In which their representatives remind us that teacher trade unions are bad for education

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The regional branch of Ofsted has published some mildly critical comments about Bradford's schools. And it's true that our schools are not closing the gap and that, to put it mildly, the Council's leadership on this matter are rather complacent. But - and this is important given the close links with Bradford's political leadership - the response from teacher trade unions is utterly shameless.

Firstly, here's what Ofsted suggested:

Nick Hudson, Ofsted director for North East, Yorkshire and Humber, said: “The fact that Bradford is ranked 144 out of 150 nationally is clearly a concern."

He added: "I think the answers lie in secondary schools in Bradford and secondary schools on the borders of Bradford that are performing well.

"The Council should maybe look beyond its borders to see why other schools are doing better than those in Bradford are. My advice is the Council needs to seek links with these areas." 

Helpful advice - look at nearby schools perhaps in Calderdale, Leeds and Kirklees that are doing better.

So what do the teacher union representatives have to say. First up is the NUT:

Ian Murch, Bradford spokesman for the National Union of Teachers, was sceptical of the findings. He said: "Ofsted often finds what it is looking for. There are high levels of deprivation and in some inner city schools there are a lot of children who don't speak English as a first language.

"These schools are measured to the same standards. Performance of children from some of the poorest families are measured against children from well off areas whose parents went to university." 

Of course there's no deprivation in Leeds, Halifax or Huddersfield! Yet again we see a series of excuses rather than an urgent desire to improve Bradford's education. Plus the re-run of the myth about children with English as a second language being less able - which they aren't:

Schools with large numbers of migrants and pupils from ethnic minorities gain the best GCSE results because they have a stronger work ethic, according to research.

A study by Bristol University found that schools with a diverse pupil population performed significantly better than those filled with white British children.

It emerged that the effect could be worth an extra eight GCSE grades compared with the rest of the country – the equivalent of leaving school with straight A grades rather than Bs.

So you see, Bradford's schools aren't poor because of immigrants. Too many of them are just poor schools.

On to the NAS/UWT representative who launches into a rant about resources:

"Many schools are having to cut back, and have bigger classes with fewer staff. Standards in school is a much bigger issue than Ofsted would have you believe." 

Bradford's schools receive some £75 million more in funding today than they did in 2010 with much of this going to schools with more children from deprived backgrounds. Pam Milner, the representative in question is simply making stuff up.

These responses are worse than complacency (and that's bad enough), they amount to a denial that teachers have a central role to play in delivering the improvements in standards. Yet all teacher unions have done is promote strikes and other industrial action - things that do nothing to help the children their members teach. And rather than face up to their responsibilities these representatives shift the blame onto government, parents, immigration - anything but the schools themselves.

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Bring it on!

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The public sector trade unions - or at least their leaders - are threatening us with strikes again. After assorted teachers' union leaders calling for strike action because their pension contributions will rise a little, we have Dave Prentiss from Unison:

Unless this government changes direction, it is heading for industrial turmoil on a massive scale,'he added. 'The government must understand that UNISON will fight tooth and nail to protect and defend public services.'

I remember the late 1970s when we buckled time and again to these sort of threats. And I remember the damage that unions did to the economy, damaging - even destroying - good businesses, creating misery for millions and using their power to demand preference for their members at the expense of the old, the sick and the poor. We should never do so again. Never.

So bring it on Mr Prentiss.

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...or you could just cut taxes?

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Read this attempt to create a distinct economic strategy for Labour - at it's heart is the idea that the share of GDP that is wages and investment need to rise for a sustainable economy. Now leaving aside the fact that the peak for 'wage share of GDP' was in 1975 - just before we crashed into the IMF's bail-out and during the height of the union power that destroyed out manufacturing industry, I was struck by an obvious alternative.

Here is our social democrat writer quoting the IMF:

"...without the prospect of a recovery in the incomes of poor and middle income households over a reasonable time horizon, the inevitable result is that loans keep growing, and therefore so does leverage and the probability of a major crisis that, in the real world, typically also has severe implications for the real economy.”

So 'poor and middle income households' can't afford to pay back loans and maintain current living standards - creating the borrowing pathology that infects our economy. The propsed solution is:

Support for a living wage in the public sector and in public procurement

That's it really. A rehash of the economic nuttiness promoted by Ed Miliband during his leadership campaign (and largely directed to the successful strategy of sucking up to big union bosses - oh, yes folks, the 1970s all over again).

And that alternative? Simpler, cleaner, less-controlling, more effective and popular?

Just cut taxes for 'poor and middle income households'

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Seems unions are good for teachers but bad for pupils

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Over recent times I’ve banged on a bit about teachers unions and specifically about a feeling I had that the power and influence of these unions was compromising efforts to raise educational attainment. At the heart of my concern was that the funding and support for opponents of ‘free schools’, academies and other reforms to education was coming predominantly from these unions.

Commenting on the Government's plans to set up Free Schools, Christine Blower, General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers, the largest teachers' union said;

"The Government's commitment to 'free schools' will create chaos at local level. Groups setting up their own schools irrespective of local planning needs would be a retrograde step that will lead to planning gridlock and social division.”

Now I’m not planning here to dissect the confused opinions of Ms Blower – or indeed of other teacher union leaders – but to explore the impact of unions on education itself. And, in this exploration, the events unfolding in Wisconsin where the Governor wishes to end union collective bargaining rights have provided some help.

Let’s start with the case for collective bargaining in education as put by the New York Times’ pet Nobel Laureate, Paul Krugman:

And in low-tax, low-spending Texas, the kids are not all right. The high school graduation rate, at just 61.3 percent, puts Texas 43rd out of 50 in state rankings. Nationally, the state ranks fifth in child poverty; it leads in the percentage of children without health insurance. And only 78 percent of Texas children are in excellent or very good health, significantly below the national average.

Now much of Mr Krugman’s argument is a familiar one to us in that it is centred on sustaining levels of public spending rather than on defending collective bargaining. But, of course, for left-wingers like Mr Krugman such things go hand in hand. Here in the UK, of course, in that peculiarly totalitarian manner beloved of the last Labour government and continued by the current regime, teachers pay and conditions are set by Parliament on the recommendation of the School Teachers Review Body. In effect ‘collective bargaining’ is nationalised with the unions engaged through the review body in determining pay for every teacher from Berwick to Penzance.

To return to Mr Krugman’s argument – or more specifically the statistics he marshals to support his contention that places with union collective bargaining agreements and high spending outperform places with lower taxes and no union collective bargaining agreements. It seems that the great brain of Mr Krugman has tripped over something called Simpson’s Paradox and, as a result, his comparison is almost wholly a false one. As you can read at the Iowahawk blog:

“...white students in Texas perform better than white students in Wisconsin, black students in Texas perform better than black students in Wisconsin, Hispanic students in Texas perform better than Hispanic students in Wisconsin. In 18 separate ethnicity-controlled comparisons, the only one where Wisconsin students performed better than their peers in Texas was 4th grade science for Hispanic students (statistically insignificant), and this was reversed by 8th grade. Further, Texas students exceeded the national average for their ethnic cohort in all 18 comparisons; Wisconsinites were below the national average in 8, above average in 8.”

So despite spending less money on schools and not working hand-in-glove with teacher unions in the running of those schools, Texas has at least as good results – mostly better – than heavily unionised Wisconsin. This doesn’t say that collective bargaining is a bad thing but that it does no discernable good for education. 

However, there a little bit of a further twist to all this which starts with Caroline Hoxby, Professor of Economics at Stamford University who says:

“I find that teachers’ unions increase school inputs but reduce productivity sufficiently to have a negative overall effect on student performance.”

So teacher unions do their proximate job really well – if you define that job as being to represent the interests of teachers – in that they succeed in getting more cash into the budget. But in doing so these unions are damaging the overall education system. It seems that my suspicion that teachers’ unions damage education has some academic foundation.

What Prof. Hoxby goes on to say is that the unionised system is very poor at:

1.       Rewarding the best teachers and keeping them in the classroom

2.       Getting rid of poor and underperforming teachers

3.       Identifying the best teachers in the first place

Central to this argument is the idea that teachers – like everyone else – will respond to incentives. At present teachers join unions because it is in their interests to do so – unions have the dominant say over pay and are good at getting the resources needed to ensure this situation continues. However, it is in the interests of education to pay teachers on the basis of outcomes, to reward them for actually raising student attainment. This does not suit the unions – or the tidiness of bureaucracy – as it undermines their power. So teachers are paid an agreed amount regardless of whether they are any good at the job.

And the findings don’t just play out in the USA – here’s a study from India:

This paper examines the relationship between teacher unionization, student achievement and teachers’ pay using a cross-section of data from private schools in India. We use differences in student mark across subjects to identify within-pupil variation in achievement and find that union membership of the teacher appears to strongly reduce pupil achievement. We find no evidence this could be due to the unobservables not controlled for by this procedure. A school fixed effects equation of teacher pay shows that union membership substantially raises pay and in this case too we find that remaining unobservables are unlikely to explain this outcome. We thus have in this data clear evidence that unions raise cost and reduce student achievement.

So it does seem that unions are good for teachers but bad for pupils.

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Breaking News: Public Sector Unions Cultivate the Money Tree!

It is more and more apparent that the representatives of many public sector workers have only a tenuous connection to reality:

Four unions representing tens of thousands of youth and community workers in the voluntary sector have said they will demand a substantial pay rise.

There is apparently a world shortage of such workers and whacking up the pay is the obvious route to close that gap (although the unions aren’t at all clear quite how they arrive at a shortage of “about 4,000”).

So who’s going to pay this “substantial” pay rise?

1. The taxes of ordinary hard-working folk
2. The charitable donations of ordinary hard-working folk

Either that or the unions have finally cultivated a money tree (scientific name; Quantitivus easingii).

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Using strikes to change policy is wrong

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I had planned to pen a little rant about the iniquities of the assorted teacher trade unions who - as it their Easter wont - are threatening all kinds of dire consequences should the government not do what they say. All the familiar public sector union buzz words are featured - "cuts", "privatisation", "overwork", "under pay" - plus a selection of moans specific to the education industry such as SATs and training.

But instead I want to meander around a rather important issue - the point at which trade unions overstep their proper role of representing members and stray into the running of overtly political campaigns directed at changing policy. Now this latter role is - if members ordain - a proper role for the union. Clearly those who work in a given industry and especially one predominantly government directed have a legitimate (and often informed) voice that trade unions can direct. So the NUT are quite entitled to argue for the abolition of SATs, for a wholly state-managed education system and for the compulsory teaching of Marxism if that is the wish of its members. But they are not entitled - in my judgment - to support such arguments with the threat of industrial action.

Nor is it right for trade unions - whether mandated by their members or not - to seek to prevent others, through private adventure from challenging the current status quo. The stifling of competition has been a theme in trade union activism across time - ironic in the case of the very competitive world of teacher trade unions!

What is clear is that the public sector unions are lining up a series of oppositional positions ahead of a possible Conservative government. And, given the radical nature of Conservative proposals in education, the teaching unions are at the forefront in developing this opposition. However, to propose industrial action because someone else - in line with Government policies - has set up a competing school outside the cuddly local authority sphere should be a matter of concern. And - as an overt political act - such action should not be taken.

There is a big difference between lobbying for policy change - a quite legitimate act - and using industrial power to achieve policy change - which is illegitimate.

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No Ed, private schools aren't staffed by racists...

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Leaving aside the foaming at the mouth from various people about BNP-supporting teachers (not least the truly awful General Secretary of the NAS/UWT union), we should concern ourselves a little with the Government’s response. Indeed Ed Balls, the secretary of state has – surprise, surprise – used it as yet another excuse for an unwarranted attack on independent schools:

"Many independent schools belong to associations which have their own membership criteria. The associations provide advice and support, and their individual requirements provide a degree of self-regulation and discipline. All the available evidence suggests that these associations have high expectations of their members and have their own procedures for handling cases where problems arise.

"However, I remained concerned about Maurice Smith's observations about the independent sector and therefore I have asked him to explore further whether the current arrangements strike the right balance between allowing independent schools autonomy, operating in accordance with their ethos and values, and protecting the young people attending those schools from teachers displaying racist or intolerant views or behaviours that could be harmful."

So you see – all those public schools are staffed by tweed wearing, racists. Or worst still Tories! So we’ll have a review about “protecting the young people!!

Ed, not only are BNP supporting teachers not a problem but private schools aren’t a problem either. Maybe you should look instead at the abject failure of state schools – schools where two out of ten kids leave without the basic skills needed to get on in life.

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