: for a teacher, being out sick is almost as much work as a normal day. The tempo of a school year means that a lot of people need a couple weeks to unwind at the end of the year.
that only partially addresses one half of the comment though. additionally, “summers off” is a fairly common red herring that’s just designed to distract from the primary argument. this has nothing to do with time off or tenure so please stop trying to distract.
IMHO, for starters, we should be subsidizing essential workers*. Indexed to cost of living.
If salary isn't over a threshold, relative to their workplace, they're eligible for subsidized housing (in a mixed-income development) and food.
That we have necessary people unable to live in the communities they serve is insane. And if we're not going to address it from the salary side, at least we can do something from the expense side.
* Where "essential worker" means any job fulfilling a social function in the local community. Teacher, nurse, police officer, firefighter etc.
I'm not sure this works. Basically, sets up dire stakes to maintain a job for as long as you can, and makes perverse incentives on the auditing of the system.
Cards on the table, I'm very keen on some sort of UBI. I also have doubts on much of the reporting I've seen surrounding it.
I further think this needs a way to both double down in access and advancement for those with access, while further increasing funding and effort for those that don't. Main belief is that success affords more and more. Such that you want to double down in success, but you also need to use more of that success to lift up everyone.
the primary argument against school choice/voucher systems is that it would implicitly recreate segregation across races and classes. there are counter arguments to this line of thinking, but that’s what i’ve heard as the primary argument against choice
Right, that argument is what I meant by places without capital. If you don't have the wealth to get your kids to a good school, what do you do? And, as a nation, are we ok with the current predominant answer?
These unions have set up a system where it takes 5 or 6 years to fire a bad teacher in LA and SF. How does that benefit children? And you act like parents have much of a choice.
In my state, Washington, the teachers union got teachers to the front of the line for vaccines, right behind healthcare workers. We were told it was to get schools back open. Once they were all vaccinated, they decided not to re-open schools.
Same thing is CA. Teachers were one of the first to be vaccinated (while resisting any vaccine mandate), yet immediately put up roadblocks to reopening.
this is a false dichotomy and reeks of political rhetoric. it’s honestly both. teachers desire a safe working environment for themselves AND want to do the best they can to educate students under the circumstances.
It’s not a false dichotomy if you just look at the union’s actions.
How does opposing a vaccine mandate help students? The answer is it doesn’t, its just the union flexing its politics muscle by using the mandate as a bargaining chip.
we’re not debating vaccine mandate efficacy, we’re debating you implication that teachers aren’t in it for the students. you’re being intellectually dishonest.
I won't deny the school system has issues, but school choice in many cases is funneling tax dollars to religious schools or allowing other private companies to bilk tax dollars while providing substandard education.
I've worked at public, private and charter schools, and all have issues.
If we’re going to be taking tax dollars anyway to pay for education, I honestly don’t care what type of school they go to as long as the family gets to make that choice. My bet is it probably would be a funnel for religious schools initially and controversially, but it would also open up opportunities for secular private schools to enter the market down the line.
Given that I have no idea what definition of extremism you’re using, I’m going to sidestep that one.
But I can put this out there: I’m not particularly happy about my money going towards religious schools either, but I have known many people in my life who have gone to such schools who I am happy to have known and their educational upbringing has not been to their detriment to the point that I consider it a non-factor in my view of them so: money follows the child (or some variation thereof) and family picks the schooling. If my money is going to be taken from me to fund any amount of schooling, I am a lot happier with that compromise than I am with my money being used to continue the same kind of public schools I attended in a diminished and uncompetitive educational market.
You do have a say! School board meetings are usually public and the board elections are democratic (usually. Some districts, usually in the south still have some at-large boards seats for racism reasons). When I was a teacher and blamed for things by parents I had no power over (e.g. standardized tests mandated by the state) I wished parents would direct their (justified & righteous) rage at the school board and state politicians instead.
“School choice” isn’t school choice unless I’m free choose to send my kids to the rich district across town or the private school the politicians and elites send their kids to.
> “School choice” isn’t school choice unless I’m free choose to send my kids to the rich district across town or the private school the politicians and elites send their kids to.
This is your own partisan definition of school choice. And frankly this attitude is why public schools are so terrible. The current system where people are forced to pay for school through taxes and then are forced to go to a specific public school means the system has ZERO reason or incentive to improve or change because their students are more like prisoners in that they have no choice where to go.
In reality school choice creates competition in the education market. If school choice were allowed to exist there would be no bad schools or they would be around for less time because people would vote with their feet and find a school that is worth it. The bad schools would go out of business.
This has already been proven to work with public and private charter schools which are hot beds for innovation and great student outcomes. Charter schools where students aren’t served well exist but they go out of business quickly due to students leaving.
Would it be perfect? No. Would it be better than what we have, most definitely.
With school choice and vouchers we expect new schools to open up. We aren't permanently limited to just the schools that already exist in rich and poor districts.
People shouldn’t have to choose between “good schools” and “bad schools.” The idea of trying to find a home “with good schools” should be a thing of the past. All schools should good schools. I think that is the goal to work towards, not having parents fight for the too few remaining life-rafts.
Schools will open in neighborhoods that have 8 students and one stellar teacher. You’ll have all the parents coming by and seeing the kids and joining in the education process.
Other parents might want their kid to have a classical education. Other parents might want a traditional Islamic education. Others may want a massive university style education, with half online.
All of these styles can be possible with school choice. I don’t really understand the vitriol. Its better for everyone if everyone is more involved and has a more tailored approach. Even those with special needs, it’s not unreasonable to double the credit. Have them get help.
I like the idea in principle, but one challenge I haven't seen addressed is that the cost of educating a student is not uniform. Students on either end of the bell curve with special needs, unstable home situations, no/broken English, exceptional intelligence, ADHD, behavioral issues, etc cost more than average.
Therefore, similar to health insurance, every organization is incentivized to attract cheaper-than-average students/patients and expel or discourage the expensive ones. You typically end up with the most expensive participants dumped onto the public schools/plans which results in a death spiral.
In my experience, most people love this kind of libertarian approach right up until the moment they find out they're going to be one of the expensive ones, at which point they discover a newfound appreciation for public services.
Public employees don't need unions. If they want better working conditions then they should ask their elected political leaders, just like every other citizen.
And teaching isn't dangerous. Everyone will be exposed to the virus so it hardly matters whether that happens in a classroom or some other setting. The teachers who want to get vaccinated have been for months now.
> Public employees don't need unions. If they want better working conditions then they should ask their elected political leaders, just like every other citizen.
Workers anywhere need to be able to negotiate with organisational management on roughly equal terms, which means a comparable level of organisational backing. Most civil service management is not elected and nor should it be; making every superintendent or subject head an elected position would cause bigger problems.
> And teaching isn't dangerous. Everyone will be exposed to the virus so it hardly matters whether that happens in a classroom or some other setting. The teachers who want to get vaccinated have been for months now.
That's easy to say when you're not the one having to do it. Not everyone can safely be vaccinated, and not everyone has the same judgement of the risks. If there really is compelling medical evidence to support the position of those who want to return to in-person schooling, then they have nothing to fear from negotiating with the union on equal terms.
At the point where you are both a voter and paid out of public money, you shouldn’t get to also have a union. This is a choose two situation, and since I’m not going to tell anyone to give up their voting rights, this is more of a choose one situation.
> At the point where you are both a voter and paid out of public money, you shouldn’t get to also have a union.
Wtf? Why?
Anyone who isn't living in a cabin in the woods is "paid out of public money" to some extent. Most businesses have some government contract somewhere upstream or downstream of them; almost everyone interacts with the tax system, almost everyone is affected by zoning or law enforcement. Why should the employment relationship be a special case, and what conceivable purpose is served by blocking such an arbitrary class of people from unionizing?
> Anyone who isn't living in a cabin in the woods is "paid out of public money" to some extent.
This is objectively false.
> Most businesses have some government contract somewhere upstream or downstream of them;
A private business providing services that the government purchased as a market participant is not the same as people who are on the government’s payroll. This is not a small distinction, but if you want me to compromise and consider public contractors ineligible to unionize too, that’s a compromise I am willing to make, but it’s unnecessary.
> almost everyone interacts with the tax system, almost everyone is affected by zoning or law enforcement
Zoning is a can of worms that is outside the scope of this discussion, but I would have plenty to say about how this exactly is abused, in another thread actually on the topic. Needless to say, being the market-based beneficiary of poor laws is everyone’s right as a citizen in our Republic today, in a way I find disagreeable, and if they can manage it. This is also why you shouldn’t also get to be both a voter, and on the government’s payroll, and have a union.
> Why should the employment relationship be a special case, and what conceivable purpose is served by blocking such an arbitrary class of people from unionizing?
Because it is a moral hazard to have a class of citizens who are able to vote for both sides at the negotiating table when what’s at stake is somebody else’s money.
Nonsense. We live in a society which is maintained with public money, and very few businesses would be profitable without that. Heck, money itself is a public institution.
> Zoning is a can of worms that is outside the scope of this discussion, but I would have plenty to say about how this exactly is abused, in another thread actually on the topic.
It's absolutely on topic when you're suggesting that we should apply much stricter rules to employment relations than we apply to every other interaction between citizens and government.
> Needless to say, being the market-based beneficiary of poor laws is everyone’s right as a citizen in our Republic today, in a way I find disagreeable, and if they can manage it. This is also why you shouldn’t also get to be both a voter, and on the government’s payroll, and have a union.
> it is a moral hazard to have a class of citizens who are able to vote for both sides at the negotiating table when what’s at stake is somebody else’s money.
Banning unions does nothing to address that - people are still "on both sides of the table" when negotiating as individuals, they're just a lot more reliant on their individual capabilities. Requiring everyone to do their own legal research and individual negotiations is both grossly inequitable and also could never be a full solution to that kind of issue - if there's some principled problem with citizens negotiating with their governments, that needs to apply to powerful individuals (including but not limited to higher-class government employees) too.
(And again, what's so special about the employment relationship? Surely the same logic applies to residents' associations, or advocacy groups, or professional associations - there are all kinds of groups of citizens that regularly find themselves on the other side of negotiations with those same citizens' elected governments)
> Nonsense. We live in a society which is maintained with public money, and very few businesses would be profitable without that.
That we vote to pay for through our elected representatives; the same people who directly determine budgets, salaries and have political skin in the game to get re-elected at the time of contract negotiation and have firing power.
Public projects are not the same as public salaries. A highway is not drawing a salary from the treasury, but the people who work on it are.
> Heck, money itself is a public institution.
Not necessarily so, and also irrelevant.
> It's absolutely on topic when you're suggesting that we should apply much stricter rules to employment relations than we apply to every other interaction between citizens and government.
The market price of your house going up because of restrictive zoning is not the same as drawing a salary directly from the treasury. Restrictive zoning has other issues, but zoning is only one factor of many which can inform the price of your house, it does not set the price of your house. You are conflating something which is unrelated to working directly for the government.
> Banning unions does nothing to address that - people are still "on both sides of the table" when negotiating as individuals, they're just a lot more reliant on their individual capabilities. Requiring everyone to do their own legal research and individual negotiations is grossly inequitable and could never be a full solution to that kind of issue - if there's some principled problem with citizens negotiating with their governments, that needs to apply to powerful individuals (including but not limited to higher-class government employees) too.
People decide all the time whether unions are actually beneficial for them in the private sector and many times vote against it either by choosing non-union employers where both are an option or by voting for or against joining a union when a unionization vote occurs.
Let’s take an example: Google is a large employer where there has been an effort to unionize the workforce (how is that going by the way? Hadn’t thought about it in a while till I was typing this). They are a private employer, and they earn their revenue from many sources: namely anyone that chooses to pay for ads on their properties, and then variously from other sources which can include government contracts. Government organizations may also choose to pay for ads on Google Search the same as if they purchased ads from elsewhere as they have been known to do from time to time. This does not make Google a public sector employer though: they are a publicly traded but private organization with a Board of Directors to represent their owners interests and an Executive team which is tasked with operating the company including whether to take on or pass on government contracts as they so choose. Taking a dollar, a thousand dollars or a billion dollars in revenue from the Feds does not make Google a corporate serf of the Feds and the owners, Board of Directors, Executive team, Employees and 1099s each have their own rights and interests. A Google employee working on a government project did not elect the Executives who approved the project and his salary, even if he may have elected the Senator that said it was a good idea for Google to handle it.
(That said this should come with the caveat that government projects have their own moral hazards all the time, they’re just usually not this one that we are discussing.)
> And again, what's so special about the employment relationship? Surely the same logic applies to residents' associations, or advocacy groups, or professional associations - there are all kinds of groups of citizens that regularly find themselves on the other side of negotiations with those same citizens' elected governments
Private advocacy groups have to compete with other moneyed interests. Public-sector unions do not. There is no one else that is going to pay government salaries except the government, and they get their money by taking it from people who earned it. Unionized employees of all stripes tend to vote as a bloc because taking collective action is their raison d’être. The government is not approving contracts between private sector companies and private sector unions. They are approving contracts between themselves and public sector unions, and have hiring and firing power over the negotiators at the table representing the public’s interest.
> That we vote to pay for through our elected representatives; the same people who directly determine budgets, salaries and have political skin in the game to get re-elected at the time of contract negotiation and have firing power.
All of that applies to employing people just as much as to other ways of spending public money. (Yes it's hard to fire a public employee - but it's also hard to cancel a public works project).
> Public projects are not the same as public salaries. A highway is not drawing a salary from the treasury, but the people who work on it are.
Public money is spent, private individuals and/or businesses benefit. Whether it's structured as an employment contract or a public works project seems pretty irrelevant.
> People decide all the time whether unions are actually beneficial for them in the private sector and many times vote against it either by choosing non-union employers where both are an option or by voting for or against joining a union when a unionization vote occurs.
Which is their right (I think it's foolish except maybe for upper-class people in fields where individual performance is directly measurable, but it's their choice), but how is that any different for a public employer vs private employer?
> A Google employee working on a government project did not elect the Executives who approved the project and his salary, even if he may have elected the Senator that said it was a good idea for Google to handle it.
What difference does that make though? That executive is hardly going to turn down a profitable contract even if they think it's for something stupid, so you're not bringing in any more accountability on any aspect that's actually relevant. (And in practice a public employee is going to be in a very similar position: there will be several layers of unelected civil service administrators between the person they vote for and the decision about how much they get paid).
> Private advocacy groups have to compete with other moneyed interests. Public-sector unions do not.
There are plenty of moneyed interests opposing public-sector unions.
> There is no one else that is going to pay government salaries except the government, and they get their money by taking it from people who earned it.
Your bias is showing. Many government employees earn their money (including many teachers) and many taxpayers don't.
> Unionized employees of all stripes tend to vote as a bloc because taking collective action is their raison d’être.
Sure, but that's exactly the same for advocacy groups, neighbourhood associations and so on.
> The government is not approving contracts between private sector companies and private sector unions. They are approving contracts between themselves and public sector unions, and have hiring and firing power over the negotiators at the table representing the public’s interest.
Right, but they negotiate contracts or quasi-contracts with all sorts of collective organisations - businesses, business groups, professional associations, residents' associations, advocacy groups - all the time, under the same kind of conditions.
They're finding new jobs. Good luck replacing them when the working conditions and pay are terrible.
> More than 270,000 public school teachers are projected to leave the profession from 2016 to 2026, according to government data, and recent polling by a prominent national teachers union showed that nearly 1 in 3 teachers said Covid-19 had made them more likely to resign or retire early
> Is there a surplus of quality teachers in the US?
There must be a surplus, at least of qualified teachers, if not quality ones. Otherwise how do we find enough people with a master's degree willing to take 45K a year to teach 25-30 rambunctious kids all day long? It baffles me that we still manage to find people willing to enter the career field, frankly.
Over there you can find educated people who are willing to work in Seely, MT for 30 kUSD/year. On a J-1 visa, with no possibility to settle permanently in the US.
I imagine ot varies by region, but there are definitely more people looking for teaching jobs than there are jobs available where I live (my sister in law is a teacher and getting a new job is a very long process indeed).
There would be if we shifted funds from administrators to teachers. Like in healthcare, administrators are hoarding most of the funds and driving up the cost.
To clarify businesses should be allowed to do things that will needlessly kill employees?
After all they could just go elsewhere or be homeless right? It is after all there freedom to choose: risking their life or homelessness: it’s their choice.
For those in California, there is a School Choice intuitive currently at the petition phase so order a form online if you support this: https://www.californiaschoolchoice.org/
Know any kids with any type of disability? They're screwed. Know any people of color? They're screwed. Know any working poor who can't make the drive to the rich neighborhood school? They're screwed. But I guess I don't know what you like.
I have evidence. In Texas we just received our school's scorecards. They show, at an aggregate, how my school (and district and state) performed at the annual exams for 2019 and 2021. The scores are broken out by some different demographics, such as: race, poverty, and disability.
As GP mentioned, the standard scores for black people, disabled people, and poor people dropped by more than the average. I had my eye on disabled people - and I was disappointed in the change!
So the current system is failing minorities and your response is let’s give this system more money, not I wish I could have my children educated by a more capable organization?
The wealthier parents hired private teachers and the kids didn’t miss a beat. Even the middle class parents just split the cost across 5 kids and they did class in the park (to align with restrictions).
The poor parents? Well they can’t take time off their jobs or work from home. So they scrambled to find someone willing to watch their kids do online learning. It started with a couple hours per day and now those kids are at least a year behind while their middle-upper class peers and right on track.
On average, students of color come from poorer families, who are less able to support a remotely learning student. The schools they go to tend to also be less well equipped to teach remotely. I forget which school, but I saw one not too long ago that was still teaching remotely, but the school itself was open so that students had access to computers to attend lessons.
As a blanket statement, yes, it is wrong. It is, however, more right than wrong when you look at the statistics.
So I went to school in a recently desegregated school district in the 70's- those who could afford to sent their kids to private schools, then voted against the public school budget at every turn. I don't think you can argue that this would not be in danger of happening again.
Expanding the term POC to include Asians is yet another example of white liberals undermining Black and Latino causes to try to convince themselves that they're not racist, only those nasty conservatives are.
You're conflating different things. People can already choose between public, private, and homeschool. The "credit" is a public resource allocated for a certain purpose under certain conditions. A union doesn't unilaterally decide anything.
You're entitled to choose a non-public school, to want to divert a public resource to yourself with fewer strings attached, and to want more leverage to disregard teachers' stakes in delivering education. Not everyone would agree with your conclusion that it "should" make things better, or that it's even necessary to make improvements.
You're entitled to choose a non-public school, to want to divert that public resource to yourself
How is that? In the US schools are paid for via property tax.
You pay the same property tax to the school whether you have 0 kids in the public school system or 100.
If you choose to pay for private school, you still pay the same amount of tax to the public school system even though you aren’t using it. Only some states have a “voucher” system that lets you have your student’s fees redirects from public school to a private school. About 70% of states don’t have any voucher system so there’s no way to redirect your public school funds to a private school.
Most people’s entire education budget is taken up by their taxes that go to public schools. So unless you are giving people their tax money back in vouchers for school this is an elitist and privileged argument.
It's not, because I never argued against doing it. Oc asked "what's not to like?", and I gave an opposing perspective. Successful negotiation usually requires understanding what you're asking the other side to compromise on.
Ironically, a school-choice-ish program was tried in a metro area near me- the idea was to get some inner city kids out to the burbs, and some suburban kids into the city, to increase diversity.
The opposite happened- almost all of the kids from the city choosing the program were white, and all the kids from the burbs in the program to go to the city schools were black or Latino.
The end result (Which killed the program) was that kids and their families chose an increase in segregation, rather than diversity.
I expect it is almost certainly tied to socioeconomics here -- wealthier people can afford the hidden costs of the vouchers such as travel time, control of schedule, after-school fees and such, etc.
If you want free education, you can go to your neighborhood school. Not everyone _can_ go to whatever school they feel like (feel free to guess which kids can't attend school 30 miles away on a whim).
Opt out if you like (there are always private schools), but not with my taxes.
[edit: I was incorrect on the fee matters, so have removed that]
Charter schools are absolutely for-profit businesses, they scam it by having the "non-profit" running the charter school employ a management company that obviously is a for-profit entity. See https://networkforpubliceducation.org/wp-content/uploads/202...
All the evidence also shows that charter schools do not produce better outcomes than regular public schools.
The real reason certain groups want charter schools (aside from grift) is a desire to indoctrinate and teach nonsense as fact.
> Every “charter” school that actually makes a profit is simply passing on the subsidies to their owners: they get to charge both the government and parents to provide the same service.
No, they don't. Charter schools operate as non-default schools within the public school system, they don't get to charge parents at all.
> Here’s an idea: let charter schools make a profit by “being efficient”: they get exactly the same amount of money as a public school
That would be an increase, charter schools typically only get a reduced amount of the per-pupil funding that the default public school would get, with the remainder retained by the host district even though the charter school itself provides for itself the services the district would provide for public schools.
> Charter schools operate as non-default schools within the public school system, they don't get to charge parents at all.
You need a great big asterisk on that statement. There's a well regarded charter school about a mile from my house, we considered sending our kids there. They may not actually charge parents money, but you know what they do? They require parents to spend one day a week volunteering. Technically that isn't a charge, but effectively it's exactly that.
Sounds like they are selecting for families who are heavily invested in their kids' education. Great way to bump the test numbers and have focused classrooms, but it definitely isn't for everyone.
No, they’re investing in people who earn enough that they can take a day off work, or have a single parent earning enough to support them.
Anyone from a family where the parents are necessarily unable to do that cannot attend. So this is a really good way to select for a specific socio-economic group. This also helps inflate grades because most data shows that wealth correlates with academic achievement (for many reasons that aren’t “families are rich because they are smarter than other poorer families”)
You would need to add "charter schools are not allowed to declassify special needs students without a third party evaluation by a public school counselor."
Because that's what they typically do. Special needs students who lag behind but are required to be allowed to attend on vouchers get declassified so that schools no longer have to apply resources towards them. They eventually either fail out and thus are no longer their problem, or are withdrawn by parents.
I too have concerns about charter schools and I suspect that they will end up making the American school system better for a few kinds of families but even more unequal, segregated, and expensive.
However, your assumptions about the motivations of charter school proponents seems uncharitable. The proponents I know come by their position honestly -- they truly believe that vouchers and charter schools are good solutions to the problems facing our nation's students.
> This is part of the reason I’m very much pro school choice. Give a credit to each family to do with what they wish.
Sure thing, if the federal "defense" budget would also be split up into credits, and each family could decide whether it wants to fund the various wars or do something else with the money.
> decrease cost. What's not to like?
Everything's not to like - not the least of which being your desire to cut salaries (or perhaps just shove children into shabbier schools? Who knows how you want to cut costs).
The current system is vote based. You (and lots of people without kids) vote on some random person for school board. 99% probably don’t even research this person.
What I described let’s the parents take the money and decide which school is best positioned to educate their children.
I can't imagine how the busses would be organized in order to make that level of choice work. Do you intend that we should eliminate regional schools with supporting bus networks and just have parents drive their kids to school?
Is there hospital choice? In my area anyone who wants to open a new hospital has to get approval from the other hospitals in the area. I don't think this is unique, I believe it's a fairly common practice across the US.
Perhaps, but there's plenty of choice in many places.
I'm in a Boston suburb, and there are at least five different hospitals with 25 minutes of me, and way more than that if I were planning something ahead of time and could go further.
They all advertise on the sides of buses. They advertise on the highway. In the pages of the New Yorker hospitals far from me advertise their brain surgeons, or that they have cyberknife or all sorts of things. It's insane how many ads for hospitals you see if you look.
Meanwhile, our public school system is very good. The teachers are paid well. And a lot of work is done to ensure equity between the schools, so there isn't a "good school" and a school for all the poor kids.
I wish we had the same selection here. I'm in a suburb of Portland and I probably have 5 hospitals within 25 minutes (no traffic) as well, but at least half of those are religious hospitals which do not offer all services. E.g. you hope your pregnancy is smooth if you're planning to get your tubes tied after your C-section, because if you have to go the hospital with a NICU, they won't do the sterilization because they are religiously opposed to it.
Not sure if any place is doing it for police, but there absolutely do exist private fire services. You can choose to buy a subscription to their service, or not.
Pretty much anyone who hires private security (most large businesses, celebrities, etc) or a private investigator is effectively hiring private police.
They won't be able to fine, arrest, jail, or recommend charges to a prosecutor, but outside of that they can do pretty much anything police would (and many things police would not, depending on how busy the department is).
Many event venues will even require hiring an off duty police officer as security when serving alcohol, for example.
Private schools can expel (or refuse to admit) underperforming or problematic students. But in most states, charter schools have to follow the same admissions and disciplinary policies as any other public school. That includes taking special education kids. They don't get to pick and choose.
Given the large difference in cost between average students and expensive students (ESL, special needs, behavioral issues, ADHD) I expect that charter schools will find creative ways to ensure they minimize the latter. (Similar to how health insurance companies compete for young, healthy participants.)
My charter school held a lottery to see who gets admitted. This way they avoid the whole elitism via only accepting through test scores. And its standardized results were near the top of the state despite the lottery system. Now it's a different matter of what are the demographics of the applicants.
Applications, some form of interview and or testing, and rejections. Same as a university system - let students compete for spots and let schools compete for students.
I admit that there would have to be a system that forces schools to take "undesirables" who can't get accepted anywhere, which is the hard part.
The biggest problem I have seen is that the local school educational bureaucracy (administrators, teachers, unions) are on covid-time while our children are growing up and developing in real time. If you are on covid-time, your instinct is to delay, seek consensus from a billion parties, and basically act very slowly to adopt to the realities of the pandemic. If your school is on covid-time things change slowly unless there is top down pressure (Florida, etc) or a brave local administrator who is willing to make decisions with ambiguity (very rare).
Meanwhile, children keep growing and developing. My opinion is that because we can't control child development and need for education (and social exposure) we need to make bold decisions with limited information to make sure we don't leave our kids behind. I didn't see this happen in my local public school. But, clearly, many parents have taken the perspective that they can't sit by the sidelines and wait for covid-time people to have events play out and left the public school system.
I don't know if union to blame as much as people not acting with a shared sense of urgency.
> If you are on covid-time, your instinct is to delay, seek consensus from a billion parties, and basically act very slowly to adopt to the realities of the pandemic.
A billion parties, huh?
I sought out three on a covid-related matter. Am I one of the bold heroes in your dichotomy, or does "covid-time" really squelch nine orders of magnitude down to "true?"
What I observed is my local school administrator working to building consensus from the teachers, the unions, the parents, the janitors, the athletic groups, the board of health, etc, etc. Which is a perfectly good approach for a stable system. However, there weren't enough hours in the day to build all this consensus with a deliberate and slow planning process. That's what I meant - so not a billion - but so many parties that here wasn't enough time in the day to align everyone. Meanwhile - kids were stuck in remote learning.
Our unpaid school committee and paid professional clearly worked their butts off. Unfortunately, hard work isn't always good enough if your fundamental slow work mechanisms can't adopt to the reality of child development. And unfortunately, the unions appeared to be a leading group that was seeking to delay and put up road blocks to returning to school.
Having worked through that, I'm wondering when exactly we stopped working. Was it when we spent long hours for a week in mid-March 2020 figuring out how to deliver instruction virtually for an undetermined period of time? Or was it summer 2000 when we were attending virtual seminars and creating collaborations among teachers and researchers, and researching how to provide hybrid instruction, and working with our tech departments and communities to figure out how to make it work? Or was it the 2020-2021 academic year when we simultaneously taught students in class and at home, trying to provide equivalent experiences in each lesson? Or was it in the beginning of the 2021-2022 school year, when we were fully in person with no legal option to teach remotely regardless of conditions, and watched rising infection rates but had no recourse because the anti-mask anti-vax crowd were packing school board meetings to protest the only protection we still had and accusing us of "not working"?
It was mid March 2020, when you spent “long hours” (I assume you mean 7, maybe almost 8?) figuring out that you could deliver instructions virtually via YouTube video for the most part. The rest of your dates are just times when you tried to find more YouTube videos or examples of you bitching about not being able to use all the YouTube playlists you curated.
Any other questions? No? I’ve got one for you.
Many people worked through the pandemic and had to transition workflows. What makes teachers special?
Seems like a mismatch to equate an individual period of time (development) to a global event (COVID). These two phases are orthogonal--children are going through their development during COVID.
I feel that creates a strawman for people supporting measures to reduce spread; that they don't understand children are developing (I suspect teachers know this better than most, anyhow). Viewing the situation considering only development doesn't change this: if the rate of infection stays above one for a long stretch, there will be mass death from overwhelmed hospitals.
That's been the balancing act that policy makers are striking. We've seen how that works in practice: restrictions have dropped, as vaccination rates have gone up and seasonal waves have passed.
I understand why people might want more support for their children via home or private schooling; that's always been an option for those with means. It highlights that we could definitely use more resources to try to support child development: more teachers for smaller class sizes class, more space in classrooms, better ventilated spaces, expanded remote learning accessibilty, etc.
Where I live, schools are asked to do more with less every year. So it's unsurprising to me that they're not super adaptable to major disruptions.
The analysis seems to be somewhat simple (just rank states by union strength and COVID measures), then conclude what is reported in the title.
The conclusion seems to suffer from severe endogeneity problems as teacher unions are correlated with other factors (e.g., being on a coast) that are also correlated with COVID response. Just making the link between unions and COVID policy is naive (at best) and misleading (at worse).
One thing to keep in mind when doing research in education in the US is that you have to account for its distributed structure. That is, local education agencies (usually school districts) make most of the decisions. For example, there is no California teacher contract; instead, contracts are negotiated between local teacher unions and local district. The California teacher union could have lobbied the California governor to extend school closures, but the eventual decision to how (and maybe when) to go back in person probably fell to the individual superintendents. Another example is to see what happened in Chicago Public Schools. The local union went on strike to negotiate covid-related measures. Those had nothing to do with the larger Illinois education policy.
A better design for this study would have been to try to measure the strength of local unions at the district level (maybe % of membership that contributes to the political fund now that teachers can opt out from that) and try to correlate it with local COVID restrictions (like more days of teacher paid leave, mask policies, possibility of online or hybrid instruction). I suspect that there is a patchwork (read, heterogeneity) of policies that were negotiated between the union and the district that could give a better picture than what is reported in the paper. As a secondary result, you could even observe whether strong and weak unions have different preferences. Maybe strong unions prefer a safer work environment (i.e., less in person, more masks) while weaker unions prefer one-time bonuses?
The problem is that unions are only empowered to point out problems but administration has to solve them. In both Union and non Union states the administrations have failed to take adequate measures to address covid safety concerns using the practical means available. instead focusing on things that provide the illusion of doing something or doing nothing at all.
In non Union states they can simply steamroll the teachers were as in Union states they can’t but in the end in none of the situations are administrators capable of providing meaningful safety measurements based on what’s known and available.
This is in a large part because the federal guidance on covid is shit and state guidance is only marginally better or also shit.
The guidance can’t really be anything but shit if e we don’t admit that covid is airborne.
The irony of technology workers who constantly express their unhappiness and frustration with being micromanaged telling a discipline (teaching) how they should be doing things.
In-person learning does, too. Districts with more minority students tend to have larger class sizes. Fewer technology resources. Less property tax to draw upon.
> Hailey is not alone. As the U.S. reaches the second anniversary of the pandemic, a growing number of parents and psychiatrists report that a return to in-person learning was not the magic bullet many had hoped it would be for school-age children and that the pandemic has resulted in a host of mental health challenges even for those young people who seemed as recently as a year ago to be faring relatively well.
The claim is not that in person learning fundamentally solves these problems. The claim is that remote learning makes these problems worse, offering a clear rationale to return back to in person learning.
>The irony of technology workers who constantly express their unhappiness and frustration with being micromanaged telling a discipline (teaching) how they should be doing things.
I know that was an attempt at a zinger but deciding whether to remote school or in person school isn't anywhere close to micromanaging.
The teacher's union represents teachers. Do you really consider teachers to be the enemy of your kids? Do you place your children into the care of their enemies five days a week? Do your kids consider their teachers to be their enemies?
An individual teacher is not the same as a body that represents the collective interests of teachers, and neither of those are necessarily aligned with the interests of children. For example, it would be in the interest of that body to make it as hard as possible to fire hopeless teachers.
do you really consider teachers unions to represent the aspect of teachers that cares for students? job security for the lowest common denominator, and 'caring for kids' somehow as well? how would the meetings go?
Teachers unions generally work for better teacher working conditions, which means better student learning conditions. They work for a strong contract and enforcement of that contract, which protects all worksers. They work for improved professional practice and improved outcomes for students.
When you discuss the "lowest common denominator" teacher as being protected, what is really being protected is the contract. We MUST enforce the contract or it is weakened. The teacher's unions want highly effective, highly skilled teachers providing excellent public education for every child. We work for due process so that teachers have the opportunity to improve, but if they don't improve and the administrators do their jobs then they are let go, all within the scope of a well formed contract.
If by "right there on the tin" you mean at the bottom of the article then sure.
I understand that all information probably has some intentional and unintentional ideological slant, but my feeling is that HN is a place for intentionally neutral - unadulterated - content. Right wing "think tank" articles don't belong here. It's not that the ideology is wrong necessarily, but the presentation is twisted and designed to mislead.
Yes, City Journal has no place here. Everything that's on there is not designed to be intellectually stimulating, it's oh-so-predictable and just tiring.
