Those interested in reducing meaningful economic inequality would thus be well advised to focus on education reform. And forget about adding new layers of bureaucracy and top-down controls. Real improvements will come from challenging the moribund state-school monopoly with greater competition.Ezra says:
Responding to that sort of despair by trying to break the teacher's unions is truly an astonishingly narrow and inadequate solutionI don't put any stock in Cato's voucher-mania, but it's a mistake to assume that every call for more competition in education, challenging the monopoly, etc., is necessarily about breaking teachers unions. For an example, look no further than today's front-page New York Times story about former Democratic fundraiser and Rock the Vote founder Steve Barr, who's challenging urban school districts by opening new charter schools with unionized teachers. Barr says, "If the district doesn’t work with me, I’ll compete with them and take their kids."
The point being, while one could probably accurately surmise that Lindsey wouldn't mind breaking teachers unions, its perfectly possible to accomplish what he advocated for in a pro-union context. Not all attempts to introduce competition into the education system mask a dastardly anti-labor agenda. Plus, given that most serious education observers--left and right--agree that many school systems suffer from moribund bureaucracies in need of reform, implicitly putting unions on the wrong side of that argument isn't doing them any favors.
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