Whenever Jonathan Chait writes about the education reform movement, he should be required to put a statement at the start of it. It should be something like this: “My wife works in the education reform movement.[1] As a result of this, I have absolutely no objectivity. Unlike most of what I write about, I have no sense whatsoever for nuance. I just hate the teachers unions and what little I will say about them will represent the most extreme factions. So it is really for the best if you don’t even read what follows because I have nothing interesting to add to any discussion on the issue of education reform.” But instead, he pretends as though he were objective and interesting. Meanwhile, his readers get intellectual whiplash from one article to the next as he moves from liberal to conservative and back again.

His article today was a particularly egregious example of this, Obamans, Selling Out, and the Proxy Fight for the Democratic Party’s Future. His complaint in the article is that supporters of teachers unions attack Obama surrogates[2] rather than Obama and this is wrong because… Really, I don’t know why. He says that they don’t attack Obama himself because the President is popular inside the unions. So the union leadership is trying to protect its members in the best way that it can. And this is wrong because… Again, I don’t know.

The whole purpose of the article seems to be to allow him to write, “The splits within the Democratic Party over whether public services should be designed for the benefit of providers or consumers tend to come out at the municipal level.” Ouch! In case you missed it, Chait is saying that teachers unions are a constituency just like the the school kids. And who you gonna support, huh?! Those greedy teachers or those poor kids? Except, there’s another constituency that Chait doesn’t mention: the people employed in the education reform movement. He must know about it, because his wife works in it. It’s a constituency too.

But in the Jonathan Chait world of black and white education reform, people working for “reform” are only looking out for the kids—unlike those dirty teachers unions that would reduce the school day to 25 minutes if they could. It’s just ridiculous. My problem with the education reform movement is that it seems focused on one thing: teachers unions. It doesn’t spend its time trying to combat the very worst thing about our educational system: inequality based upon the widespread use of local property taxes to fund public education.

When it comes to the people who are always ranting about the budget deficit, Chait has no problem seeing that they aren’t interested in what they claim to be. He sees clearly that these people have ulterior motivations like cutting aid to the poor. But when it comes to education reform, Chait couldn’t be more naive. It seems to not even occur to him that some, maybe even most (Look at who funds the movement!), are not quite so pure. And that’s why his writing about education reform is useless.

[1] According to her Twitter account she is, “Director of Performance Management and Human Resources, Center City Public Charter Schools.”

[2] One of those surrogates is Education Secretary Arne Duncan, which hardly seems to apply. Would he make the same claim if liberals complained about Obama’s Defense Secretary (which we did)?

Update (22 August 2014 10:06 pm)

I want to make clear that this is not about the education reform movement not adopting my favorite issue. I’ve been attacked on this before. People will say that there is no political will to deal with the issue that I am most concerned about and ask if we shouldn’t at least do whatever it is that we can. There are a couple of issues here. One is that education funding inequality is not just any other issue. It is like taxes in the budget deficit debate. If someone isn’t willing to deal with this issue, it shows that they aren’t serious. At best it shows they only want to nibble around the edges of the problem. Another issue is: why is it politically viable to go after teachers unions and to push testing, testing, and more testing? I think a lot of it is that the people who are willing to give millions of dollars for education reform are mostly interested in something else. I’m all for things that work. But at one time, charter schools were what would save us. In fact, to many people, they still are. But it’s turned out that other than moving a lot of teachers out of unions, the charter schools haven’t done that much good. On average, they are about as good as public schools. I think I have plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the motivations of the education reform movement. And so does Jonathan Chait.

For the last few months, Dean Baker has taken to referring to the “skills gap” in a unique way. If you read the Very Serious Commentators, you will doubtless have heard about the supposed skills gap. It is a form of apologia intended to justify high unemployment. The argument goes like this: people aren’t out of work because there is a lack of jobs; rather, they are out of work because they don’t have the skills necessary for the jobs that are available. And to bolster this, the commentator will find some employer who claims that, for example, he just can’t find manufacturing workers who can do trigonometry. What is almost never stated in such articles is that the example employer is only willing to pay slightly more than minimum wage for such skills.

Baker has been saying for a while there is a skills gap: the managers of these companies that can’t find qualified employees to hire don’t know basic economics which would tell them that if they want skilled employees, they need to pay them more money. He’s joking, of course. What’s really going on is that these employers are being disingenuous. Obviously, any employer would be able to sell more stuff if he could undercut the competition by paying less than the going rate for workers. Usually, it turns out that such employers are really just conservative ideologues trying to make a political point.

Today, Baker published a related article, It’s Hard to Find Good Help, Chicago Cubs Edition. It’s the kind of story that makes me boil over with rage, because we are talking about a baseball franchise. Major League Baseball has a Congressionally created monopoly—the only one in existence. And franchises are very profitable. But they still do everything they can to screw the American worker.

According to Talking Points Memo, Cubs Cut Workers’ Hours To Avoid Obamacare Mandate, Then Disaster Struck. The Cubs management didn’t want to have to provide healthcare for their grounds crew, so they cut back their hours to less than 30 per week so they wouldn’t have to. First: the Cubs don’t already provide healthcare for their grounds crew?! Second, that is the most petty thing I’ve heard this week. The disaster was that because the crew was under-staffed, the field got muddy and the Cubs ended getting a winning game overturned. So great! They totally deserve that.

But that’s not the best part of it. The best part of it has to do with the managerial skills gap I talked about at the beginning of this. Here’s Dean Baker:

This is entirely typical. My experience in the corporate world is that there is basically no correlation between success and competence. And many managers don’t get their information about government programs from objective sources but rather from people like Michael Savage. So it isn’t surprising in the least that the Cubs management got this wrong. They are as competent as they are kind.

Update (23 August 2014 3:45 pm)

Today, Dean Baker is back with another in his series, It’s Hard To Get Good Help: Trucking Industry Edition. He explains:

This pattern will exist pretty much anywhere people claim that employers can’t find workers. You know when it is for real because wages go up sharply. Something I should have noted above: during the Great Depression, conservatives made exactly the same claims, “Workers didn’t have the right skills!” But then we geared up for World War II and suddenly all those “unemployable” workers found jobs. The skills gap was a myth then and it is a myth now.