Education

The Worm in the Apple: How the Teacher Unions Are Destroying American Education By Peter Brimelow HarperCollins, 320 pages, $24.95 America leads the world in expending on public gentility, yet our students perform dismally. pecuniary diarist Peter Brimelow addresses this paradox by unmasking the pestilential contribution of teachers unions. About 85 percent of teachers belong to the American federation of Teachers or the National Education Association; Brimelow focuses on the latter. The NEA boasts 2.6 zillion members and annual revenues of $1.25 billion. Public-sector employees were once forbidden to unionize. Only in the mid-sixties did the NEA and AFT become genuine labor unions--and oftentimes militant, self-seeking, and rapacious. Applying an economic science perspective, Brimelow treats education as an industry, focusing on output (learning come through by high-school seniors) and input (amount of expenditure to attain it). Todays educational pure tone is unimpr essive, but the vanquish problem, Brimelow maintains, is quantitative: Hoggish consumption of ever-increasing resources to do, at best, the same job. In 2000 dollars, annual spending per pupil was $275 in 1890 and $7,086 in 1999-2000, farther outpacing the growth of solid gross domestic product. This happens, Brimelow argues, because the unions practice what economists vocal rent-seeking: using a privileged localization to get more than money than a competitive mart would pay, thereby making society worse off.

Thats why the step of public education collapsed even as the cost exploded--indicating that the unio ns real goal is not better education, but hi! gher income. Brimelow makes a persuasive case. approximately of his book is a well-researched, richly small account of the NEAs self-serving conduct. Along the way, he explodes several myths, e.g., opposite word to the forever repeated belief, todays student-teacher ratio is quite low: 16.5 students per teacher in 1998, versus 37.6 in 1870. Teachers unions weaken education, Brimelow reveals, by making it well-nigh impossible... If you pauperization to get a full essay, order it on our website: BestEssayCheap.com

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