China Details Missing Billions

From the Wall Street Journal:

In a report that underscores the depth of official corruption in China, auditors discovered that 234.7 billion yuan ($34.3 billion) disappeared from public funds in the first 11 months of this year, state media reported.

Cases involving 67 senior officials and 164 others were handed over to judicial authorities.

Premier Wen Jiabao has called on state auditors to review public-investment projects to help avoid embezzlement and waste, Xinhua news agency reported.

The auditors said that in addition to the money that government officials embezzled, 16.3 billion yuan was wasted during the same period, Xinhua reported.

Private vs. Public Sector Pay

Economix has posted a chart illustrating compensation breakdowns between private and public sector employees:

While pay disparities between the public and private sector are pervasive, I try to avoid broad comparisons like this. Averages are terribly misleading, especially when the inputs are different. The characteristics of private and public sector workers are not identical. We should, therefore, not expect equal pay.

Nevertheless, when comparing likes, I would still anticipate public sector employees to earn more than private sector employees.

Unions Gaining on Charter Schools

The New York Times published an interesting piece on charter schools:

Charter schools, which are publicly financed but managed by groups separate from school districts, have been a mainstay of the education reform movement and widely embraced by parents. Because most of the nation’s 4,600 charter schools operate without unions, they have been freer to innovate, their advocates say, allowing them to lengthen the class day, dismiss underperforming teachers at will, and experiment with merit pay and other changes that are often banned by work rules governing traditional public schools.

“Charter schools have been too successful for the unions to ignore,” said Elizabeth D. Purvis, executive director of the Chicago International Charter School, where teachers voted last month to unionize 3 of its 12 campuses.

But if charter schools have been so successful, why unionize them? Don’t fix whats not broken.

The standard argument generally admits the success of charter schools but contends that teachers lose bargaining power over their employers. A union, they argue, would correct this apparent problem.

If teachers felt this way, however, they would leave their charter school positions and teach in standard public schools. This is not occurring at any major scale. What is occurring is the freedom to choose. Teachers can choose to work under a unionized public school system or a non-unionized charter school system. This is the best arrangement.

Under this system teachers in the non-unionized charter schools get paid by merit, while teachers in the unionized public schools get paid by seniority. This is the tragedy of public education.

What can ultimately be gained from the partial unionization of charter schools is a case study. Will students perform better under unionized or non-unionized charter schools? That we will see. Hopefully the focus will remain on how students perform, not on how teachers feels. That concern has destroyed public education in the United States.