Category: Education

 

Students and employers often complain that college does not prepare them for the real world of filling jobs and this complaint has some merit. But what is the real world of jobs like for most workers? Professor David Graeber got considerable media attention when he published his book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. He claims that millions of people are working jobs they know are meaningless and unnecessary. Researcher Simon Walo decided to test Graeber’s theory and found that his investigation supported Graeber’s view. While Graeber’s view can be debated, it is reasonable to believe that some jobs are BS all the time and all jobs are BS some of the time. Thus, if educators are to prepare students for working in the real world, they must prepare them for the BS of the workplace. AI can prove useful here.

In an optimistic sci-fi view of the future, AI exists to relieve humans of the dreadful four Ds of bad jobs: the Dangerous, the Degrading, the Dirty, and the Dull. In a bright future, general AI would assist, but not replace, humans in creative and scientific endeavors. In dystopian sci-fi views of the AI future, AI enslaves or exterminates humanity. In dystopia lite, a few humans use AI to make life worse for many humans, such as by replacing humans with AI in good and rewarding jobs.  Much of the effort in AI development seems aimed at making this a reality.

As an example, it is feared that AI will put writers and artists out of work, so when the Hollywood writers went on strike, they wanted protection from being replaced by AI. They succeeded in this goal, but there remains a reasonable question about how great the threat of AI is in terms of its being able to replace humans in jobs humans want to do. Fortunately for humans doing creative and meaningful work, AI is not very good at these tasks. As Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor have argued, AI of this sort seems to be most useful at doing useless things. But this can be useful for workers and educators should train students to use AI to do these useless things. This might seem a bit crazy but makes perfect sense in our economic reality.

Some jobs are useless, and all jobs have useless tasks. Although his view can be challenged, Graeber came up with three categories of useless jobs. His “flunkies” category consists of people paid to make the rich and important look more rich and more important.  This can be expanded to include all decorative minions. “Goons” are people filling positions existing only because a competitor company created similar jobs. Finally, there are the  “box tickers”, which can be refined to cover jobs workers see as useless but also produce work whose absence would have no meaningful effect on the world.

It must be noted that what is perceived as useless is a matter of values and will vary between persons and in different contexts. To use a silly example, imagine the Florida state legislature mandated that all state universities send in a monthly report in the form of a haiku. Each month, someone will need to create and email the haiku. This task seems useless. But imagine that if a school fails to comply, they lose $1 million in funding. This makes the task useful for the school as a means of protecting their funding. Fortunately, AI can easily complete this useless useful task.

As a serious example, suppose a worker must write reports for management based on bullet points given in presentations. Management, of course, never reads the reports and they are thus useless but required by company policy. While a seemingly rational solution is to eliminate the reports, that is not how bureaucracies usually operate in the “real world.” Fortunately, AI can make the worker’s task easier: they can use AI to transform the bullet points into a report and use the saved time for more meaningful tasks (or viewing social media). Management can also use AI to summarize the report into bullet points. While it would seem more rational to eliminate the reports, this is not how the real world usually works. But what should educators do with AI in their classrooms in the context of useless tasks and jobs?

While this will need to vary from class to class, relevant educators should consider a general overview of jobs and task categories in terms of usefulness and the ability of AI to do these jobs and tasks.  Faculty could then identify the likely useless jobs and useless tasks their students will probably do in the real world. They can then consider how these tasks can be done using AI. This will allow them to create lessons and assignments to give students the skills to use AI to complete useless tasks quickly and with minimal effort. This can allow workers to spend more time on useful work, assuming their jobs have any such tasks.

In closing, my focus has been on using AI for useless tasks. Teaching students to use AI for useful tasks is another subject entirely and while not covered here is certainly worthy of consideration. And here is an AI generated haiku:

 

Eighty percent rise

FAMU students excel

In their learning’s ligh

 

When ChatGPT and its competitors became available to students, some warned of an AI apocalypse in education.  This fear mirrored the broader worries about the over-hyped dangers of AI. This is not to deny that AI presents challenges and danger, but we need to have a realistic view of the threats and promises so that rational policies and practices can be implemented.

As a professor and the chair of the General Education Assessment Committee at Florida A&M University I assess the work of my students, and I am involved with the broader task of assessing general education. In both cases a key challenge is determining how much of the work turned in by students is their work. After all, we want to know how our students are performing and not how AI or some unknown writer is performing.

While students have been cheating since the advent of education, it was feared AI would cause a cheating tsunami. This worry seemed sensible since AI makes cheating easy, free and harder to detect.  Large language models allow “plagiarism on demand” by generating new text each time. With the development of software such as Turnitin, detecting traditional plagiarism became automated and fast. These tools also identify the sources used in plagiarism, providing professors with reliable evidence. But large language models defeat this method of detection, since they generate original text. Ironically, some faculty now see a 0% plagiarism score on Turnitin as a possible red flag. But has an AI cheating tsunami washed over education?

Determining how many students are cheating is like determining how many people are committing crime: one only knows how many people have been caught and not how many people are doing it. Because of this, caution must be exercised when drawing a conclusion about the extent of cheating otherwise one runs the risk of falling victim to the fallacy of overconfident inference from unknown statistics.

In the case of AI cheating in education, one source of data is Turnitin’s AI detection software. Over the course of a year, the service checked 200 million assignments and flagged AI use in 1 in 10 assignments while 3 in 100 were flagged as mostly AI. These results have remained stable, suggesting that AI cheating is neither a tsunami nor increasing. But this assumes that the AI detection software is accurate.

Turnitin claims it has a false positive rate of 1%. In addition to Turnitin, there are other AI detection services that have been evaluated, with the worst having an accuracy of 38% and the best claimed to have a 90% accuracy. But there are two major problems with the accuracy of existing plagiarism detection software.

The first, as the title of a recent paper notes, “GPT detectors are biased against non-native English writers.” As the authors noted, while AI detectors are nearly perfectly accurate in evaluating essays by U.S. born eighth-graders, they misclassified 61.22% of TOEFL essays written by non-native English students. All seven of the tested detectors incorrectly flagged 18 of the 91 TOEFL essays and 89 of 91 of the essays (97%) were flagged by at least one detector.

The second is that AI detectors can be fooled. The current detectors usually work by evaluating perplexity as a metric. Perplexity, which is a measure of such factors as lexical diversity and grammatical complexity, can be created in AI text by using simple prompt engineering. For example, a student could prompt ChatGPT to rewrite the text using more literary language. There is also a concern that the algorithms used in proprietary detection software will be kept secret, so it will be difficult to determine what biases and defects they might have.

Because of these problems, educators should be cautious when using such software to evaluate student work. This is especially true in cases in which a student is assigned a failing grade or even accused of academic misconduct because they are suspected of using AI. In the case of traditional cheating, a professor could have clear evidence in the form of copied text. In the case of AI detection, the professor only has the evaluation of software whose inner workings are most likely not available for examination and whose true accuracy remains unknown. Because of this, educational institutes need to develop rational guidelines for best practices when using AI detection software. But the question remains as to how likely it is that students will engage in cheating now that ChatGPT and its ilk are readily available.

Stanford scholars Victor Lee and Denise Pope have been studying cheating, and past surveys over 15 years showed that 60-70% of students admitted to cheating. In 2023 the percentage stayed about the same or decreased slightly, even when students were asked about using AI. While there is the concern that cheaters would lie about cheating, Pope and Lee use anonymous surveys and take care in designing the survey questions. While cheating remains a problem, AI has not increased it, and the feared tsunami seems to have died far offshore.

This does make sense in that cheating has always been relatively easy, and the decision to cheat is more a matter of moral and practical judgment rather than based on the available technology. While technology can provide new means of cheating, a student must still be willing to cheat, and that percentage seems to be relatively stable in the face of changing technology.  That said, large language models are a new technology and their long-term impact in cheating is something that needs to be determined. But, so far, the doomsayers predictions have not come true. Fairness requires acknowledging that this might be because educators took effective action to prevent this; it would be poor reasoning to fall for the prediction fallacy.

As a final point of discussion, it is worth considering that  perhaps AI has not resulted in a surge in cheating because it is not a great tool for this. As Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor have argued, AI seems to be most useful at doing useless things. To be fair, assignments in higher education can be useless things of the type AI is good at doing. But if AI is being used to complete useless assignments, then this is a problem with the assignments (and the professors) and not AI.

In closing, w8 There is also the concern that AI will get better at cheating or that as students grow up with AI, they will be more inclined to use it to cheat. And, of course, it is worth considering whether such use should be considered cheating or if it is time to retire some types of assignments and change our approach to education as, for example, we did when calculators were accepted.

 

For more on cyber policy issues: Hewlett Foundation Cyber Policy Institute (famu.edu)

 

In June 2024, Oklahoma’s state superintendent mandated that public schools teach the Bible. In a familiar move, the justification is that the Bible is “a necessary historical document to teach our kids about the history of this country, to have a complete understanding of Western civilization, to have an understanding of the basis of our legal system.”

To be fair and balanced, the Bible is an important historical document, and I would go so far as to say that knowing about it (and other major religious texts) is essential to understanding world history. It is also important in my field, philosophy. While I teach at the college level, the same reasoning applies since I teach at a state school.

When I teach Ethics, Metaphysics, Modern and Introduction to Philosophy, I include Biblical content. For example, discussing the Medieval dispute over metaphysical universals requires discussing such topics as original sin and the Trinity. My colleagues also include the Bible in appropriate classes, the most obvious examples being classes on the Old and New Testaments. While K-12 education tends to be weak in the areas of philosophy and religion, the Bible should be covered in appropriate classes—along with other important religious texts. As such, I obviously have no objection against covering the Bible and other religious texts as historic, religious and philosophical documents in the context of academic study. Likewise, I have no objection against including historically important works of atheists, anarchists, and Marxists. These are all important to history and philosophy and should be included.

Naturally, there is always the practical challenge of determining what content to include in courses and we educators can only include a microscopic sliver of all the important works. Ideally, we should make this decision in a principled manner and not based on our own ideology or n0n-academic agenda. As an honest educator, I must admit that we do not magically uplink to the Platonic forms of education when picking our content and our values, biases and experience influence us despite our efforts to build an ideal curriculum. As I somewhat jokingly tell my students when they ask why I included certain philosophers, my response is that we usually teach what we were taught, and this probably goes back to some trivial reason for inclusion. For example, my Modern class is mostly made up of the philosophers that were in the Modern class I took. I did add Mary Wollstonecraft to the class because I had the notes from my Ethics class, and I added her to that class at the suggestion of my ex-wife. But, as noted above, the Bible seems to be an objectively important work. But so does the Communist Manifesto.

There are also concerns about how content should be taught, which is usually framed as a conflict between teaching and preaching (indoctrination). While the right regularly accuses educators of indoctrination, this is not what we do as professionals. And, as professors joke, if we can’t even get the students to read the syllabus or look up from their phones, we are not indoctrinating them to be Islamic Transgender Homosexual Feminist Woke Atheist Socialist Post Modern Tik Tok Marxist Fascist Migrants. As the meme goes, every accusation of the right is a confession. This mandate and numerous laws being passed governing education are clearly aimed at mandating the teaching of a set of values. That is, they are aimed at indoctrination. The right, if one reviews the laws and mandates, is not opposed to indoctrination. What they are opposed to is a lack of indoctrination in their values.

A supporter of this mandate might raise the obvious objection: the mandate does not state that biblical content will be taught as a religion but that it will be taught as an historical document. As such, the mandate is not a problem. While this does have some appeal, there are some problems with it. First, schools can already include the Bible as an historical document, hence there is no need for such a mandate. Second, the mandate is just about the Bible, which is clearly favoring the text of one religion over all others (and non-religious texts). Third, this reply is likely to be a bad-faith reply, since Mr. Walters professed views are quite clear.

While it is obvious why non-religious people and people of faiths other than Christianity would be concerned about these sorts of mandates (and laws), Christians should also be concerned. There are, of course, all the historical arguments made by the Founders for separating church and state. After all, they understood the dangers arising from combining secular power with theological power. They also understood the history of Europe, including the bloody conflicts between sects of Christianity. But there is also a very pragmatic concern. While Christianity is monotheistic, it is not monolithic and sects have been splitting off from it since the beginning. As such, when an official mandates that the Bible be taught, the question arises as to which version of the Bible (will it be yours?) and which interpretation of that Bible will be taught. So, while a person might applaud the mandate, they should not assume that what will be taught will match their version of the Bible or their interpretation. To be fair, a supporter might reasonably believe that this mandate is code for culture war values they probably agree with (such as anti-LGBT views, capitalism, white supremacy, 1800s era gender roles, and misogyny) and they are probably right. But Christians should be concerned that the version of the mandated Bible and its interpretation will conflict with their own faith. For example, Seventh Day Adventists and Catholics presumably do not want the faith of the other sect imposed upon their children in school. But some might see this as better than a lack of biblical lessons.

Of course, if someone wants their children to learn about the bible, most churches offer Sunday school classes and, of course, they have regular sermons that people can attend. As such, it would be absurd to argue that there is some critical lack of biblical education that the state has a compelling reason to address with a mandate.

 

The Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that state officials can accept gratuities as rewards for their official actions. To be fair, there are disparities in punishments that should be addressed. A federal official can receive up to fifteen years for accepting a bribe, but the punishments cap at two years for accepting gratuities. The statute the ruling is about applies only to state officials and imposes a 10-year sentence. While inconsistency in punishment is a hallmark of the American legal system, from a moral standpoint sentences should be consistent (and fair). As such, it would be reasonable to make the punishments for accepting gratuities for federal and state officials the same. Unless, of course, there is a relevant difference that would warrant such a disparity. However, the court ruling was not about addressing this inconsistency. Instead, critics claim that the ruling has legalized corruption. To be fair, the ruling seems to have the intent of allowing state and local governments to define what is acceptable as a gratuity. That is, the intent seems to be to allow the people who will receive gratuities to decide what they are allowed to receive.

The ruling rests on a philosophical discussion of the difference between bribery (always corrupt) and gratuities (sometimes corrupt). Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that “bribes are payments made or agreed to before an official act in order to influence the official with respect to that future official act.” Gratuities “are typically payments made to an official after an official act as a token of appreciation.” Taking the terms strictly, Kavanaugh seems to be right: a bribe is offered to influence an action, a gratuity is given to reward an action. For example, one might bribe the maître de to get a table and then give the server a gratuity to reward them for good service. Naturally, the payment of the bribe can take place after the action is completed, since the agreement can be made with the payment promised in the future. This would seem to allow for cases claimed to be gratuities to be bribes and this would require showing that an agreement was made that influenced the future action.

One interesting consideration is the likely possibility of iterated gratuity in which an official accepts gratuities for their actions and thus sends a clear signal that they will, in the future, act in ways that will be rewarded by gratuities. Imagine that an official who sees to it that a business gets a lucrative contract to provide school lunches gets a $12,000 gratuity from the business to express their appreciation after the fact. The official now knows they will be rewarded for helping the business. Imagine they then see to it that the business gets a contract providing prison food and is rewarded with a gratuity. Now the business knows the official is amenable to being influenced by gratuities. Strictly speaking, there would be no bribery—it would be analogous to how we train dogs by rewarding them for doing what we want. But it would create a situation indistinguishable from bribery because it would be silent bribery. Everyone would know how the system worked, and no one would need to say anything.  But it might be objected that gratuities can just be rewards and not corruption.

Kavanaugh makes this argument by using what he takes to be innocuous examples. He asks, “could students take their college professor out to Chipotle for an end-of-term celebration? And if so, would it somehow become criminal to take the professor for a steak dinner? Or to treat her to a Hoosiers game?” While he did consider that some gratuities could be “problematic” he provides obviously innocuous examples, such as tipping a mail carrier, a thank you gift basket given to a teacher at the end of the school year, a college dean giving a sweatshirt to a city council member who speaks at a school event. He argues that these examples suggest that “gratuities after the official act are not the same as bribes before the official act,” adding that unlike gratuities, “bribes can corrupt the official act — meaning that the official takes the act for private gain, not for the public good.” Let us consider both these examples and the general argument.

It is interesting that the justice picked the example of a mail carrier, since the USPS has a strict policy about gifts to postal employees. They can receive a gift, but it must be $20 or less per occasion and no more than $50 in a single year. This is obviously much stricter than the rules governing the Supreme Court, which are effectively none. That there is such a limit on postal employees does suggest that there are concerns about allowing large gratuities. And, of course, there is the practical fact that a postal carrier is rather limited in what sort of corruption they can engage in in their official role.

Assuming the local laws allow it, the sweatshirt gift seems morally fine—it is unlikely that an official would engage in corrupt deeds for the sake of a sweatshirt. Also, giving out cheap college merchandise to speakers or people at events is a normal, non-corrupt practice.

The gift basket is somewhat more problematic, depending on how strict the school policies and local laws are. On the one hand, there is almost certainly no intention of corruption. On the other hand, accepting such gifts from the public does signal that one is willing to accept gifts and could open the door to corruption. But I teach at the college level, so I am not that familiar with the rules and ethics at the K-12 level. Which takes us to his professor examples.

So, would it be criminal for students to take their professor out to dinner for an end of term celebration or give them tickets to an event? I infer that the professor in question is a government employee, so the answer would partially depend on the local laws. Distinct from the laws, there are also the matters of university policies (violating these could get the professor fired for cause) and ethical concerns.

Ethically, a professor should not accept dinner or tickets from students, even at the end of the semester. This can create the impression of impropriety and other students might hear of this and think that the professor either expects or will reward students if they think they will receive such gifts. It is especially problematic if the students will take future classes with the professor, since such gifts could influence the professor’s behavior in those classes. Of course, my moral view is that a professor should not profit from their position (beyond their salary and appropriate compensation), even in small ways. The Supreme Court and public officials, who have far more power than us professors, should also follow this moral practice lest they fall into corruption. Well, more corruption.

In terms of policy, schools vary in their guidance. Based on what colleagues around the nation have said, some schools have no clear guidance about small gifts and other schools have strict and precise guidelines. Anecdotally, most schools would frown on students taking professors out to dinner or gifting them tickets. Smaller gifts, like a $16 reusable bag, might be allowed—to use a random example.

 My university has a clear policy about gifts, and we are all required to complete ethics training about gifts every year. The short version is that as a faculty member I must not solicit or accept gifts with the understanding that the gift was given to influence or gain a favorable action or decision from me in my official capacity. Given that I understand that a gratuity given today for past behavior can be aimed at influencing future behavior, I take this as forbidding me from accepting any gifts that might have this nature. For example, I cannot accept any gifts from students since they might be in a future class and the gift might be intended to influence my future behavior.

We are also subject to disclosing outside employment, foreign influence and so on. It is interesting to compare the strict limits I operate under as a professor at a state school to the lack of limits enjoyed by the Supreme Court. But I suppose they are just trying to share the wealth by expanding opportunities for officials to profit from their positions through gratuities. Now to the general argument.

Kavanaugh claims that “gratuities after the official act are not the same as bribes before the official act” and that unlike gratuities, “bribes can corrupt the official act — meaning that the official takes the act for private gain, not for the public good.” So, his argument is that bribes can corrupt since they occur before the act, but gratuities cannot since they take place after the act. Hence, a gratuity cannot corrupt.

In an idealized situation, Kavanaugh’s reasoning would hold. If an official acted with no knowledge or beliefs about how those they benefited would respond and were thus surprised and amazed when those they benefited gave them a gift for acting to their advantage, then there would be no corruption. The official could not have been influenced by a gift they had no idea they might receive.

In reality, officials would be aware that a reward would be forthcoming if they act in certain ways, especially if they (as Clarence Thomas is alleged to have done) regularly receive gratuities as they act in ways that benefit those giving them the gifts. To think otherwise would be to ignore the plain facts or to infer that officials have no conception of the actual world. While it might be hard to prove that a one-time gratuity is a payoff of desired behavior, reiterated gratuities would clearly be bribes. I do not need to tell a dog that he will get a treat if he does what I want, giving him treats when he does what I want takes care of bribing him.  And the Supreme Court has legalized giving treats.

In terms of why this is bad, one obvious reason is that it makes America even more of an oligarchy: people with money seem even more free to simply buy the results they want. Unless you are one of these people, the officials will most likely not be acting in your interest. The second problem is that this could lead to another standard outcome of corruption: it will be more likely that you will have to give gifts to officials to get things done; that is what happens when gifts to officials are legal. Going back to the professor example, if I could and did accept dinners and tickets from students and they saw that students did well in my classes, students would keep giving me dinners and tickets. After all, even though I said nothing, they would know that I expected such gifts and thus my classes would become corrupted. Which is why I, unlike certain Justices, do not accept gifts.

In what seems to be a victory for Christian Nationalists, the Ten Commandments must now be displayed in Louisiana public classrooms. This law will be challenged, but its proponents are hoping that the Supreme Court will rule in its favor. Given the ideology and religious views of the majority of the court, this victory is all but assured.  

The 2022 Kennedy v. Bremerton School District ruling provides guidance here as the court ruled in favor of a high school football coach who was fired for praying on the field. The court decided that the prayer was private speech and hence protected. Meanwhile, Republicans in Florida are arguing that “in the classroom, the professor’s speech is the government’s speech…” when it is speech they do not like.  It would be interesting to see what they would say about professors praying in classrooms; I suspect that if it was a suitable Christian prayer, it would be considered private speech.

While I am not a legal scholar, there does seem to be an obvious difference between a coach engaging in a private prayer on the field and a state mandating that the Ten Commandments be displayed in all classrooms. If, for example, a teacher or professor wanted to carry a copy of the Ten Commandments to draw inspiration from before teaching or during committee meetings, that would obviously not present any issues. I, in fact, have a copy of the Ten Commandments in my Ethics class notes since I do a section on religion and ethics. In this context I am using the Ten Commandments as an example of religious ethics rather than proselytizing a specific faith in the classroom, since we are not in the indoctrination business. Coincidentally, this is a work around that proponents of the law have also attempted to use.

As the separation of church and state is well-established, proponents of the law need a narrative that will allow the Ten Commandments to be displayed while they can insist this is not the state promoting a religion. One approach is built on the same justification I use to cover the Ten Commandments in my class: the Ten Commandments are an important part of legal (and moral) history and hence should be included in the relevant lessons. I certainly would not think of teaching a basic ethics class without including them in a section on religious rules-based ethics. Likewise, my colleagues in religion and history would not think to exclude them from the relevant classes. But there are two obvious differences.

One is that academic coverage of the Ten Commandments does not require a state mandate that they be displayed in all classrooms. Providing them to the students in the text, PowerPoints or notes suffices. The second is that my colleagues and I are not, as I noted earlier, in the business of indoctrinating students. In fact, students routinely ask us what we think, since we are careful not to preach our own views. When discussing paper topics, I stress that they should argue for their position and not try to argue for what they think I might think. When grading, I take care to separate my view of their position from a fair assessment of the quality of their work. As I tell my students, people have gotten an A on papers arguing for positions I strongly disagree with, and others have done badly by arguing badly for positions I agree with. I never tell them these positions and stick to generalities.

The clever counter to this is that the law has an amendment that permits display of historical documents such as the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence and the Northwest Ordinance. Presumably the intent is to try to persuade people that the Ten Commandments is just being displayed as an historically important document and hence all the concerns about the separation of church and state are unfounded. But the obvious problem is that only the display of the Ten Commandments is mandated by law (and a specific version, at that). But even if the law required other documents to be displayed, it would still be reasonable to consider why the Ten Commandments and these other documents were being mandated for display. They did not, for example, mandate that specific content from mathematics, science, or English literature be displayed in classrooms, even those that are foundational. If they were really concerned that classrooms display important documents, they would have presumably included such content in the law.  But maybe that will be the next move to conceal their intentions.

Interestingly, this move does send an unintended message about the Ten Commandments. If we take seriously the argument that they are being displayed just because they are historically important and not for religious reasons, then the message to students is that that they are just historically important, on par with the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence and the Northwest Ordinance. They are perhaps not the word of God given to Moses by God.  As such, they should be subject to the same academic assessment as any other historical document and subject to the same criticism as any other legal works created by flawed humans for human purposes. The schools should also display other historically important documents, such as select quotes from Marxists, Muslims, Buddhists, socialists, atheists, anarchists, Satanists and others. After all, if it really is about displaying important documents, there are many that deserve a place alongside the Ten Commandments. But it is evident and obvious what the intent of the law is, and it has nothing to do with presenting students with historically important documents.

One common conservative criticism of teachers’ unions is that they harm students by protecting bad teachers. If these unions could be changed or eliminated, then bad teachers could be replaced, and students would benefit. A specific version of this criticism is about the practice of last-in first-out: those hired last are the first fired. The concern is that teachers are retained based on seniority rather than ability, which can mean that bad teachers remain while good teachers are fired. These criticisms do have some appeal since most institutions tend to devolve into systems that protect certain bad members. Churches and police unions provide two example of this phenomenon. It is especially informative to compare conservative stances on police unions and other unions.

On the face of it, this criticism fits a plausible narrative about unions: since they exist to protect members, the leadership might not be overly concerned about their quality. So, unions do their best to keep teachers from being fired and thus bad teachers remain in the system. These bad teachers do a bad job at teaching students and this harm can impact them throughout their life. Being able to fire bad teachers would open positions for good teachers and send a message to bad teachers. The good teachers would do a good job, thus benefiting the students. From this it is inferred.  that eliminating unions would be good for students. Critics of police unions have made a similar argument to address the problem of bad and even dangerous officers being able to continue to work as police.

In the case of the policy of first firing the last hired, the claim is that eliminating unions would result in merit-based hiring and firing, so that when there was a need to fire teachers, the bad teachers would be eliminated regardless of seniority. As such, being rid of unions would improve things for students.

One easy and obvious reply to these criticisms is that they are not general criticisms of unions. Rather, they are criticisms of specific practices: retaining bad teachers and retaining based on seniority rather than quality. There is nothing essential to a teacher’s union that requires that it mandate the retention of bad teachers nor that it mandate a seniority-based retention system. To use an analogy, there are countless examples of bad policies followed by corporations that do not arise simply because a corporation is a corporation. Roughly put, bad corporate policies are bad not because they are policies of corporations but because they are bad policies. As such, they do not provide grounds for the elimination of corporations. Rather, the badness of a corporation’s policy provides grounds for changing that policy. The same applies to teachers’ unions: the badness of a union policy serves as grounds for changing that policy, not eliminating unions.

It could be argued that by their very nature unions must protect bad teachers and it is impossible for them to do otherwise. Likewise, it could be argued that corporations by their very nature must have terrible policies that harm the public. If so, then solving these problems would require eliminating unions and corporations. However, this view seems implausible for both unions and corporations.

A second reply involves considering the facts of the matter. If unions protect bad teachers, then highly unionized districts should retain more bad teachers than districts that are less unionized. But, if unions do not protect bad teachers, then districts should have comparable percentages of bad teachers (adjusting for other factors, of course).

As should not be surprising, the debate over the facts usually involves anecdotes about bad teachers and intuitions about unions. While anecdotes can provide some illustrative examples, they do not provide a foundation for general conclusions. There is, after all, the classic fallacy of anecdotal evidence which involves doing just that. Intuitions can provide some guidance, but by they are feelings and thoughts one has prior to considering the evidence. As such, anecdotes and intuitions do not suffice to show whether unions are good or bad.

Fortunately, Professor Eunice Han has conducted a study of the claim that unions overprotect bad teachers. While it runs contrary to the anecdotes about bad teachers that cannot be fired and intuitions about overprotective unions, the evidence shows that “highly unionized districts actually fire more bad teachers.” Somewhat ironically, districts with weak or no unions retain more lower quality teachers than highly unionized districts.

As Han notes, stronger unions reduced the attrition rate of teachers and increased teacher wages. Because of the higher salaries, there is a greater incentive to remove bad teachers and good teachers have a greater incentive to remain. This nicely fits the conservative mantra that top talent can only be kept by paying top salaries, although this mantra is usually just applied to people like CEOs and not the people who do the work.

In contrast, weak unions (and the absence of unions) increase the attrition rate of teachers and decrease teacher wages. So, good teachers will tend to leave for areas with strong unions while bad teachers will often end up in areas with weaker unions or those that lack unions. The statistics show that unions have a positive impact on teacher quality and that the myths of the overprotective union and the irremovable bad teacher are just that, myths unsupported by facts. This also nicely matches the conservative mantra about compensation: lesser talent will settle for lower salaries. Ironically, teachers’ unions should be supported by conservative who profess to worry about teacher quality.

As this issue is so ideologically charged, those who oppose unions will tend to see the study as biased and might offer “alternative facts” of their own on the grounds that what they believe must be true. Likewise, those who favor unions can be accused of accepting “facts” that match their views. This is, of course, a much larger problem than the debate over unions: if there is not a shared set of facts and methods, then no rational discussion is possible.

 

Before proceeding with the discussion, I am obligated to disclose that I am a union member. My arguments should be checked for the influence of unconscious biases on my part. While some might think that I must be blindly pro-union, I will endeavor to give an objective assessment of the arguments for and against teachers’ unions.

Objectively assessing teachers’ unions is a daunting task as it is politically charged.  For many conservatives, it is an article of faith that one of the many villains of education is the teachers’ union. Ain contrast, liberals tend to favor (or at least tolerate) teachers’ unions. A person’s stance on teachers’ unions can become part of their identity and this ideological commitment is the enemy of rational assessment. This is because it triggers a cognitive bias and motivates people to accept fallacious reasoning. As such, arguments and facts tend to be accepted or rejected depending on how they fit a person’s preferred narrative about unions. While it is difficult to do so, these tendencies can be overcome—if one is willing to make the effort.

Another reason objective assessment is difficult is there are entrenched and unfounded opinions about unions. People tend to believe what they hear repeated in the media. These opinions can be hard to overcome with reason and evidence, but doing so is easier than getting a person to change an aspect of their political identity.

A third reason, one that helps explain unfounded opinions on the matter, is there are few studies of the impact of unions. So, people tend to rely on anecdotal evidence and intuitions.

In this essay (and the following ones) I will endeavor to objectively assess teachers’ unions while resisting my own political views and entrenched opinions. I will try to do this with good arguments and data rather than relying on anecdotes and intuitions. While my concern is with the impact of unions on education, I will begin by addressing two general criticisms of unions.

One criticism is an argument based on the idea that it is wrong for workers to be required to join a union or pay dues to a union. In politics, this view is called “right to work.” This is usually opposed by unions and supported by businesses. Supporters contend that it is good for business and employees. Opponents point to data showing the negative impact of right to work laws.

As a philosopher, my concern is with the ethics of compelling people to join a union or pay dues rather than with the legal issues. On the face of it, membership and fee paying should be voluntary. Just as a person should be free to accept or reject a job or any service, the same should apply to unions. However, freedom is not free: those who decide not to join or pay dues should, morally, be excluded from the benefits. As with any goods or services, a person who refuses to pay for them has no right to expect them. If a group of homeowners are involved in a lawsuit and want to hire a lawyer, individual homeowners have every right to refuse to pay the lawyer’s fee. However, if they do not pay, they have no right to be free riders. As another example, if a business does not want to join a chamber of commerce, it should be free to not join. However, the business has no right to claim the benefits. I voluntarily joined the union on the moral grounds that I did not want to be a free rider. I knew I would benefit from the union; hence I am obligated to contribute to the costs of getting those services. 

If unions are compelled to represent non-members, then the non-members would be obligated to contribute to the cost of this representation, and it would be right to compel them to do so. Going back to the lawyer example, if the lawyer is compelled to represent all the homeowners, then they are all obligated to pay their share. Otherwise, they are engaged in theft. The same holds for the chamber of commerce analogy: if a chamber of commerce is compelled to provide services to all businesses in the area, then those businesses are obligated to pay if they avail themselves of these benefits.

A second stock criticism of unions is based on the fact that they do not represent the views of all their members on social and political issues. While this is a matter of concern, it is hardly unique to unions. All groups, ranging from clubs to nations face this problem. For example, the state legislature of any American state does not represent the views of all the members of the state. Since people have different and often conflicting views, it is nearly impossible for the representatives of any group to represent the views of all the members. For example, some union members might favor allowing computer programing to count as a math class while others oppose it. Obviously, the class cannot be a math class and not a math class, so a union stance on the matter will fail to represent all views. As such, being unable to represent every view is not a special problem for teachers’ unions, it is a feature of groups.

If the teachers’ union has a democratic process for taking positions on issues, be it direct democracy or electing representatives, then the union would represent the views of the members in the same way any democratic or representative system does. That is, imperfectly and with compromises. As such, the fact that unions do not represent the views of all members is not a special problem for teachers’ unions. If this criticism was telling against unions, it would be equally effective against all groups that represent their members and this is absurd.

In the following essays I will focus on the claim that teachers’ unions are bad for education in general and students in particular.

While being a charter school is distinct from being a for-profit school, one argument given in favor of charter schools is because they, unlike public schools, can operate as for-profit businesses. While some might assume a for-profit charter school must automatically be bad, it is worth considering this.

As one would suspect, the arguments in favor of for-profit charter schools are essentially the same as arguments in favor of providing public money to any for-profit business. While I cannot consider all of them in this short essay, I will present and assess some of them.

One stock argument is the efficiency argument. The idea is that for-profit charter schools have a greater incentive than non-profit schools to be efficient. This is because every increase in efficiency can yield an increase in profits. For example, if a for-profit charter school can offer school lunches at a lower cost than a public school, then the school can turn that difference into a profit. In contrast. A public school has less incentive to be efficient, since there is no profit to be made from cutting costs.

While this argument is reasonable, it can be countered. One obvious concern is that profits can also be increased by cutting costs in ways that are detrimental to the students and employees of the school. For example, the “efficiency” of lower cost school lunches could be the result of providing the students with low quality food. As another example, a school could be more “efficient” by not offering essential services for students with special needs. As a final example, employee pay could be kept as low as possible.  

Another counter is that while public schools lack the profit motive, they still need to accomplish required tasks with limited funds. As such, they also need to be efficient. In fact, they usually must be creative with extremely limited resources and teachers routinely spend their own money purchasing supplies for the students. For-profit charter schools must do what public schools do but must also make a profit. As such, for-profit schools would cost the public more for the same services and thus be less cost effective.

It could be objected that for-profit schools are inherently more efficient than public schools and hence they can make a profit and do all that a public school would do, for the same money or even less. To support this, proponents of for-profit education point to various incidents of badly run public schools.

The easy and obvious reply is that such problems do not arise because the schools are public, they arise because of bad management and other problems. There are many public schools that are well run and there are many for-profit operations that are badly run. Boeing provides an excellent example of this. As such, merely being for-profit will not make a charter school better than a public school.

A second stock argument in favor of for-profit charter schools is based on the idea competition itself improves quality. While students go to public school by default, for-profit charter schools must compete for students with public schools, private schools and other charter schools. Since parents generally look for the best school for their children, the highest quality for-profit charter schools will win the competition. As such, the for-profits have an incentive that public schools lack and thus will be better schools.

One obvious concern is that for-profits can get students without being of better quality. They could do so by advertising, by exploiting political connections and various other ways that have nothing to do with quality. Think of businesses that people hate and that offer poor goods and services, but still manage to make a profit. They are not getting customers through their quality, but by other means and charter schools could use similar methods.

Another concern about making the education of children a competitive business venture is that competition has causalities: businesses go out of business. While the local hardware store going out of business is unfortunate, having an entire school go out of business would be worse. If a for-profit school goes out of business, there would be considerable disruption to the children and to the schools that would have to accept them. There is also the usual concern that the initial competition will result in a few (or one) for-profit emerging victorious and then settling into the usual pattern of lower quality and higher costs. Think, for example, of cable/internet companies. As such, the competition argument is not as strong as some might believe.

Those who disagree with me might contend that my arguments are mere speculation and that for-profit charter schools should be given a chance. They might turn out to be everything their proponents claim they will be.

While this is a reasonable point, it can be countered by considering the examples presented by other ventures in which for-profit versions of public institutions receive public money. Since there is a school to prison pipeline, it seems relevant to consider the example of for-profit prisons.

The arguments in favor of for-profit prisons were like those considered above: for-profit prisons would be more efficient and have higher quality than prisons run by the state. Not surprisingly, to make more profits, many prisons cut staff, pay very low salaries, cut important services and so on. By making incarceration even more of a business, the imprisonment of citizens was incentivized with the expected results of more people being imprisoned for longer sentences. As such, for-profit prisons turned out to be disastrous for the prisoners and the public. While schools are different from prisons, it is easy enough to see the same sort of thing play out with for-profit charter schools.

The best and most obvious analogy is, of course, to the for-profit colleges. As with prisons and charter schools, the usual arguments about efficiency and quality were advanced to allow public money to go to for-profit institutes. The results were not surprising: for profit colleges proved to be disastrous for the students and the public. Far from being more efficient than public and non-profit colleges, the for-profits generally turned out to be much more expensive. They also tend to have significantly worse graduation and job placement rates than public and non-profit private schools. Students of for-profit schools also accrue far more debt and make significantly less money relative to public and private school students. These schools also sometimes go out of business, leaving students abandoned and often with useless credits that cannot transfer. They do, however, often excel at advertising. This explains how they lure in so many students when there are vastly better alternatives.

The public paid the price for these schools as the for-profits receive a disproportionate amount of public money and students take out more student loans to pay for these schools and default on them more often. Far from being models of efficiency and quality, the for-profit colleges have usually turned out to be little more than machines for turning public money into profits for a few people. This is not to say that for-profit charter schools must become exploitation engines as well, but the disaster of for-profit colleges must be taken as a cautionary tale. While there are some who see our children as another resource to be exploited for profits, we should not allow this to happen. As such, the fact that a charter school could be for-profit is a reason against funding them with public money. In closing, the charter school approach seems to a method of funneling public money to fund value-based groups (like churches) and into private pockets.  

In my previous essay on charter schools, I considered the quality argument. The idea is that charter schools provide a better alternative to public schools and should receive public money so that poorer families can afford to choose them. The primary problem with this argument is that it makes more sense to use public money to improve public schools rather than siphoning money from them. I now turn to another aspect of choice, that of  values.

While parents want to be able to choose a quality school for their children, some parents are also interested in having an alternative to public schools based on their values. This desire forms the basis for the value choice argument for charter schools. While public schools are supposed to be as neutral as possible, some see public schools as problematic in two broad ways.

One way is that the public schools provide content and experiences that conflict with the values of some parents, most commonly with their religious values. For example, public schools often teach evolution in science classes, and this runs contrary to some theological views. As another example, some public schools allow students to use bathrooms and locker rooms based on their gender identity, which runs contrary to the values of some parents. As a third example, some schools teach history (such as that of slavery) in ways that run afoul of the ideology of parents. As a final example, some schools include climate change in their science courses, which might be rejected by some parents on political grounds.

A second way is that public schools fail to provide value-based content and experiences that parents want them to provide, often based on their religious and political views. For example, a public school might not provide Christian prayers in the classroom. As another example, a public school might not offer religious content in the science classes (such as creationism). As a final example, a public school might not offer abstinence only sex education, which can conflict with the values of some parents.

Charter schools, the argument goes, can offer parents an alternative to public schools, thus giving them more choices regarding the education of their children. Value-based charter schools can avoid offering content and experiences that parents do not want for their children while offering the content and experiences they want. For example, a private charter school could teach creationism and abstinence only sex education.

It might be argued that parents already have such a choice: they can send their children to existing private schools that match their values. But, as noted in my first essay, some parents cannot afford to pay for private schools. Since charter schools receive public money, parents who cannot afford to send their children to private value-based schools can send them to value-based charter schools, thus allowing them to exercise their right to choose. As an alternative to charter schools, some places have school voucher systems which allow students to attend private (often religious) schools using public money. The appeal of this approach is that it allows those who are less well-off to enjoy the same freedom of choice as the well off. After all, it seems unfair that the poor should be denied this freedom simply because they are poor. That said, there are problems with ideological charter schools.

One concern about value-based charter schools is that funding them would fund specific values with public money. For example, public money going to a religious charter school would be a case of public funding of that religion, which is problematic in many ways in the United States. At least until the Supreme Court removes that obstacle. Those who favor value-based charter schools usually do so because they are thinking of their own values being funded by public money and not value-based charter schools they would dislike. However, it is important to consider that allowing such charter schools opens the door to funding values other than one’s own. For example, conservative Christian proponents of religious charter schools are no doubt thinking of public money going to Christian schools and are not considering that public money might also flow to Islamic charter schools, to a Satanist school or a charter transgender training academy. Or perhaps they believe, probably correctly, that they can ensure the money flows in accord with their values.

Another concern is that funding value-based charter schools with public money would deny others their choice. There are many taxpayers who do not want their money going to fund values they do not accept. For example, people who do not belong to a religious sect would most likely not want to involuntarily support that sect and people who oppose abortion would not want state funds supporting abortion.

What might seem to be an obvious counter is that there are people who do not want their money to go to public schools because of their values. So, if it is accepted that public money can go to public schools, it should also be allowed to flow into value-based charter schools. After all, if state money should be denied to anything that some people oppose based on their values, almost all public funding would cease.

The reply to this is that public schools are controlled by the public, typically through elected officials. As such, people do have a choice regarding the content and experiences offered by public schools. While people will not always get what they want, they do have a role in the process. Public money is thus being spent in accord with what the public wants, as determined by this process. That people do not always get what they want is how democracy works.

 In contrast, the public does not have comparable choice when it comes to value-based charter schools. They are, by their very nature, outside of the public education system. This is not to say that there should not be such value-based schools, just that they should be in the realm of private choice rather than public funding.

To use a road analogy, imagine that Billy believes that it is offensive in the eyes of God for men and women to drive on the same roads and he does not want his children to see such blasphemy. Billy has every right to stay off the public roads and every right to start his own private road system on his property. However, he does not have the right to expect public road money to be diverted to his private road system so that he can exercise his choice.

Billy could, however, argue that as a citizen he is entitled to his share of the public road money. Since he is not using the public roads, the state should send him that share so that he might fund his private roads. He could get others to join him and pool these funds, thus creating his value-based charter roads. If confronted by the objection that the public should not fund his values, Billy could counter by arguing that road choice should not be a luxury that must be purchased. Rather, it is an entitlement that the state is obligated to provide.

This points to a key part of the matter about public funding for things like public roads and public education: are citizens entitled to access to the public systems or are they entitled to the monetary value of that access, which they should be free to use elsewhere? My intuition is that citizens are entitled to access to the public system rather than to a cash payout from the state. Citizens can elect to forgo such access, but this does not entitle them to a check from the state. As a citizen, I have the right to use the public roads and send any children I might have to public schools. However, I am not entitled to public money to fund roads or schools that match my values just because I do not like the public system. As a citizen, I have the right to try to change the public system and that is how democratic public systems are supposed to work. As such, while the ideological choice argument is appealing, it is not compelling.

In the previous essay I considered the monopoly argument for them. On this view, charter schools break the state’s harmful monopoly on education. It is worth noting that the state does not have a monopoly on education (there are private, non-charter schools). Instead, the state schools often have a monopoly on public money and charter schools break this monopoly by receiving public money. This, it is argued by charter school proponents, allows for more choice. They are right. But not all choices are good choices.

Without charter schools, people have one less type of alternative to publics schools. But there are alternatives. One is home schooling. While this is appealing to some, it has obvious limits and doing it well demands much of the parents. Another alternative is attending a non-charter private school. While these schools can provide excellent education, they are also often known for being expensive. As such, they are usually only an option for those who can afford them. Because charter schools receive public money, they can provide an alternative to public schools for those who cannot afford a private school. However, there is the question of why there should be such a choice and why people would take it.

Proponents of charter schools often claim charter schools provide better education than public schools or have some other advantage, such as being safer. Proponents of charter schools point to failing public schools and their various problems as support for their view. While this is a rational argument, it does raise some concerns.

One concern is that while there are bad public schools and excellent charter schools, there are also excellent public schools and awful charter schools. As such, there is nothing intrinsic to the public system that necessitates its badness nor anything intrinsic to the charter system that necessitates its superiority. This raises the question about what factors determine school quality.

The easy and obvious answer is funding. It is no accident that the best schools tend to be in affluent neighborhoods and the worst schools tend to be in poor areas. After all, most public school funding is local and based on property taxes. As such, high value property generates more funding for schools. Low value property generates less. Naturally, this is not the whole story for school funding, but it is an important part. It is also worth noting that it is not just community wealth that is a factor. Community health is also important for the quality of education. After all, stable communities that have families actively involved in the school can create a very good educational experience for the children. However, wealth and health often travel hand in hand.

Parents usually prefer their children to attend the best schools. This is why parents who have the income buy houses in the best school districts. This provides another limit to choice: while anyone can attend the best public schools, they must be able to afford to live in the districts that have the best schools. This public school is analogous to private schools; one must pay to be able to choose to attend. An appealing promise of charter schools is that children can escape the poor schools and go to a superior charter school, using public money rather than needing to rely on the resources of the family.

While this is appealing, there are obvious problems. One is that poor schools will become poorer as they lose students and will decline until only those who cannot escape remain as students. This is like spending a fortune on lifeboats for an ailing ship rather than using the money to fix it.

Of course, this analogy could be countered by saying that the public-school ship is doomed and the only viable option is to escape. This is a reasonable counter. If a school is so badly wrecked that it cannot be saved, then escaping to another school would be as sensible as fleeing a sinking ship. The challenge is, however, showing that this should be a charter school and not a new public school.

 Another concern is that it would seem to make more sense to use the public money to improve the public school so that parents would want their children to attend. After all, if parents want to choose good schools, the best use of public money would seem to be to make public schools better. Since there are excellent public schools, this is something that can be done with proper funding and a strong community. As noted above, there is no special magic to charters that makes them inherently better than public schools. To use another analogy, the charter school argument is like pointing to the poorly maintained roads of a community and saying that the solution is not to fix the roads, but to use the public money to put in another set of roads adjacent to the existing roads. It would seem to make much more sense to fix the existing public roads rather than building charter roads.

Given the above discussion, the choice argument for charter schools based on quality does not appear compelling. Unless it can be shown that charter schools are inherently better than public schools in virtue of being charters, then it would be better to improve the quality of existing public schools rather than siphoning away public money to charter schools. There are, however, other factors that figure into offering choices in education. In the next essay I will look at the appeal of ideological choice: charter schools can offer an ideological or theological alternative to public schools.