I think free market fans become so enamored with Friedman that they fail to see that the theory can’t always be applied to all professions. Do you really want cheap labor teachers for children? I can tell you my charter colleagues always stay young because they burn out before they reach 30. I want a veteran teacher for my own children, who teaches for good old fashioned passion and to educate youth. Were any of you in this forum educated by cheap labor? Was Friedman?

The real story here, as far as I’m concerned, is Villaraigosa’s defection from staunch city employee Union supporter to firm opponent of those organizations. When he first unsuccessfully ran against fellow Democrat James Hahn, the knock on Villaraigosa was that he was too pro-Union, and insufficiently pro-Black. Hahn was seen as more level-headed in dealing with the unions, and (through his father, a member of the county Board of Supervisors representing South Los Angeles in the sixties) seen as the champion of the Black community, though he’s white himself. Hahn self-destructed once in office, firing the city’s Black police chief (not without reason, but that’s beside the point) and allowing his administration to become embroiled in a series of financial scandals. Enter Villaraigosa, and the unions thought they were in the catbird seat, essentially running the show. They’d get to set their own salaries, retirement benefits, health care, working conditions, everything. Everyone would get big raises, not have to work so hard, and of course the benefits would be endless.

Then the economy went into the toilet, and the unions acted (or tried to) like nothing happened. They should still get their whopping raises and gold-plated benefits (after all, times are tough, aren’t they?). Pay cuts were out of the question, furloughs for workers inconceivable, and essentially anything that saved the city money was a horrible idea, almost akin to the Holocaust. Instead, the savior of the whole mess was going to be a massive tax increase passed by referendum back in the spring. The voters, unfortunately, voted it down, for the strange reason that they don’t seem to have any money in the midst of an economic downturn. The Dems in the legislature tried to convince Arnold raising taxes was a good idea, but he balked after seeing the results of the referenda (which he had supported). So now we’re stuck at every level in California. The state is broke, counties are broke, cities from Compton to Beverly Hills are broke, and since we’re governed pretty much wall to wall by Democrats, the only solution is a tax increase that will hasten the departure from the state of those few who live here and actually produce something, which is therefor taxable.

So Villaraigosa’s defected and doesn’t support his old friends in the Unions any more, because apparently he’s figured out that they’re going to bankrupt the whole thing before they’re through. He’s been weakened by a personal scandal which tarnished his image and rendered even his name a bit strange (his last name is a combination of his own growing up, and that of his now ex-wife, who divorced him after it was revealed he’d had an affair with a Spanish-language news correspondent) so you have to wonder where he sees his political career going from here. There’s been talk of him running for governor, but a Democrat who blows off the unions like this would have a hard time running for state-wide office, and he would have a pretty tough competitor in Jerry Brown, who’s been talking pretty seriously of running again. My sense is that he’s just frustrated, and might wind up back in the private sector when his term’s over.

The New Yorker (no I don’t normally read it but I did for this article) published an essay last month called the “Rubber Room” about NY’s schools. Excellent and damning essay on the inability of NY’s teacher’s unions to cooperate in ousting the bad and incompetent teachers. The average hearing to fire a NY school teacher takes 5 years! And even then an arbitrator that wnats to continue working on school cases is reluctant to really fure anyone.

LA’s union rules are just as bad: LAUSD –just like NY–pays millions to teachers each year for doing nothing–just to keep the worst ones out of the classroom.

The same union problems ruined MArtin Luther King hospital here in LA County. Horribel workers that no one could fire. The feds finally pulled its license.

Neighborhood schools worked fine when they existed for kids, not unionos. That’s what must be returned.

Privatize it all. No taxes, no public schools, no laws requiring school attendance or curriculum. Sell the land we have, and repeal every paragraph of the education code. No vouchers, no subsidies from those without children to those with kids. No government jobs and only those unions that can compete in a free market. Then things would get better. What we’d find is that large fractions of what we call education today are a complete waste of time – standing in line waiting, moving from place to place, etc. We’d find that a huge amount of the content delivered by teachers to groups can be delivered over the web just as effectively, and much less expensively. Kids would play with their neighbors to get exercise. Networks of moms would take turns hosting small groups. Specialists like music and arts teachers would make the rounds, getting paid market wages. Mandates requiring services for non-English speakers and mainstreaming of students whose intellectual development will never pay for the cost of the services delivered to them would go away. Some families would be much worse of than today, but 85-90% of all other families would be significantly better off.

What you might see is a bigger gulf between the good students and the bad students. But you can achieve that just as quickly by empowering good teachers to teach, abandoning social programs that interfere with a genuine educational experience, reinstating an authentic, achievement-based grading system, foregoing social promotion, and re-establishing the right to discipline students in schools.