Unionization Responsible for Educational Decline

Brilliant (I've seen her present a paper, trust me on this) Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby published a study last year that has just been brought to my attention. She and co-author Andrew Leigh discovered that compression of the teacher salary scale explains the overwhelming majority of declining teacher quality over the past several decades.

The percentage of teachers coming out of the nation's top universities has been cut in half since 1964, and the Hoxby/Leigh analysis concludes that 80 percent of that drop can be attributed to the compression of the teacher pay curve that has resulted from collective union bargaining. The unions have made it so that teachers are paid roughly the same amount based on time served, with no consideration given to relative performance in the classroom. That, demonstrate Hoxby and Leigh, has resulted in bright female college students opting in increasing numbers for fields other than teaching.