Judicial restraint

The AP reports that a judge in Wisconsin has issues a temporary restraining order stopping the implementation of Scott Walker's union-stripping bill, on the grounds that the Wisconsin state senate violated the law by not giving enough notice of the vote.

If I may say so, I saw this coming - it was pretty obvious even at the time that the legislative procedure they used to get the thing passed was unlawful. I also think it was a stupid thing for the Republicans to do, politically, because now they get all the flack for shoving the thing through, and the law will get struck down anyway. But then the whole thing is an exercise in political (to say nothing of economic and moral) stupidity.

Against performance reviews

Good op-ed in the New York Times today on the argument that ending collective bargaining will ensure fairer pay, because better employees would be able to be paid more. Samuel Culbert of UCLA says that's nonsense, because the "merit" that merit-based pay is based on comes from assessment by performance review:

In my years studying such reviews, I’ve learned that they are subjective evaluations that measure how “comfortable” a boss is with an employee, not how much an employee contributes to overall results. They are an intimidating tool that makes employees too scared to speak their minds, lest their criticism come back to haunt them in their annual evaluations. They almost guarantee that the owners — whether they be taxpayers or shareholders — will get less bang for their buck.

My Quaker skepticism of competition makes me suspicious of merit pay as a concept for very similar reasons to this - who exactly decides what constitutes merit? And on what authority? Surely "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is a much fairer way of doing things - and easier to get right, too!

In defense of teachers' unions

Slate has a great piece on former DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, whose anti-union teacher witch-hunt was one of the reasons that Andrew Fenty lost reelection as DC's mayor. I've always been deeply skeptical of the anti-teachers' union argument - it strikes me that urban public schools have been so badly underfunded for so long that it's impossible to assess whether teachers are bad or not based on student performance, and if you just fire teachers without addressing the funding issue, you're not going to make any progress. This evidence backs this up:

If the ability to fire bad teachers and pay great teachers more were the key missing ingredient in education reform, why haven't charter schools, 88% of which are nonunionized and have that flexibility, lit the education world on fire? Why did the nation's most comprehensive study of charter schools, conducted by Stanford University researchers and sponsored by pro-charter foundations, conclude that charters outperformed regular public schools only 17 percent of the time, and actually did significantly worse 37 percent of the time? Why don't Southern states, which have weak teachers' unions, or none at all, outperform other parts of the country?

The secret is that like every public spending issue in the United States, education funding is wrapped up in issues of race and segregation. So until someone can convince affluent whites to spend money on poor blacks, you're left fiddling around the edges of the problem. Which in my view is exactly what Michelle Rhee was doing - just in a particularly obnoxious way.