The Los Angeles teachers union this week joined a three-day strike by school service workers, such as custodians and cafeteria workers. This means 400,000 students were locked out for three days. Many of these students get their only square meal of the day at school.
It’s not a surprise that the teachers union put its interests above the students. What’s rich is that the teachers union contract is the reason the school district lacks resources to pay service workers more.
Read MoreJonah Goldberg and Philip Howard offer some “fiendishly nerdy ramblings on the nature of public sector unions” and “some hopeful thoughts on how America’s legal and legislative systems could be improved.”
Read MoreAccountability is basically nonexistent in American government today. Performance doesn’t matter; many public managers tell me they’ve never seen a public employee dismissed for poor performance. The Minneapolis Police Department had received 2,600 complaints in the decade before the killing of George Floyd in 2020. Twelve led to discipline, of which the most severe was a 40-hour suspension.
Read MoreThe Wall Street Journal’s Paul Gigot interviews Philip Howard about Not Accountable.
Read MoreOn Wednesday, April 19, Common Good and Columbia University’s Center on Capitalism and Society will host a morning forum “Re-empowering Human Agency.” The event will bring together leading scholars and practitioners to explore how to overhaul legacy bureaucracies that stifle human responsibility. These legal structures have grown ever-denser over the past 70 years, not only in the United States but in virtually all developed countries.
Read MoreIn “Not Accountable,” Philip Howard shows in vivid detail how such practices have made government at all levels unmanageable, inefficient and opposed to the common good. He argues that, in fact, public unions—that is, unions whose members work for the government—are forbidden by the Constitution. The argument, he notes, would have been familiar to President Franklin Roosevelt and George Meany, the longtime president of the AFL-CIO.
Read MorePhil is a New York lawyer, author and original thinker whose new book, Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions, is making waves. We talk here about how to make government work better in the face of entrenched interest groups, especially teachers unions and other government employee unions.
Read MoreRich Valdés interviews Philip Howard about Not Accountable.
Read MoreWe read this week, in a column by teachers union president Randi Weingarten, that teachers unions “empower teachers’ professionalism,” cause “higher student achievement,” were heroic during COVID, and create “a more just and fair society.” Ms. Weingarten also accuses Philip Howard of “empty rhetoric.” So let’s look again at the facts: Near-zero accountability, endemic failure of many inner city schools, refusal to return to the classroom during COVID until six months to a year after other schools reopened, and political bullying aimed at closing high-performing charter schools.
Read MoreMr. Howard, a lawyer and writer, first noticed how unions stymie governance during his public service in New York as a member of a neighborhood zoning board and chairman of the Municipal Art Society. “I kept wondering why my friends who had responsible jobs in government couldn’t do what they thought was right,” he recalls. That might be speeding up a land-use review for a construction project or approving repairs on a school building.
Read MoreSchoolchildren all learn that the spoils system in the 19th century was evil. No matter how inept, political hacks got and kept government jobs. The currency was campaign support: Public jobs were for sale to the highest bidder. The idea of “good government” was an oxymoron.
Fast forward to today. No matter how inept, public employees keep their jobs.
Read MoreJoe Selvaggi interviews Philip Howard about Not Accountable.
Read MoreCalifornia Policy Center President Will Swaim interviews Philip Howard about Not Accountable.
Read MoreWhich is the party of good government? Democrats like to claim that mantle, but Joe Klein in his new Substack "Sanity Clause" describes how public employee unions are "an issue no Democrat wants to talk about." Klein, former senior columnist at TIME and best-selling author, is clear-eyed about the unholy alliances that make liberal sanctimony so hard to take. Fixing lousy schools and toxic police cultures is impossible as long as public employee unions call the shots.
Read MoreThe Wall Street Journal’s Paul Gigot interviews Philip Howard about Not Accountable.
Read MoreThe clearest case against [public unions’] flagrant distortion of American democracy is made in a new book Not Accountable by Philip K. Howard, a lawyer who has been a lonely voice for common sense governance since his brilliant book, The Death of Common Sense, in 1994. … If you are interested in your progeny not having their intellects stunted by mediocre martinets, you should read this book.
Read MoreHere’s the public failure of the week: Twenty-three schools in Baltimore have not one student who is "proficient" in math—i.e., performing at grade level. Another 20 schools have only one or two students who are proficient. In Chicago, Wirepoints discovered, 33 schools similarly have no student proficient in math, and another 22 schools have no student proficient in reading.
Read MorePhilip Howard talks about Not Accountable with Michael Taylor.
Read MorePhilip Howard talks about Not Accountable with former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.
Read MoreAEI President Robert Doar moderates a conversation with Philip Howard about Not Accountable.
Read More
