March 19, 2007
From the desk of Jane Galt:Please, permit me to 'splain
Kevin Drum says that my previous post on vouchers proves that I'm just in the business of union-busting. His commenters add to that my fierce committment to racial segregation, and of course, my desire to get taxpayers to subsidise my children in parochial schools.
As a childless agnotheist, I must protest that last. And the first two, as well. I have no particular interest in the teachers' unions, except insofar as I think they are an obstacle to reform. And if I could take all the disadvantaged minorities in the country and sprinkle them throughout the nation's lily-white high-performance school districts like so much cayenne pepper, I would, except that I'm pretty thoroughly revolted by the white paternalist liberalism implied by that sort of sentiment. At any rate, you'll have to accept on faith (or not) that I'm not trying to make Our Schools Whiter. Not that I'm sure how this could be accomplished, short of spraying the nation's affluent suburbs with a solution composed of two parts extra-strength Clorox to one part miracle whip.
Let's establish some of the basics which seem obvious to me:
1) The American educational system sucks.
2) It particularly sucks for poor and minority kids
3) It has sucked in approximately the same way for at least forty years.
4) The institutional barriers to not sucking are apparently insurmountable with the current interest groups in place.
5) It is extremely segregated by class, race, and income
6) It is extremely hard to recruit and keep good teachers
7) As a result, the schools with the most attractively upper middle class parents and children get almost all of the good teachers
8) The main reason that it is hard to get good teachers (outside of rural areas where it is hard to get good anyone to move there) is that their pay, unlike that of other union workers, is at the bottom of the distribution for their education level.
9) Given that the pay is at the bottom of the distribution for educated professionals, one of the primary attractions of the job is its short workyear and near-ironclad job security. Short of molesting the students or screaming racial epithets at them, it's awfully hard to get fired from a teaching position.
10) Jobs whose primary attraction is short hours and the difficulty of getting fired rarely attract the cream of the crop. The best teachers are either those few gifted passionate souls who want to teach, or women who are trying to match their schedule to that of their children. The latter group is shrinking; the former group has always been small.
11) Any meaningful reform of the school system that actually improves them will need to pay teachers much more.
12) Paying the current group of teachers much more will improve their standard of living immeasurably, but will do absolutely nothing for the students.
13) Therefore, coupled with higher teacher pay must come the ability to get rid of substandard teachers
14) This is not remotely feasible within the existing system
15) The programmes which have been shown to work best with disadvantaged kids are the ones that are heavily scripted, involve lots of repetition and rote learning, and otherwise make life no fun for the teacher.
16) These programmes are rarely implemented, implying that teaching disadvantaged kids to read and do math are somewhere well down the priority list of your average school district.
17) Monopolies are rarely responsive to their customers.
18) School board elections are not a particularly good way to gather feedback on school performance, but other than lawsuits, it is the single mechanism currently available to school districts. School board elections are a particularly bad way to gather feedback in very large, dysfunctional polities like cities.
19) A school where parents may pull their children at any moment is a school that worries about pleasing parents and children.
20) The government cannot hand out money without making sure schools meet basic requirements, like having a building, teachers, and some students. Any voucher programme will also have to periodically test kids to ensure that they are making progress.
21) This is not the same thing as imposing the same set of elaborate regulations on everything from teacher hours to eraser purchasing that currently hamstring public schools, and then complaining that voucher schools don't do any better.
22) Current teacher certification standards are lunatic protectionism promulgated by education schools collecting fat rents for slapping a laminate veneer of professionalism on educators. Any one I have ever met who has done a real degree, and then sat through education classes, has attested to their utter lack of useful content. We have math teachers who are very good at making posters about race, and very bad at math. The way to teach someone to teach is to give them some elementary child psychology, and then have them practice on actual children, who will illustrate the folly of listening to professors of child psychology. "Teacher standards" are the absolute last thing we should be imposing on voucher programmes. Principals are pretty good at figuring out if a teacher can teach.
23) Any voucher programme will have to offer bonuses for educating difficult kids: poor kids, kids with emotional problems, kids with learning disabilities, and so forth. Otherwise, those kids will end up stuck in a ghetto. On the other hand, if you get the pricing right, you don't need to worry about lotteries and so forth.
24) To hell with rich people: if you're in, say, the top 5-10% of the income distribution, you ought to get the same help educating your kids as my parents got, which is to say none.
25) Some people will be worse off under this system. There is no change ever that leaves every single person better off. This is not a reason to avoid change.
In short, I want to disempower all the groups currently agitating for Status Quo + More Government Cash, which includes, but certainly is not limited to, the teachers' unions. In exchange, I think I can give Democrats something I assume they want more than teachers' unions, which is a decent educational system.
But it's not because I want to gut the Democratic party. (I'm pretty sure that the Democratic party can survive without a big teachers' union bloc.) It's because incremental top down reform has so far mostly funneled more money into existing bad schools, with no better results. I want to change the system so that it works more like . . . something that works, like my local grocery store. I want to take the focus of the debate off the damn teachers, and put it back on the children. The teachers already had their shot. I want a voucher system not because I have it in for teachers, but because I want a school system that is more responsive, child focused, creative, outcome-oriented, and effective. I think that schools that have to meet basic standards and treat parents like customers are more likely to be this way than government monopolies where elections generally centre around one of two questions:
1) Who was the incumbent mean to at the last PTA meeting?2) Shall we teach evolution and sex ed?
I'd just assumed that it was understood that I was willing to pay higher taxes if necessary to achieve better outcomes; that any voucher programme would have to test outcomes (which should obviate the need to control inputs); that difficult to educate children would need to come attached to some kind of bonus to help schools educate them; and so forth. But since that was apparently not obvious, yes, I am willing to double spending per student, to the tune of $500 billion a year if such a sum should be necessary, not because I enjoy seeing the AFT writhe in agony, but because I would very much enjoy seeing most of the kids in America get a decent education.
Posted by Jane Galt at March 19, 2007 7:17 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links"); ?>The poor pay received by teachers is a bit of a red herring. When I live, the unions -- in "collusion" with the school board and the local pols -- argued years ago that what teachers wanted were pension and medical benefits over pay. Now that they have very lavish retirement and life-long health benefits (no out-of-pocket costs for medical care for life), the local union is claiming that the teachers are "underpaid." Humorous, but they can always count on the average citizen to have either forgotten the deal or to have never understood it to begin with. Humorous, but sad for those of us who get it but cannot move the inert mass of well-meaning but dense fellow citizens.
Posted by: mark on March 19, 2007 8:17 PMThe American educational system sucks.
C'mon, Jane, don't be so unreasonable. Nearly 2/3 of the citizens of our nation's capital manage to avoid illeteracy:
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8NVBUV81&show_article=1
Posted by: Jasper on March 19, 2007 8:17 PMYou are out of your mind if you think this will get broad agreement. I disagree with a lot of it but the worst part is 24). If you start out by saying to hell with me and people like me this means we will oppose whatever you suggest. Good luck getting it passed.
Posted by: James B. Shearer on March 19, 2007 8:18 PMI agree with James. "To hell with rich people" is not something I think is basic. I hope it isn't for you. But fortunately the case for vouchers does not depend on class envy. I assume you're just pandering to your leftist readers with this.
But let me make a substantive disagreement. You cannot know if pay for teachers is too high or low, because they are not in a free market. You seem to assume that it's obvious their pay will increase with vouchers. Some teachers will do better in terms of pay, probably: those tasked with the hardest jobs, namely, "teaching" juvenile criminals.
My guess is, though, that on average teacher pay will go down somewhat. Why? The reason is that currently teachers are paid based on several things:
- market value of teaching services
- inflation of demand due to govt subsidies and truancy laws
- monopoly rents via political action
- risk premium for working in unsafe environment
Posted by: Leonard on March 19, 2007 8:46 PM
It's a bit amazing that out of that entire thread, only Kevin Drum had the self-awareness to admit his "lack of knowledge" on the education issue.
Posted by: Stuart Buck on March 19, 2007 8:52 PMRe teacher pay: At the (good but not famous or truly elite) private school I attended, teachers made a fraction of what their public-school peers earned, and were expected to put in more time as well. However, they got a pretty good class of student due to limited admissions, and a pleasant work environment. This suggests to me that Leonard may be right.
Re point no. 1: The US school system does not "suck". Many inner-city schools, and school districts, do indeed suck (depending on the definition of "inner city", of course). Part of the problem is that decision-making on the system's structure has been centralized in DC and state capitols, rather than local. Thus, although many people in absolute terms may have poor schools, they are a smallish portion of most legislatures that could change things. Plus, of course, part of the reason they're stuck with bad schools is that they typically have less raw political power -- the same power needed to make radical changes.
Posted by: Shelby on March 19, 2007 9:01 PMI'm surprised that no-one connects the supposedly inadequate salary of the teachers to the fact that its NOT a full time job - demanding neither 40 hours a week, nor 52 weeks a year like all the rest of us slobs, nor does it demand a very high level of education, nor does it entail much professional risk. How much does the market pay low level managers? dental assistants? technical analysts? Meanwhile, I live in a pretty upscale development here in WA and there are many single income public school teachers here as well.... I always wonder...?
Posted by: Sully on March 19, 2007 9:17 PMBravo, you've identified the crux of the school problem. It's the teachers. Obviously there is a large social benefit from attracting top teachers. But, the types that would be great teachers are not attracted by a secretary's salary.
Perhaps there is a free market solution. What if we tied current principal and teacher pay to future incomes earned by the students, kind of like a future contract, except many years out. The teacher/principal/school can get 1% or 5% of the students earnings for a certain amount of years after graduation. This way, there is a pecuniary incentive for student and teacher performance.
There could even be a secondary market on "students", even perhaps student call or put options.
Posted by: stanfo on March 19, 2007 9:30 PMWell, another problem with vouchers that make them opposed by middle class people more than poor people is that once you have voucher systems you have no remaining reason for school districts to pay more to educate middle class kids more than they pay to educate poor kids.
You did make that point earlier, but only when you mentioned that middle class area schools in school districts got better teachers and higher paid teachers than poor area teachers.
You did not mention that middle class school districts also got more money per student than poor school districts.
A voucher system directly attacks the first subsidy to middle class schools. It indirectly attacks the second because it directly illuminates the present unfairness of financing schools.
Vermont's attempts to allocate business real estate taxes evenly among school districts has caused considerable controversy as school districts with large nonresidential real estate tax payers like ski resorts have suddenly had their real estate welfare checks terminated.
I do not think that teachers are undercompensated. Average hourly earnings for teachers in the US came in at $34.06/hour in 2005 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. To put that in perspective, with a standard 2000 hour work year that would entail just shy of $70k a year, which isn't to shaby. Given the extremely generous health and retirement benefits, and hour for hour teaching on average pays *very* well.
The central problem with teacher compensation is that it is incredibly poorly structured.
First, a large percentage of teacher compensation goes into defered pay (pension benefits).
Second, starting pay is extremely low, while pay for large amounts of seniority is quite high. Please note, typically that is pay for seniority, not experience. In other words, it's how long you've sat in the same school or school district, not how long you've been teaching.
When structuring compensation around experience, you really want to know how much experience contributes to the quality of output. I have seen studies indicating that teacher experience makes quite a difference, up to about 10 years in the field. After that it levels off quite a bit. Or to put it differently, the results you get from a teacher who has 20 years experience is not that much different from 10. But the pay is VASTLY different.
Third, schools make very poor utilization of their resources, both teachers and physical plant because they do not operate for roughly a quarter to a third of the year (summer break, spring break, christmas break, etc). If we improved that utilization, then perhaps it would be easier to justify hire *annual* teacher salaries, because they would actually be putting in a number of hours roughly comparable to the standard in the US.
Oh... and one last thing... those folks whom I've known who became teachers (all of whom left the field by the way) have cited *working conditions*, not pay, as the reason for their departure. In particular they simply couldn't take the way they were treated by their management (principals). I would suggest that the 'working conditions' issue is a big part of the reason many private schools can pay much lower salaries and still attract hire quality teachers. I suspect that it's not just the selectivity of the student body that leads to those improved working conditions, but also much better management.
Posted by: quadrupole on March 19, 2007 10:26 PMwkwillis
I keep hearing about these funding disparities between the education spending on poor children vs wealthy children. I've poked around trying to look into it from time to time and usually I find one of the following at the root:
1) Frequently it's just not true, some of the poorest districts (DC for example) spend some the greatest amount per pupil. It's important to remember that the difference between squalid schools and immaculate schools is not always funding, sometimes it's management.
2) In many of the cases where it *is* true it's actually a side effect of unions that require in their contracts that more senior (ie expensive) teachers can transfer to the schools of their choice within the district. This causes the most experiences (expensive) teachers to transfer to the more pleasant wealthier schools in the district, thus causing more real money to flow to them.
Why do schools suck in states that have no/powerless teachers' unions?
If there are reasons other than strong unions that lead to school sucking, what reasons exist (besides religious committments to opposing unions) to lay a particular share of blame for sucky schools to unions?
Does systematic evidence (not a series of anecdotes) exist to show that it is more difficult to fire a bad unionized teacher than a bad non-unionized teacher?
Posted by: Arr-squared on March 19, 2007 10:46 PMPoints 1-14 are very strong. I hope this sort of thing can move the debate from yes/no to "how to do it?". It seems health care is moving along this path.
Regarding teacher pay: while the average hourly pay is decent, there is an opportunity cost to teaching in that your time is occupied for 9 months a year so you likely won't find a similarly lucrative job over the summer. If we want to recruit teachers that have strong math/science skills, we have to pay salaries competitive with other professions recruiting those students. Something like a starting salary of $40k-50k (accounting for the summer off) and up to $100k or so.
Jane, on the general listing you give, I agree in the main. But there's a big, glaring omission. You do discuss that teachers are important, but you don't mention students.
The big, ugly truth of American education is that the quality of a school is largely a function, not of its teachers, but its students. Fill the best, most modern school with good teachers, but send it even a large minority of bad students, and what happens? Bad school. (This has happened in many of those "inner city" schools you decry.) Meanwhile, any school with nearly all good students... is good.
We do not live in Lake Wobegon. Fully half of American students have double-digit IQs! A minority is disruptive, having never been socialized to sit still when bored. An even smaller minority is violent. It doesn't take many disruptive or violent students to ruin a learning environment for everyone.
The game for the middle classes is thus to determine the good schools, and move there. When everyone does this, the price of schools gets built into property prices. This segregates neighborhoods by wealth and race, based on school district.
Vouchers will break this cycle in two ways. On is simple educational choice. Other ways (charters, etc.) offer choice, and that is all in their favor, too. Choice promises to unlink school locations from neighborhoods; thus wealthy white people won't have to move out of the 'hood when little Suzy turns 5. The long term effect on residential segregation is thus positive.
Over the long term, educational choice should also improve schools as they compete. The rising tide lifts all schools, but it seems pretty clear to me that choice is an example of a policy that most strongly benefits the capable. The bad students may not all be concentrated in bad schools in the 'hood any more; they'll be concentrated in bad schools all over the place.
The second effect of vouchers is more radical: a private school can meaningfully expel students. The threat to expel is thus a check on the students. This is something that a public system ultimately cannot have, at least so long as there are truancy laws and forced education of all minors. If it is public, then equal protection under the law applies, with all the lawyerly attention that implies.
The threat to expel is a second means by which the schools adjust their "fit" with students, but unlike in the case of student choice, this is an effect which basically gives little or nothing to the high-end schools; they already have control. Rather, the power to expel empowers what would currently be bad schools.
I should think that the left would like this aspect of vouchers as opposed to weaker forms of school reform.
Posted by: Leonard on March 19, 2007 11:43 PMI just think the entire thrust of the debate here - namely, the teachers - is wrong. And it starts with point 1...'it sucks'...
Sucks how? For who or whom? It 'sucks' differently for different people.
For some people, it sucks because they teach evolution. For others, it's a worldwide humiliation that around half of our citizens don't believe in evolution.
I think it sucks that we spend time teaching first graders how to write cursive but not how to type. I think it sucks that they give homework to first graders, too, despite the evidence that it doesn't help kids.
I think lots of things suck about our current system. So do you, right? But I bet if we compared our Suckiness lists, they would only have a few points in common and that's the same for most people.
That's why I don't think the key is empowering teachers or principals. It's empowering parents. It's about really new approachs that prepare kids for the new economy and technology. It's changing the structure of schools from gigantic, prison like structures to smaller, more responsive learning centers. Or getting rid of the brick and mortar structure all together and using new technology.
The public policy debate is interesting, but if you have kids you can solve the problems yourself, right now. Get involved in your kid's education, do what you think is right and don't leave your children's future in a stranger's hands.
Posted by: Lee Stranahan on March 19, 2007 11:52 PMThe programmes which have been shown to work best with disadvantaged kids are the ones that are heavily scripted, involve lots of repetition and rote learning, and otherwise make life no fun for the teacher.
Actually, teachers who have used Direct Instruction seem to enjoy it. See this blog post . I think this has two reasons:
1. The vast majority of teachers actually went into the area at least in part because they wanted to teach kids. Being able to do so successfully is enjoyable in itself to those teachers - I think we all, regardless of career choice, know that burst of pleasure from something at work going right that is quite apart from any material benefits.
2. Teaching by a script no more destroys creativity and responsible professionalism than acting according to a script. Lots of people want to be actors despite the terrible obligation of having to repeat a playwrights' words. A teacher in a Direct Instruction school is continually monitoring the students and adjusting the class based on feedback, adjusting the amount of practice (also called rote learning), dealing with students' behavioural problems, etc. The scripting gives them the tools to tackle problems and frees up the teacher's creative resources from reinventing the wheel to concentrating on higher-level problems - which means thinking about things like if a kid may be doing poor work because they have a vision problem or may mean thinking about things like how to improve the lessons even further.
Posted by: Tracy W on March 20, 2007 12:03 AMArr-squared:
You definitely should look at this PDF on what New York has to go through to fire an indisputably bad teacher.
Posted by: Kim Scarborough on March 20, 2007 12:10 AMLen touches on a point you missed, Jane:
Parents don't always want a quality education for their kids.
Posted by: Anthony on March 20, 2007 12:12 AM'sully' is quite right that teaching does not demand 40 hours a week. It demands a lot more than that. I teach at a very small (50 students) private school in the 'classical Christian' tradition, meaning required Latin, logic, rhetoric, and grammar (lots of sentence diagramming), plus plenty of AP classes and 4 years of elective Ancient Greek. Most of us have Ph.D.s. We're all expected to be at school from 7:30 to 3:30 M-F, which is already 40 hours, plus another hour or two for faculty meetings every other Tuesday, plus after-school tutoring for those who need it, plus meetings with worried parents, plus I'm the 'closer' on Thursdays and Fridays, which means being there until the last student is picked up (usually around 6 pm). That's already well over 40 hours per week, and doesn't count class preparation, grading, Sunday open houses for recruiting, field trips, and so on. Did I mention that we don't have a janitor, so each of us, paired with a lucky student, gets to clean one classroom and one bathroom every Friday afternoon?
I imagine a tenured public school teacher who has given up preparing for class and grading tests can get his work week under 40 hours, but that doesn't apply to most of us. Did I mention that my salary last year for teaching four classes (=4/5 of full-time) was $12,500? Class sizes ranged from 1 to 4, so I'm not complaining. In fact, I wouldn't trade my job for any other. But you'd have to put a gun to my head to make me teach public school again -- six months of that was all I could take.
Posted by: Dr. Weevil on March 20, 2007 12:13 AMmark and quadrupole are right: People forget the pension benefits teachers get, which would require significant saving in other jobs. Teachers in most school districts are also exempt from Social Security taxes because of the pre-existing pension plans. Left that part out, didn't they?
However, quadrupole, I wouldn't invoke the "divide by 0.75" approach you use since they only work nine months. Do you think they and their dependents go into hibernation for three months of the year? Just as being paid $100 for an hour of work per week is NOT the same thing as being paid $4000/week, making $30,000/year for working 9 months is NOT the same as being paid $40,000/year.
Posted by: Person on March 20, 2007 12:35 AMMy memories of public high school (i.e., the years where I was actually aware of the teaching contract structure) suggested to me that the problem with the unions is often less an issue of dismissing bad teachers, as it is a problem of being able to incentivize teachers to work harder (and reward those who already do).
My best teachers, without exception, were putting in 8-9 hours a day, plus weekend responsibilities on ocassion. Their union-negotiated contract gave them salaried pay based on 7 hours/day, with structured advancements for seniority and education level (i.e., Ph.D > MA > BA) only.
In any other industry, there would be annual or quarterly performance reviews, with stern reprimands to chronic slackers and carrots dangled out for those who wanted to put in the extra mile. Union shops destroy these by ensuring that both individual-level oversight and incentivized pay structures are impossible in most cases. Which might also explain why many principals aren't very effective managers: they have to perform management duties without access to basic management tools, and they may find themselves fighting the entire faculty as a bloc over conflicts that could be otherwise isolated to one or two offending parties in the absence of union mentality.
Posted by: anony-mouse on March 20, 2007 1:50 AMJane Galt said:
"... In exchange, I think I can give Democrats something I assume they want more than teachers' unions, which is a decent educational system."
This is the exact sort of over confident unjustified arrogance that got us into Iraq.
Posted by: James B. Shearer on March 20, 2007 3:57 AMIn any other industry, there would be annual or quarterly performance reviews, with stern reprimands to chronic slackers and carrots dangled out for those who wanted to put in the extra mile.
In any other industry, there would be proper training for new entrants on how to be effective doctors/engineers/lawyers/etc. And the administration's renumeration would have some connection to whether or not the company meets its objectives.
I don't think unions are the problems with public schools, it's administrations that don't have to care about whether kids are learning and therefore don't have to support teachers properly. Oh, and education schools that don't have any feedback from industry on whether they are training good teachers.
Posted by: Tracy W on March 20, 2007 6:05 AMJane is right there is no effective control over the administration/teachers in the public schools. My daughter is 16 and really motivated in science, but still is recovering from years of trendy math instruction. Many of her friends in our wealthy suburb are being placed in private school, not because the teachers are better, but that they are less inclined to let students drift.
The whole union setup lets teachers slack off on the hard parts of teaching and turn classrooms into personal playthings. Constantly changing curriculums creates higher paying coordinator positions. We've found that the kids really do respond to the few old battlaxe teachers still left around.
Posted by: David Moelling on March 20, 2007 7:54 AMLike Shelby and others, I have to point out the problem with point #1 ("The American educational system sucks"). In fact - and I really have to put this somewhere so I can just cut and paste instead of typing it out each time - that's not actually true, because there isn't even any such entity as "the American educational system." What we have in reality is a number of separate public education systems - maybe five or six - sharply differentiated by demographics, economics, history, etc. A public school in Scarsdale is not in any meaningful way part of the same general system as one in the South Bronx. (Upper Merion/West Philly, etc.) A number of the systems - relatively to very affluent suburban schools, for example - do pretty well: certainly not that there's no room for improvement, but they don't simply suck in any obvious way. Others, especially extremely impoverished inner-city schools, do suck: they are desperately in need of help. (Another way to look at this is that schools generally perform in line with parents' SES; a slightly different way is that the various systems are in fact all functioning quite well if we assume that their function is to reproduce social inequality, but we don't have to go there).
Rhetorically (and not necessarily intentionally), this is a very important point. People do know this, on an explicit level, but even when they go on to discuss the reality, as Megan does in points #2, #5 and #7, the issue's already been framed as how the "American educational system" sucks. That's going to affect the discussion. One way it often this does is lead folks to focus on, for example, teachers and teachers' unions as the main cause for why "the public schools" are so bad, rather than steadfastly facing the reality of the situation, where the main culprit is savage socioeconomic inequalities and their repercussions. Even the voucher debate, which does sometimes genuinely attempt to grapple with this, gets messed up in this way.
Posted by: Dan S. on March 20, 2007 8:02 AMFill the best, most modern school with good teachers, but send it even a large minority of bad students, and what happens? Bad school. (This has happened in many of those "inner city" schools you decry.) Except that here and there you'll find a school that gets the worst students and succeeds in teaching them. If I understand these cases correctly, they start with an exceptional principal, who has both somehow gained more freedom to run the school his way than most large districts allow, and has the abilities to make full use of that freedom. The principal then attracts good teachers - teachers who actually want to teach, not to babysit, and who appreciate having a principal that backs them up enough to not transfer to a school in a nice neighborhood as soon as they get enough seniority. They work extra hours, so kids can stay late at the school and do their homework in relative safety and quiet. They set high standards and insist the kids meet them. (For ghetto kids, getting to school on time and doing a bit of your homework are high standards, but they go beyond that,) They persuade parents to back them up. And they change the culture of ths school, including the students.
But those principals are really exceptional. It's not just the leadership skills they show, which I suspect are more instinctual than learned. I've been told that education majors mostly come from the kids entering college with the lowest SAT's, that 4-year education graduates average lower Graduate Records Exam scores than most other majors, but that school administration majors score even lower on the GRE. I haven't dug out these statistics myself, but I've seen for myself that education majors were far from the smartest kids on campus, many teachers are dolts, and most principals are worse, and education professors often teach unproven teaching methods. However, I also know brilliant people that teach because they like to teach, in spite of being paid the same as the dolts - as long as doltish administrators don't drive them out. There appear to also be a very few brilliant people that want to run a school well enough to deal with poor pay ($100K might sound good, but these are people that could be running a major corporation), stupid regulations, and a whole lot of other obstacles.
Suggestions? Fire every education professor that cannot show solid research proving that using his methods in the classroom produce good results. Eliminate all education and school administration majors, except possibly for specialists in K-3rd grade. For 4th grade and up teaching, require a college degree in a rigorous academic field, plus a few classes in proven pedagogic methods. For administration, either require a business management degree, or promote top-notch teachers and give them assistants with the right training to take care of the paperwork.
Then, reduce the bureacracy above the schools and give the new principals full control of their schools, including hiring and firing teachers for any reason, and full responsibility for the results. If the kids don't learn (shown by year to year improvement on standardized tests, administered by outsiders), fire the principal and hire a new principal who can replace as much of the staff as desired. Repeat until the school is working.
I know, I know, that sounds way too harsh. It's what any businessman would do with a business that wasn't competing - unless he closed it entirely, which would happen long before it got as bad as the average inner-city school - but it's too harsh for government employees, and it isn't going to happen.
Which is why we need to move towards a free market, so it is forced to happen. Bad businesses close when their customers leave. Bad schools survive only because their customers are forced to attenc.
Posted by: markm on March 20, 2007 9:39 AMI find it really hard to reconcile 21 and 22 with your previous willingness to require organic seaweed salad. The previous proposal made it sound like you were willing to accept a vast INCREASE in regulations. Which obviously makes it look like all you wanna do is bust up unions. The problem wasn't that people were reading you unfairly, the problem was that you didn't think your proposal through all the way. Now that you've admitted you want to eliminate licensing of teachers--which anyone who knows anything about education would never accept--then everyone's confusion should be gone now.
Posted by: Consumatopia on March 20, 2007 9:56 AMPerson said: "Do you think they and their dependents go into hibernation for three months of the year? Just as being paid $100 for an hour of work per week is NOT the same thing as being paid $4000/week, making $30,000/year for working 9 months is NOT the same as being paid $40,000/year."
Making $30k/year for working 9 months is also not the same as making $30k/year for working 12 months. Making $30k/year + gold plated medical plan + generous defined benefit retirement plan + ironclad job security is also not the same as making $30k/year + bottom of the barrel HMO + self-funded IRA without even employer matching contributions + at-will employment.
Posted by: Scott on March 20, 2007 10:13 AMPerson,
"However, quadrupole, I wouldn't invoke the "divide by 0.75" approach you use since they only work nine months. Do you think they and their dependents go into hibernation for three months of the year? Just as being paid $100 for an hour of work per week is NOT the same thing as being paid $4000/week, making $30,000/year for working 9 months is NOT the same as being paid $40,000/year."
I think you misunderstand somewhat my point. I am making the case that teachers are not undercompensated, but rather underemployed. I am advocating that we restructure schools so that we continue to employ teachers at closer to the 2000 hour per year level that is normal in our economy. If you are giving an employee too few hours, the solution is not to pay that employee an astronomical wage to make up for the fact you are getting little work out of him, but rather to increase the number of hours you give that employee by reducing the number of total employees you have to spread across the hours of work that need to be done. This can be structurally acheived with certain year round schooling schemes.
Imagine you have 4 classes of 4th graders. Right now you would employ 4 teachers for 8-9 months to teach them. Switch the kids to a year round schedule of 12 weeks on 3 weeks off, staggered. This means that at any given time, you only have 3 classes in attendance (the fourth being on it's 3 week break). Thus you only need 3 teachers, but you can employ them more or less the 2000 hour per year norm. Keep their hourly wage constant and suddenly you have teachers making annualized incomes of around $70k on average.
Posted by: quadrupole on March 20, 2007 10:28 AM"but I've seen for myself that education majors were far from the smartest kids on campus, many teachers are dolts . . .
----
"In another recent ETS study,Richard Coley and Barbara Bruschi compared the literacy skills of teachers to those of adults in other occupations. They found that the literacy skills of teachers were comparable to those of other professionals. For instance, teachers performed as well as lawyers, physicians, and electrical engineers, while outperforming managers and
administrators on two of the three forms of literacy that were studied. Their standing was particularly impressive when taking into
account the large difference we found in compensation. Compared to other college graduates at the highest level of literacy, teachers earned $222 less each week." [link]
Now that you've admitted you want to eliminate licensing of teachers--which anyone who knows anything about education would never accept
None of my teachers, K-12, was licensed. I did fine, as did my peers.
Posted by: Rob Lyman on March 20, 2007 10:47 AMI still think that you are making a fairly common mistake among reformers: assuming that the folks implimenting the system will be people like you. Initially, maybe the regulations will be light and reasonable, but I can certainly see a regulatory creep in which they become progressively more onerous. And by the time people notice, all of the schools, public and private, will have become dependent on vouchers.
Posted by: cheerful iconoclast on March 20, 2007 11:04 AMI live in a small town in the NYC metro area which educates its students very well for maybe 60% of what the nearby, dysfunctional Newark public system spends to have few college applicants and many drop-outs. I frankly don't want to hear about how poor area schools are underfunded and think it's generally false.
In terms of political opposition, the potential resistance of people who have paid a surcharge to live in educational districts with good schools needs to be factored in.
I think Leonard's 11:43 post is particularly worthwhile, but many interesting contributions.
Posted by: jult52 on March 20, 2007 11:33 AMAgain, the problems with American schools isn't the funding, and it mostly isn't caused by the teachers: it is caused by the students and the parents. As I wrote in a previous thread, there is a critical fraction of students, with parents who take the process of education seriously (and impart this seriousness to their children), required to run a "good" school. As this fraction of students falls below this level, as it does in the poor inner cities, the school can't even educate those children of responisible parenting. I see only two solutions-either give those responsible parents the means to move their children out of these failing schools, or expel (or, at the very least, segregate them from the rest of the student body), those children who disrupt the classrooms.
If you are unwilling to make either of these reforms, then no amount of money is going to give success.
Now, on the issue of money and education, more resources would make a difference in the schools of most poor, rural areas. Here, the problems of family disintegration are not so great as they are in the inner cities- it really is a case of the schools and students underperforming due to lack of resources.
Posted by: Yancey Ward on March 20, 2007 11:40 AM#22 is right on, and NCLB has only made
it worse. A college math professor with
a PhD is not "highly qualified" for teaching
8th grade math. Our kids' charter school is
going to hit in the near future because of
the changes in qualification requirements.
Sweden has a voucher system in place; why can't we? Voucher schools in Sweden must not charge more than the voucher (unless they offer more than the standard curriculum), are provided with land and a building by the state, cannot select among applicants (other than to have a preference for local students and siblings), and have to deal with all of Sweden's complex and difficult labor laws. They limit the number of voucher schools to about 10% of the total.
(This information comes from a relative who founded and ran a voucher school there. She also said that in order to fire support staff, she had to bribe them to leave [due to the onerous labor laws] but that teachers had enough professional pride that they left if they were not appreciated.)
Posted by: Larry Weinstein on March 20, 2007 12:49 PMI support the ideals of unions but the implementation and reality have become pure evil. Consider the following:
Let's say you are a teacher with a few years (say 10 years) of work experience. Let's then imagine you decide to move to another district for any reason: better pay, spouse's job, professional growth, economy, etc. What happens to you financially and professionally?
What happens is something that happens only in union shops and in no other major profession in the US! Your pay and professional rank will be reduced to entry level or if you're lucky just above entry level!
Imagine if you were an engineer, accountant, sport professional, etc., with 10 years of experience, you change jobs, and all of your professional experience is deemed irrelevant and you get dropped into the same pay grade as a new hire without any experience! This is what happens to teachers throughout the US today! This assures that the most risk-averse behavior survives which pretty much guarantees that schools will never do better than "treading water" and more likely be fairing worse. It just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. In fact, if you do stuff like this, you can't legitimately call teaching a profession if you are treated so unprofessionally as a matter of course.
A very simple fix to the education system would improve things. That is: require that all public school districts and their unions nation-wide be required to consider experience and ability only for pay setting (you know, meritocracy, like nearly every other normal US job) and ban having pay from being tied to seniority or tenure - only merit that is objectively defined. Seniority should be applicable to tenure only. Tenure should be about what it originally was about: "senatorial" insulation of objective rationalism from political fashion and abuse.
I don't like legislating economics (laws are never flexible enough to adapt to real economic pressures and there's always a risk of injecting partisan inanity to fill the gap), but as long as public education is a de facto monopoly, you can't use regular market forces to enforce market fairness. Non-transferable, anti-merit, anti-objective job rules are unfair and ensure a race to the bottom.
Posted by: Jeff on March 20, 2007 1:38 PMFully half of American students have double-digit IQs!
Just to be pedantic, this is almost certainly untrue, for at least two reasons. First, while 100 is theoretically the average IQ, it probably isn't in reality, and second, half of a population will be below the average only if it's a normal distribution (which IQ probably isn't). 100 is the theoretical average IQ, but it's not the median, which is the value that splits the population in half.
This is a common error, for which I blame a sucky educational system.
Posted by: Rand Simberg on March 20, 2007 1:59 PMIt's a pretty good list, though as with anything, there are a couple I'd disagree with... but you've already gotten an earfull, so I'll go in another direction...
namely, that you get what it is you pay for. the accountability that everyone pushes now works best when you have a large pool of qualification. you won't get a large pool of qualification until you make it worth the effort to get qualified. If I'd have to take a substantial paycut AND get a Master's in order to teach... why am I motivated to do that? I know many teachers, and those that are good do a lot of extra work to teach. just because you make a lesson plan at home doesn't mean those hours don't count to how much you work in a day. most of my teacher friends take summer jobs to make enough to make ends meet. Those good teachers are often drawn to teaching, it's not just a jobe for them. There are a whole group of people who would make good teachers, though, that can't afford the pay cut, and so? you never get that group.
Accountability is more effective if you pay enough, because paying enough allows you to ask for more change at every level.
I don't think education in the US sucks, exactly, but it could be better... You don't always have to dismantle everything, to innovate. Though sometimes, yeah, you have to tear it down...
Cheers, D
Posted by: D on March 20, 2007 2:00 PM"In short, I want to disempower all the groups currently agitating for Status Quo + More Government Cash, which includes, but certainly is not limited to, the teachers' unions. In exchange, I think I can give Democrats something I assume they want more than teachers' unions, which is a decent educational system.
But it's not because I want to gut the Democratic party. (I'm pretty sure that the Democratic party can survive without a big teachers' union bloc.) "
But I doubt that the Democratic party (at least as currently known) could survive with a decently educated populace.
Posted by: Jim Thomason on March 20, 2007 2:15 PMI can verify that private schools generally have lower pay scales than public schools. This is true at the college level as well: my father, who taught at Pace University (one of the largest in New York state) for nearly four decades, never made as much as the professors in the City University system.
Nor do I think that--at least for my father--retirement benefits were any worse: like most university profs, he socked away part of his paycheck into TIAA/CREF, and collected a tidy sum when he retired (so much for the theory that you can't privatize Social Security, BTW).
As for the "we can only work nine months a year" argument, I'll again point to my father, who taught in the summer session pretty much every year in order to enhance his take-home pay. I appreciate that most public schools don't have summer sessions: but why can't public school teachers bestir themselves to do tutoring over the summer? Seems like the obvious.
But the reality here is the unenumerated interest group, that several have alluded to but none dare name: middle class suburban parents. Any solution to the problem of inner-city schools that threatens their expensive investment in a house in Fairfax County is a non-starter, even if every teacher's union on the planet disappeared tomorrow.
Posted by: David Hecht on March 20, 2007 2:16 PMVouchers are an excellent idea. Especially if they were set up to allow in home schooling too. Education is essential for setting kids up for the future. Its funding is a cumpulsory tax on the people. Therefore, if we are to force them to get an education, we might as well allow them to get one they want.
The current system is a failure. Those wealthy enough to escape the poor schools do so, those who don't pay the price in college in remedial classes or in a low income career.
Private schools currently shy away from helping challenging kids because they can't afford to increase tuition any more to fund those efforts. Parents are paying twice, first in taxes, second in tuition to send their children and few are going to pony up for programs that their children don't need.
A voucher system, tied to a certification system like the one private schools already use, would allow parents to choose a school that is a good match for their kids. Choice would allow them to abandon schools with poor teachers or facilites and provide incentive for groups to come in and rehabilitate poor schools.
Posted by: the Brain on March 20, 2007 2:27 PMThank you for such a great laying out of such obviously correct and reasonable points. As a former high school teacher and now a public librarian, I can attest to the abysmal quality and waste of time of schools of education. I'll never forget in one of my classes a discussion that centered around what makes a great teacher: the young people in the program, so idealistic and naive, presented a very long list of emotional attributes, such as empathy, respect for diversity, making lessons "relevant" to the students' real world, and on and on. When I finally raised my hand and suggested that a deep knowledge of one's subject, such as history or american literature, would be a very important element in a successful teacher, the professor and the other students looked at me like I was from Mars. The professor's attitude was clearly dismissive of such a quaint notion.
D. Dixon
Posted by: Daniela Dixon on March 20, 2007 2:34 PMAlong the lines of Jeff (1:38) - the whole structure is set up to make good union members not good teachers, there is no free labor market for teachers.
1. High (artificial) barrier to entry
2. Seniority versus ability and experience
3. High switching costs (pension and seniority)
4. Tenure
etc.
Like most organizations that start out with good intentions, the teachers union serves to make good union members, not to protect teachers.
With vouchers, can I get one for home schooling my kids?
As a Middle school teacher, I agree 100% with Yancey Ward's comment above.
Which is why as a public school teacher and union member, I support vouchers.
By the way, I wonder why so many public school teachers send their kids to private schools...
Posted by: gahrie on March 20, 2007 2:39 PMSchools are only as good as the students, and students are generally only as good as the parents (or other influential adult mentors). I really get tired of people who say that inner city schools "need help/funding/resources", or that suburban school teachers are paid more (or are paid a too much, for that matter). Yes, some inner-city schools are appalling - asbestos flaking off of ceilings, not enough textbooks, 40 kids to a class, etc. Do you really think that performance would dramatically increase if the ceilings got fixed?
I attended a public high school that was kind of a petri dish for this kind of discussion, as it a) paid the teachers crappy salaries b) had horrible facilities (by suburban standards, at least) and c) had students from 6 communities: 1 ultra-rich, 1 upper-middle class, 1 middle-class and 3 lower-middle class. (BTW, the school population was lily-white, so race did not enter the picture in our little experiment)
The school consistently was seen as one of the top public schools in Pennsylvania, and other school districts visited to see what our "secret" was. The "secret" was, the top test scores and prizes were skewed by the half of the school from middle class and better communities. The lower-income communities' kids struggled and generally spent the most time in detention/suspension/summer school. We all had the same teachers and walked the same dark, dingy hallways, yet there seemed to be a "school within a school." All the kids whose parents made them do homework amazingly did well. The kids whose parents didn't care - didn't. (I'm not generalizing here. I had lower-income friend with PhD parents who got straight-A's and an upper-crust friend with absentee parents who was only known for his drug use.)
My dad taught in the same public school for 33 years. He started as a history teacher, then became a guidance counselor, then director of guidance, so he saw both micro (in-class behavior) and macro (overall life goals) aspects of the student population. When he started in the 1960s-1970s, the school won the same awards that my school did in the 1980s. When he retired, the school was in shambles, with discipline problems, falling test scores, etc. Same exact school, same budget, same (award-winning) teachers. What happened? The surrounding neighborhoods went downhill. The incoming students were not motivated, and neither were their parents.
Now, I support vouchers, because I think that a "bad" school creates a toxic atmosphere of bad peer pressure and frustrated teachers, and the few who want to escape should be allowed to do so. I also agree that school boards and teacher unions can impede solutions that can help on the margin. I ALSO agree that "certifying" schools by testing for absolute ability is wrong, and an "improvement" yardstick should be used.
All of these solutions will not effectively crack the problem of the "toxic waste" that will foul up any facility they attend, no matter how modern or "innovative."
Remember, American public schools give EVERYBODY a chance to improve themselves (or fail, for that matter). A lot of European systems track kids early, so late bloomers end up traning as welders, whether they want to or not.
Posted by: Doug on March 20, 2007 2:42 PMIt's not just Sweden, Belgium has a voucher system as well.
I think an earlier commenter was correct about teacher requirements. Education majors are OK for K-3 teachers and should probably be very focused on teaching phonics and reading. 4th grade and above should have a BA in the subject they teach. This is what you see at many private schools in my area, while even the best public schools do not have specialists teaching individual topics until middle school or even high school.
It has to contribute to their performance, not just because of their higher level of knowledge, but the chance to focus on their favorite subject. The enthusiasm they have is infectious - my son's reading teacher obviously loves reading. His science teacher is amazing and does tons of hands-on activities which keeps the boys very interested.
It also allows the schools to tailor a child's schedule to their strengths and weaknesses academically. This something that is common at private schools, but a huge no-no at our area public schools. For some reason public schools are obsessed with everyone getting the exact same curriculum irregardless of their ability. But if the kids who need extra help get extra help and those that are ready for extra challenges aren't held back to the average students pace, everyone ends up doing their personal best.
Shouldn't that be the goal?
My father taught school from the early 60s through 1984. At that time, compared to today, the schools were good. Teachers had degrees in Math, English, Chemistry, Physics, etc. NOT EDUCATION.
I went to a small town/rural school. 1500 students in 7th through 12th drawing from1-1/2 counties (really).
The entire time, Dad worked at least two jobs at any given time. He taught, always, and variously, worked as a clerk at a hardware/automotive parts store, worked as a clerk at a furniture store, read meters for the power company, mowed the grass at a Christmas tree farm, did the Senior play (it paid extra), and so on.
He intended to work until he was 70.
In 79 or so, Jimmy Carter Federalized the Education Department, and the Teachers Union. My father is an old Union man and was glad of it. Every two years the teachers had to negotiate a new contract, and the school board always started with the first one they ever had - from 1952.
Each contract was a negotiation from scratch. So, he thought having the Union Federalized would end that. It did.
Now, everything went smoothly.
Of course, there were a few changes.
They took over one wing of the school to put in the new Administration offices. The teachers were told that they could double up on the rooms since they each had at least two periods a day that their rooms were not used, it was just a matter of scheduling.
Before that, when a teacher needed chalk, they went to the supply room (there was one in each corridor) and got a box of chalk.
Now, they got ONE box and had to turn in all 24 nubs and fill out a form before they got the next one. The first time my father was told this, he us kids come in (this was the week before school opened), break the chalk and scribble on the board to wear the edges down. He turned in fifty or so nubs and asked for his normal six boxes.
They told him he could not teach Romeo and Juliet to the 12th graders who were not going to college because "they would not understand it and it is not relevant to their life". Two years later, he was told to not teach Shakespeare at all because he was not relevant (all the English teachers were told this). He was to teach only "approved authors', all from the second half of the 20th century.
He ignored the syllabus and taught what he wanted, after all, the most they could do was fire him.
However, the younger teachers switched. They needed the job security.
There is more - he hated the health care instead of money.
It is true that teachers are ill paid - but they were ill paid through out history. It had the effect of ensuring that most of the teachers were there because they wanted to be. (No, I do NOT think this was good or effective, but the modern solution is not better either)
I do not have the answers. If I did, I would be a well healed lobbyist influencing Congress on an expense account.
Posted by: Dan in MD on March 20, 2007 2:46 PMMy father was a PhD from Caltech who taught Geology at a small New Mexico school for more than 40 years. I earned more in my third year at my current job than he did in any single year of his entire career. That being said, he loved his job, was a popular teacher, and was gratified to hear from students who, after graduation, were making double his salary. He was a GOOD teacher.
My current family lives in a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles. We moved there because the school district was "excellent" and the high school was a "California Distinguished School." My oldest daughter's chemistry class consisted of watching films like "The Right Stuff" and "October Sky" because they dealt with "scientific things"...she learned NO chemistry whatsoever.
I blame teacher unions for the woeful state of at least THAT school; the chemistry teacher (among several others) was someone whose job was assured through tenure, and the principal of the school was not at all interested in improving anything...and yet, this school was considered "distiguished."
It's a sad state of affairs.
Posted by: Stan Smith on March 20, 2007 2:51 PMThe reason school sucks for many minority students and a contributing factor to not being able to keep good teaches - is the behavior of too many ot the minority students. Teachers won't teach and students won't learn - when both fear for their personal safety.
Posted by: Uncle Devo on March 20, 2007 2:55 PMFor a purported objectivist, you seem to be proposing to steal money from Peter to pay for Paul's children's education. This is, simply, morally evil. Focusing on trivia such as teacher compensation, or voucher schemes, or anything else for that matter, ignores this basic fact. We can mutter about "social contracts", or "the greater good". The end result, no matter how high-minded the intention, is the tyranny of the majority, and a non-functional government school system. From the Ayn Rand Institute:
-----------------
Rand Institute Press Release
No Child Let Ahead
February 13, 2007
Irvine, CA--With the No Child Left Behind Act up for reauthorization, critics are pointing out that it is preventing gifted children from advancing ahead. Because the act forces states to ensure that the weakest students are not left behind, it has dried up funding for programs intended to challenge the strongest.
"The problem is not just with No Child Left Behind," said Dr. Keith Lockitch, resident fellow of the Ayn Rand Institute. "The problem is inherent in the very system of public education, itself. When people's tax dollars are taken to pay for the education of other people's children, there is no way to distribute those dollars fairly."
"The inevitable result is a massive government bureaucracy making collective judgments involving millions of students. And given the egalitarian philosophy dominating that bureaucracy, should it be any surprise that it is our nation's best and brightest that are sacrificed in the attempt to serve the weakest?
"Only a free market in education can prevent the injustices of the current system--a system that, like any government-run industry, has deteriorated into a junk heap of dismal public schools that meets no one's educational needs."
### ### ###
-----------------
Anthing other than locally (parent) controlled private educational systems give far too much power to the government to inculcate collectivist attitudes within them.
Posted by: Blackwing1 on March 20, 2007 3:00 PM"Schools are only as good as the students, and students are generally only as good as the parents"
Several other people have said this before. But your entire post gets it wrong-the problem isn't teachers, it isn't unions, it isn't money, it isn't the 'system,' man.
Good schools have good students and good parents. Bad schools have bad students and bad parents.
If you can make that intellectual leap, and rewrite your points to refer to the problem (i.e. "1) The American education system sucks" becomes "1) some students in the American education system suck" and so on) you will realize your entire post is nonsense.
Sk
Posted by: Sk on March 20, 2007 3:04 PMThat's beautiful. Call it McArdle's 25 Theses. Now you just need to go over to your state's capitol building and nail it on the door, and the reformation can begin.
Posted by: Thief on March 20, 2007 3:15 PMMegan: " I am willing to double spending per student, to the tune of $500 billion a year if such a sum should be necessary,"
Two things:
1) It seems you're saying that these various reforms you'll accept to get vouchers are good things in and of themselves - at least in a voucher-enabled environment - not things you'll reluctantly go along with in order to get needed reforms implemented. Do I understand correctly? (Low on sleep today, kinda fuzzy).
2) Do you think doubling (total) spending per student is politically possible? It's very nice of you to suggest it, but whatever the details (I imagine this would either have to be through federal spending and/or through additional legislation that mandated such spending at local/state levels, however they raised it - but I'm quite bad at wonkery, perhaps you have some exciting ideas), do you think it would pass? (Total federal funding of k-12 ed is about 38 billion).
And if not, what's the point of this statement? I'd support a lot of stuff for a pony, but if there's no chance of getting a pony . . .
" want to change the system so that it works more like . . . something that works, like my local grocery store.
Oh, Megan, Megan! Perhaps this has been brought up already, but food stores are infamous for having a highly inequitable distribution in terms of quality, with poor areas grossly underserved. You grew up in New York too - did you not know that? And that's with food vouchers.
For example: "Research shows that there are fewer supermarkets located in low-income neighborhoods than in middle class or affluent ones. . . [A 1995] study found there were 30 percent fewer supermarkets in low-income areas than in higher-income areas; it also found low-income consumers were less likely to possess automobiles . . .
. . . Due to the lack of supermarkets in low-income areas, residents' local shopping options are often limited to smaller neighborhood stores. Small stores offer fewer food choices at higher prices than supermarkets. Reasons for differences in price, quality, and selection are varied, and are often tied to "economies of scale." For example, smaller stores cannot buy in volume, have limited access to large-scale wholesale produce, and often do not have the space or equipment needed to offer fresh produce on a daily basis. . . .
. . . Studies have shown that prices at neighborhood markets can exceed those at chain supermarkets by as much as 76 percent.4 A United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) report found that smaller stores also are unlikely to offer the variety of products carried by most major supermarkets.5 In a 1993 study in Eastern Pennsylvania, researchers found that the average full-service supermarket offered 19 kinds of fruit, 29 kinds of vegetables, and 18 kinds of meat, while the average small store only carried 6 kinds of fruit, 5 kinds of vegetables, and 2 kinds of meat.6 The study also showed that the produce and other foods offered in smaller stores were often lower in quality . . ."
Posted by: Dan S. on March 20, 2007 3:18 PMAs someone who took education classes during college and was so traumatized that I decided to become a lawyer instead, I would have to say that teacher's education is nothing more than sociology as viewed through the prism of victimhood. Most of the time by far was spent learning about how the core of the rotting education system was the racism and sexism of the system. And the really disturbing thing was that it didn't matter what the symptom was, the diagnosis was always racism or sexism. For example, first we would learn that girls get better grades and are more likely to go to higher education. Then we would learn that even though it may appear that girls are doing better in school, they could be doing even better except teachers of both sexes are unconsciously sexist against them as evidenced by their calling on boys more than girls. Almost no thought at all was spent studying why boys had worse grades and weren't going to college.
At about the 4th sociology and victimhood class disguised as an education class, upon seeing that I would be 'learning' the same exact material as in my previous classes, not just thematically but down to the examples being exactly the same, I became so disgusted that I quit the class and the department only 3 units short of completion.
Posted by: AJG on March 20, 2007 3:27 PMAnd yet . . . no one in poor neighbourhoods is starving to death because of the lack of food in their stores . . .
Posted by: Jane Galt on March 20, 2007 3:27 PMWe're not just fighting the unions, we're talking TIAA-CREF, etc.
I don't know if it's changed, but my limited understanding about how retirement was partially funded least in my state was it was funded in 5 year increments.
For example, leave after 13 years of teaching, you'd only get credit for 10, but this was something I read I think in the late 90s.
I'm willing to pay 6 figures a year in exchange for 401ks and HSAs.
Posted by: Sandy P on March 20, 2007 3:32 PMAll the expertise in, and enthusiasm for, a subject won't help if you can't control a classroom and relate the material to the students. Think of the experts in your line of work; they aren't always the best people to train a new employee. I would much rather have someone with mediocre expertise who can control a class and relate the material, than an expert who can't. So there is a need for "education training" in the licensing of teachers.
Posted by: exhelodrvr on March 20, 2007 3:37 PMIf the schools are underfunded, can someone please explain to me what happened in Kansas City, MO c. 1984-2001????
It failed miserably, and money was not the issue.
Posted by: Sandy P on March 20, 2007 3:39 PMMegan!
Your urban bias is showing with that comment about the difficulty of getting anyone good to move there. The assumption that all the ability chooses city life (which includes the suburbs) is unconscionable.
Posted by: Brett on March 20, 2007 3:44 PMMost teachers in public school today are awful. There. I said it. The best ones are the new ones. Never have I seen a system where the best were paid the least and the worst were paid the most.
Ask yourself, why does each school that gets built need it's own architect? Have we not figured out the design of a school by now?
And why in the one of the bluest, most pro-union states of the country, IL, do we have such a disparity in school quality (i.e. try this - New Trier vs Chicago Public).
Why do we insist on having different curriculums in different districts. I know "local control" is the religion of conservatives, but ultimatley, we would do much better if we could apply some economy of scale to the problem (we have none currently).
Why do schools in bad neighborhoods have people whose sole job it is to manage the boundary and keep people out who live on the wrong side of the line? Thats like hiring a cop to guard a pile of shit!
Schools are nasty little kingdoms run largely by petty tyrants, with a few exceptions. Nobody speaks truth to power in a school. It is one of the most conformist institutions around. The unstated purpose of public school is, by all available evidence, to create easily led, easily manipulated consumers (when Republicans run it) - or - easily led, easily manipulated voters (when Democrats run it). Neither is good.
The best advice I can give people is to live in a modest neighborhood with a bad school system, and use the money you save, and buy private school tuition at a good school with the difference.
Posted by: Aaron Erickson on March 20, 2007 3:47 PM6) It is extremely hard to recruit and keep good teachers
Ummmm...maybe if more "good teachers" were produced, they wouldn't be so hard to recruit and keep. The system is great at producing low performers, promoting low performers, and discouraging anyone who actually cares about educating (not indoctrinating) children. If money was the issue, why does my son's school of 1200 kids have 12 principals? ...one of whom laughingly described himself as the "parking lot Principal" during my son's orientation. When I grew up, this man's "job" was done by a part ime custodian for 1/30th his salary. Disgusting.
Posted by: Gunga on March 20, 2007 3:52 PMI would like to see advanced placement courses either deleted from the curriculum or offered with a stiff course fee. We have (had) a social contract to provide a decent high school education for developing ones citizenship and elementary workplace skills. High schools need not provide low cost (low quality) college courses.
Posted by: Jay Bee on March 20, 2007 3:53 PMTwo disagreements.
1. Many people of ability choose to live in the country.
2. Teachers are not underpaid, and until this falsehood is generally understood, no improvements will emerge from our debates on education. Comparing the pay of union workers in the private and government sectors is misleading, as our non-market-based education system camoflauges the teachers actual value. Besides, I submit we enjoyed better educational outcomes when they actually were underpaid sixty years ago.
Were I a professional teacher, I would be deeply embarassed by my colleagues who insist that the way to address the interests of the ill-educated pupils is to put money in my pocket. I'm confident more than enough money is given the system to produce a better outcome right now. We could actually see that better outcome if the profession left its hobby of social activism at home, and spent our time on our children's education, rather than their own political aspirations.
Posted by: Brett on March 20, 2007 3:54 PMA lot of teacher training is bad, but that doesn't mean that all it takes is degree in the subject matter to teach it. 7-year-olds learn very differently from 13-year-olds. Anyone who thinks they can go into a seventh grade classroom and lecture 5 days a week is in for a rude awakening.
Teaching is a skill. Good teacher training produces good teachers.
And anyone who thinks that teaching is well-paid for the amount of hours you work has clearly never taught. I taught for 3 years in NC, teaching 7th grade English. Two of those years were in a well-run public school, the last was in a terribly run charter school. I left because:
1) The demands are insane.
I was working 70-80 hours a week and still wasn't getting everything done. That probably says something about my own organizational skills, but I was not alone. The best teachers I knew put in at least 60 hours a week -- and they had years of experience and course develoment behind them.
2) The work is isolating.
I could easily go a full week without having a conversation longer than five minutes with someone over the age of 12 while at work.
3) Greenhorns are saddled with the same responsibilities and expectations as 20-year veterans.
How many professional organizations do this? Doctors spend years as interns before operating thier own practice; lawyers do years of grunt work under partners before they're expected to take a case on their own. Yet teachers are simply given the keys to a classroom and five classes with a total of 140 students and told: "Go to it!"
Well, if they're lucky, they have a classroom.
4) The job is not respected.
It just isn't. People think you're either a martyr who's sacrificing yourself for your job or a moron who couldn't get other work. Plus everyone thinks they know how to teach because they went to school for at least 12 years themselves.
5) Last, the pay really does suck most places.
I made $21,000 my first year of teaching (with an MAEd) and, after 20 years, would have made $40k. That was in 1995, though, and pay rates have improved since then.
I stayed three years because I loved my kids, and many days found the work extremely fulfilling. But the daily grind and stress was ultimately too much for me. I now make six figures in a totally different line of work with less stress, fewer hours and more time to spend with my family.
And people wonder why talented folks don't go into or stay in teaching?
Posted by: Jeff on March 20, 2007 3:56 PMDear Jane,
Your claims that teachers are underpaid simply is not true. I'm referring to these points in your discourse:
8) The main reason that it is hard to get good teachers (outside of rural areas where it is hard to get good anyone to move there) is that their pay, unlike that of other union workers, is at the bottom of the distribution for their education level.
9) Given that the pay is at the bottom of the distribution for educated professionals, one of the primary attractions of the job is its short workyear and near-ironclad job security. Short of molesting the students or screaming racial epithets at them, it's awfully hard to get fired from a teaching position.
10) Jobs whose primary attraction is short hours and the difficulty of getting fired rarely attract the cream of the crop. The best teachers are either those few gifted passionate souls who want to teach, or women who are trying to match their schedule to that of their children. The latter group is shrinking; the former group has always been small.
11) Any meaningful reform of the school system that actually improves them will need to pay teachers much more.
Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute wrote a detailed analysis of teacher pay in this article:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=26346
QUOTING THE TEACHER PAY PART:
The teacher pay myth
The common assertion that teachers are severely underpaid when compared to workers in similar professions is so omnipresent that many Americans simply accept it as gospel. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen has declared that teachers ought to be excused from paying any income taxes. Teachers unions are not shy about claiming, like one spokesman for the National Education Association, that "it's easier to earn more money with less stress in other fields." Even First Lady Laura Bush, herself a former public school teacher, has said that for teachers, "salaries are too low. We all know that. We need to figure out a way to pay teachers more."
But the facts tell a different story. The average teacher's salary does seem modest at first glance: about $44,600 in 2002 for all teachers. But when we take an accurate account of what teachers are paid for their labor and compare it to what workers of similar skill levels in similar professions are paid, we find that teachers are not shortchanged at all.
One reason for the prominence of the underpaid-teacher belief is that people often fail to account for the relatively low number of hours that teachers work. It seems obvious, but it is easily forgotten: teachers work only about nine months per year. During the summer they can either work at other jobs or use the time off however else they wish. Either way, it's as much a form of compensation as a paycheck--as anyone who has ever had to count vacation days knows. If a teacher makes $45,000 for nine months of work while a nurse makes $45,000 for 12 months of work, clearly the teacher is much better paid. Nurses would certainly consider it to be a generous raise if they were offered three months' vacation each year at the same annual salary.
The most recent data available indicate that teachers average 7.3 working hours per day, and that they work 180 days per year, adding up to 1,314 hours per year. Americans in normal 9-to-5 professions who take two weeks of vacation and another ten paid holidays per year put in 1,928 working hours. Doing the math, this means the average teacher gets paid a base salary equivalent to a fulltime salary of $65,440. That's the national average for all teachers--more experienced instructors, and those working in better-paying school districts, make tens of thousands of dollars more, sometimes approaching the equivalent of six-figure salaries.
Data from the U.S. Department of Labor show that in 2002, elementary school teachers averaged $30.75 per hour and high school teachers made $31.01. That is about the same as other professionals like architects, economists, biologists, civil engineers, chemists, physicists and astronomers, and computer systems analysts and scientists. Even demanding, education-intensive professions like electrical and electronic engineering, dentistry, and nuclear engineering didn't make much more than teachers per hour worked. And the earnings of teachers are much higher than those of registered nurses, police officers, editors and reporters, firefighters, and social workers.
Some argue that it's unfair to calculate teacher pay on an hourly basis because teachers perform a large amount of work at home--grading papers on the weekend, for instance. But people in other professions also do offsite work. The only important question is whether teachers do significantly more offsite work than others.
Many assume that teachers spend almost all of the school day teaching. But in reality, the average teacher in a departmentalized school (where students have different instructors for different subjects) taught fewer than 3.9 hours per day in 2000. This leaves plenty of time for grading and planning lessons during regular school hours.
What's more, unlike most other professionals, public school teachers cannot easily be fired. Teachers have unparalleled job security because of the strong tenure protections they (but almost no other profession) enjoy. They face essentially none of the performance tests, work quotas, or pressures to produce that people in most other professions requiring a college degree do. Further, unlike other professionals, teachers are not rewarded for exemplary performance with pay raises because their salaries are entirely driven by their years of experience and the number of academic credentials they have earned. This leaves them with little incentive to do great amounts of weekend or overtime work.
It has been well documented that the people drawn into teaching these days tend to be those who have performed least well in college. If teachers are paid about as well as employees in many other good professions, why aren't more high performers taking it up? One suspects that high-performing graduates tend to stay away from teaching because the field's rigid seniority-based structure doesn't allow them to rise faster and earn more money through better performance or by voluntarily putting in longer hours. In any case, it's clear that the primary obstacle to attracting better teachers isn't simply raising pay.
Posted by: Mark Michael on March 20, 2007 4:04 PMMuch to agree with and disagree with in Jane's and commenter's thoughts, but I'll try to be brief.
1) While the "underpaid teacher" charge is mostly untrue, the real problem has to do with incentive and differentiation (something Jane kinda hit in point #23.) A couple of people have pointed out that good teachers work far more than 40 hours a week. But the typical salary structure doesn't compensate based on time worked, or results, or awards; rather, it's a function of time served and education level. It's not that good teachers are underpaid; it's that they don't get paid more for being good teachers. There are few built-in incentives for anything other than hanging on and taking summer classes.
2) If you wish to say, "the school system sucks", it must be asked, "in comparison to what?" When was the golden age of US education? In pondering this, I think people must recognize the sea change in education away from excellence and towards equality. Drop the lower 10% or 20% of children from the system (or only concentrate on education for the top 10% or 20%, the case for much of history), and the resulting education for the rest is liable to show marked improvement in excellence. But that 10%/20% need the education the most and represent a dangerous cost if they remain uneducated without opportunity. The move from education for the elite to universal education involves certain costs and trade-offs, and it may help to at least attempt to quantify those so we know what we're buying.
3) Teaching is essentially a trade masquerading as a profession. Much of the education college runaround, teacher certification rigamarole, and professional development hoopla is designed to support this illusion. In what other "profession" can a practitioner be temporarily replaced by someone with no "professional" experience? (Case in point: for a short time, I was a substitute teacher which required only 60 college hours and a background check. I have a computer science degree; I was teaching middle-school English.)
4) Teachers' union serve the interests of teachers, not students. That's their job; students don't pay dues. As such, when it comes to improving conditions for students, their influence is suspect.
Just my buck and a quarter worth (and yes, for me that's brief.)
Posted by: slarrow on March 20, 2007 4:12 PMSuppose, ... just suppose, ... we're not teaching the most important things in school.
Like, what things might be in your long term interest to learn and why.
Shameless plug, but I don't make anything from it:
Posted by: sbw on March 20, 2007 4:19 PMMark, my apologies, but this article is bullshit.
Let's take my experience as an example. I taught five courses a day, each lasting 45 minutes. Hey, that's EASY, right? I only worked 3 hours and 45 minutes a day. Man, what a cushy gig!
Of course, that doesn't count the 30 minutes I spent every day in the lunchroom. Or the hour I spent every morning monitoring the hallways. Or the 2-3 hours a day I spent after school running extra-curricular theater. Or the parent conferences I'd have in the afternoon. Or the phone calls I'd make to parents whose kids weren't doing homework. Or the 5 minutes between every class monitoring the hallways.
Plenty of time for planning and grading? I had 140 students. Let's say I give them a writing assignment. Let's conservatively say that it takes ... 3 minutes to grade and comment on each assignment. That means that this single assignment gives me SEVEN HOURS of work.
You think planning is easy? I had to put together lesson plans that would work for:
1) The boy whose Mom was a crack addict and likely had him stealing for her at the local Wal-Mart the night before when she wasn't in jail.
2) The girl who's reading J.R.R. Tolkein and whose folks are both doctors.
3) The Vietnamese girl who barely speaks English.
And they're all in the same class. It took hours to put that together.
Plus, there are kids who learn well through lecture and others who need to be doing something physically to learn. I could do it -- my kid's writing scores were second in the state -- but it was a grind.
Hell, I spent half my "summer break" just trying to get prepared for the next year.
3.5 hours a day? I'd like to see Jay Greene spend a month teaching 7th graders. Let's see how well he does.
Posted by: Jeff on March 20, 2007 4:21 PMJust to be clear, I was referring to the "The teacher pay myth" article.
And slarrow's points are excellent.
I can't personally speak to unions, as my system was not unionized.
Posted by: Jeff on March 20, 2007 4:24 PMJeff is right that the job is not respected. The reason for that is not snobbery, but forty years of disreputable product.
Posted by: Brett on March 20, 2007 4:41 PMJeff, with all due respect, go get a different job since yours is so lousy. Under a real competitive system such as is favored by Megan, good teachers will be in demand. If you are any good, you will do well. If not, I repeat, go get a different job.
I went through city public schools all the way, with 35 kids in a class and somehow we learned, but now class sizes are supposed to be 15 or 18. That makes some sense for some ages and some classes- and other classes could have 80 and do just fine. No simple formula.
Our kids also went through public schools all the way, though we by that time were in the 'burbs. Now one daughter is finishing her doctorate, the other is an engineering prof.
And, I now lobby hard against every mill levy increase proposed in my fat district, and will continue to do so until the local teacher union monopoly has competition. Here, "Education Minnesota" spends several million dollars on local TV ads for their "schools first" campaign; funny, I though it was supposed to be the kids first. Silly me.
So I donate, instead, at least a thousand bucks a year to a local private school scholarship fund for inner-city kids; as Megan points out in #24, they are the ones who get shafted here. When the system changes to put the kids first, I will vote for tax increases to pay for the low income (below median, family size eligibility formula) vouchers.
Not only that, the problem is more than just tuition. When younger daughter spent a year in Americorps, she ran an inner-city reading tutor program for two very diverse, poor-performing elementary schools. The place was full of kids of single mothers, and lots of the moms actually wanted their kids to learn and do better, but they would move around so much because of housing issues that the kids would end up in 3 different schools a year. Therefore, the tuition vouchers, tax credits, whatever, would also have a companion means-tested transporation credit so that the kid could get to the schools of choice no matter where she/he lived, and no matter how often she/he had to move.
As Megan notes, universal vouchers are not necessary, and shame on the self-absorbed folk who get ugly about that and only support a program if they get a piece of it themselves.
The key is, as always, to catalyze the system through market forces, carrots and sticks. As Howard Fuller found in Milwaukee, when the vouchers started to pull kids (poor kids, not cream-skimming, contrary to the standard NEA lies) from the public schools, the public districts started to get a lot more interested in results.
Posted by: Kurmudge on March 20, 2007 5:09 PMKurmudge,
I think Jeff has already written that he did move into another profession.
Posted by: Yancey Ward on March 20, 2007 5:11 PMCongratulations to markm! You gave the correct answer. jeff is a close 2nd.
The problem, more than any other thing, is the teaching materials in reading and arithmetic (I use the term arithmetic, not math, advisedly).
Students are not taught correctly. Compared to Whole language and Everyday Math, creationism, ID, young earth theory, and the whole lot of it appear as the acme of hard-headed rationality. At least they engage with real science.
Most reading and arithmetic instruction, on the other hand, is pure voodoo. The way in which the brain learns is understood well enough to make it clear that phonetics in reading and drilled sequential learning in arithmetic are the only effective way to learn these critical skills. This has been proven over and over again, to the utter indifference of school boards and curriculum committees for many decades now. Read R. Feynmann's service in textbook selection in the California schools in the 1950's to get an idea.
The first cause of misbehavior is the incomprehension and boredom of students who are being taught poorly. The teachers will teach the way they are told; they have to.
Here's a quick, absolutely 100% true (well, dialogue is not exact) NYC public school horror story from several years ago, when I was involved in a web venture providig on-line tutoring:
I was speaking to an NYC elementary school teacher about her reading curriculum. She told me that her school had been on probation, but had improved significantly both with higher academic scores and reduced disciplinary problems to the point where the school had been removed from probationary status the year before.
I congratulated her, but she said, no, that it was a disaster. The first thing that occurred to me was that it meant less money. To the contrary she said, in regard to my question, the school had just been given a new, incredibly expensive reading curriculum. It replaced the older one that had been brought in when the school went on probation and that had been reponsible for allowing the teachers to do their jobs much more effectively and much more easily, bringing up scores and improving behavior.
When I asked why the effective materials were replaced, she had no answer. Everyone was as baffled, she said, but no one questioned it. This was what always happened. The principal of the school had actually managed to delay reporting test scores late enough to keep the school on probation an extra year so as not to lose the better teaching materials, but that year had passed.
It gets even worse. She then mentioned that she had a brilliant math and science student who was not making the progress he should because his reading abilities were not developing quickly enough to keep pace. "If only I could get a set of the old reading materials," she said.
I'm not rich, to say the least, but I pulled out my wallet and said I'd write a check on the spot to buy the kid what he needed. This is what happened:
"Oh, no," she said, "it's not a problem."
I thought she was being considerate, so I said, "I'm sure it can't be much more than a hundred bucks. It's worth it."
"The principal won't let me use it. We'd both get in trouble for bringing in supplemental materials. I asked him."
"But I'm sure if I bought it, there wouldn't be a problem," I said, like an idiot.
"Oh, we have the stuff. It's all in boxes in the basement, locked up."
My understanding is that the school should be on probation next year. Multiply this by a billion, and you have public education.
Posted by: Joe Y on March 20, 2007 5:13 PMThere is a website out there that lists what is spent per student by state and I think district.
Bring back McGuffy, Dick and Jane, and basic math, please.
We just had a class for parents on how to help our kids w/their homework because how they're learning is so different from us.
I don't understand some of the questions they're asking and my kid's only in 3rd grade!
Anyone ever look at your district's budget?
How much is set aside for legal fees????
We never really had any problems/worries.
Posted by: Sandy P on March 20, 2007 5:39 PMAs to the barely speaking English kids - separate classrooms w/intense English courses - how much would we save if bi-lingual was cut back?
Posted by: Sandy P on March 20, 2007 5:40 PMJoe Y, you would find that the lumping in your last post is apples and hot dogs. The people who push "whole language" and "everyday math" are the same ones who oppose competition and student-centered old-fashioned teaching. On the other hand, every creationist, young earth home schooler I've ever met is a strong proponent of exactly the drill-based repetition, phonics, etc. approach to teaching kids. And despite the fact that they are often religious conservatives, their home-schooled kids blow past the public school students in every academic competition out there. The three R's don't depend at all on any modernistic philosophy of science.
That was an unnecessary gratuitous shot that had nothing to do with the topic at hand (and for the record, I don't believe in young earth creationism or teaching such stuff in public schools either). The John Dewey modern education, E-school, Eddie-psych crowd that has destroyed an entire generation is just as agnostic as you are.
Posted by: Kurmudge on March 20, 2007 5:42 PMUnder a universal voucher system schools will be required to compete for teachers just as they must compete for students. Excelllent teachers will receive excellent compensation, good teachers will receive good compensation, and poor teachers will have to find something else to do for a living. Which is just as it should be.
Schools will also specialize when they are finally freed from the current absurdity of each school more or less having to be all things to all people. And it won't necessarily cost more.
yours/
peter.
Kurmudge: Well, my aim is really bad, because I hit the exact opposite target I was aiming for! I was trying to say that even the most extreme anti-science caricatures in the popular imagination are trivial compared to the superstitions of many educational theories. Sorry.
Posted by: Joe Y on March 20, 2007 5:52 PMWay too many kids are simply unteachable, and in school they misbehave all day, ruining the learning environment for others and demoralizing the teachers. A lot of this is due to negative attitudes they pick up from parents. Beyond the obvious broken, abusive homes in poor communities, even in upper-middle class areas there are parents who send mixed messages - maybe one minute giving lip service to the importance of school, but the next minute making cynical comments toward intellectual pursuits and suggesting the point to life is to be popular and have lots of stuff. Then they wonder why their kids spend more time partying than studying. Plus, an abundance of evidence suggests that 40-80% of intelligence is genetic (granted, intelligence is not necessarily the same as being well-educated). Education is important, and therefore I am not against paying teachers more, but if we think that or any other reform is going to have anything beyond a modest effect, that is just naive.
Posted by: Patrick on March 20, 2007 6:45 PMSomeone earlier asked where teacher’s unions are weak. Teacher’s unions are not recognized in South Carolina and most other Southern states. Teachers don’t have to join them and they do not negotiate contracts. Unions are not the cause of all problems everywhere in education. I am not a member. Having said that, I want to say that teaching is the most difficult and stressful thing I have attempted since basic military training. Teaching is my second career. I have three real degrees. None of them are in Education. When I taught full time, it took 60 to 80 hours a week to meet the demands of the job. Every summer I spent in graduate school to maintain or upgrade my teaching certificate. I teach part time now because I don’t really need the money and the stress was just too much. A major problem is the petty tyrants who make their way into administrative positions. I am grateful that the guy I have now is not one. Many administrators are failed coaches or teachers who desperately want to get out of the classroom and away from the students without losing their pension rights. They take the courses needed to qualify for admin slots and then lord it over their former colleagues. At one school, if I sent a kid to the office for misbehavior, the first thing that happened was an investigation of me—and the students knew it. Do you think they took advantage of that? You bet!
Posted by: Ken in SC on March 20, 2007 6:55 PMI forgot to write, as a public school teacher, vouchers are OK by me.
Posted by: Ken in Sc on March 20, 2007 7:00 PMI'd be willing to bet that Korean students learn about as well in the US as they do in Korea, and that the mostly N. Eurpean students of Iowa do about as well as thier conterparts in Germany, Sweden, etc.
Posted by: Roy on March 20, 2007 7:46 PMI guess Roy is saying that race matters. I won't touch that. I will say this about teaching. It is a performance art like acting. To count only the hours a teacher spends in front of a class as teaching is like counting the time an actor spends on stage as acting. And actors don't have to write their own scripts and do their own direction. Teaching is hard folks!
Posted by: Ken in SC on March 20, 2007 8:01 PMWow, I had no idea that so many folks think teaching was easy. Or that teachers are paid well.
Short form: The sucky teachers are overpaid and overprotected. The good teachers are underpaid and overworked. Which is what Jane said, I think. And I'm not sure how to fix it.
I say this as a former engineer, now a bank executive, who makes compensation decisions all the time. The payroll for my line of business is larger than the entire budget for my sons' school.
And I say this as a person who sends his kids to one of the most exclusive private schools in our area -- I really DO believe in "I get what I PAY for."
And I say this as a person whose wife's family includes two public-school teachers.
And I say this as a person whose wife is an Ed Psych -- who spent a number of years teaching teachers.
Oh, and as a person with an one undergrad in Psych (other is EE -- I was into robotics and it seemed like a good combination at the time), the thought that the only thing a good teacher needs is subject matter knowledge is wet-your-pants hysterical. Not only does it require a good understanding of how a person learns, but -- as one commenter already pointed out -- it requires an understanding of how differently students of different ages learn.
Seriously, can anyone who ever raised a child and paid attention believe -- even for a moment -- that all you do is present knowledge in a static manner and a student just absorbs it ? Or that the same rote-memorization that works in the first few elementary grades will work for even a nanosecond in high school ?
As for hours, I SERIOUSLY doubt that any of my employees below senior-management level do as much work at home as a typical teacher. Have any of you ever created and maintained lesson plans ?
Yeah, I take work home all the time, but I am NOT compensated the way teachers are, thank you very much.
Oh, and the teachers at my sons' school are compensated less than that of public school teachers -- I know this because we've recruited some of the best from that pool.
Why do they come ? Because they want to teach in an environment where the kids want to learn, the administration wants the kids to learn, and the PARENTS want the kids to learn. And where students whose parents are a problem can be invited to leave.
And they want this so much they are willing to take a cut in pay.
I wish they didn't have to. But there is a limit to how much you can get than many people to pay. Espially after paying school tax to a district I don't use. I'd be much happier if I could deduct the tuition, if only from my state tax. But that's another post.
We have few problem students, but have had a few problem parents who created troublesome students.
And therein lies the rub. What I have become convinced of is that the biggest difference in my sons' school is that their school remains committed to certain principles which are non-negotiable.
And because of that, only parents that can make the bar have kids who attend.
Posted by: 1charlie2 on March 20, 2007 8:17 PMI actually am a teacher in a public school so I do have some knowledge of problems in schools. Your statement that education has sucked for 40 years is wrong. It has sucked for as long as their has been public education. That is because we are trying to educate "the public". And in general, the public is not too bright. While I agree that teachers unions, in many ways are an impediment to good education, you must remember that like all unions in the past, they are a result of poor management (and I am not a union member and I never will be). My sister is a music teacher and last fall she was instructed by her school's superintendant that she must give only As and Bs in her class, as "music doesn't really count". Reacting to that sort of stupidity is what has caused a lot of unions to become stupid themselves. So yes, better management, and weaker unions would be good in the long run. But the one major problem in public education is that because we have to educate all of the public, we have to teach to the lowest common denominator among students. And as long as those students and their parents do not care about education, they will always drag others down with them. In my private life, I have the right to choose to be with people who are decent and hardworking people. My students do not have that right to choose... they must occupy a classroom with other students who only want to cause trouble. And don't say "well you should do something about the troublemakers". We already do all that we can legally to control them. The government that you and all the other critics elected will not allow us to control our classrooms the way we would like. And you can not blame this on the Democrats. Republicans are just as guilty of hamstringing our schools (and for the record I am a conservative Republican who makes Rush Limbaugh look liberal) In the long run, the true fix for public education is for us to actually fix the public.
Posted by: Bert on March 20, 2007 9:10 PMHas anyone tried to form a coalition between pro-vouchers groups and pro-housing/anti-zoning groups? Here in the SF Bay Area, real estate (both rental and purchase) is extremely expensive b/c the towns have outlawed further growth/increase in density. They don't want more kids in the school districts, b/c they want to keep the quality high. That means the only thing my fiancee can afford is a subsidized 300 sq ft. student apartment. It might end up being a wash for a libertarian. Education becomes more centralized but housing and zoning becomes more free. A good example of coupled systems.
Posted by: John V on March 20, 2007 9:26 PMThere have been a lot of good posts here, and I agree that there shoulod be vouchers. It seems that there are several fallacies propounded by those who oppose vouchers.
1. There are three parts to every public school system in existence: (A)Raise sufficient money through taxes, state funds and federal funds to pay for the program. This is always subject to public resistence from local taxpayers who don't want higher sales, property or income taxes. (B) Set the broad program goals and administer testing regimes and reviews to make sure the broad goals are being implemented. This is why we have the NCLB and other similar statewide tests. (C) Hire and supervize the staff (teachers, administrators, librarians and support staff)to carry out the in-your-face teaching. Almost everybody wants to keep part A, people can disagree about B as to what tests, what is a passing grade, and unfairness, but almost everybody now admits there must be some form of accountability, and thus the only disagreement is about part C. Should the state or local school system have a monopoly on these funds, or should parents be allowed to sign up for voucher money that they can take to the private or religious school of their choice? Only part C is impacted.
People need to recognize that, like in business, it's the results that count.
If you asked knowledgeable teachers and parents to come up with a "wish list" for what each school needed, they might come up with something like this: (A) new or remodeled buildings in excellant physical condition, (B) small class size, (C) almost every teacher would have advanced degrees, (D) really good pay for teachers, (E) suburb athletic facilities and stadiums, (F) great science, computer and language labs, (G) more than adequate campus security, (H) up to date textbooks, (I) plenty of technology and (J) maybe three or four other things, depending on the wish list. The problem comes back to (A) above - the funding issue. Taxpayers, even when generous, will only provide about 75% to 80% of what is needed to fund every item on the wish list. This is why well-to-do parents already opt for prestigous private schools and pay taxes and then pay private tuition equal to or greater than 150% of average local tuition. They get the complete wish list. The only way lower middle class parents will ever get what works for their kid(s) is to have a voucher system that allos the parents to pick a school that fits each kid they have. A geek kid may not need a 4,000 seat football stadium, or a 2,000 seat gym, but may want a fully equipped (technology-speaking) school with low class size and excellent teachers, while some other kid may need a fully-equiped vocational school. The solution is to let each school differentiate and let the kids and the schools, by addressing differing approaches, be a good fit.
The othere issue is professionalism, or the lack of it. I had a great aunt who taught for 52 years, and who was a true professional. This, however, was many years ago, when a woman's choice of vocations was more limited. Today, when everything is either dictated from the central office downtown or the school's administration, why would a competent person who could achieve fame and fortune in many different professions choose being a teacher in the typical public school? If you allow vouchers, many a person who might choose to be a lawyer, a real estate agent, a CPA, or CLU might choose to be a teacher if she or he only has to negotiate with a principal/headmaster in a school that exists because of vouchers. They could choose their own textbooks, and could choose to work in a school that had rules they liked, such as rules related to student discipline.
Megan,
I think this is the best indictment of the state of the educational system I've seen. Just about about everything you said was dead on -- especially this:
"the schools with the most attractively upper middle class parents and children get almost all of the good teachers"
I'm no expert on education, and I have no children, but I decided to check out the academic performance of a local inner city (Philadelphia) high school where the teachers are being assaulted at horrendous rates (broken necks and jaws, stuff like that).
It just plain shocked the hell out of me to see that barely over ten percent have reading proficiency, and less than that can do simple math! Using Schoolmatters.com I compared this school to a nearby school just minutes away in the suburbs -- which shows nearly 90% proficiency. There's no excuse for this -- no moral excuse anyway.
Things could not possibly be any worse!
If anyone wants to see graphic proof of how shockingly right Megan is, just take a look:
http://www.classicalvalues.com/archives/2007/03/do_guns_cause_i.html
Posted by: Eric Scheie on March 20, 2007 11:48 PM
Well, you have no evidence to back up most of your assumptions, which is typical for a libertarian. But that's not the point. The real crux is the issue is this; in a system where teachers don't have control over their inputs (students), and don't receive equal inputs (students), how can you evaluate teacher quality objectively? Unless you answer, "I can't," you are being disingenuous. In addition, have you watched any news since November, 2006? Our party is in power, and we don't want this. The neo-liberals might, but they lost all of their credibility hemming and hawing over (and in some cases supporting) the foolish Iraq occupation. They don't have much weight. If you want to improve education in inner cities without spending (much) additional money, simply try to convince Democrats to convince our unions to accept longer school days, weekend classes, and mandatory summer school. Those are pedagogical methods that appear to have a realistic impact on urban students' outcomes, and they wouldn't cost an arm and a leg (air conditioning for schools, a handful of extra teachers). But, I feel that your list of unsupported assertions betrays a vigorous anti-union bias, so I won't expect much...
Posted by: Father Figure on March 20, 2007 11:59 PMOh, one more thing:
"A school where parents may pull their children at any moment is a school that worries about pleasing parents and children"
Its also a school where nobody will want to teach, because the school will always operate under the threat of closure.
Posted by: Father Figure on March 21, 2007 12:10 AMTeachers work less than 40 hours and are lucky that they don't have to work 12 months of the year? Have you taught in my school district?
I work on campus from 7:00am to 3:10pm - but usually stay later so I can get things done before going home. I get next to no planning time when school is in session. Aside from the 20 minutes away from the kids while I inhale my lunch, I'm with the class the entire day. This means most of my planning (which is extensive) is done at home. I also spend money out of my own pocket for my classroom. And over breaks (winter, spring, summer), I use that time to prepare for returning to the classroom, working on lesson plans, creating things I need in the classroom, etc. The average teacher makes 44k a year? Maybe an average, but you also know that isn't an accurate picture. Many of us fall far below that. New teachers here are at 35k. Many of them are single parents who come home to do more work instead of spending that "extra time" with their families. School may dismiss students early in the day -- but we still don't get home until 5 or 6 each night.
I love my job. But I _am_ underpaid, and the hours I put into my work goes far above anything I have ever done before teaching, aside from the 24/7 demands of motherhood. Before you say get a different job -- no, I don't want a different job. What I do matters and I love it. But my students, myself (and my family) deserve a system that would enable the best teachers to support their families through the hours they put in on the job (give us planning time, aides for our classroom, ample resources so we aren't spending our family money on classroom materials, etc.). Get rid of the teachers who do half-assed work and replace them with those of us who would choose to do twice the work for half the pay -- and compensate us for that work, whether by paying more salary or by providing us with the resources to do our jobs more efficiently.
Posted by: Liz on March 21, 2007 12:34 AM"Father Figure" above:
All private schools "operate under the threat of closure" all the time. So do all non-monopoly businesses.
So "nobody would want to teach" at a private school? There are plenty of counterexamples even in the comments to this thread.
Posted by: SteveA on March 21, 2007 12:38 AM"the thought that the only thing a good teacher needs is subject matter knowledge is wet-your-pants hysterical."
Indeed. I'm sure most of us with college experience had at least one prof who had an excellent command of the subject matter, but virtually no ability to teach it, at least not at the level required. And there we're talking about students 18 years and older, a self-selected population who theoretically are there for a purpose, full of motivation and at least some long-term reasoning ability. Imagine what it's like with, say, 8- , 10-, or 12-year-olds, with mandatory attendance and little child brains?
"Wow, I had no idea that so many folks think teaching was easy. Or that teachers are paid well."
Yep. And it's not just that most people's main experience of teaching was as a k-12 student, with the perceptions of a child and adolescent; not just that most people's ideas of what teaching is like are about as realistic as the belief, in the early grades, that teachers surely live and sleep in the school. (Ethical/legal issues aside, I suspect a reality show where lawyers and doctors and CEOS competed as inner-city teachers - or even just a particularly good widely-watched documentary - would completely change the public debate. Honestly, there simply aren't that many other professions where going home at the end of the day and just crying is normal, routine behavior for new hires. )
You see, these are hardworking ideas that serve a purpose. For example, they justify not spending adequate amounts of money on public ed - which, since affluent districts are able to draw on their own resources to provide high levels of funding for their children, and to keep real estate values up, means that those other people's children's get screwed. These myths also help reconcile our image of ourselves as a good and just society with opportunity and class mobility for all who strive with the brutal socioeconomic realities. It's those lazy, overpaid teachers who don't bother to do their easy job, and the teachers' unions! That's what's going on! It's not that we've largely turned our back on the poorest and most needy of our nation's children, while the most advantaged have extra amenities lavished upon them. At least some of the apparently-raised-by-wolves hardcore libertarians openly reject any such claims upon them. (And yes, that rather misrepresents wolf social structure and behavior. Primates pretending to be cats is really a better description).
If anyone's interested, I'd love to see any of the non-teachers here offer up a lesson plan in some area they enjoy and know very well. You can pick the grade: assume you have 45 minutes as a baseline, and subtract as you think appropriate for the younger grades. I'll even give you a basic format:
Objective(s): [what the student should be able to know or do by the end of the lesson]
Materials and equipment needed: [Like it says]
Differentiation of instruction: [How do you account for the wide variety in ability, learning style, etc., and make sure everyone has an opportunity to learn? What do you have for fast finishers, kids who are way ahead or behind the rest of the class, etc.]
Activities and procedures: [what will be done, including:]
- Introductory activities [raise interest, evaluate and activate background knowledge, etc.]
- Developmental activities [what is being taught, and how.]
- Concluding activities [sum up, reinforce, check for understanding]
Methods of Evaluation [Like it says - how do you evaluate how each child did, and how/if they're learning, any problems/strengths, etc.]
Alternative Activities [for if something doesn't work - broken technology, missing supplies, have to respond to an emergency, all sorts of predictable unpredictableness]
Assignments [Like it says].
If you want to be really spiffy, you can look up your state's standards and tie it into that.
Don't forget- this is for an individual lesson, a discrete set of activities taking up a small piece of the day, not a plan of what you're going to teach over the course of a day/week/unit . . .
Posted by: Dan S. on March 21, 2007 1:18 AMHmm, schedules. (I shoud mention that I was an extremely bad teacher, sadly). My day:
Arrive a little after 7 (kids show up 8:15) - til 3: 19 teaching, discipline, planning (individually and with other teachers), grading, covering classes, and lunch (including lunch detentions and an occasional special lunch as a reward - music, tv, soda and snacks on top of the school food). Meetings with parents, etc.
3:30 - 4:30 extra help with class/homework; being around for any questions/concerns/talk.
Tidying up, getting ready for tommorow, misc. chores.
by 4:45 or so - Yes! The working copier is free! Making copies for the next day.
By 5:30 - bus ride home. Read through books to recommend/discuss/read aloud, etc. Find it hard to concentrate on grade-level books.
6ish - Home. [Go to local library (M/W) Anything I can use?] /grading
7ish - call parents. /Dinner
8ish Grading/planning. TV on in background. Wave 'hi' to wife.
til 930
10ish. Crawl into bed, pick up grown-up book, start to turn page, fall asleep.
Saturday: shopping. Teacher stores, bookstores, Staples, etc. In the end, I bought perhaps ~100 books and magazines for the pitiful classroom library: also decorations, academic/character themed posters, assorted teaching materials, books on teaching, prizes for achievement, supplies, etc. Free time later in the day!
Sunday late afternoon-evening: planning.
And yes, for many teachers, summer is a time to plan out the next year, make teaching materials, etc. Also continuing education, and sometimes a second job.
Less than 40 hours my arse.
-------
"a local inner city (Philadelphia) high school where the teachers are being assaulted at horrendous rates (broken necks and jaws, stuff like that).
Ah, West Philly High. They've been starting fires, too. My wife had a student dislocate her shoulder her first year of teaching, but not there - that was at an elementary school.
"It just plain shocked the hell out of me to see that barely over ten percent have reading proficiency, and less than that can do simple math! Using Schoolmatters.com I compared this school to a nearby school just minutes away in the suburbs -- which shows nearly 90% proficiency. There's no excuse for this -- no moral excuse anyway."
Nope. I entirely agree. What, do you think, are the reasons for this?
It was very interesting, when we were renting part of a house in Chestnut Hill (high-income neighborhood in far northwest Philly): every afternoon I'd come home and be hit with mini-culture shock. I remember one time we took a few of the classes out to see a farm and pick pumpkins: at one point the bus passed some small free-standing houses: some of the younger kids were all excited to see the mansions.
So, why do you think those good schools get all the good teachers? (That's not actually true, there are some excellent teachers in some very bad schools but we certainly lose (or never get) fairly high-quality teachers to the suburbs, or they transfer to one of the better Philly schools, and one way or another, there's a very high rate of turnover, and a big chunk of the staff that's fairly new and/or minimally qualified. Why might that be? All Megan says is that ") It is extremely hard to recruit and keep good teachers" - but that's not really true: affluent suburban districts have no trouble. Who exactly is having trouble with recruiting and especially retaining good teachers, and why might that be?
Random question to everyone: What, if anything, did your parents do when you were a child, and getting ready to go to sleep?
Posted by: Dan S. on March 21, 2007 2:50 AMSorry, but Teachers are paid well above most professions in this country. They work nine months out of the year and are paid for 12, work six hours a day - no overtime, their benefits including medical/dental retirement, etc are about 26% of their salary compared to private sector employees which is about 17% and going down yearly. The only way they can get fired is to die or do something really really bad - like maybe have carnal knowlegdge of some underage kid, but even nowadays that is being overlooked. Let us compare that do say a doctor who puts in 8 years of school, two year residency - working about 80 hours a week, has anywhere from $200,000 to $300,000 in school loans, has about $100,000 a year in just medical malpractice insurance and probably makes about $100,000 to $150,000 a year working over 60 hours a week. If the doctor makes one mistake he/she will get sued for millions and their medical malpractice insurance premiums will probably put them out of business.
Teachers are the sorriest, lowest, whinest people in existence. The 112,566th reason why I homeschool my child - who by the way is at least one grade level above where public school kids his age are. Teachers don't need them, don't want anything to do with them. They are a drag on taxpayers.
Good riddance...
Posted by: onetrickcowgirl on March 21, 2007 9:14 AMJane Galt:
Concerning your willingness to double school expenditures, I must say that is insane.
In Newark it's, what, $17K a year per student? You want to make it $34K? Then what? $68K in a few years?
Where I live, a quite nice but not over-the-top suburb of Chicago, I have a median house worth maybe $300K. Our property taxes go primarily to support our public schools, which by and large are quite good. We pay $6800 in property taxes, and they go up ever year percentage-wise more than incomes and more than property values. Doubling school expenditures will push that to, who knows, $11000?
And my federal taxes would presumably go up, too. And state taxes too, if Rod F-ing Blagojevich has anything to say. And I may have to send my kid to private school besides for middle school, based on some things I have heard.
I have friends in downtown Chicago whose property tax went from $8000 to $13000 in one year. By now it's probably pushing $18000 for them. Yes, let's raise them to $30,000 overnight.
At what point do we get some relief from these GODAWFUL CRUSHING BURDENS, which in many cases go to pay for CRAP?
Posted by: Chester White on March 21, 2007 10:31 AM"Concerning your willingness to double school expenditures, I must say that is insane."
To be fair, there's no need for Megan to double school expenditures across the board. Your public schools - in a quite nice Chicago suburb, with $300,000 houses - are probably doing fairly well, because you guys have the tax base to fund them adequately, especially since you are, as a responsible parent, investing incredible resources (both monetary and nonmonetary) in your child's education outside of school- they just have to add onto the foundation you provide. (Middle school is kinda tough across the board. Honestly, from 6-8th grade they should have a sort of more academic-oriented Outward Bound program.
Posted by: Dan S. on March 21, 2007 12:07 PMSomewhere upthread, some people were arguing for more local control and complaining about centralization. In some inner cities, local control is a disaster because the people who want to get on the school boards are often agitators and "community leaders" of the Al Sharpton ilk. In the 1960's, some of the local community boards in New York City actually complained that too many of the teachers were Jewish whereas most of the students were black. A lot of times these leaders use the schools to further their racialist agendas or worse. I'm not sure that local control in Kansas has done much good there, either. That's not to say that Albany or DC running the schools would be a whole lot better, but it sure beats an undercurrent of anti-Semitism or anti-white bias towards teachers.
Posted by: Yevgeny Vilensky on March 21, 2007 12:35 PMDan S: They found that the literacy skills of teachers were comparable to those of other professionals. For instance, teachers performed as well as lawyers, physicians, and electrical engineers, while outperforming managers and
administrators on two of the three forms of literacy that were studied.
1. What are these "three forms of literacy"? Your link doesn't say.
2. I'm an electrical engineer. Literacy is merely what I needed to start learning the skills that are important to my profession. The average education major would bust out of an engineering program in the first week. Nor would a doctor, lawyer, or business administrator be able to get or keep a job in their field on the basis of just literacy.
3. I would not be surprised if teachers outperform school administrators on this or any other test for anything but bullheaded stupidity.
Posted by: markm on March 21, 2007 1:08 PMWhen I was in school, although it was denied, we kids got the impression the like-intelligence got lumped together per class to a certain degree.
But we must all bow down to diversity now.
Of course, allowing the teachers to tape unruly children to their chairs and tape their mouths shut would help.
Posted by: Sandy P on March 21, 2007 1:52 PMSeriously, can anyone who ever raised a child and paid attention believe -- even for a moment -- that all you do is present knowledge in a static manner and a student just absorbs it ? Or that the same rote-memorization that works in the first few elementary grades will work for even a nanosecond in high school ?
I don't believe that. However, where's the proof that education school improves anyone's ability to teach? I suspect I could do better at teaching kids to read just by remembering how my 1st grade teacher went about it 48 years ago than a fresh education school graduate is going to do if they taught her to teach by the "whole word" method.
"Whole word" is the most obvious example of how education schools ignore the scientific method, and spin theories without ever testing them. Until education schools are placed on a scientific basis, doing proper controlled experiments to demonstrate new methods are effective before they begin indoctrinating teachers in their use,
Posted by: markm on March 21, 2007 4:23 PMHmm, looks like I pushed Post when I got interrupted...
"Whole word" is the most obvious example of how education schools ignore the scientific method, and spin theories without ever testing them. Until education schools are placed on a scientific basis, doing proper controlled experiments to demonstrate new methods are effective before they begin indoctrinating teachers in their use, they are just as likely to impair your natural abilities to teach as to improve them. What's not in question is what majoring in education rather than a particular subject area does to teachers in higher grades - they know far less of their subject specialty than someone who majored in that subject. It doesn't matter how much you know about pedagogy, you can't teach something you don't know.
Posted by: markm on March 21, 2007 5:01 PM"I suspect I could do better at teaching kids to read just by remembering how my 1st grade teacher went about it 48 years ago than a fresh education school graduate is going to do if they taught her to teach by the "whole word" method.
Of course, that's merely a hypothesis, not a proper controlled experiment. And "whole word"? Talk about old school! That's the Look-Say method, it's Dick and Jane and The Cat in the Hat. No edschool grad is being taught this method, although they are learning about the whole language approach. The thing now (for districts not entirely hooked on phonics) is balanced literacy, which is more or combines both whole language and phonics approaches, something that seems quite sensible. My wife got her ed certification at a elite liberal arts college (along with another major) and learned about phonics; I went right into an M.Ed. program and likewise learned that phonics were were a vital and necessary part of literacy instruction -though a part, not the only one - and that the vast majority of kids benefitted from direct instruction in that area. I don't know what they're teaching elsewhere.
"What's not in question is what majoring in education rather than a particular subject area does to teachers in higher grades"
Pennsylvania requires high school teachers to major in a subject area in order to be certified, as do 30 other states (18 more only require passing a test in the subject area, while Wyoming and Alaska don't require either). Of course, that doesn't mean that they all do - 72% do in PA, with the national average a dismal 64%. (in 2000). I'm not clear on if they're counting private school hs teachers, who don't need to be certified. Middle school teachers don't need subject area majors, on the other hand: this probably needs to be improved
"1. What are these "three forms of literacy"? Your link doesn't say.
I dunno. I cut, I paste.
Ah - here's a bit more info. They're prose literacy (understanding/using knowledge from new stories, fiction, editorials, poems, etc.), document literacy (finding and using info from tables, graphs, forms, schedules, etc.), and quantitative literacy (balancing a checkbook, filling out an order form, etc.). Quantitative lit is the one we're relatively weak on - hey, maybe that's where all the money's going! - though still doing fairly well. Better than real estate agents, interestingly enough . . .
"I'm an electrical engineer. Literacy is merely what I needed to start learning the skills that are important to my profession."
Well, sure. I think it was largely making the point that teachers weren't drooling on themselves and grunting, but in fact are quite literate - and underpaid by comparison to other professions that feature this level of proficiency as a base. Specifically, they were really just mentioning it as one in a series of three related studies, of which that link was the third
"The average education major would bust out of an engineering program in the first week"
Perhaps - after all, they'd seem to be wildly different fields drawing on almost entirely separate skills, above and beyond any difference in rigor and applicants. I suspect the average engineer would bust out of a K-12 classroom in the first week, but that's slightly different.
"Nor would a doctor, lawyer, or business administrator be able to get or keep a job in their field on the basis of just literacy."
Sure. They definitely weren't claiming anything like that.
I meant to say "an elite liberal arts college," of course.
Dan: The problem with "balanced literacy" is that wherever I see a description of it being used in the classroom, it's not balanced, there's no phonics applied to anything after the initial letter - it's just a cover for continuing the ineffective look-see method.
I've never heard skill with numbers described as "quantitative literacy" before. I'm not surprised teachers test as good at reading prose and documents but poor at numbers. The numerical skills are far rarer, and they do command a premium on the job marketplace. Without them, you can read and understand instructions, which is worth a buck or two above minimum wage. It's worth a lot more if you are able to write reports, but in most management jobs you have to put together and understand the numbers going into the graphs and tables. Anyway, what wasn't tested for is reasoning ability, which doctors, lawyers, and engineers have to develop to a very high degree.
"...teachers weren't drooling on themselves and grunting, but in fact are quite literate - and underpaid by comparison to other professions that feature this level of proficiency as a base."
The point is, the other professions consider literacy merely the base that gets you into the program. No one who survives the first year of engineering program cares about his abilities to read, write, and compute; they have been tested and exercised to the maximum, and it's what we learn to do with them that counts.
In other words, you're literacy test results just show that you have the same abilities an English Lit major needs. I do hope you're getting paid better than most of those.
Posted by: markm on March 22, 2007 6:11 AMI've never understood these "methods" of learning to read and do basic math. Neither of my parents had any education experience. However, my mother stayed at home to raise me and my father was an engineer. They read to me a lot. They found me interesting. I learned how to read and write and do basic math long before going to school. All from parents who did not have any of the boutique crap like "Baby Einstein" we have today. However, they did have a working library card, and they used it to keep me occupied, by reading to me first, later having me read to them.
They repeated this success with that of my sister, who also learned all she needed to get bootstrapped long before going to school.
With my sister's daughter, it's been another successful repeat. No formal training, but a stay-at-home mom who actually found her daughter quite fascinating.
Both my sister and I were in the tops of all our classes all the way through high school. The bulk of our friends in the top were there for the very same reason. With little exception, stay-at-home Mom (at least until junior high), and both parents really cared about teaching their children, even though neither had any formal training.
Based on my childhood and time spent in public funded schools, I'm of the opinion that the real solution begins at home. Unfortunately, that's in direct conflict with the free will of the parents, many of whom seem to find their own free will more important than that of their own children's future.
The problems we face today go deeper than just the teacher unions.
"e problem with "balanced literacy" is that wherever I see a description of it being used in the classroom, it's not balanced, there's no phonics applied to anything after the initial letter -"
Well, that wouldn't be good. Where are you seeing these descriptions?
"The point is, the other professions consider literacy merely the base that gets you into the program. "
Well, you also need them to perform the job, in that various skills rest upon that base. I think we're talking past each other a bit: let me paste the whole little bit:
"In another recent ETS study, Richard Coley and Barbara Bruschi compared the literacy skills of teachers to those of adults in other occupations. They found that the literacy skills of teachers were comparable to those of other professionals. For instance, teachers performed as well as lawyers, physicians, and electrical engineers, while outperforming managers and administrators on two of the three forms of literacy that were studied. Their standing was particularly impressive when taking into account the large difference we found in compensation. Compared to other college graduates at the highest level of literacy, teachers earned $222 less each week.
"In other words, you're literacy test results . . ."
Wait, I thought I was Dan S. Have I been wrong all this time? Oh no, my whole life is a lie!! {runs away}
Remember, "you're" is the contraction, = you are. "Your" is possessive, it refers to something that belongs (in one way or other) to you, like test results. If you're not certain, read it out all uncontracted-like (ie, read 'you're' as 'you are', and 'your' as, well, 'your') and see if it sounds right. This also works for' it's'(= it is)/'its', and to distinguish 'they're' from its evil twins 'there'/'their'. If you're always mixing those last two up and can't remember which one to use, one possible trick is to think of the two e's in 'there' as looking over there ->, while for their, think " 'I' want their stuff.' But results may vary.
There have been numerous, redundant studies done of teaching people how to read in alphabetical (as opposed to ideograms and other representational) languages. The most effective way, by far, is phonics. The most basic obvious reason is tautological: alphabets are phonetical; they make sounds. Learn to make the sounds, and all else follows easily. Physical disabilities aside, there is no reason--and, in fact, there is limitless documentation--that after basic phonics instruction, children can read any word that is already in their vocabulary.
Whole language, for the most part, occurs naturally as phonetic abilities develop, as do many other skills that cannot be classified as either. Here's the easiest example, a well-known one, that I can think of off-hand. Read this sentence. Don't stop for each word, just read it as you would normally:
"Etid yuor bolg cetmomnts brfeoe pnistog tehm, pelsae."
As long as the first and last letters of each word remain in their proper places, almost any sentence can be read by a competent reader. Not a word by itself; that's an anagram. The whole sentence allows the brain to figure out the words, somehow. Whole language develops naturally; the brain can read the entire sentence above without phonics, since phonics would obviously be useless in decoding it, but this skill develops naturally.
Aside from a limited amount of "sight words," that is, non-phonetic words that beginning readers need to know ("know"- that's one of them now!), learners only need phonics to get them started. After that, they need to expand their vocabularies, which is the real problem. However, with Whole Language, they not only cannot read words they do not already know; they cannot even read a word they do know if they have not been taught it by sight. With phonics they can read anything. Even in a word they do not know, the context allows them to narrow down its possible meanings, and to recognize it when they see it again or hear it. That's the key to the much higher achievement of students who are taught in phonics.
The best that can be said about teaching methods other than phonics is that they are a dreary, cumbersome, and ineffecient way for students to learn a skill they would have picked up easily and naturally anyway.
Posted by: Joe Y on March 22, 2007 11:18 AM"Unfortunately, that's in direct conflict with the free will of the parents, many of whom seem to find their own free will more important than that of their own children's future.
While I'm sure this sometimes is the case, there's another aspect to consider: as you mention, your father was a college grad in a skilled profession, your mother probably also had a college education (yesno?): so presumably both highly educated, with a clear and experienced understanding of the importance of education, and a fundamental comfortableness with it - native to that world, so to speak (for example, they had a library card). So you're getting a rich environment (in these terms) as a matter of course the entire time; your mom was able to stay home, and had you for the entire day; and you also were one of the kids who is able learn to read well without explicit and formal instruction.
The problems do indeed go deeper than teachers' unions, which pose at most fairly minor problems, many of which could be fixed if folks were actually offering something decent in exchange. (Especially if they're requesting reasonable things: making it easier to fire obviously poorly-performing teachers is one thing; demanding to be able to fire at will is another. It also helps to understand where teachers are coming from. When they start worrying about firings and merit pay becoming all politicized to favor administrators' whims and cronies, this isn't coming out of nowhere - there's a reason teachers ended up with these kinds of protections. Yes, office politics is a problem in all kinds of jobs, but there seem to be some features of teaching that make it especially bad.
And one has to be able to focus on the reality of the situation - it's going to be very hard to come up with effective solutions if people can't really look at the problem. For example, the way new and inexperienced teachers end up at the most troubled urban schools, with transfers governed by seniority - this is a horrible thing that does the reverse of what would be sensible, and ensures the neediest schools get the weakest teachers, while the better ones get experienced old hands. Except that, as is, the alternative is losing many of those experienced teachers altogether, as they quit to either teach elsewhere or leave the profession altogether, because poor urban schools provide an incredibly rough work environment. (This is often hard for many folks to really grasp without personal experience - often, the closest they get is Hollywood hero-teacher movies, which probably do a lot to shape unconscious attitudes even as they're (hopefully) recognized as being highly fictionalized. Tom Moore has an excellent piece on this:
"The great misconception of these films is not that actual schools are more chaotic and decrepit — many schools in poor neighborhoods are clean and orderly yet still don’t have enough teachers or money for supplies. No, the most dangerous message such films promote is that what schools really need are heroes. This is the Myth of the Great Teacher.
. . . I don’t expect to be thought of as a hero for doing my job. I do expect to be respected, supported, trusted and paid. And while I don’t anticipate that Hollywood will stop producing movies about gold-hearted mavericks who play by their own rules and show the suits how to get the job done, I do hope that these movies will be kept in perspective.
While no one believes that hospitals are really like “ER” or that doctors are anything like “House,” no one blames doctors for the failure of the health care system. From No Child Left Behind to City Hall, teachers are accused of being incompetent and underqualified, while their appeals for better and safer workplaces are systematically ignored. . . . ")
This gets us into incentives, but if one hasn't grasped what the job is like, one's going to think that, for example, offering a small bonus for staying is rather likely to be especially effective.
Joe Y.
1) Phonics vs. Whole Language is over. Pretty much everybody says that teaching phonics is (for the majority of students) vital. The question is really how and in what proportion you combine phonics with other approaches, because
2) I really think you're overstating how natural and easy it is to pick up these other skills. Reading itself isn't natural: it's a bizarre and rather recent thing kludged together and tacked onto our actually natural language abilites. (This is where some whole language advocates often went really wrong, in imagining that (for most people) learning to read was like learning to talk.) Many kids (and adults) who have trouble reading often don't, for example, really use context clues either as an unconscious skill or at least a conscious strategy - it's one of the things we specifically and explicitly teach.
Posted by: Dan S. on March 22, 2007 12:12 PM1) Over? That's absurd. Aside from the conclusive science (phonics is vital "for the majority of students?" it's critical for all students), phonics instruction not only remains the foundation of teaching reading, the inferior performance of every other method has brought about a resurgance, at last. Also, don't confuse large public school systems with the the whole world. Even public school students are often taught to read with phonics outside of school (as my own kids were, by me, and I would say about half my friends had to teach their kids properly too).
2) Easy? of course it's not easy. It takes years and years, and it's marvelous for you to teach students anything they can to do better, but there is no substitute for learning to read by phonetic instruction. Ask anyone who has had children who learned by different methods.
I don't want to repeat myself, but I will mention one other example. If you're Jewish, or have any Jewish friends or acquaintances, thinka about or ask them about their Hebrew language abilities. Most Jews I know will complain that they can read Hebrew but that they don't understand what they are reading. Now, Hebrew is an easier language to read, because the sounds are consistent, but it makes up for that for American students because the alphabet is unfamiliar and they seldom hear any of the words, which they don't know the meanng of. In spite of all that, plus the piupils who are usually tired and resentful, they usually learn the aphabet, the sounds, and can manage to read any Hebrew word (slowly) after about 15 to 20 hours total of disjointed insruction occuring once or twice a week, with weeks of for holidays and vacations, over a 4 - 6 month period.
Now these students are usually 3rd or 4th graders, and know how to read English, so they are operating at a higher level. On the other hand, they have no familiarity with the language, they're in no mood to learn, and actual class time is tiny. There is no reason for US students not to learn to read phonetically. It works. Nothing else does nearly as well.
I don't blame teachers, not at all. Given the proper tools, they can do their jobs; without them, they cannot.
Posted by: joe y on March 22, 2007 2:01 PMJoe Y. - I'm not sure who you're arguing with, 'cause in many ways it's not me. For example, I'm not saying the the reading wars are over and phonics lost, but that they're over and phonics has made substantial gains, being recognized as vital for the majority of students (there is a minority that seems to do fine with little or no formal phonics instruction, but it's obviously kinda stupid to base everyone's instruction on them). I'm just saying that (a somewhat strawmanish) strict phonics-only fundamentalism seems a bit off - there are other aspects of teaching reading that are good and helpful as well. For what very little it's worth, let me quote wikipedia's phonics entry:
"Owing to the shifting debate over time (see "History and Controversy" above), many school systems, such as California's, have made major changes in the method they have used to teach early reading. Today, most teachers combine phonics with the elements of whole language that focus on reading comprehension, as Adams advocated.[2] This combined approach is often called balanced literacy. Proponents of various approaches generally agree that a combined approach is important. A few stalwarts favor isolated synthetic phonics and introduction of intensive reading comprehension only after children have mastered sound-symbol correspondences. On the other side, some whole language supporters are intransigent in arguing that phonics should be taught little, if at all. Generally, however, the balanced literacy approach has settled much of the disagreement in the United States."
An additional contribution from whole language is to stress the importance of embedding the process of learning to read in a rich social and emotional context.
The Hebrew comparison - well, as you point out, the students are older, symbol-sound correspondences in Hebrew are far, far more regular/simpler, and most importantly, they've already learned this sort of thing in one language: it's not a totally new and rather odd concept - this rather outweighs the limited time. (It probably helps that there is a simple and concrete goal). This isn't to deny the importance of phonics instruction, though.
(Really, I'm probably just quibbling 'cause I had so much trouble learning to sound out written Hebrew (='read' it) that we had to put off my bar mitzvah until I was 14. Even with the entire extra year it was a pretty close thing: I ended up having to memorize most of my torah portion off a tape, rather like a little kid who can 'read' a book they know by heart . . .)
Posted by: Dan S. on March 23, 2007 10:42 AM[quote]As a [b]childless[/b] agnotheist, I must protest that last. And the first two, as well. I have no particular interest in the teachers' unions, except insofar as [b]I think they are an obstacle to reform[/b].[/quote]
Great. Another person who has no real contact with the system she criticizes.
Let's see, my last year at SFUSD we got rid of an incompetant teacher in the HS I taught in. This person was of color and handicapped, yet everyone agreed that classroom was out of control and no learning was going on. The also 'differently abled' dept. head who hired that teacher over other fully credentialed candidates was made to look like a fool. Here's hoping said dept head retires soon since no one else wants that equally thankless job, though.
This year in my new blue collar district, we are shipping out a non-native speaking English teacher who is credentialed but so lousy at the job, [i]I[/i] can't understand what 'they' are saying half the time. How are the kids supposed to learn from them? [plural used to hide identity]
Both of these removals were with the involvement of the union. The Union who realizes that everyone suffers if the idiots are allowed to keep teaching. It takes a principal with cojones, though. And in both cases it was other teachers who first brought the problem to the notice of the administration, and demanded that something be done.
What I have noticed in the four schools I have taught is:
[b]the administration sucks.[/b] Every. single. principal.
THAT's where you outside critics should aim your cannons.
Posted by: teacher on March 24, 2007 10:23 PMI had an opinion to express, but after reading #8, I imagine my thoughts are worthless. After all, I live in a rural county with a population of 2000, and no one *good* lives in such an area. Time for this serf to head for the field so all my *betters* will have something to eat.
Posted by: feeblemind on March 25, 2007 11:32 AM