I saw Dougj’s post on Steve Jobs and teachers’ unions and I had to weigh in. I’ve been reading a lot on unions lately. The attack on teachers’ unions specifically concerns me, because the crazed, reckless race to deregulate public schools in Ohio has led to some completely crazy unregulated for-profit grifting in Ohio and elsewhere.
What’s both interesting and truly scary about the now-rote conventional wisdom that teachers unions are to blame for whatever one hates most about public education is that there doesn’t seem to be any real basis for the claim.
There’s horrible (and true) stories about teachers’ unions, but there’s also horrible (and true) stories about non-profit charter schools, or private schools, or for-profit charter schools. You give me a teachers’ union horror story and I’ll give you a for-profit charter school horror story, in Ohio, or Florida, or Michigan. We can go back and forth for a while.
To show how silly this knee-jerk insane demonization of teachers’ unions has become, I liked this, from Matthew Di Carlo at The Shanker Blog:
For years, some people have been determined to blame teachers’ unions for all that ails public education in America. This issue has been around a long time (see here and here), but, given the tenor of the current debate, it seems to bear rehashing. According to this view, teachers unions negatively affect student achievement primarily through the mechanism of the collective bargaining agreement, or contract. These contracts are thought to include “harmful” provisions, such as seniority-based layoffs and unified salary schedules that give raises based on experience and education rather than performance.
But a fairly large proportion of public school teachers are not covered under legally-binding contracts. In fact, there are ten states in which there are no legally binding K-12 teacher contracts at all (AL, AZ, AR, GA, LA, MS, NC, SC, TX, and VA). Districts in a few of these states have entered into what are called “meet and confer” agreements about salary, benefits, and other working conditions, but administrators have the right to break these agreements at will. For all intents and purposes, these states are free of many of the alleged “negative union effects.”
Here’s a simple proposition: If teacher union contracts are the problem, then we should expect to see higher achievement outcomes in the ten states where there are no binding teacher contracts. So, let’s take a quick look at how states with no contracts compare with the states that have them.
In the table below, using data from the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), I present average scale scores for states that currently have binding teacher contracts and those that don’t. The averages are weighted by grade-level enrollment, and they include only public non-charter schools (since most charters in all states have no contracts).
Out of these ten states, only one (Virginia) has an average rank above the median, while four are in the bottom ten, and seven are in the bottom 15. These data make it very clear that states without binding teacher contracts are not doing better, and the majority are actually among the lowest performers in the nation. In contrast, nine of the ten states with the highest average ranks are high coverage states, including Massachusetts, which has the highest average score on all four tests.
If anything, it seems that the presence of teacher contracts in a state has a rather large, positive effect on achievement. Now, some may object to this conclusion. They might argue that I can’t possibly say that teacher contracts alone caused the higher scores in these states. That there are dozens of other factors besides contracts that influence achievement, such as lack of resources, income, parents’ education, and curriculum, and that these factors are at least partially responsible for the lower scores in the ten non-contract states. My response: Exactly.
In other words, it’s complicated.
I have no earthly idea why and when we all agreed to turn US education policy over to a group of completely unaccountable billionaires, but it seems both extremely unwise and anti-democratic to me. Do I want Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or any random member of the Walton family directing and dominating any debate about my kid’s public school? Am I wrong to examine motives and be a little wary when the massive Wal Mart fortune comes out strong against union workers? Seriously. This doesn’t raise alarm bells?
Nutella
Why? Because we’re turning everything over to completely unaccountable billionaires.
kay
@Nutella:
Why did Steve Jobs know more about education that you or me? Did he know more about my local schools than the people I just elected to my school board?
If so, perhaps he should have run for office.
Zifnab
No. ‘Eff that. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Teacher Unions should be trumpeting these results and pro-union Democrats should be pushing “Teacher Unionization” laws in every state that doesn’t have them, waving studies like this in anyone’s face that objects.
Yeah it is simplistic and asinine and logically flawed, but let the opposition argue over that. We have a nice, clear, bumper sticker message. Unions = Higher Test Scores. Unions = Better College Placement. Unions = Successful Students.
Run that, and run it hard. There’s no room for quibbling in the modern political climate.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
The problem, Kay, is that they’re UNIONS. What more needs to be said, everyone knows that Union anything is inherently evil, anti-business, anti-progress, and Anti-American. I mean, DUH, haven’t you gotten the talking points in the mail yet?
@Nutella:
And this too. It won’t stop until we’re the United States of ExxonVerizon.
The Moar You Know
My wife’s a teacher, I watch what she deals with every day, and I’ll keep saying this until the day I die:
American schools, in general, do a heroic job of compensating for the two things that are destroying our students: American parents and an American culture that actively despises the educated and worships the mindset and exploits of the stupid and greedy.
There is nothing wrong with American schools. The problem is, quite literally, at home.
kay
@Zifnab:
I haven’t been reading on it that long, but I have to say, nuance is the single best indicator of good faith.
If you read someone who says “longer school days! bust teachers’ unions! merit pay!”, or any overly-simplistic “solution” you’re reading a hack with an agenda other than helping children.
becca
Speaking of alarm bells, someone tossed a chemical bomb into the food tent of Occupy Maine. Luckily, no one was inside when the bomb exploded.
Sorry to go OT.
Jay in Oregon
I remember a libertarian trying out one of his favorite talking points on me: “If schools were run by tobacco companies, they’d be pushing the benefits of smoking. If the were run by beer breweries, they’d be pushing the benefits of drinking. What do you think schools run by the government are pushing?”
After a little thought, my response was “Take public financing of education away and you’ll have schools run by tobacco companies and beer breweries.”
JGabriel
It seems worth noting that every single one of those states was part of the Confederacy. It just kind of jumps out at you.
Why would the descendants of Southern traitors & insurrectionists hate teachers so much? It’s almost like they don’t want their kids learnin’ history or somethin’.
.
smith
Bill Gates is one of the leaders in trying to privatize schools and getting rid of teachers’ unions. Steve Jobs’ widow is on the board for Teach For America, Michelle Rhee’s old organization, which wants to replace unionized teachers with those who take 5 weeks of training.
They want our schools to run like a business, or to make it easier for people to understand, like a sweatshop. They want long hours with more testing, basically warehousing kids until they turn 18.
Also, there is a growing movement among the privatization crowd that parents aren’t responsible for how their kids do in school – it’s all the teachers’ fault if the child doesn’t grow up to be rich, successful, etc. Poor children should be resilient enough to overcome poverty, mom or dad not around (or in jail), hunger, etc. Of course a lot of parents are going to get on board with this line of thinking – crappy parents always like to be absolved of any responsibility. It makes people feel better when it’s “someone else’s fault.”
You want to play stump the wingnut? Ask them to explain why states that have unionized teachers routinely outperform states that have non-union teachers. Not once have I ever received an explanation for this by the anti-union crowd.
kay
@smith:
Yeah. That scares me. Because you know what we call that employee in the for-profit market-driven world that has (thankfully) not yet been imposed on unknowing and childish second-graders?
A temp.
JGabriel
@kay:
All the teachers would have committed suicide — but the school foyers, and any other interfaces, would have looked fabulous.
.
PeakVT
This doesn’t raise alarm bells?
They’re deafening over here, but I’m a DFH so what do I know?
Alison
@kay:
I think this comes out of the general way a lot of people in this country view rich people – that they got rich by being so much smarter or harder working or just plain better than those who are not rich. The Cain “blame yourself for being poor or out of work” way of thinking leads to “praise yourself for being super crazy rich”, no matter how you got there, no matter if you were born into privilege or got lucky or crushed others on your way to the upper echelons, whatever. So many people see wealth as an indicator of just flat being more deserving and a better person overall, and thus they think those wealthy people’s thoughts and opinions are therefore more worthy of being heeded and more likely to be right.
(Except when it’s Warren Buffet saying he should pay more taxes. I guess liberalness overrides the “rich = right” mentality.)
Samara Morgan
/yawn
what is more frightening is the merit pay objective the glibertarians (including “Our” EDK) and academic administrators are pushing now.
Its basically NCLB for teachers. Having failed to make all children in America above average, now local school boards will attempt to make all teachers above average. They are ginning a set of fantasy performance metrics for teachers based on some sort of triangulation on “goals” and “successes”.
Basically this will drive all good teachers out of the system and retain the shysters that can “perform” to the metrics.
the same dumb cattle that bought into NCLB will fall for this hook, line and sinker.
get ready for America to be 45th and 50th in science and math in the next decade.
joes527
@becca: from what I’ve seen someone threw a dry ice bomb. These are a youtube staple.
Describing this as a chemical bomb is a bit over the top.
These things are pranks. (yes, dangerous pranks, and someone definitely could have been hurt by it) But until someone puts an eye out, it will be considered outhouse tipping level prank.
Yes, it was a bad thing and could have ended very badly, but that describes most pranks that folks laugh at right up to the point where someone gets hurt.
soonergrunt
@Zifnab: THIS
Samara Morgan
@smith: no, they want to create No Teacher Left Behind.
kay
@JGabriel:
How would it go if I called Bill and Melinda Gates and just sort of opined on their childrens’ education, or the length of the day their children should be in school?
Would that go well, do you think, that helpful advice?
I’ll make a donation to the school fundraiser! I always need wrapping paper.
slag
@kay:
Exactly! As a designer, Jobs should have been uniquely aware of the limits of his individual experience as a user of the educational system(s). The fact that he obviously wasn’t aware of those limits should raise questions as to his judgment in this area. And the fact that it didn’t raise questions in some circles should raise questions as to the judgment of all those in those circles. But instead–look over there–iPod!
RIP, Steve Jobs, Apparent Asshole with Several Good Qualities that had Limits of which He Seems to Have Been Unaware
Jeff Fecke
@The Moar You Know:
Add in the other thing schools do: Serve as a social services center of last resort.
My mom’s a principal at a school with high poverty. A not-insignificant part of her job is making sure that students have basic supplies, that their parents (many of whom don’t speak English) are kept in the loop, and dealing with incredibly high student turnover, because parents are poor and living in apartments.
She and the teacher at her school bust their behinds to help these students, and they have a great deal of success; nevertheless, because we use high-stakes testing as our only metric of school progress, they come up as a “bad” school. (Fast fact: if you’re a student taking the fourth-grade test, and your fourth-grade teacher heroically raises your scores from first-grade level to third-grade level, you count as a failure. If you come into fourth-grade reading at a fifth-grade level and your fourth-grade teacher actually causes you to drop to a fourth-grade level, you count as a success. Awesome metric, that.)
Nothing would help public schools more than robust investment in the social safety net, which would allow students more stability, allow parents to engage more successfully in their children’s lives and schooling, and generally give all children a better shot at life. But a robust social safety net would require Paris Hilton to pay a bit more in taxes, so it’s easier to attack teacher’s unions.
(Incidentally, in Finland, which is the Country We All Must Try To Be Like, teachers are a) unionized and b) very well compensated. I’m sure it’s an accident their education system is doing well.)
kay
@slag:
I would think tech people might be interested in a little hard information. Like the fact that charter schools don’t do any better, across the board, than old-fashioned public schools.
Nah. Why look at that? Full steam ahead on opening them!
Redshift
If we had a press willing to report that kind of logic, and public that could understand it in the face of a stream of conservative disinformation, they’d also understand that the only economic difference between “right to work” states and union states is that the median wage in “right to work” states is lower.
smith
Here in NY, teachers evaluations are now going to be based on how the kids do on the standardized tests. My sister was telling me this story about how the school district she’s in took kids who had failed the 7th grade and were being held back, and how the school district decided that the kids who failed should be moved up to the 8th grade anyway.
So these kids who failed the 7th grade and should have been held back, were rubber-stamped into the 8th grade by the superintendent’s office because it looks bad if the district has so many failing kids. These kids who couldn’t pass the 7th grade tests are now going to be expected to pass the 8th grade tests?
The 8th grade teachers are beside themselves because they are now being evaluated on how the kids perform on the test, which means that the 8th grade teachers could be the best teacher ever but still will get a crappy evaluation because the superintendent demanded that failing kids couldn’t be held back because of political reasons. And yet when the kids fail, everything will be placed on the backs of the teachers, not central office, not the superintendent, not the administrators, etc. You couldn’t pay me a zillion dollars to be a teacher nowadays.
JGabriel
smith:
From a policy perspective, there’s not a lot you can do directly about crappy parenting — much of which, it should be added, is probably due to crappy employers overworking and underpaying workers, many of whom are also parents.
Indirectly, it might help to pay people better, but that’s the kind of solution that rich billionaires would never think of.
So instead, as a rich billionaire, you’re looking for ways to get more out of teachers for less money, which means breaking the unions. And if the education still sucks at the end of the enterprise, well, at least your taxes are lower.
.
harlana
Not a teacher, don’t have kids, support public schools through my property taxes and I am sick to death of hearing about this. Is this really the best they’ve got, picking on teachers? Pathetic.
Same thing as when everytime I turn on the teevee, ALL I hear about is reducing TAXES. What about jobs? They are trying to hypnotize the public into thinking tax cuts for the rich will create jobs. Well, not that they weren’t doing it before, but boy oh boy, seems like since OWS got started, they’re really ramping up that rhetoric. And they don’t even get the fact that people aren’t buying it anymore.
HEH.
slag
@kay:
Not only tech people but business people! You know, those bloodless, data-driven decision-makers who don’t let their icky feelings get in the way of them making the tough calls.
DougJ is right. Corporations really are just a cover for sociopathy.
kay
@smith:
And that worries me, because what if the one and only thing between a teacher and the “merit bonus” is a kid who just isn’t doing well, for any one of a number of reasons?
They’re now adversaries, these two people, one of whom is a child? Great. That’s a great idea. Make her pay depend on him not screwing up. I’m sure that will be a warm and fulfilling relationship.
Villago Delenda Est
There you go again, bringing the liberally biased scientific method into the argument again. Of course this will make our arguments look moronic! It’s liberally biased! That’s what fucking facts do to our arguments! That’s why we can’t allow, ever, factually based reasoning processes to get in the way of our ideological, faith based cant!
Duh!
JGabriel
kay:
Don’t know, but, going by the design of Windows, if Bill Gates were on the school board you’d probably never get rid of the unions. Instead, he would add slews and slews of ultimately productivity draining new features, while keeping the unions as a subsystem, for the sake of compatibility.
.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@kay:
It’s such a stupid self-fulfilling policy too. Schools with lots of floundering students tend to be the ones that need funding the most, as most those students suffer from outdated material and other ways schools could reasonably help counteract problem factors in students’ lives (like extra curricular clubs and focused tutoring). But nupe, if the kids screw up, it must be solely the schools’ fault, so you get no money, your teachers get an F, and hey, why don’t we just sell you off to a big corp, since they obviously know how to teach kids. I.E. Beatings Will Continue Until
MoraleGrades Improve.Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
There’s probably a weak positive correlation between well compensated public servants and better education outcomes. Those well compensated public employees tend to live where they work so money continues to circulate in the local economy, helping to limit the extent of an economic down turn, hence the poverty rate, which does affect educational outcomes.
gene108
@kay:
Entrepreneurs like Jobs do have hard information about charter schools: They make an excellent investment opportunity.
The problem with America is there are very few emerging markets for businesses to tap. Consumer goods – T.V.’s, refrigerators, automobiles, telephones, etc. – are ubiquitous.
The market for these goods is not going to grow substantially, unless there’s a new technological break through (HDTV’s, cellphones, smartphones, etc.) that makes the prior generation of these goods outdated and even then the growth will only be until the new generation of goods is adopted.
Education has been monopolized by the government.
If private companies could get a greater share of the education investment the U.S. makes, you have a new emerging market, where businesses can invest in and expect growth, as more and more parts of education are privatized.
Samara Morgan
@smith: its for the teachers Own Good.
Martin
But they aren’t directing or dominating any debate. Fuck, Jobs didn’t even make those statements in a public forum – it was made in a private meeting – one that Obama sought out, not Jobs and presumably to stimulate a discussion – so they weren’t even on-the-record statements presumably using his position to give it weight.
If it wasn’t for this biography, nobody would even know that he recently held such a position – he made two mentions of public school policy a decade+ ago and has said nothing publicly on the topic since. How the fuck could he be influencing policy? If Jobs wanted a pulpit to speak from, he didn’t even need to ask for one – the media were constantly begging him to provide one. He only spoke at one non-Apple event in the last 10 years – the All Things D conference. He turned down pretty much every other request to speak. So, he didn’t use that to further an agenda. Further, he didn’t lobby Obama on this topic, Obama invited him to come and discuss this very thing. So what was Jobs and the rest of the group supposed to do – sit there and say nothing when invited by the President for a discussion?
And Jobs was so fucking influential at advancing his no-union, year-round agenda that even when Palo Alto was discussing year-round schools, he failed to win it over. Apparently he couldn’t even influence his own school district.
I’m not defending his opinions on education here – Steve had some pretty out there opinions on things – but I don’t see any real evidence that he used his position to advocate for them. He could have used Apple’s influence to push the state or even the city in one direction or another, but there’s no evidence he ever did that. Even when Apple went to the city about building their new multi-billion dollar headquarters they didn’t ask for any kind of tax provision, which would have been the most direct and effective means of influencing policy.
Samara Morgan
@gene108: yup. like college mortages, the new subprimes.
Prime paper that can be flipped, bundled, sold and resold.
sublime33
My wife was a unionized public school teacher for 14 years. I am an accountant by trade, so we had many spirited discussions over the years. The most valid criticism of the teachers is that it is very difficult to remove the poor performers and she agrees with this. The unresolved issue is merit pay, which I support IF there is an accurate measuring stick. Measuring strictly on standardized test performance is a lazy and inaccurate way to evaluate the teacher. But all parties including local tax payers like this because it allows a Gross Pointe Michigan or Highland Park Illinois to brag how well their schools are doing. And it also allows administrators in poor neighborhoods to say “what the hell did you expect for test scores?”. What they should do is evaluate same student test scores year over year by teacher. Average it over enough students, this would quickly show which teachers show improving scores and which ones have sliding scores.
And not nearly enough focus is on administrations, where at least half of the problems lie. The lowest paid administrator usually makes more the highest paid teacher, and the best teachers are encouraged to move up. That is crazy. It would be as if someone went up to Tom Brady or Albert Pujols and said “you are such a great player, we think you should move into coaching right now.”
gene108
@JGabriel:
You assume the parents of under performing children have jobs. Traditionally employment in historically poor areas has been much much lower than the national average.
The employment opportunities in these areas is also pretty low, which further compounds the problems of getting a job.
Jeff Fecke
@gene108: This.
@Martin:
Well, except for the time he used his position to directly advocate them in a closed meeting with the President of the United States.
But all of us have times when we can make policy pitches to the president, so it evens out, right?
gelfling545
@harlana: Actually, it is the best they’ve got. You see that’s the only part of the teaching-learning continuum they can mess with. There is no way to make parents behave responsibly if they choose not to; there is no way to force students to work if they choose not to (or are unable to due to a variety of social problems which we seem to choose not to address). What else is there?
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@JGabriel:
Actually that might explain Mr. Gates’ attitude. If you were to hand most software developers a magic lamp and tell them they could get 1 technical wish out of it, “fuck the legacy code and the installed base who force us to hang onto it until the entropic heat death of the universe, no matter how much we hate it and how much it gets in the way of us doing anything useful or productive” would probably rank right up at the top of the list. Never underestimate the lust that architects and designers have for starting over with a Stunde Null condition.
Culture of Truth
Anyone can work hard and make a million dollars. It takes real genius to do nothing and inherit a billion.
kay
@Martin:
Martin, that may be true of Jobs but you are dead wrong on Gates and the Walton family.
They are. They’re directing the debate. They’re doing it with massive amounts of money, either donated or directed to state legislatures.
I’ve been reading on this for months. It’s just now coming to the fore, and the only reason it’s coming to the fore is because Diane Ravitch, who was once a school reformer, won’t shut up about it. Good for her.
When the public was sold charter schools and “school choice” they were NOT informed that many of them would be for-profit. Maybe you can tell me how this is going to be regulated, once a profit motive has been introduced, but I’m (rightfully) concerned about that. I have cause, Martin. I’m looking at states like Ohio and Michigan and Florida. It’s fabulous that the Walton family want to come in and bust unions and throw some donations around but what happens after the unions are gone? I’m left with a deregulated public school system and the Waltons are down the road.
I do not want yet another entrenched for-profit industry to grow up around taxpayer funds sent to private entities. We don’t have a good track record there.
ruemara
I’m going to say something that may make some howl in disagreement. Money trumps anything else. My super hippie city is full of dissatisfied, “Obama sold us out”, I eat whole grains and tofu, I <3 #OWS, hippies who own property and have a median income of $90k. They mostly think public sector unions are ripping them off and they should give back what prior negotiations have gotten them. The tree-huggingest member of the city council would love to have an anti-union law here. But with a less biased name, the union curbing law? They ride bikes to meetings and publicly state that unions are full of nice people but they have too much power. The general public writes LTEs blaming relatively small fee increases in city services on unions, pensions, hell, it could be ACORN. Everyone's distancing themselves from unions. They're all solid democratic party members.
Money makes people douches. Not every last one, but for a significantly large portion of the population. Add in power, the rise to douchedom does become a near universal constant.
Citizen Alan
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik:
This! Every union is a slave uprising in the minds of the overclass and those who agree (whoever irrationally) with the overclass. Why do you think that the Confederate States are the ones most strongly opposed to union activity? Because every strike by a union in a Confederate state is the equivalent of Harper’s Ferry — a blow against slavery and the established order it preserves.
Ohio Mom
@kay:
About your comment about Teach for America: “you know what we call that employee in the for-profit market-driven world that has (thankfully) not yet been imposed on unknowing and childish second-graders? A temp.” — There’s an old joke about that, TFA stands for Teach for Awhile.
techno
Ok, so teacher’s unions aren’t the problem—then what is? Seriously. I am pro union to the point where I wouldn’t even consider buying a house (or having work done on mine) that wasn’t done by a union contractor, etc. In construction, union shops won’t stand for incompetents in their ranks—so why do teacher’s unions defend bumbling incompetents?
I went to schools for a total of 20 years and in that time, I had exactly two teachers that had something interesting to say. The overwhelming majority of them didn’t even know much about the subjects they taught. So unless there is a seriously upgrade in teacher skills, I would consider Jobs suggestion that we spend 11 months a year trapped with such charlatans as a freaking nightmare.
Narcissus
It seems like every time I read or watch the news there’s the same bunch of well-funded malcontents trying some new and exciting way to fuck society and civilization. Maybe they just get off on it.
slag
@Jeff Fecke:
Yep. Everyone here is in the 0.5%. I’m pretty sure.
kay
@Martin:
You know what, Martin? I don’t want the donations from the foundations and the hedge fund managers and the rest. It seems to me hedge fund mangers have enough trouble running finance, their own field, without branching out into education. I’ll make a deal with them. They can run our fabulous finance system and I’ll let school teachers run their classrooms, just like school teachers graciously allow me run my law practice.
The money comes with massive strings. We’ll muddle through here dealing with local teachers and local schools and local taxes and elected bodies to run them and all that messy and unproductive “democracy” that is SO getting in the WAY of our “competitiveness”.
dms
@Martin: Hey, any company that comes up with a slogan “Think Different” has already done enough damage to the educational system.
kay
@Ohio Mom:
We had a great summer law-student intern here who did Teach For America. Just a wonderful person.
He makes zillions of dollars as a lawyer now :) He’s quite the big shot.
Ohio Mom
@Jeff Fecke: Finland also has very, very, very low numbers of poor children, IIRC, their percent of children in poverty is in the very low single digits. Their well-paid teachers are not dipping into their wallets, as your mom probably does and my mom did, to do things like buy alarm clocks for third-graders whose parents are too disfunctional to wake them up for school.
I put this link in the last thread but I think it bears repeating. It summarizes US school achievement by school SES and compares those numbers to international assessments. Our schools that have mid-high SES stand up against schools in other industrialized countries. Our schools with low SES do not. And we have an awful lot of children in poverty. http://nasspblogs.org/principaldifference/2010/12/pisa_its_poverty_not_stupid_1.html
smith
@techno:
Yes there are bad teachers that should not be protected, but it’s not just teachers – police officers, firefighters, doctors, politicians, lawyers, etc. all refuse to police their own. It’s not just teachers that “tolerate”, in your words, “bumbling incompetents.”
slag
@smith:
Don’t forget the banksters. But I suppose ascribing incompetence to them is probably being generous.
ETA Though I should add that I don’t think the question of competence should be dismissed. Just saying that everyone’s incompetent doesn’t solve the problem. But just blaming teacher’s unions also doesn’t solve the problem. If anything, it’s probably a distraction that just makes the problem worse.
The Moar You Know
@techno: Somebody has obviously never worked construction.
I was going to respond to this with some snarky anecdotes about the pilot’s union, but this is a serious accusation that always goes unaddressed and it needs to be addressed.
Defending jobs is a function of unions. That’s what they’re supposed to do. They’re not a police force, and they do not and should never represent the interests of management. If the teacher is incompetent or worse, it is a failure of the administration and of the district to get rid of that teacher. The onus is not and should not be on the union, which is there to defend the interests of all of its members. Including those who are accused of being incompetent. It may shock you to discover that not all members of a union who are accused of something bad are guilty of the accusations.
rikyrah
My mother was a teacher, as were all of her sisters. My one aunt was the slacker in the family because she only had ONE Masters degree. I get tired of teachers being crapped upon. Nobody goes into teaching to get rich. they spend out of their pockets for a LOT of things, and this was happening even before all these budget cuts. Teachers in Urban America deserve COMBAT PAY…fuck Merit Pay. What they have to deal with on a daily basis is unreal.
I get pissed off everytime I see one of these business types put in charge of a school system. Because you know how to sell a sprocket, or some other ‘commodity’, doesn’t mean you know ANYTHING about educating children.
kay
@Martin:
I have an idea for how the Wal Mart heirs can help “education”, and it isn’t giant donations to “establish” (although not fund, taxpayers do that) charter schools.
They can pay their employees something better than a subsistance wage, and they can stop with JIT retail scheduling, which makes it impossible for those parents to have an orderly, predictable family life, because their work schedules change every 20 minutes. Forget “good daycare”. They don’t even know when they’re working next.
Let’s see if they’re serious about this, or if there’s another, less laudable goal here.
Martin
@JGabriel:
Well, that might be true in general, but I don’t think it’d apply to Jobs. He’s had a very reliable perspective, which is that things of value are worth paying for. His perspective (flawed as it may be translating from phones to education) is that if the public values education then they’ll pay for that value, and that having it hidden in the broad base of taxes tends to decouple what they value from what they pay.
That’s particularly true in CA where school funding used to be based on local property tax assessment, but long ago changed (mostly due to federal civil rights issues and then the tax reform movement) so that citizens can’t readily express that sense of value. If a CA resident wants to advocate for higher school funding, where do they do it? Property taxes here are entirely wrapped up in a 40 year old state-wide ballot initiative, so residents of a city have no way of stepping up and saying ‘hey, we’re okay with paying more if we can get better teacher salary, smaller class sizes, whatever’. It’s not an attitude that necessarily translates to other states, but has been true in CA for as long as Jobs lived here as an adult.
It’s an attitude that works fine for consumer devices because the inability to pay never plays a role. If you can’t afford an iPhone, it says nothing to whether you value it or not, you just don’t buy it. The value assessment only plays a role when you choose the iPhone over some other phone. But that can’t work in public policy. I think Jobs probably understood that as he never advocated for privatizing education, just incentivizing it within the public structure. And I think that’s not so much in dispute – everyone seems to feel that education requires some mechanism for incentives – either to encourage people to go into the field, to work at struggling schools, to improve as a teacher. The mechanism is what’s mostly in dispute.
I think Jobs is somewhat correct at least on the very diffuse point that unions have hampered the ability to incentivize education. Unions have a very mixed record on this, and they do sometimes wield excessive power against reform. Other times they wield power in favor of reform. They’re often caught at opposing goals – sometimes pushing for better education policy and sometimes pushing for worse, but only because there’s a broader push for MUCH worse policy. Tenure and seniority are bad policy set against a context of very bad policy. They exist as a mechanism of last resort to protect good teachers from political or actuarial firing. They also exist as a mechanism to protect bad teachers. If not for the very bad policy, it’d be a valid complaint against unions, but it’s simultaneously true that unions also prevent well-intentioned reform as a byproduct. He’s not provided any mechanism to prevent the very bad policy except to suggest that citizens would do so organically if there was a specific value calculation taking place in the context of education vs government taxation/spending as a whole. That’s probably true in places like Palo Alto where the public could probably be trusted to overpower other forces on education but guaranteed to not be true in places like Vernon where the public was never able to.
I think Compton serves as a bit of a model for the complexity of the problem. Compton parents have been petitioning the school district to turn one school there into a charter school. The district was refusing to do that, but the parents have worked quite hard to overcome that resistance from the district. Now, I think the parents are on the wrong track here by thinking that a charter school will solve their issues, but I side with them in the sense that the district wasn’t addressing the problems any other way.
To the CEOs weighing in here, there’s a huge gap in the problem – and that is that none of these problems can be solved without revenues. The district has no ability to go to the parents and say ‘Are you willing to accept an x mill property tax increase to pay for these reforms?’ and the parents have no ability to lobby for that and get it enacted. Further, the district has no ability to go back to the teachers and say ‘Here’s the problem, how do we solve this’ because the union is back to applying the bad policy to trump the very bad policy game. That is, it’s a zero-sum revenue game that is pitting parents against districts and districts against teachers because of the fuckwad tax and revenue policies that the state has become saddled with. So, the CEOs weighing in are going straight after the revenue side of the problem, and part of the revenue problem is tied up with a cost problem that everyone acknowledges in the union rules.
I don’t think any CEOs in CA are looking at this as a cost savings measure. Nor do I think they’re looking at this as means to lower taxes. CA is so low on the ladder of funding per pupil than nobody is arguing that we should go lower yet. The only arguments out of CEOs here (with the possible exception of eMeg) is that funding per pupil needs to go UP, but that the new revenues should go into the most productive areas, and that’s far, far from assured in the current system. And (because Jobs historically works these problems in reverse from how you would think to work them) because the public doesn’t have faith that added value will come from added revenue, there’s no way to ask the public to pay more.
This is somewhat a classic liberal/conservative split, with Jobs ironically making the conservative argument (even though he’s very much a liberal). The liberal argument is that we should dump more money into the system and the system will deliver proportionate value as a result. But we know that’s not true. We know it because we can see student performance as a function of per-pupil spending, even accounting for cost-of-living differences and see that it’s not true – and you can pick any assessment mechanism for student performance and see that it’s not true. They’re correlated, but not proportionate. Jobs is likely arguing that if you can demonstrate what value you will get for that funding, then the public will insist on funding it (in much the way that the Compton parents have dumped a TON of effort and money in their own reform effort) – that the tax reform effort will go in reverse. In broad terms, I think he’s correct. In specifics, I think he’s wrong (right idea, wrong mechanisms). But there don’t seem to be many people on the left even willing to entertain working the problem in that way, instead giving to a knee-jerk reaction that because it’s hostile to the status quo, that it’s hostile to education. It might be that, but might be favorable to education and merely hostile to the status quo, but nobody can really carry that experiment out because the reformers aren’t interested in reforming education, but the status quo. So the status quo is defended in favor of defending education. The entire debate has been shifted over to something that shouldn’t matter, and what’s ignored is the one thing that should matter.
slag
@kay: Seconded. Although, there’s one thing missing in all this discussion (well, two things, really). Charts and graphs. Specifically, I’d like to see more charts and graphs for data like this:
For teaching people about this topic. Is there a good place to get some visual representations of the facts about unions and their relationship to student performance?
I think the line graphs that OWS has been using on some of their signs have been very effective. Want more!
feebog
@ The Moar You Know:
You are exactly right when you describe the Union’s function. They are in business to protect their members, or at least that is job 1. However that function is also used against them, and sometimes for good reason. Yes, it takes two to tango, and school administrations should also be blamed when incompetent teachers are not dealt with. By and large, I think the number of incompetents in any school system is fairly small compared to other industries, or even other public sector jobs. But it is almost impossible to fire a crappy teacher in some districts, including the two largest, New York and LAUSD. This is not strictly opinion BTW, I am a labor arbitrator who mainly hears public sector cases in Southern California. LAUSD and UTLA have a panel of nine arbitrators to hear cases (others may be selected by mutual consent). Of the nine, two are dead an two are retired. No effort was made during the last round of negotiations to update or expand the panel. By comparison, the classified employees, who are subject to civil service regulations rather than a labor contract, just had twelve new panelists hired. And there are far fewer classified employees than there are teachers, firgure it out.
cckids
@Jeff Fecke:
Amen to that. My sister teaches here in southern NV, fourth grade. She has a class of 38. One of her kids, who’d always done well, started showing up late, & not turning in homework. When she asked why, (privately), he told her “We’re living in a tent now & I don’t have enough light or any pencils”. So she bought him some supplies & a camping lantern, as well as a lap desk. She sent some social-services info home with him for the parents & got her head bit off. There are so many issues beyond school work that affect teaching & learning, and only a few are in the control of the teachers.
Martin
@kay:
See, but we don’t have that in CA. And Jobs and many of the others are from CA. There are no local taxes as such. We’re not even allowed to levy local property taxes. I pay no city or county taxes at all, nor do anyone else in the state aside from certain fees restricted to specific purposes – such as Mello-Roos.
There is virtually no local funding of education. All monies go to the state and the state disburses downward according to various formulas. That was originally done to address civil rights issues related to disparities in education due to local tax bases – the state was mandated to shift dollars between tax districts to even out the quality of education. The tax reform yahoos got their hooks into the same system and now everything is well and truly fucked up.
What we have instead is a system whereby well-off school districts establish private foundations where parents and local companies can dump money which then gets funneled to the local district. Works great in well-off areas, but it also serves to delude the people that live there that education funding is just fine, and maybe another little cut to the tax base won’t be so bad. Meanwhile, folks in low-income areas are getting absolutely hammered at every turn.
Just because things are working fine in Ohio doesn’t mean they’re working fine in CA, and I’d hope that people from CA should have the right to express opinions about the state of things.
JGabriel
Martin:
Is he, though? From what I’ve read about Jobs, I get the feeling that his views are closer to what E.D. Kain liked to call liberaltarian, back when Kain still posted here.
Other than that, I agree with most of your analysis (in CA), though I suspect you’ve given it more thought than Jobs did.
.
negative 1
Sorry, had to weigh in on this one…
I work for a teachers’ union, not as a teacher but in the central office. The most popular misconception about teachers’ unions is that you can’t fire a teacher who is a union. Every week we have a grievance hearing in this building and absolutely some times teachers are fired. We defend them, but only because they are entitled to a defense. It doesn’t mean we win every time, plainly put we don’t. Behind the scenes there are times when we agree they should be fired, often times they are (although we represent them to the best of our ability, as they deserve, just the same).
Now ask yourself about the stories you’ve heard to the contrary — how much evidence is there in the stories about the ‘teacher who should’ve been fired but the union stepped in’? Someone said they’re an awful teacher. Who? The parent of a kid that didn’t like them? The newspaper article who couldn’t make a point without that assumption? The republican running on a platform of calling public servants lazy? People accept this crap as gospel, and the argument seems to have been lost long ago. But think about it for a second – unions (ours included) have been getting our a**es handed to us in public life for 30 years, but suddenly we have the power to tell outside entities who to fire?
Last point on this is defending seniority. Do you like age discrimination? No? Then accept that there may be some mediocre professionals who stay mediocre professionals. Your choice is this, or watching companies ‘lay off’ anyone over 50 because they make to much or God forbid may retire on the company dime. I’ve worked for both, I choose the former.
JGabriel
@Martin:
But Gates and Buffet are not. BTW, I don’t know what Buffet’s stance on education reform is, I’m including him here merely because so much of his money is earmarked for the Gates Foundation.
.
libarbarian
Correlation does not imply causation – but – Causation damn well does imply correlation!
kay
Martin,I’m a satisfied Apple customer. I don’t need Jobs to be any sort of hero. I don’t care about him.
We just disagree on the level of influence these guys have.
If Jobs wants to petition on education, I think he should get in line with everyone else.
Carnegie built libraries. He stayed out of running them. He let librarians run them.
JGabriel
negative 1:
Thank you for weighing in here. It’s good to get this viewpoint into the discussion.
.
kay
And, Martin, Jobs is a minor player.
The three biggest hitters in school reform are Gates, Wal Mart and the Broad family.
Am I supposed to ignore that and just assume these people are working in the best interests of public schools?
Why? Because they’re incredibly wealthy?
What does that matter?
The last time I saw the Wal Mart heirs they were lying about the estate tax.
Ohio Mom
From the comments here, it sounds like Califonia’s school issues — for example, not enough hours of instruction — are a reflection of California’s general budget problems, and the budget shortfalls all go back to Proposition 13, don’t they? Wouldn’t repealing that go a long way to helping the schools?
Upthread somebody from California said something like, “Things might be fine in Ohio.” Well, they’re not. We have some screwy aspects to our school funding. There are big disrepancies between the funding of inner-city and rural schools versus suburban schools; some good-sized revenue streams have been taken away and not replaced; the way things are set up, school districts have to convince the voters every few years to agree to yet another levy increase, and that’s getting harder and harder to do. And that’s not including the havoc our new governor’s trying to wreck. But reading about California is making me feel fortunate in comparison.
slag
@kay:
And besides all that, Jobs’ critique of education amounts to little more than that joke Woody Allen used at the beginning of Annie Hall:
Yes. He, and those who take him seriously in this arena, deserve a good smackdown.
Martin
@JGabriel:
I think on economic issues, Jobs was a bit different. There’s a convention when negotiating on price in some places where the goal isn’t to get the item as inexpensively as possible but to find a price where both parties are satisfied with the outcome. I think there’s a term for it, but I can’t pull it. I think Jobs tends a bit more toward that ideal than the libertarian ideal – at least in broad dealings, places where Jobs as individual shows up more than Jobs representing what’s best for Apple. The recent dealings with the city of Cupertino sort of illustrate that to me. Apple went to the city seeking approval for their new campus/building. The city asked (somewhat jokingly) if Apple would pay for city-wide WiFi as Google had for Mountain View, and Steve responded that Apple liked the current arrangement that they pay taxes and the city can build their own WiFi if they want.
I think the libertarian view would be to try and get out of those taxes, which Apple probably could have done to a certain degree given the impact they have on the city. Or Apple could have demanded things in exchange for the taxes, or complained about the rate or whatever. So, I think it’s a bit of a harmony thing – we’re asked to do this, and we’ll do this. We ask you to do that, and we trust that you will do that. Apple does similar things in other areas. That’s not to say that they are generous in contracts, but they can be generous in ways that others cannot be – they take a very unusual business approach in many ways, cultivating long-term relationships rather than lowest-cost ones. Cultivating long-term relationships isn’t exactly a tenet of libertarianism. In fact, it’s almost an anathema to libertarianism.
And Jobs is hard to classify as well if you’re trying to cover him from when he became a corporate figure at about 20 years old, until now. He’s fucked up a lot of stuff over that time, and changed in a lot of ways. I don’t think any of us would lend well to a label over a similar age range. We know Cole wouldn’t. I know I wouldn’t. For instance, I know that Jobs and Apple have given money philanthropically over the last few years, but it’s all anonymous. Part of that is to avoid having a political label attached to the company so they won’t get boycotted over some triviality (though the company and Jobs came out against Prop 8 in CA), and part of it is that Steve is just a secretive guy that hasn’t ever really sought the public’s affection. So, I don’t think he was ever going to give a pile of money and ask for some building to be named for him, or anything like that. But Jobs has given significant amounts of money to Amnesty International – but all anonymously.
I think one thing that folks here are guilty of (which is why people do it) is measuring people based on what they publicly attach themselves to and assuming that Jobs isn’t a liberal because he doesn’t come out and put his public weight and wealth behind causes. Which is infuriating, because at the same time they say they don’t want CEOs and the rich influencing policy, they’ll just as quickly hold it against you if you don’t use your power and wealth to influence policy. So Jobs is an asshole for privately holding an opinion for which he never tried to influence policy (on education), and he’s also an asshole for not public holding an opinion and trying to influence policy (on every other matter we would expect him to align with us on). And if you give money anonymously and people can’t see you do it (because seeing you do it apparently is what really matters) then you’re an asshole for not letting us see you do it. So no matter what you do you’re just going to have people pissed at you.
Davis X. Machina
@negative 1: Hear, hear, well said, the man. (Or woman)
[Shuffles feet, rattles order papers.]
Davis X. Machina
@rikyrah:
Back when I worked for the Jesuits we used to say — over a pint, usually — “It’s a good thing teaching is one of the corporal works of mercy — because it sucks as a job.”
matryoshka
What is the source of the notion that teachers cannot be fired and that unions are to blame? When I was teaching in a large public high school, every teacher worked without a contract for 6 years before he or she got a “tenure contract.” We got a tenure contract based on 6 years of evaluations by administrators, peers, and parent and student feedback, and we got the contract whether or not we belonged to a union–and there were two unions to choose from. However, the state I worked in was an “at will” employment state, so if the admin decided they wanted to fire you, they could do it, regardless of the tenure contract.
Union membership was optional, and it only served to identify you as a “friend of the admin” (state teachers’ assoc., very conservative) or a “potential troublemaker” (NEA, progressive). It was as clear as a divide as the one between Republicans & Democrats is now. Many teachers didn’t belong to a union at all.
The deep resentment of teachers is a real problem in this country, as is teachers’ enabling of a crappy system by paying out of pocket for so much and accepting working conditions that no other adult in their right mind would accept.
jonas
Teachers and other public sector unions came about in the late nineteenth century in response to the cronyism and spoils system of the urban political machines that controlled public services at the time in places like New York and Boston. Jobs in city schools were frequently doled out (and capriciously taken away) as political favors, rather than based on qualifications or skill. Unions defended teachers as a professional guild that stood outside workaday politics and served the greater public good. They also fought for better benefits, particularly good pensions, which made up for the mediocre salaries teachers have always earned.
Of course back then, the vast majority of Americans saw the public school system as a source of national pride and were happy to make sure teachers were, if not well-paid, then at least respected with secure jobs. All that changed in the 60s and 70s when civil rights, desegregation, and the collapse of the inner cities turned a lot of (increasingly suburban) middle class white Americans against public services as an unfair transfer of their wealth to lazy black people and other minorities who didn’t deserve it. Public schools, particularly in the inner city, and their unionized teachers became indelibly linked with urban decay and the broader social failures of 1970s de-industrialization. White parents came to distrust schools that were now racially integrated, prayer-free zones with minimal discipline and unionized teachers who taught evolution and secular values over traditional Christian morals. It’s no surprise that the most anti-teachers-union states are in the deep South.
What has happened is that American *society* has failed children — particularly poor, minority children — in numerous ways, and when this failure manifests itself in poor educational outcomes, people want to blame teachers and their union. When the union just does its job, they get blamed for “not caring about the children.” That’s like letting all the roads in a town completely deteriorate for lack of maintenance and then blaming the UAW for your poor shocks and flat tires. The teachers’ union is there to protect the workplace rights of its members. It’s the job of our communities, our states and our nation to make sure that the kids we are sending to school have a stable home life, decent food and medical care and a sense of hope in the future that makes education worthwhile.
We have failed. Not the teachers union.
Martin
@kay:
I’m not suggesting he be any kind of hero. I admire Steve for cutting against the grain of conventional thinking – something he did very well, and often very painfully, sometimes deliberately and sadistically so – and being able to vindicate his actions through quite exceptional execution by the people that worked for him. We need people like that even if we don’t like people like that. If America suffers from any truly perverse disease its the inability of our culture to break out of our conventional thinking, even though we know by the very definition of the phrase to be wrong.
But what influence did Jobs have here? None, as far as I can tell. He didn’t lobby Obama on education reform – Obama lobbied Jobs, and Jobs was even enough of an asshole to refuse the meeting at first, and enough of a polite guy to give Obama one of the first iPad 2s to leave the company as a gift. I’m not aware of Jobs or Apple lobbying state education reform efforts, of even giving an opinion on those matters, or of using their wealth or influence to affect local policy. If they did, they were catastrophic failures at it because they literally left no trace behind and achieved nothing.
You’re getting upset over statements at a private meeting at which Obama asked Jobs for his opinion. Jobs clearly has an opinion. He’s given this some thought. We know that he’s even interacted with the school at the local level as a regular parent:
Jobs didn’t want to petition on education. If he did, you can be damn sure he would have. He wasn’t exactly a shrinking violet. But he can still express an opinion when asked, no? And by all measures he did get in line with everyone else.
I mean, you acknowledge the three biggest hitters in school reform don’t include Jobs (who’s now dead and no longer even part of the conversation), yet he got two front page posts for one expressed opinion, not on the record, and no other actions to advance that position. If those other three are bigger threats, then why the fuck do this false equivalence bullshit that I know you all hate? Why not simply step up and say ‘Hey, here’s an off the record opinion by Jobs in response to a question from Obama, but we’ve got these other players that are putting real money behind these attitudes and fucking things up’ and then go into your spiel? Why waste everyone’s attention and kick up all of that dust looking at Jobs (who, I remind you is dead and powerless) when we really need everyone’s attention looking at those other three?
Martin
@Ohio Mom:
Repealing Prop 13 requires the same amount of effort as calling for a new state Constitution. Quite literally it’s easier to petition for a change to the US Dept of Education standards and then watch the state struggle to meet them.
None of us living in CA are proud of that, by the way, but since the feasibility of reforming CA education funding was raised as something unaddressed in the debate, I’ll counter by saying that lobbying Obama is probably the easier path to actual implementation than overturning Prop 13.
That was me in response to Kay telling me to “stay the fuck out of Ohio, they’ve got this”. If things aren’t fine in Ohio and they aren’t fine in California, and they aren’t fine in most other states, than maybe a national effort isn’t such a bad idea after all, no?
Look, I’d vastly prefer that CA fix its own goddamn problems. It’s not like any of you guys are responsible for this particular mess (though most of our ballot disasters are due to outside forces now that everyone has seen the kind of power available thanks to Prop 13). I personally don’t agree that we should be seeking the Feds to solve the state’s problems, but I’m far from optimistic that anything can be done in the state short of a new Constitution.
But I’m also not opposed to anyone willing to brainstorm about the problem. You’ve got a new idea for us? Great, bring it on. We’re 40 years into this rat maze and nobody knows how to get out of it, and if relaxing some union rules gets us a 50% increase in per-pupil revenue and vastly better outcome measures, I’ll sure as hell listen.
PurpleGirl
@kay: I worked for an educational non-profit in NYC. The organization recruited and trained people to do volunteer tutoring in the NYC public schools. I started the field trainers’ secretary, began the function of desktop/electronic publishing and ended as the administration assistant in development. For seven years I worked with the grant writer, did research and followed trends in fund raising.
We approached Microsoft and Bill Gates and then the Gates foundation (once it was operational) for grants. Outside of a few programs in and around Seattle schools and libraries, Gates was ONLY interested in giving money to SCHOOL DISTRICTS which agreed to institute reform programs he liked and supported. These mainly involved charter schools. He did begin to money to NYC’s Department of Education, but it involved things like charter schools and not the more general school budget.
He (and his money) is doing good work in health issues around the world but I’m very leery of his involvement in education reform here at home.
PurpleGirl
@kay: In fact, in order to get a Carnegie library, a town had show that they could continue to support and run the library. He would build the library building, but he wasn’t interested in the later operation of the library.
kay
@Martin:
That’s a fair point, Martin, but Jobs makes headlines for everything he says, and I ASSURE you, I am going to hear the Steve Job’s Opinion on teachers’ unions, because it’s all over the place. That’s why it’s news. Because he said it. It’s also topical right now, because several states are having a giant battle on public employee unions. While I realize Jobs didn’t create that situation, the price of fame is being quoted.
One more thing, before I feel too sorry about how mean I’m being to Jobs, correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Apple make huge inroads with their fanatically loyal customer base by entering public school markets? Didn’t many of their (now customers) get attached to that brand in public schools? Because that’s how I remember it. It’s a good product, easy to use, kids love them, but isn’t some of Job’s success due to those archaic public schools and their failing union school teachers?
We buy the products in this office, and we’ll probably continue to buy them. I really don’t feel I owe Jobs more than that, anymore than I owe Henry Ford some deference because I bought a used Taurus once every five years. I liked the car.
kay
@PurpleGirl:
We have a Carnegie library, and it’s run by an appointed local board. It was endowed with a grant from a local family 30 years ago, the grant is unrestricted, but it was never tapped. Operations are partly funded by the state and partly funded by a local levy.
They’re going to use the local grant to put a new roof on, and repair the original stained glass, which leaks. There are five gallon buckets set strategically among the shelves when it rains.
PurpleGirl
@kay: I use a NYC library branch on 58th Street as my “home” library, where I pick up books I’ve reserved. It is Carnegie library and it was built before the City’s system was formed. (Actually the Carnegie building is gone and the library takes parts of two floors in an office building. I wish we still had the Carnegie building.)
Menzies
@Davis X. Machina:
I work for the Jesuits right now – and, go figure, have ended up more Catholic than I was before I started.
Which is why now I feel bad for not remembering that teaching was actually a work of mercy, given that I tell my students quite often that “the quality of mercy is never strained,” with me.
Jeff Fecke
@Ohio Mom:
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not fetishizing Finland as so many in the Unions-Suck-More-Charter-Schools-Now group do. America’s a lot more heterogeneous and has a lot more poverty and is, simply, much bigger. But it’s interesting, and telling, that the one policy prescription the “reformers” tout is one that is 180 degrees away from what Finland’s done.
KS in MA
@Ohio Mom: Thanks for the link. This is really interesting.
kay
@Martin:
This was the other sort of big news yesterday, Martin, among the people I’ve been reading:
That sounds pretty old-fashioned to me, Martin. Do you really think you’re going to improve on one human being interacting with another, in terms of children? Do you know any children that are “inspired” or “incentivized” by round after round of testing, which will then be used to set their teacher’s pay scale? Are “union work rules” really the problem here? Because one of the dreaded “union work rules” in Ohio that we need “flexibility” on is how many kids they can jam into a class. You understand my concern. I’m not sure everyone has the noblest intentions. I don’t know how many kids a second grade teacher can talk to or work with or reach every day. My assumption is, he or she does.
Samara Morgan
@JGabriel: naif.
:)
liberaltarian==classic liberal==neoliberal==bleeding heart libertarian==libertarian==Libertarian.
all the same thing.
and all things EDK has claimed to be at one time or another.
they all just mean a crypto-conservative that is trying to headfake liberalism for sympathy and pageclicks.
kay
@PurpleGirl:
Yeah, I watched education nation online and it was really alarming:
This year it was the Melinda Gates show. Oh, and it was sponsored by the University of Phoenix, the for-profit that is saddling people with so much debt they can’t walk unaided, so that’s wonderful, in a series that is supposed to be about public education.
buckyblue
This is really not the thread I should be reading today, after one of the most frustrating days I’ve had in quite awhile in teaching. The issue is that all of the expectations are heaped on the teacher, and NONE (read: none, zero, zilch, nada) is on the student. The high stakes testing kids have to take have NO bearing on how the kid does in school, whether he moves up to the next grade, or even passes a class. NONE. They can draw pretty pictures of butterflies (which I’ve seen) on the test and it would mean nothing. All of the education reform is really just trying to make sure teachers work hard. We have created a lazy group of kids who look to blame everyone else but their work ethic for their failure. Everyone’s to blame but THEM. When we finally get the glare off of the teachers and onto the kids, and what kinds of kids we want to produce, will the system change. I wish they would have started this bullshit in the ’90s when I started teaching and the economy was rocking. They do it now when your choices are extremely limited. I hear machinist jobs are plentiful, it may be worth the switch.
HyperIon
@kay wrote:
yeah, here in WA we are facing another ballot measure to allow charter schools. i say “why?” there is zero evidence that a charter school can/has achieved anything a public school cannot. there are good ones and bad ones.
however, one really important difference between the two: public schools gotta take all comers. charter schools, not so much. given that, charter schools SHOULD be outperforming public schools, but as you say, they are not.
mclaren
Kay is right, of course. The remarkable fact remains that there are some real problems in public K-12 education, but no one anywhere in the media or in the elite punditry seems to be discussing ’em.
For example: since 1970, the per capita number of school administrators has doubled. There’s just no good reason for this. And standardized test scores haven’t budged an inch since 1970. Much of the increased spending on K-12 schools has gone into layer after layer of administrators, not teachers or classroom equipment.
Point 2: the mania for hi-tech gadgets. There is simply no hard evidence that dumping more computers or laptops or ipads or digital projectors into a K-12 school increases test scores. All evidence points to the quality of the teacher as the crucial determinant, not the amount of quality of hi-tech gadgets in the classroom.
Point 3: standardized tests have wrought havoc by creating a teach-to-the-test mania. The introduction of nationwide massive standardized test protocols appears to have damaged the quality of education, since schools now obsess solely about the test scores and dump curricula not tested: arts programs, music programs, you name it, it all gets thrown out in favor of teaching to the test.
Point 4: “juking the stats.” Standardized testing has merely spurred K-12 school administrators to play games with the stats to insure that their school looks good. This does nothing to improve education, but does a great deal for the school’s nationwide ranking. As just one example, consider that many schools now employ temporary truant officers during certain months to track down students and force them to attend school for one day in certain months when the students’ attendance gets officially counted. This counts statistically as “full enrollment” so the K-12 school gets its full share of state money. But the reality is that the students only attend school that one day, when they’re officially counted, and the rest of the semester, the school admins don’t give a damn whether those truant students are even in school.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik:
I think unions would have been successful in the south if they had been called a Confederacy instead of a UNION. Seriously. The south has essentially banned unions (right to work states) but I bet they would have supported them if they had been named otherwise.
Martin
@kay:
Well, I went to a Waldorf School for a while, and it was fantastic. Even when I was 8 I could recognize it was fantastic and looking back from 42 I can see how fantastic it was. And I don’t think that’s a unique perspective:
That was Steve Jobs.
So, the issue isn’t incentivizing kids. They already have that. They have an overabundance of it, so long as you don’t drain it all out of them. I think if we could resurrect Jobs and ask him what the ideal classroom would look like, he’d describe it no differently than you or I, based solely on the things he’s said and done over the years. The difference is how you get there, and we all vary radically on that.
The union work rules are a byproduct of political and economic assaults on schools. Without those assaults, the unions wouldn’t be needed. But the assaults are there, and will continue to be there. I don’t diminish the importance of the unions or of tenure – in the current political climate they’re critical.
But at the same time, you can’t do what a Waldorf School does with unions in place. Teaching at a Waldorf School is quite a bit more challenging than the public system is ever likely to tolerate. That’s not to say my kids teachers couldn’t do it, I think they have great teachers and they could absolutely do it, but Waldorf Schools work because people attend voluntarily. If you want the diversity of educational tools, viewpoints, and attitudes that such a classroom can provide, you’re going to piss off a LOT of parents. I’m not happy about that, but you can’t force policy down the throats of the public at the local level. You just can’t – and if you try you’re going to get a flood of parents complaining to the school board, demanding that teachers are fired, and then you need to get the union back in place. It’s a catch-22. It didn’t used to be like this, but it is now. Blame the right. Blame the parents that have decided that they know what happens in the classroom better than the teachers, that know that their kid couldn’t POSSIBLY have done this or that wrong. Do you realize that parents intervene on behalf of bad grades even at the university level now? Do you realize that my HR department offers workshops on how to deal with parents of recent hires? Yeah, 23 year-olds out of college in their first job still have mom and dad giving employers shit about what happens in the office. No, you’re not going to get education back to the way it was in the 1950s any more than you can get the institution of marriage, or sexual mores, or the one-income household, or any other thing back to that state. Not going to happen.
At the public level you’re going to have to accept a relatively large degree of mediocrity, not because of teachers or unions or administrators or budgets, but because the public will demand it. They’ll demand you don’t talk about sex ed. They’ll demand their kids learn how to read at age 5 (Waldorf Schools used to not worry about reading until 2nd grade), they’ll demand standardized testing. They won’t fucking care if you assess the kid as ‘creative’ or ‘sensitive’. They’ll be outraged if you formally teach kids concepts like ’empathy’, even though it’s a pretty important concept in a group setting. And they’re going to want a receipt for their tax dollars – endless rounds of test scores are that receipt, like it or not.
My point is that public education has turned into a nearly impossible problem to solve. 20 years ago the public didn’t fucking care what was taught in school but now everyone wants some measure of accountability for their tax dollars and as those tax dollars increasingly flow down rather than up, that accountability gets more and more institutionalized and requires more and more layers of administration and costs. Every parent in my school district knows the attendance formula for the school district – what hours the kid needs to be in the school to be counted as present in order to maximize the funding to the school from the state and feds. If the family is going to check out for a ski weekend, the kid will be there through 9AM, at which point they are promptly checked out. Why go through this? Why burden the teachers and staff with this? Why the bean counting? Because everyone wants their fucking receipt now.
The only way to get back to local control of schools is to abandon all of the reasons why we lost it in the first place. Yeah, it was kind of great having that back in the 50s, unless you were black and lived in the south, and then local control of schools was a fairly unique hell. California wasn’t immune from that either with how poor latino communities were treated, and I’m sure Ohio had their fair share as well. So we’ve got this catch-22. How do you give local communities control to shape schools as they feel fit, and still have sufficient oversight to ensure that entire communities aren’t eschewing science? It’s a great ideal, but it’s not possible without dumping quite a bit more money into a system today to achieve results that was needed some decades ago to attain the same goal.
You suggested that California not demand federal rules that would screw things up in Ohio, but that’s precisely the kind of system that liberals demanded, and for good reason because without it, black kids in the south would still be separate and unequal. So which way do we go on this? More oversight? Less oversight? They both carry costs. California has turned into a microcosm of the federal system, so we know it very well here.
One problem unaddressed in this whole debate is how voters view these kinds of systems. It’s a fairly standard game theory problem. Because we’ve now enlarged the problem (by expanding where tax dollars get directed and where policy gets applied) to incorporate people that we have no affiliation with (presumably we’ll act in the interests of people we have a relationship with, eg. local, vs those that we have no relationship with) we end up with a sort of diner’s dilemma, where the optimal strategy is to minimize tax contributions in order to screw over people in other cities (who you can always rationalize are wasting your money, because who the fuck knows) and reserve your tax dollars and voluntarily spend them locally. Shit, that’s pretty much the collective consciousness for the city of Newport Beach.
So we’re getting the behavior we should expect to get simply because of how we’ve structured the system. Are we willing to restructure the system?
kay
@Martin:
I’ll give you my “big picture” scenario and why I’m so alarmed about this.
You and I (generally) supported the ACA. We did that because we have a for-profit health care system, and that wasn’t going to change, and a non-profit or public payment mechanism doesn’t really dent spending on health care. We took what we could get.
We currently have a (truly) public education system in this country. I want to keep that. I think we’re making a huge mistake following blindly behind MBAs and corporate people and people from finance.
Worse, they’re buying us. They come into a cash-strapped system and buy the whole goddamnned thing. People are nuts about their children, so they’re grateful for the “help” and when they take the money they lose control of their own school system.
Martin, looking at health care, where 25% of Medicare has been privatized, and 40% of Medicaid has been privatized, and that’s just the payment mechanism, the health care system was already for-profit, tell me why this won’t happen to education.
This conservative model isn’t new. We’ve seen it again and again and again. The magic of markets will miraculously transcend all of our problems and we’ll all be issued a voucher to use at the for-profit “academy” of our choosing. Well. most of us. The wealthiest among us will continue to use the schools they’ve always used.
We’ll lose public education.
When I watched the propaganda piece NBC news produced, Arne Duncan was sitting in the audience and Bill Clinton was the closing speaker. The University of Phoenix was the sponsor. Really, Martin, it was sick-making. This collection of US political and media leaders and their corporate backers, just having a grand old time, bashing public education and “innovating” like mad, all of it top-down, all of it conservative free-market dogma, all of it patronizing and sanctimonious.
I don’t think children should be thrust into a “market-based” system. I think children are relentlessly and disgustingly “marketed” to as it is. I want them to have some place to go that is truly public, where they aren’t being SOLD anything, and where they aren’t a “product”, trained for whatever this year’s fad is in “competitiveness”.
Gates, several years ago, was pushing small high schools. That was the “magic bullet”. Break up your high school and it’ll be great! The fad prior to small high schools was…BIG high schools. The small high school fad failed.
It makes me laugh because we’ve always had small high schools here, so we missed both the BIG high school fad and the small high school fad. We were cutting edge there for about 4 years, and we didn’t change a thing :)
kay
@Martin:
I do and I’m embarrassed by them. For them. But that’s parents, Martin. If you value independence and self-sufficiency, you’ll teach it to your kids.
Losing tenure scares the shit out of me because this a conservative area and there are three religious nuts on the school board, and the first people to go will be the science teacher who bravely insists on mentioning evolution, or the honors English teacher who assigns “controversial” books, or the best (IMO) high school math teacher who is kind of an eccentric person, just generally, and is rumored to be gay. I don’t really buy that the “best” teachers are 25 years old. That hasn’t been my experience.