How would it perform? Hurricane Katrina provided the experiment we needed:
The storm ravaged the city’s architecture and infrastructure, took hundreds of lives, exiled hundreds of thousands of residents. But it also destroyed, or enabled the destruction of, the city’s public-school system—an outcome many New Orleanians saw as deliverance….The floodwaters, so the talk went, had washed this befouled slate clean—had offered, in a state official’s words, a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reinvent public education.” In due course, that opportunity was taken:…Stripped of most of its domain and financing, the Orleans Parish School Board fired all 7,500 of its teachers and support staff, effectively breaking the teachers’ union. And the Bush administration stepped in with millions of dollars for the expansion of charter schools—publicly financed but independently run schools that answer to their own boards. The result was the fastest makeover of an urban school system in American history.
A year later now, and it appears to be working very well. Megan McArdle has more here.
ok, ok. do away with tenure but not the union. They protect and fight for my right to earn enough money to be above the poverty line. Why can’t charter schools (your favorite) and unions work together? I don’t see why they can’t.
Because they are inherently contradictory. Charter schools want to help the students first, unions want to help the teachers first…you can’t have both.
Just to give two examples: under unions you are not allowed to pay one group of teachers more than another. Math teachers more than say, english teachers. Yet this is a must if you want to attract better math teachers, see more here. Also, unions make it very difficult to fire bad teachers.