Look at What Those Horrible Unionized Public School Teachers Have Done

They've done what everybody said they never could: raise reading and math scores for ALL eighth-graders for 20 years.

Kevin Drum:

The charts below are taken directly from the most recent NAEP report card, generally viewed as the "gold standard" among measures of student achievement. Here are the results among eighth-graders over the past 20 years in reading:

Overall scores are up.
White scores are up.
Black scores are up.
Hispanic scores are up.

And for math:

Overall scores are way up.
White scores are way up.
Black scores are way up.
Hispanic scores are way up.

Obviously it would be nice to be doing even better. It would be nice if black and Hispanic scores were catching up faster. We still have plenty of lousy schools that we should be working hard to improve. And achievement results among twelfth-graders are more ambiguous. School reform is an important topic and worth spending a lot of time on.

Still, keep these basic results in the back of your minds. Contrary to widespread opinion, our children are doing better today than they were 20 years ago. We're making progress, not falling ever further behind.

Click here to see the charts.

Time after time after time, when public employees - with their unions and their health insurance and their paid sick time and their defined-benefit pensions - go up in direct comparison to privatized, corporate employees - with their minimum wage and no benefits and massive profits for owners - public employees turn out to be not just less expensive, but far more efficient and effective than their modern serf competition.

Liberals created the civil service system of professional public employees more than a century ago. We were right about it then, and we're still right about it now.