House of Eratosthenes

Maybe I watched too many cowboy movies when I was a kid, but I’ve navigated my way to this midpoint of my life-expectancy with this presumption pretty much unchallenged, that cowardice is anathema to being an American. And by “cowardice” I mean hiding behind weaker people when someone comes gunnin’ for you. I have been laboring under the assumption that Americans don’t like that. Hiding behind old women, hiding behind kids, hiding behind cripples, to escape some kind of justice, retribution, or intellectual scrutiny. Americans, I think, would almost tolerate someone actively beating up on an old crippled guy, more than they would tolerate someone hiding behind that old crippled guy to escape…a mall cop, a meter maid, a lawyer, an angry mob, whatever.

Fighting your own battles, is an American value. I think.

Unions are supposed to represent an American value. That’s what I’ve been told. They were legislated into existence in order to support our First Amendment right to assemble peaceably.

Unions are American, fighting your own battles is American.

Why, then, oh why, is it, that whenever I hear the point-of-view of a union, they are always hiding behind someone else?

Union goons and union thugs and union bosses wanted Gray Davis to remain the Governor of California, and for the recall effort to go away. Did they say that? No. They said “policemen oppose the recall” and “firefighters oppose the recall,” when rank-and-file policemen and real firefighters opposed no such thing. “Nurses oppose Gov. Schwarzenegger’s initiatives.” “Reagan is hurting air traffic controllers.” “Bush is hurting longshoremen.”

It seems anytime someone wants to take on the organizational structure and management of a union, and the policy decisions of same, the union’s defense is to attack the attacker: They are denigrating, or conducting an assault on, …insert name of large-eyed puppy here. It’s not us. Nobody’s got anything to say against our questionable decisions. It’s the puppy.

And now John Stossel is hurting little schoolchildren. Here we go again. [emphasis mine]

Teachers unions are mad at me. The New York State United Teachers demands I apologize for my “gutter level” journalism, “an irresponsible assault on public school students and teachers.” This is because I hosted an ABC News TV special titled “Stupid in America,” which pointed out:

— American fourth graders do well on international tests, but by high school, Americans have fallen behind kids in most other countries.

— The constant refrain that “public schools need more money” is nonsense. Many countries that spend significantly less on education do better than we do. School spending in America (adjusted for inflation) has more than tripled over the past 30 years, but national test scores are flat. The average per-pupil cost today is an astonishing $10,000 per student — $200,000 per classroom! Think about how many teachers you could hire, and how much better you could do with that amount of money.

— Most American parents give their kids’ schools an A or B grade, but that’s only because, without market competition, they don’t know what they might have had. The educators who conduct the international tests say that most of the countries that do best are those that give school managers autonomy, and give parents and students the right to choose their schools. Competition forces private and public schools to improve.

— There is little K-12 education competition in America because public schools are a government monopoly. Monopolies rarely innovate, and union-dominated monopolies, burdened with contracts filled with a hundred pages of suffocating rules, are worse. The head of New York City’s schools told me that the union’s rules “reward mediocrity.”

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Hiding Behind Someone ElseThursday, March 9th, 2006

Hiding Behind Someone Else
Thursday, March 9th, 2006