Democrats should fire bad teachers and bad cops

Standing up for workers doesn't mean letting public sector unions undermine public services

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signed a bill enhancing public sector pension benefits last year, which influenced two bond agencies’ decision to downgrade Chicago’s credit. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

“We’re taking The Argument to San Francisco! This Wednesday, Kelsey Piper and Jerusalem Demsas are debating whether AI can help humans cure cancer. Jerusalem is bullish; Kelsey is skeptical.

And you won’t just be watching. You’ll get to join in on the argument, too.

May 13 at The Chapel from 7 to 10 p.m.

Come argue with us! RSVP here.

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The left has two competing impulses: Expand high-quality government services and embrace the public sector union agenda.

But those two impulses are in tension with one another — and too many Democrats are in denial about that. At its core, the problem is that public sector unions generally fight to minimize differences among employees, including both standouts at the top and weak links at the bottom.

That means governments cannot recruit and retain the best workers or manage up or out the worst performers. That, in turn, badly degrades the quality of government service in ways that damage the Democrats’ own cause.

In California, for example — as Zach Liscow at Yale Law School and two coauthors recently showed — higher-quality engineers saved the state a ton of money on transportation projects. When these engineers retired, project costs rose by six times their wages.

And no wonder those excellent engineers retired. Good engineers can earn much more in the private sector. The same is true for excellent technologists, who can save governments millions on vendors but are often paid far below average market levels. Higher pay for effective teachers has likewise been a part of performance gains for schools in the District of Columbia and Dallas.

But labor serves to compress pay across jobs and reject salary differences based on performance altogether. Excessive job protection for poor performers has an even greater effect on government results.

Although few in number, the worst employees in most jobs are very bad — worse than the bell curve would predict. These “bad apples” can also spoil morale and productivity for others.

First, consider schools. Students with the least effective teachers earn less as adults, save less for retirement, and are less likely to attend college. They even have more kids as teenagers. Raj Chetty and his coauthors found that replacing the worst 5% of teachers with an average teacher would raise the present value of an average classroom’s lifetime earnings by more than $250,000.

Now, consider policing. Max Schanzenbach and Kyle Rozema found that the worst 1% of officers, as measured by misconduct allegations against them, cost their departments four times as much as an average officer in payouts to civil-rights plaintiffs. Other research indicates that bad cops make a disproportionate number of low-quality arrests — which is to say, arrests that don’t lead to charges or convictions.

Under collective bargaining agreements, government dismissal processes are often incredibly onerous. Across multiple rounds of review, the government must extensively document and defend multiple efforts to help employees succeed.

In New York State’s prisons, a Marshall Project report found that the state succeeded in dismissing corrections officers for excessive use of force in fewer than 10% of cases. In the 2011 to 2012 school year, for every 1,000 teachers, only one with tenure was fired or nonrenewed.