Rick Hess is one of the better known authors and analysts of the education reform movement. His blog can be found over at EdWeek.

In a recent set of posts , Rick was commenting on all the “Edu-Agitprop” movies coming out. (Just FYI, “agitprop” is a combination of “Agitation Propaganda.”) You can read both this post and this one to read a healthy debate on where the education system should be headed.

Bruno Behrend interviewed on WCRA Radio by Morning Host William Bence. Topics include HB 2494, The Cartel Movie, Unions, and school choice in general.

MP3 File

My colleague, Ben Boychuk, and I got a great editorial placed in the San Francisco Chronicle . It covers a recent CA lawsuit filed by people who think that more money will solve every education problem, as long as it ends up on the union pocket.

If you go there and read the comments, you can see how easy it is to defeat the weak arguments against school choice.

“If the judges want to legislate, let them run for the legislature.”

Priceless!

Though great credit goes to policy wonks like Steven Malanga and others, the fact is that there are very few people who saw the financial conflagration wrought by greedy unions sooner than folks like John Bambenek and I.

While a few senators in the Illinois Legislature saw the pension time bomb coming, they still felt it necessary to vote “yes” on patently awful policies like the Early Retirement Option while looking the other way on atrocities like “end-of-career bonuses.” We deserved more from them.

I fully realize that the mood was different 5-10 years ago, when every bozo making over $50,000 was stupid enough to think his net worth and property values were going to keep up with public union greed. We tried to warn them. We were just a few years and a few quarters of economic retraction ahead of our time.

We were told that “the unions are just too powerful,” and that there was no “constituency for spending cuts. Would that a few stood their ground and told the taxpayers the truth.

Pols turn on labor unions

Unlike past battles over the high cost of labor, this time pitched battles over wages and pensions are being waged from Sacramento to Springfield to New York City and the conflict is marked by its bipartisan tone, with public employee unions emerging as an intransigent public enemy number one in cities and state capitals across the country.

They’re the whipping boys for a new generation of governors who, thanks to a tanking economy and an assist from editorial boards, feel freer than ever to make political targets out of what was once a protected liberal class of teachers, cops, and other public servants.

Republicans around the nation have cheered New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whose shouting match over budget cuts with an outraged teacher—“You don’t have to” teach, he told her without sympathy—became a YouTube sensation on the right last week.

Here is my message to our gubernatorial candidates and our legislators. Tell the firemen and policemen “No.” Tell the greedy administrators “No.” Tell the greedy teacher unions “Hell NO!” Tell them they have had a 25 year ride on the gravy train, and it’s time to give the taxpayers a 10 year breather.

I have no idea how successful I will be in promoting this message, but I am working for an election cycle where anyone who takes public union money and does their financially and morally corrosive bidding is washed away in an election cycle they won’t believe is coming - even as they see it.

2010 is going to be big. 2012, waged in the midst of a potentially deep double-dip recession, is going to be gargantuan. It is time to drive public unionization out of the public sector. Learn your facts, practice your lines, get your signatures, and drive their supporter from office.

“Devoid of a publicly supportable agenda.”

Gov. Christie Slams Education Org: “Devoid Of A Publicly Supportable Agenda”

Those, ladies and gentlemen, are the words of an elected politician talking about teacher’s unions. Perhaps it is time for the rest of the political class to stop taking money from these corrupt organizations, and start driving them out of our schools.

For starters, if you are teacher reading this blog, I beseech you to ask yourself whether you are a dedicated professional committed to your craft, or whether you are a self-serving union drone with an overpowering sense of entitlement? You can’t be both, and over the next few years, you will be forced to choose sides.

This nation cannot afford the financial and social cost of America’s schools system. Not in the city. Not in the suburbs. Teacher or not, read these articles. This system MUST be transformed.

First, this should be obvious, but why do we believe we need MORE teachers? What if we need less? What if all of us can become “teachers” in some way or fashion, reducing the need to pay people to do what we might do for free?

We Need Fewer Teachers, Not More

As I explain in Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning, we need fewer teachers, not more, and those few teachers must reach thousands of students at a time. Fortunately, this possibility, once remote, is now arriving with a speed as rapid as that of the avatar-laden space ship zeroing in on the planet Pandora. As we enter the world of high-powered notebook computers, broadband internet connections, 3-dimensional curricula, open-source product development, and internet-based games, both co-operative and competitive, students will learn by accessing dynamic, interactive instructional materials that provide information to each student at the level of accomplishment he or she has reached.

Today, millions of students in brick-and-mortar classrooms are either bored because they already know the material being presented or confused because it is far beyond their contemporary level of comprehension. Teaching algebra to someone who cannot divide just doesn’t work.
Solving the teaching problem does not mean hiring millions of better teachers but finding new ways of reaching students directly. Teachers can then be used as coaches to help students access curricula created by the world’s most brilliant pedagogues–who in some cases may turn out to be students themselves.

Next up, this too should be obvious, but why go through all the rigmarole of “training teachers to be good” when we can simply identify the best ones and pay them accordingly?

A Case for Merit Pay: It’s Easier to Identify Good Teachers than to Train Them

Decades ago progressive reformers persuaded states and districts to put school boards under tight controls when they hired and paid teachers–on the theory that they would otherwise appoint their friends and neighbors to the job and pay them according to their political connections. Teachers could be hired only if they had a state-certified teaching license earned at a school of education. After a few years, teachers were given tenure and could be removed only by means of a complex, quasi-legal process. Salaries were based solely on their academic credentials and teaching experience, not according to the whim of any supervisor.

Now we are learning that almost every one of these decisions was wrong-headed. A just-released paper prepared by Matthew M. Chingos and myself for a Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance conference on merit pay (which will take place on June 3-4) shows that Florida teachers who majored in education in college are no better at teaching math and reading to elementary- and middle-school students than those who did not. Even those teachers who attended the most selective universities in Florida, such as the state’s flagship university, the University of Florida, are no better at lifting student performance in reading and math than those who attended Florida’s less prestigious institutions. Nor can we identify any benefit from earning a master’s degree, despite the fact that school districts tend to pay 8 percent to 10 percent more to teachers who hold such a degree.

This article shows that certification is a scam. It’s a union card. If you think about it, the process is designed to screen out the talented, and “equalize” any talented people brave enough to stay.

The idea that China is going to overtake the USA in anything important has always been laughable.

Why Factories are leaving China

As costs climbed in Taiwan two decades ago, Ben Fan moved his lighting factory to take advantage of China’s cheap labor. Now, with Chinese wages on the rise, he’s moving again. “It’s just like what happened in Taiwan,” says Fan, chairman of Neo-Neon Holdings, which sells lamps and lighting fixtures to big retailers including Home Depot (HD), Target (TGT), and Wal-Mart (WMT). “Chinese don’t want to work in factories anymore.”

So Fan is expanding his factory in Vietnam, where wages are $100 a month, one-third what he pays in China. He plans to shift 85 percent of his production across the border, and by December he’ll have 8,000 workers in Vietnam—up from 300 a year ago—and just 5,000 in China, down from 25,000 in 2008.

Over the past two years, millions of jobs have moved to China’s interior or elsewhere in Asia as factory owners try to cut costs. In Guangdong, the mainland’s top exporting province, wages have almost doubled in the past three years, and more than half the factories can’t find enough workers. The number of migrants who traveled to coastal provinces for work fell by 9 percent last year, to 91 million. “This lack of labor will only get worse,” says Willy Lin, chairman of the Textile Council of Hong Kong, a trade association.

Here are the free trade facts.

1. Cheap labor gets things built and manufactured.

2. Capital will flow to finance cheap labor.

3. If you try to prop up local expensive labor, you merely keep that labor artificially and relatively rich at the expense of neighbors who no longer can benefit from cheaper goods. Protectionism makes all of us poorer.
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If you read the article above properly, you will notice two important items.

1. To get rid of any bad effects of “globalization,” the only solution is to globalize even faster.

2. America, if it got over its ridiculous education system and union mind-set, could conceivably become the “high-quality” manufacturer of first resort, given its very effective and mature economy. Build it best, not cheapest, and the world will pound a path to our products.

Two great videos for your viewing pleasure.

One is an example of the liberal media getting the story right on school choice. The other is Chris Christie telling it like it is. If America produces 100s or 1000s of these types of leaders, they could shift the nation back onto a proper axis. This is true, even if they were all served only one term.

Look everyone, I want you all to think about this as you join this fight for properly educating our children. Like the USSR and the segregationists in the South, the Teachers Unions will look strong right up to the point that they collapse. That is why you need to get involved. That is why you need to get in their face. This is why you must join us in beating on them mercilessly, as they deserve.

We are close to winning. Join the fight!

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The Cartel

Click this link to find out about a great way to spend Friday night. (April 30th)

I’ve previewed “The Cartel,” and it is must see. If you like this site and its take on education, you need to invite one or 2 soccer moms to this movie and post-movie discussion. It is a mind-changer.

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The Heartland Institute, For the Good of Illinois, and America’s Future Foundation invite you to the Chicago premier of “The Cartel.” Click here for a downloadable poster.

This compelling documentary highlights the problems and promise involved in transforming America’s schools … and exposes the cartel blocking that transformation at every turn.

To highlight the importance of this movie, your hosts will present Bob Bowdon, producer of “The Cartel.” Immediately following the movie’s showing, we’ll hold a question-and-answer session in the theater, featuring Bowden; Bruno Behrend, director of the Center for School Reform at The Heartland Institute; and Adam Andrzejewski, founder of For the Good of Illinois.

Space is limited, so make your reservations today! To secure your spot for this important, informative, and entertaining event:

Register online using a credit card or your PayPal account
Register with a credit card by calling Tonya Houston at 312/377-4000.
Register by sending a check to The Heartland Institute, 19 South LaSalle Street #903, Chicago, IL 60603.
Cancellation policy: Cancellations received by The Heartland Institute at 312/377-4000 on or before 5:00 pm CDT Friday, April 23 will be refunded in full. No refunds will be made for cancellations made after April 23, or for cancellations made by email at any time.

This event is an excellent opportunity to find out just how close we are to a real transformation of the American education system. It’s great way to introduce your friends and relatives to the organizations and people promoting necessary reforms.