Won't somebody please think of the children.

More shocking news. School systems in wisconsin (and therefore students) are better off now that unions have been curbed. Shocking i know. Although i don't think even unions would have argued that cutting union power could possibly hurt students in the short run. That's just crazy. The unions/teachers position aught to be that in the long term you won't get as many good teachers because people who might have become teachers will decide against it when they realize the poor wages/treatment non unionized teachers have. I'm not sure i believe that, but it's a legitimate argument. But in the short term teachers don't have anywhere to go. The same teachers will be teaching next year as last year, only now they will make less money which leaves more money for the school. To hire more teachers, or get new books/computers, or whatever. We have yet to see what the future holds for wisconsin teachers. When measured in absolute terms they rank as one of the better states for education, but when measurements are controlled for race they fall way down the list. (They have all white kids who generally perform better than hispanics or african americans but their white kids don't do better than most other states, and the hispanic and african american kids they have don't do better either. So once race is controlled for the performance is really mediocre.) I'm sure their will be a lot of eyes on wisconsin and what test results are in the next few years. This may give teachers the perverse motivation to do a bad job so kids do poorly and they can blame this change in the law. On the other hand they may fear for their job and thus work harder to make sure the kids do well. We'll just wait and see.