Audience Capture
So now you're not running a school for the sake of the kids. You're running a school for the sake of the teachers who are in it.
The following is Principle 8, from Matthew Yglesias's Nine Principles for Common Sense Democrats and then Yglesias's elaboration on that principle during a discussion with Sam Harris:
Public services and institutions like schools deserve adequate funding, and they must prioritize the interests of their users, not their workforce or abstract ideological projects.
I'm thinking, you know, especially about public schools and teachers' unions, although to an extent, also police forces and the cop unions there and other kinds of public services.
I mean, you know, every center-left political party in the world faces some version of this dilemma, right? You're the political party that believes that we should have public services and that we need to invest money in educating kids. So naturally, you become the party that teachers want to vote for, which is good. But you can become a party that is captured by them, right?
And so now you're not running a school for the sake of the kids. You're running a school for the sake of the teachers who are in it. And that can be very bad. That can be very dysfunctional. We saw it with the COVID shutdowns of schools. You see it with, you know, nitty-gritty stuff about the compensation schemes that are at work there, all kinds of things like that. And there's been a tendency, I think, in recent years for the teacher community to start pushing a lot of sort of questionable ideological ideas around race, around all kinds of different things as an alternative to doing what people want them to do, which is just, like, teach people how to read.
