This about sums it up…

The thing is, at some point our public education system will completely break down. It’s fiscally unsustainable and the product it yields isn’t competitive. The market will kill it, as the market inevitably kills all things which don’t satisfy its needs.

And that may make some people – in particular the unions and the others who make a living off the public education system – very sad.

But what’s funny is that when the public education system dies, y’know who’ll be among the prime beneficiaries?

The teachers.

Because what teachers do is inherently professional in nature. And what they do can be measured and scored. There is also a spectrum of performance within that profession – good teachers produce good students, and bad students produce crap.

So when we abandon our top-down, bureaucratic, command-and-control educational structure, and schools are on their own to attract students – either because there’s a voucher program or some other future system in place – the number one field they’ll be competing in will be that of finding the best teachers. And that means if you’re a good teacher, there will be lots of competitors for your services. And you’ll be able to bargain with those competitors over lots of things – the price of your labor, the curriculum you’ll teach, the conditions in your classroom, the rules of engagement with your students, and so on.

But the one thing that new system won’t include will be unions. Unions die amid economic competition. The auto industry proved that.