Oh, I think a great deal can be learned. It's just that Leo and I disagree about the lessons. I think worker participation is a vital goals for unions to fight for, but it's got to be in another framework than the Staurn one, in which the management makes the decisions and the workers participate in their implementation to reach management goals.
OK, Leo wants me to talk about public education, which is something about which I know anything only as a former public school student and current parent and PTA member. (Auto I actually worked in, at least on the legal end, and I did legal work connected with Saturn--defending it, as it happens, against a catatrophically stupid ADA lawsuit. ) Given my ignorance, I will comment ignorantly on Leo's proposals:
>
>As for concrete examples on the table which he wants so badly, I have
>provided quite a few from education, and Justin has chosen to ignore every
>one -- (a) establishing committees with a majority of teachers the
>authority to make personnel decisions, such as hiring, transfer in, tenure,
>etc.;
Sounds good to me, at least in the abstract.
(b)
>establishing systems of peer evaluation, peer review and peer intervention
>as opposed to traditional supervisory relationships;
I don't know what this means, but if we could get rid of the ed bureaucracy, I think it would be progress. I don't see how theteachers could do any worse in administering public schools than the bureaucracy does.
(c) teacher controlled,
>school based professional development focusing on the acquisition and
>honing of teaching skills; (d) apprenticeship and mentoring relationships
>for novice teachers to learn the skills of the teaching draft; (e) capacity
>of teachers to establish school specific class schedules rather than being
>forced to fit into a factory model with invariable, identical classes of
>invariable, identical length, and a school run by bells; (f) teacher
>control of curriculum design and implementation.
These sound all right, so far as I understand them.
_Labor Notes_/Solidarity activists in
>teacher unions and education oppose them all, portraying them as teachers
>taking on management functions -- an act of class betrayal to be avoided at
>all costs.
I am not aware of these positions. I suspect a lot of it depends on how they are proposed--whether they are demands won by rank-and-file controlled unions or imposed from above by business unionists. The devil, moreover, is in the details.
>
>And speaking of particulars, it would also be interesting to know if Justin
>agrees with the line taken by _Labor Notes_/Solidarity activists in teacher
>unions and education that there are no common interests between management
>and labor in public education, that labor has no responsibility to defend
>public education against privatization, or to work to ensure the quality of
>the education provided to poor and working class communities.
I am not aware of this position; I do not think that Soli/LN supports this view.
He might even
>offer an opinion if he agrees with the book just published by one of the
>major education commentators to appear in _Against the Current_, Harry
>Brighouse, which argues for vouchers and a free market in education, rather
>than a public education system?
Harry quit Soli some time ago when he gave up on socialism. I am sorry to hear that he has gone so far to the right. I am a market socialist, but education is a public good.
>--jks
>
>
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