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Are Ontario Teachers’ Unions Bad for Your Health?
Today, Adam Radwanski is writing about Ontario’s $24.7-billion deficit and the danger that it will turn into a long-term structural one. Speculating on what the government will do, Radwanski notes that the only two portfolios with potentially-significant savings are Education and Health. Of the two, Education has more room for cost-cutting, Radwanski writes, but the premier is “not about to pick a fight with teachers, whose salaries would offer the main opportunity for belt-tightening”. As a result, Radwanski thinks the government is likely to try to find its savings in the health care portfolio.
There is, of course, no evidence that the huge increases in teachers’ salaries year after year after year (teachers can earn almost $100,000 now) has led to higher academic achievement or increased parental satisfaction. It’s kind of like raising the cost of low-octane gas. We just pay more, without anything to show for it.
So if Ontario patients start finding it even harder to get a family doctor or the wait times for specialists start getting even longer, they can thank their not-so-friendly teachers’ unions. Of course, few union officials will be personally affected by the consequences of their actions, since their own salaries are high enough that they can afford to go to the States when they get sick.
Of course we have the fact that in the USA the highly unionized states have much higher test results than the states known as “Right-to-Work” states where there are not closed shops for teachers. There is a direct relationship between highly unioized states and good test scores. The states that pay the least also have the lowest scores. In Canada, Alberta pays the highest teacher wages and has the best test results. The Atlantic provinces which pay the lowest wages and spend the least on education have the worst results.
The OECD, the think tank of western capitalism, says one of the reasons Finland has the best system in the world is because they spend the most. Go figure.