Edward Glaeser: belief

Transcript context

…What’s your political economy model of the persistence of that problem? Why doesn’t the median voter in the city just fix that? We all want better schools. I think it’s very hard to change things because there are very powerful entrenched interests in schools and because schools are somewhat complicated. Unlike policing, principals cannot immediately tell teachers how to change their behavior, whereas police chiefs can actually change what their officers do on a dime. It’s very, very hard to get teachers to change. Consequently, working change in the schools is incredibly hard. Now, we could move much more radically to vouchers to add competition. I think, in many cases, that would be a great thing to do, but it’s been very hard to move that politically, partially because of the strong opposition of the teachers’ unions. One of the things that we push in our book is something that feels more like wraparound, after-school, summertime vocational training, competitively sourced, pay-for-performance because you know, when someone’s a plumber, whether they’ve learned how to do this or not. You allow a full degree of competition, and you can do it in a way that completely bypasses the unions. I’ve been on the edges of this reform movement for 20 years now, and it’s hard to be very hopeful about it, in part because the political economy is just difficult because there are teachers who vote who are very anxious not to see change, even as they are often doing heroic work in the classroom themselves. Are cities, as a result, just population sinks? If you think of population shrinkage as a major problem in parts of the developed world — obviously Japan, Italy, Singapore, South Korea, maybe the United States — and fertility in cities is below replacement level. Aren’t cities a big problem, and our founding fathers were right? We should be suspicious of cities? They can’t fix their own schools. Education is super important. They’re taking away people, which is also a fiscal problem.…

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