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 culture, yet our students perform dismally. pecuniary diarist Peter Brimelow addresses this paradox by unmasking the subtle 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 practi mentiony militant, self-serving, 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 unimpressi ve, but the scald 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, farthest outpacing the growth of solid gross domestic product. This happens, Brimelow argues, because the unions practice what economists call rent-seeking: using a privileged localization to get more than money than a competitive mart would pay, thereby fashioning society worse off.

Thats why the step of public education collapsed even as the cost exploded--indicating that the unions real goal is not better education, but higher income.! Brimelow makes a persuasive case. nearly 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 constantly 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 penury to get a full essay, order it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

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