I’ve long been fascinated between the divide between the elite supporters of the Democratic party and the institutional supporters of the Democratic party. When you go to a Democratic convention, you see a fascinating cross-section of highly educated lawyers, financial industry titans and other elite-educated and very rich people on the one hand and leaders of labor unions on the other. They seem to get on fairly well, if a little awkwardly. After all, they’re all enlisted in a common enterprise, to install Democratic candidates and appointees in public office. And both the elites and the labor hacks believe, at some level, that they’re doing this in order to help ordinary people and, especially, the poor, in ways that hardhearted conservatives and selfish Republicans would never do.
But the elites never spend much time on ground level seeing how the public employee unions actually deliver—or don’t deliver—the services they’re so proud of. And on the rare occasions when they do, when they actually see how public sector institutions operate and how they affect ordinary people and the poor, they are horrified.
Case in point: Steven Brill’s New Yorker article on “The Rubber Room,” an account of the thousands of New York City public school teachers who are paid, in the high five figures or even six figures, to show up at windowless offices and not teach at all. Brill, longtime proprietor of the American Lawyer, has spent most of his life at the top levels of American society, superintending some very interesting reporting but, when it comes to opinion, doing little more than mouthing liberal clichés. He’s used to dealing with very smart and able people. I suspect that for years he’s accepted, without thinking about it much one way or the other, the belief that if governments spend more money on public services, ordinary people and the poor will be helped.
Brill is clearly shocked and appalled at what he sees in the Rubber Rooms in New York. His accounts of the maladjusted and utterly incompetent teachers he finds there are vivid and terrific reporting; his accounts of the rationalization of teacher union officials for this appalling system make clear, despite his clear and graceful prose, that he is enraged by what this system costs taxpayers and, even more, by what it denies children who are most in need of help. As Mickey Kaus puts it in his Twitter-length link to Brill’s article: “Everyone hates the teachers’ unions now.”
It’s interesting to juxtapose Brill’s article withthe very good Washington Post editorial this morning, “Beach reading for Mr. Obama.” The Post recommends an Education Next article on the District of Columbia school voucher program which Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have decided to abolish and a report by the Heritage Foundation and Lexington Institute on violence in D.C. schools. The concluding paragraph is worth quoting:
“As we’ve said before, vouchers aren’t the answer to Washington’s school troubles; we enthusiastically support public school reform and charter schools, too. But vouchers are an answer for some children whose options otherwise are bleak. In Washington, they are also part of a carefully designed social-science experiment that may provide useful evidence for all schools on helping low-income children learn. Why would a Democratic administration and Congress want to cut such an experiment short?”
The Post is too polite to answer its own question. Steven Brill, however, has figured it out. “Leading Democrats often talk about the need to reform education,” he writes, “but they almost never openly criticize the teachers’ unions, which are perhaps the Party’s most powerful support group.” In other words, on the issue of D.C. vouchers Barack Obama and Arne Duncan are doing what their union paymasters want. The union bosses snap their fingers, and Obama and Duncan jump. It’s good for just about everyone involved: the teachers’ unions get taxpayers’ money, the Democratic party through the teachers’ unions gets taxpayers’ money. Just about everyone, that is, except for the kids.
Something for the elite Democrats who congratulate themselves on how generous they are to those less well off might want to keep in mind.
