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1. I in general am in favor of unions. But in this case I think you are right. But don’t put too much power in the unions. I am in GA and there aren’t any unions here. But still the process to fire a teacher is really hard. They are laying off teachers around here and being forced to keep teachers with unfavorable ratings and fire teachers with excellent ratings. The difference is that part time teachers have no contract. So if you are job sharing (common among young parents trying to stay home with their children but still get some work time in) then you will lose your job, even if you were teacher of the year. But a teacher that was across the board unfavorable will not get fired. It makes principals nuts.

   On the other hand, the GA state assembly tried to revoke a bonus to Nationally Board Certified teachers that work at the lowest performing schools. The only program that has shown across the board success in picking good teachers is the National Board Certification. But the state assembly tried to kill the bonus. These Nationally Board Certified teachers could work anywhere. But the 10% bonus was an incentive to work at the schools that most needed their expertise. It barely was defeated.

   — Adam S · May 6, 02:09 AM · #

2. Yes, to be clear, I too am in favor of private sector unions for those workers who want them.

   — Conor Friedersdorf · May 6, 02:27 AM · #

3. My own experience as a union member has been a depressing education in the institutionalization of privilege. At my own job — a state-funded social service agency — it takes 6 months to fully invest and pass your probationary period. Unfortunately, the job really takes about a year or so to learn well enough to begin performing it at a level that then lets you properly evaluate someone’s performance and aptitude. But the union culture is one that is virulently anti-management, with the base assumption that managers are out to screw labor. This results in a grievance and firing procedure (nowhere near as onerous as the schools’) that allows for extremely bad workers to remain employed with very little latitude to management to mitigate the damage they can do.

   I’m not even a manager and I find that endlessly frustrating. The problem, as I see it, is the adversarial culture: unions think management is out to screw them, and management thinks the same of unions. This might be true in general enterprise, but in social services — like education or my own — this is absurd: both sides owe a duty to the people they serve, management by preserving and maintaining the system and labor by doing the direct service.

   Somehow, that’s gotten lost.

   — James F. Elliott · May 6, 02:36 AM · #

4. Okay Connor, here’s my problem with the “get rid of teacher’s unions, save the world” argument. Aside from the benefits and job protection a union provides, what incentives are there for a highly educated person to want to be a teacher?

   Said another way, if you take away the one financial incentive there is to be a teacher, how do you persuade qualified people to be teachers? I presume you aren’t arguing that if you got rid of teachers, that we would therefore suddenly start obtaining a bunch of qualified ones.

   You don’t have to be a rock-ribbed capitalist to treat a teacher’s salary as a joke. Ever hear the saying,“you get what you pay for?”

   — Joseph · May 6, 03:07 AM · #

5. Like most conservatives, you misunderstand the reasons for academic failure, I think.

   But ok; let’s roll with the idea that we need better educators. Tell me if this makes any sense, Conor: we face, as you are asserting here, a lack of talent in the ranks of our teachers. So what we’re going to do to solve this problem is to… completely remove one of the absolute most valuable aspects of a teacher’s compensation.

   Does that make sense to you? To anyone?

   Look: people take jobs because the jobs offer a compelling package of compensation. For many jobs, this is salary. Teachers make far, far less than others with comparable amounts of education. (Usually 3 years of advanced training beyond an undergraduate college degree.) Compare an average first year teacher’s salary to that of a first year lawyer, another profession requiring three years of post-graduate education, and I think you’ll see that we need some powerful incentives to entice people to be teachers.

   That incentive that can at times make up for this dramatic discrepancy in salary is the job security that comes with being a teacher. People take less pay because they can expect a stable paycheck without significant fear of termination, if they survive their first three or five years. That’s rational economic behavior— take a job, particularly one as emotionally punishing as teaching, if and only if you are compensated fairly.

   Now your telling me that you want to cut out the single most powerful incentive for someone to teach, and that somehow, that’s going to improve our quality of teaching? Why on earth, Conor, would a smart and talented young professional choose to teach, when they can work a myriad of other jobs for better pay and benefits and far less grief? You don’t attract better people to a profession by cutting out the chief benefit of that profession.

   I’m broadly in favor of reducing the power of tenure in public school teachers, but that must be replaced by a significantly higher pay scale. And I’m not talking a few thousand, but tens of thousands of dollars a year. That’s the only way to lure people from pursuing other jobs. And by the way, the teachers unions could be the best possible partners in terminating the contracts of bad teachers, if conservative education reformers could make actual educational reform their top priority, rather than making it clear that destroying the teachers unions is the actual end they are working towards.

   Tenure needs to be significantly altered, but to orphan that out there without any thought to how to replace that kind of compensation is just not productive.

   http://lhote.blogspot.com/2008/11/teachers-are-rational-actors.html

   — Freddie · May 6, 03:14 AM · #

6. Joseph beat me to it.

   — Freddie · May 6, 03:15 AM · #

7. Why on earth, Conor, would a smart and talented young professional choose to teach, when they can work a myriad of other jobs for better pay and benefits and far less grief?

   Well, why do people end up teaching at parochial schools where unions aren’t available? Are they paid more? Not so far as I know. Are they worse teachers? The data certainly don’t seem to show it. Maybe it just goes to show that some people really like to teach, that being a schoolteacher really isn’t all that awful, and that as a consequence – supply and demand in action! – the going price for a schoolteacher just isn’t as high as some might think it “ought” to be. In other news, I wish organic milk didn’t cost so much – maybe we should pass a law.

   Note also that nothing in what Conor is proposing would rule out or even make improbable significant increases in teacher salaries. It seems entirely likely, for example, that in a situation that allowed increased school choice, competition for more and better students would lead to competition for the best teachers, which in turn would lead to … well, to teachers being paid more, unless my capacity for economic intuition is broken. And what would be the matter with that?

   P.S. My sister-in-law is a public high school teacher with a master’s degree. I’m soon to be a university professor with a Ph.D. There’s just about no question, I think, that she’ll make more money than me until my dying day … at which point she will have long since retired on a generous pension after serving out her three decades of service to the county.

   — John Schwenkler · May 6, 03:35 AM · #

8. “Merely that teachers be hired and fired under the same rules that govern the jobs of most Americans.”

   One gendered advantage for female teachers with something like tenure is that it allows them to take a year off to have a baby, without seriously disrupting their ability to return, or even to climb the educational career ladder. Would you want to see that retained? Or would you want it to be like most careers – take a year off, back to the end of the line?

   Freddie – one model is to make it tournament labor status going forward, like at KPMG and other consulting firms. Up or out. First place gets $100,000, second place gets $40K and steak knives. Third place is you’re fired.

   My friends teaching in New York where these competitions are coming online are debating whether or not to share study materials with other teachers since they are all in competition. I’m demanding that they let me help them with a model to strategically assign homework and classroom activities to cause kids to fail tests in their other classes, taught by other teachers.

   — rortybomb · May 6, 03:42 AM · #

9. The data certainly don’t seem to show it

   The data doesn’t exist, and to the degree to which it does, it is rendered absolutely moot by the truly enormous selection error. The students taught in parochial schools are demographically nothing like the students taught in public schools. Again, as I will insist on pointing out, as much as this truth upsets your bootstrapping sensibilities, educational output is very largely a product of the socioeconomic status of the student and his or her family, to a degree that correlates overwhelmingly more powerfully than the individual educational system.

   Maybe it just goes to show that some people really like to teach, that being a schoolteacher really isn’t all that awful, and that as a consequence – supply and demand in action! – the going price for a schoolteacher just isn’t as high as some might think it “ought” to be. In other news, I wish organic milk didn’t cost so much – maybe we should pass a law.

   There is, in fact, a teacher shortage in this country. And there is, as Conor is asserting, a shortage of talented teachers that is even worse. This makes sense, because (as I said) you can be vastly better compensated for jobs requiring similar amounts of education and work.

   Maybe it just goes to show that some people really like to teach

   This is not a mature plan for a national base of competent teachers which is required to number in the hundreds of thousands.

   Note also that nothing in what Conor is proposing would rule out or even make improbable significant increases in teacher salaries

   And, in fact, no one asserted that he had ruled anything out. What I am asserting is that it is asinine to discuss this issue without

   P.S. My sister-in-law is a public high school teacher with a master’s degree. I’m soon to be a university professor with a Ph.D. There’s just about no question, I think, that she’ll make more money than me until my dying day … at which point she will have long since retired on a generous pension after serving out her three decades of service to the county.

   So what? I fail to see how that is germane to anything.

   — Freddie · May 6, 03:46 AM · #

10. I was making three simple claims, Freddie:

    1. Non-unionized private school teachers get paid just as much, if not less, than public school ones.

    2. There are no available data that suggest that private school teachers are worse teachers.

    3. There is also no reason not to think that increased school choice would drive teachers’ salaries up through the usual market mechanisms.

    Nothing you say gives reason to disbelieve any of this, yet everything you argued in your comment was premised on the denial of (2) and (3). If you want to deny them, then go ahead and find the data; but so far as I know, private school teachers are usually paid less than public school ones, and such imperfect data as there are suggest that the educations they provide are either better than or equal to those that are provided in public schools. As to the point about teacher shortages, there’s once again no reason to think that increased competitiveness wouldn’t do a lot to solve this by way of the same sorts of mechanisms as described in (3). This is, again, basic economics. And the point about my sister in law was tongue-in-cheek, of course, so please do calm down.

    — John Schwenkler · May 6, 03:54 AM · #

11. I think, on this issue, you are ill-informed. I don’t see any logical connection between what you’re saying and my point.

    1. Conor says we need better teachers.
    2. He says we need to get rid of tenure.
    3. Tenure is the most powerful incentive for teachers to teach.
    4. Removing compensation is not a method to increase the talent in a worker base; indeed, it’s a method to do the opposite. How’s that for basic market economics?

    Private school teachers are in fact paid less than their public school counterparts, as you say. There is a very obvious reason why some would still choose to teach at a private school: being a private school teacher is significantly easier than being a public school teacher.

    And why? Because, one more time: academic failure is overwhelmingly correlated with certain factors. The biggest is economics. The less money a child’s family makes, the worse his grades are likely to be. This is confirmed by so much data as to not be questionable. Children in poverty are overwhelmingly in academic distress. This is confirmed by so much data as to not be questionable.

    And children in poverty, overwhelmingly, attend public schools, and not private schools. Private school teachers don’t have to teach those difficult-to-teach kids.

    Children with cognitive and developmental disabilities, and children with severe emotional disturbance, statistically have major disadvantages in academic success. Their data, despite popular opinion to the contrary, is generally pooled along with other students from their school district, with only a minority being checklisted out. Special education is also extremely expensive. The vast majority of private schools have no special education whatsoever.

    Children with only one biological parent or no biological parents in the home are far more likely to fail academically. Children with only one or no biological parents in the home are far more likely to attend public school than private.

    Public and private schools do not face even remotely similar challenges when it comes to educating their students. That a teacher could rationally decide toe teach at a private school and escape this far greater educational challenge is yet another reason why public school teachers must be better compensated if we want to increase the talent available at our public schools.

    There is simply no sound economic argument for dramatically reducing a profession’s compensation and yet expecting to increase the available level of talent. People who actually know something about the day to day vicissitudes of employing teachers understand that there isn’t, contrary to conservative assumptions, this vast group of smart and talented people trying to get into the profession of teaching but who can’t break in because of tenured teachers clogging the system. We can improve the quality of teachers by making it easier to fire poor performers, but we can only replace those poor performers with better performers if we employ reason and recognize that the only way to entice people to perform a difficult job is by offering them an attractive package of compensation.

    Do you know why education is dominated by liberals and Democrats? Because educators actually have to do the business of educating, and they have a front-row view for the fact that simplistic, ideologically-motivated solutions don’t solve anything. Education is a microcosm of the reality of conservative criticism of governmental ventures; conservatives make great critics but terrible leaders. The Bush years demonstrate what actually happens when conservatives govern: suddenly, you actually have to, you know, run the government, and it seems that most conservatives inherent opposition to government makes them spectacularly bad at it. Similarly, I don’t want to employ people who are opposed to public education to run public education, particularly when again and again and again, all that they seem willing to say is “the markets will fix this.”

    When someone actually teaches, and he or she is very likely a Democrat and a liberal, he or she can see that simply saying yet again “Markets will solve everything!” is just empty sloganeering. Then you’re still left with kids whose problems cannot be solved by meaningless invocations of market rhetoric, and you have to begin the business of preparing them for a world in which many of them face incredible disadvantages.

    — Freddie · May 6, 04:23 AM · #

12. I read one line and I don’t even need to scroll down to see that it’s Freddie, who once again is arguing against “conservatives” and not against, say, Conor, who says nothing about “academic failure,” but rather addresses some discrete anecdotal ways in which job protections force schools to “suffer.”

    And, yeah, what John said. The smartest liberal arts grads I knew from Duke who were going into teaching were preparing to teach at decidedly sub-public school salaries at private schools. Either that or going into public schools but by doing an end-run around the whole stinking stigma and joining Teach for America. Think of this, Freddie. Perhaps the attraction entailed in the higher, union-negotiated salary is offset to some degree by what the public employee union culture does to, one, the public reputation of the profession and, two the attractiveness of its work environment, as described by J.F. Elliot above. I know that my own semester student teaching in a unionized public school, successful as it was as a classroom experience, was more than enough to convince me I wanted no freaking part of that world.

    Also, the focus on poverty is accurate but analytically trivial, especially in the current context. So, yes, get rid of poverty. I’m all for it. But in the mean time, we can, say, compare schools, and teachers and practices. Freddie’s point seems to constantly be, as long as poverty persists, it’s just reactionary callousness to complain about ossified institutions and practices.

    — Matt Feeney · May 6, 04:35 AM · #

13. It’s really hard to discuss this stuff with you, Freddie, when you get so incredibly shrill and wound up.

    Your (4) is right, but (3) is an empirical question to which the questions concerning non-unionized private school teachers are obviously relevant. Moreover, you yourself propose increasing salaries as a way to offset the marginal effects of reduction in tenure power, and you haven’t said anything to call into question my rather commonsense argument that increasing school choice and competitiveness would be one way to help to do just this.

    As to the rest of it, neither I nor Conor have ever said that markets would solve everything; that’s another one of your straw men. But they could clearly help to solve some things, and the fact that the unions and associated interest groups stand in the way of needed reforms is simply appalling. That your reaction to a post like this one is to steer attention away from the conditions in question and start accusing Conor of being an ideologue is about as ironic as it gets.

    P.S. What Matt Feeney just said, too.

    — John Schwenkler · May 6, 04:59 AM · #

14. P.P.S. And by the way, Freddie, will you acknowledge that the same data that don’t show that private schools do better than public ones also lend absolutely no support to claims of the educational benefits of preschooling?

    — John Schwenkler · May 6, 05:14 AM · #

15. The empirical reality is that, by far, the biggest factor influencing public school achievement is not the liberals’ favorite of spending on schools or the conservatives’ favorite of not having a teacher’s union, but the race of the students. But nobody is supposed to mention that, so we just have these endless arguments about unions and about spending that never get anywhere because nobody can mention the elephant in the room.

    Look, I’ve spent years looking at data. If somebody wants to argue that Texas does a slightly better job with its raw material according to the NAEP than California does, and that the difference is because Texas has fewer/weaker unions, well, I’ll be all ears.

    But the vast majority of arguments over the public schools never get to a level where we can learn anything because nobody will admit that results are overwhelmingly dominated by the race of the students and that there’s not much that can done to change that.

    Perhaps Texas is better than California at helping its students come closer to achieving their individual potential, but we never hear about that.

    — Steve Sailer · May 6, 10:04 AM · #

16. Steve, never mind whether you’re right or wrong — I fail to see why it would be relevant to this discussion even if you were right. Do you contend that if a school is inhabited largely by students of a certain race, then the principal should not be able to fire teachers who store narcotics on campus, or get caught having sex in the gym, or are unable to establish basic order in the classroom, or do not have mastery of the material? How does race possibly bear on this discussion?

    — Conor Friedersdorf · May 6, 10:31 AM · #

17. So how does the fact that huge numbers of college grads are being turned down for “Teach for America” this year factor in. According to WSJ article about 11 percent of all Ivy league seniors applied for Teach for America this year and about 30,000 were turned down because there aren’t enough slots. Not all of those students would have made good teachers, but it does show that income alone is not what drives teachers. The Teach for America program doesn’t pay even as much as a regular teacher.

    I agree that compensation is complicated. I know that summers off are a draw, but I doubt most people plan to go into teaching because they have good unions. Although job security in a bad economy probably is a draw.

    There was a Univ of Chicago study that took average kids, rated teachers according to quality and then tracked students as they went through good and bad teachers. Students that started the same academically (in elementary school) then had three years of good teachers were 1.5 years ahead of their counterparts that had 3 strait years of bad teachers. The same study said that overwhelmingly bad teachers were found at poor and minority schools and good teachers were found at upper income and white schools. The study took student background into account in its measurements.

    Part of the compensation issue is resources. Two teachers at the same district may receive the same salary, but one teacher has to use their own money to buy school supplies for kids that don’t have the money and another teacher has high tech computer white boards. This is in large part from parents. The district give the same money, but PTA and other parent groups contribute. My wife’s low income school has a PTA that raise enough to send kids on some field trips, a couple thousand dollars. But a friend’s PTA raise almost $30,000 in a single event. They will raise around $100,000 this year. My wife’s school stopped handing out paper last money because they ran out of supply money. So where would you rather teach?

    — Adam S · May 6, 10:31 AM · #

18. J.S., Baiting someone and then calling them “shrill” when they rise to the fly is hardly sporting. Once hooked, the fish should be played gently, subdued quickly, and then released. A barbless hook is recommended.

    Conor: Your examples are wonderfully lurid, but I hardly think the problem is there are too many coke snorting, student humping, unfirable teachers.

    Imagine, if you will, that principals could fire the teachers who constituted the bottom 10%. No hearings, no review; boom, you’re gone, don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out.

    Now what? Seriously, Conor, what happens now?

    Steve S: You’ve got it wrong, brother. Race isn’t the elephant in the room on this and every other discussion. It’s sex.

    — Tony Comstock · May 6, 12:02 PM · #

19. Although Friedersdorf didn’t comment on the unions at all, except indirectly as they make it hard to fire teachers, many of the comments have been pro/con unions: which tells you something. I’ve not much to say — I mean, unions can be helpful or they can promote sucky practices, whoopee, that’s not much of an observation — save to note that one of the Bay Area teachers’ unions went by the acronym MEDEA, and I always thought it was interesting that they named the teachers’ union after someone who ate her own children.

    Freddie is beyond shrill here: some of his claims about empirical data are just false, and there’s rather a lot of data now on teachers in charter school and parochial school setting suggesting that in fact they are better (disclosure: I only ever went to public schools then dropped out, I went to private and public universities. My children are in public schools.) In fact in San Francisco when I was there they went to great lengths to force the charter schools to take the same student population as everyone else (and in fact probably a lower-performing population), and when the charter seemed nonetheless to outperform the public schools in student improvement, they kneecapped it further — and when the charter still outperformed they killed it. The student population issue is a shibboleth.

    But Freddie is begiining with a ludicrously wrong argument. He emphasizes that the security of the job is a major, significant form of compensation. From that, and because “there is simply no sound economic argument for dramatically reducing a profession’s compensation and yet expecting to increase the available level of talent,” he wants to say, you can’t expect to improve teacher quality by removing that security.

    That’s beyond goofy, and not simply because private school teachers are generally paid less than public school ones. It’s goofy because that job security is only a major, significant form of compensation if you suck. I have never sought that kind of security in a job and, even with family to feed, I wouldn’t. I’m good at what I do and I’m pretty happy saying, if you think I’m bad at it, fire my ass: because you won’t. And if you do, I’ll get another job. That’s what Friedersdorf is talking about when he says, “the same rules that overn the jobs of most Americans.” And it’s why Freddie is just wrong. If you remove an incentive which is only an incentive for poor performers, and not an incentive at all for excellent ones — yeah, I expect your talent pool will improve! Teachers are rational economic actors, man: you heard it here first. There’s a lot of teaching jobs out there most of the time — because there’s a lot of students to be taught — and a good teacher will always get a job (if the districts’ budgets aren’t clogged with crappy ones they can’t fire).

    — Sanjay · May 6, 02:36 PM · #

20. And it’s why Freddie is just wrong. If you remove an incentive which is only an incentive for poor performers, and not an incentive at all for excellent ones — yeah, I expect your talent pool will improve! Teachers are rational economic actors, man: you heard it here first.

    I’m sorry, but that doesn’t make sense. You’re actually assuming that teachers are in fact irrational, and the same number of them will still be interested in a profession that now has a less attractive compensation package.

    If you remove tenure rules without increasing pay or other benefits, you’ve overall made the job less attractive. You are now able to fire poor teachers, but how are you going to encourage new skilled people to enter the profession to replace them? If you couldn’t entice me to be a teacher under the old rules, you’re certainly not going to sell me on “same mediocre pay, but now we can fire you more easily!”

    Now I actually agree that tenure rules are a problem. But if you’re going to make teaching jobs have private sector levels of job security, you need to make them have private sector levels of pay. That’s the type of overall compensation package that’s attractive to the high-performing individuals you want to encourage to go into the profession. You can’t get the most talented employees until you’re willing to pay them what they’re worth.

    — cwk · May 6, 03:17 PM · #

21. A few thoughts:

    Regarding private or parochial vs public – often the pay decrease at the parochial school is made up for by two factors:

    1) The student body is more select, usually better behaved, and often of a slightly higher socio-economic class. Having attended just about every type of school I can attest to this. (I have gone to Catholic, public, and montessori schools and have been home-schooled and this in two different countries).

    2) Teaching at a charter or a parochial school reduces the strain from “on high” and gives teachers and administrators more autonomy. This is the way education used to be before we had so many standardized tests etc. This is the way it should be, which is why so many talented teachers are drawn to it. The reason it’s hard to do this at the public school level is all to do with budgets – both how revenue is received and how shortfalls in revenue are then made up for from the state and the feds.

    Teacher’s unions are not the problem in most cases. That is a red herring. The real foundational issues are revenue structure and lack of local autonomy. These are more difficult issues to solve.

    My father is the Dean of Education in our home town. He was a teacher most of his life. So were many other members of my family. I’ve substitute taught. One reality is that education is vital to our national well-being. Another reality is that graduation rates aren’t that much worse than they used to be, but the potential jobs for uneducated drop-outs have decreased in number and in pay, so socio-economically the side-effects of lower graduation numbers have worsened.

    What’s to be done?

    I think we need to tailor schools more to the communities they reside in, as well as follow trade-school models available to students who probably won’t become doctors and lawyers. Teach real skills for those students who probably aren’t cut out to be professors of philosophy.

    Steve is right about race, too. In my hometown it’s predominately white, hispanic, and native american. The race gap is huge. One way to combat this is, again, to be able to tailor education to the local community rather than to arbitrary national standards.

    etc. etc. etc.

    — E.D. Kain · May 6, 03:19 PM · #

22. Teacher’s unions are not the problem in most cases.

    The question isn’t whether teacher’s unions are the problem, but whether they’re very often a problem. And only an ideologue could deny the latter.

    This leaves open, of course, the possibility that addressing this part of the overall problem would not require disbanding the unions altogether. And that is almost certainly true. But it would require standing up to them, which is something that Democrats tend to be very bad at doing. How is any of this controversial?

    P.S. I agree with cwk that Sanjay overstates his case. I’m attracted to the tenure that comes with a university professorship, for example, not because I think I’m not good at what I do, but because I think increased job security is a good thing, plain and simple. But in any case the real problem here isn’t tenure as such, but the fact that the unions – yes, them again – have managed to make it so that teachers with tenure can’t get fired even for hitting or having sex with their students.

    — John Schwenkler · May 6, 03:31 PM · #

23. Sanjay, I’ll ask you the same question I asked Conor: Remove the bottom 10% tomorrow (presuming they are correctly identified,) and from this point forward, teachers can be fired the same way that I hire and fire people who work for me.

    Now what? Seriously, what happens next? Teaching is already an unattractive enough profession that we have a shortage, particularly in math and science and in difficult school districts. Do you really think that folks like you are now going to pour into the profession on the promise that (in exchange for less job security) they won’t have to work with sub-par colleagues? Maybe that applies for a hard-charger like you, but I think it’s already well-established that you don’t represent the average applicant.

    Conor’s examples are wonderfully enflametory, as is JS’s; very good for getting the blood boiling. But make yourself king, and on the first day fire all the child humpers and the dope fiends, and the lazy and the stupid and the burned out. Fire ‘em and then take them out and shoot them for all I care. Outlaw the union too.

    Now what? What you are you going to do on day two? Maybe run a press-gang through the CDC to round up all the folks who think their own personal excellence is all the job security they need. I’m sure you’ll make a wonderful junior high school science teacher…

    — Tony Comstock · May 6, 03:57 PM · #

24. Even “good” school districts accumulate a residue of incompetent teachers. Palo Alto, where my kids went, has an excellent (somewhat overblown) reputation, but firing the worst 5% of the teachers would be very high on any list of ways to improve the education.

    Personally, I think software engineers should never be fired for any reason, but that’s not the way the world works. If you want good performance, you have to ask for it, help people achieve it, and if that doesn’t work management needs the power to get rid of them.

    People like Freddie are touchy on this because for many conservatives (absolutely not including Conor or the locals) attacking tenure is just a way to attack political enemies, without any real backing interest in improving education. But I think there is the possibility of a grand bargain that would make most people happy and do a lot of good – demand (and as appropriate pay for) much more performance and responsibility from teachers and administrators, as part of a serious effort to bring up educational attainment across the board, especially in poor communities.

    — peterg · May 6, 04:12 PM · #

25. “People like Freddie are touchy on this because for many conservatives (absolutely not including Conor or the locals) attacking tenure is just a way to attack political enemies, without any real backing interest in improving education. But I think there is the possibility of a grand bargain that would make most people happy and do a lot of good – demand (and as appropriate pay for) much more performance and responsibility from teachers and administrators, as part of a serious effort to bring up educational attainment across the board, especially in poor communities.”

    I can’t speak for Freddie, but I get touchy when folks happily invoke marginal effect economic arguments when it suits them, then when it doesn’t, pop off with “nobody really responds that way.” Folks on both sides of the aisle are guilty of this, as it suits them. I’m sure I do it too (if/when I think I can get away with it.)

    Whether or not it would let to better educated students aside, the problem with paying teachers more is that it costs more (I hope that’s inarguable) and if you hack out the bottom 5% (but I’d go 10%) it’s going to cost more to replace them, and more still if you don’t offer their replacements the prospect of tenure/job security/whatever. (Except of course for Sanjay, who, out of sheer spite for yours truly, has just tendered his resignation from his present job and will begin at the local junior high school tomorrow.)

    And that my friend is the rub. Like everything else, apparently we’re only interested in getting things that we don’t have to pay for; and unlike the federal government, which can run deficits in order to indulge our national aversion to paying for what we want/need, local school districts actually have to find the money before they spend it.

    And their ends the discussion.

    And like our deficit spending or dependance on foreign oil, there won’t be any serious proposals on the table until it’s too late, or at best, a pound of cure instead of an ounce of prevention. Talk about cultural degeneracy!

    — Tony Comstock · May 6, 04:44 PM · #

26. But Tony, I don’t think that shortage is insurmountable for a couple reasons.

    For one easy thing, I agree that teachers should be paid more. That’s separate from the issue of, should I be able to fire them more easily.

    For another, I am not sure there’s that bad a shortage. I fell in love with the charter school idea when I was volunteering with kids at a program in Boston; it was something where I’d spend about five hours every Saturday doing the work. There were a group of young guys there — committed, dedicated guys — who it turned out worked at a charter school during the week: I’d think, man, these guys are doing this six days out of seven? The school was having some of the same issues that the one in SF did so the principal was mopping floors and they were operating out of, I think, a YMCA — and the teachers were damn good. And now drummed out of the teaching profession — their school was shut down much as the one in SF was. So there’s folk you can hire, that won’t do the job exactly because of the tenured fools they’d work with.

    But let’s be clear: I think when you fire the incompetents you’re left with less than half what you started with and even after everything comes to equilibrium you probably come up short. And you find you have to pay people more, and you do it. OK. I’m willing to make that deal: pay great performers more, fire lousy ones. But that’s an end to “job security.”

    Schwenkler: really? Because the Berkeley profs I knew probably all could’ve gotten a job somewhere else fast if they needed to.

    Note that I’m not saying “security” isn’t an incentive. I’m saying it’s a minor, almost negligible incentive for people who are excellent at what they do, and a huge incentive for people who suck at it. It’s like a kind of steeply regressive tax on competence. And that’s a good reason to kill it: it’s not like you can’t incentivize people better. Cash works great.

    — Sanjay · May 6, 04:46 PM · #

27. Now, now, Tony, I already spend a lot of time volunteer teaching!

    Seriously, I know a lot of professionals who’d take the job, though, even at the pay as it is, if they had the freedom to do it as they thought wise and beneficial to students — and you daren’t give the dead hearts and minds in classrooms now, that freedom.

    — Sanjay · May 6, 04:51 PM · #

28. “Seriously, I know a lot of professionals who’d take the job, though, even at the pay as it is, if they had the freedom to do it as they thought wise and beneficial to students — and you daren’t give the dead hearts and minds in classrooms now, that freedom.”

    That, my friend, is a different argument altogether, and not one that with which I disagree. Tenure is but one sort of intangible benefit that can be dangled, and not necessarily the most appealing to the sorts of people I think should be teaching.

    But then that begs the question, do you want Tony Comstock (or people like him) teaching your children’s junior high school science class?

    — Tony Comstock · May 6, 05:03 PM · #

29. Schwenkler: really? Because the Berkeley profs I knew probably all could’ve gotten a job somewhere else fast if they needed to.

    But I don’t want a job somewhere else; I want this job – or rather, the job I’ll have come next January, assuming I turn out to like it. Part of this is about the attractiveness of being a part of the same community of scholars for a long period of time, which may be a bit less of a concern for at least some schoolteachers. But while looking calmly into other jobs while you’re safely employed is one thing, there’s a reason why nobody in academia wants to go “on the market” more than once – obviously, though, this has something to do with the fact that there are far more job-hungry Ph.D.‘s than there are tenure-track university posts, which as noted above doesn’t find a real counterpart in the case of “lower” education.

    — John Schwenkler · May 6, 05:07 PM · #

30. “And by the way, Freddie, will you acknowledge that the same data that don’t show that private schools do better than public ones also lend absolutely no support to claims of the educational benefits of preschooling?”

    Well, sure, because that’s not what they’re about. But longitudinal studies that ARE about preschool’s benefits do exist, from such hotbeds of radical leftism as the RAND Corporation and the Michigan Department of Education, both of which found returns of over 1,000 (if I recall correctly it was 1,4000 in CA and 1,700 in MI) percent in savings from other social services and increased earnings by people who attended just one year of preschool versus peers who did not. That is to say, for every dollar spent in sending a child to one year of preschool, the state of Michigan realized savings and earnings of over $17.

    But that’s a totally separate conversation. You’re right that teacher’s unions can be a problem. They’re not THE problem, though.

    — James F. Elliott · May 6, 05:09 PM · #

31. But longitudinal studies that ARE about preschool’s benefits do exist, from such hotbeds of radical leftism as the RAND Corporation and the Michigan Department of Education, both of which found returns of over 1,000 (if I recall correctly it was 1,4000 in CA and 1,700 in MI) percent in savings from other social services and increased earnings by people who attended just one year of preschool versus peers who did not. That is to say, for every dollar spent in sending a child to one year of preschool, the state of Michigan realized savings and earnings of over $17.

    Yes, and those data have been convincingly shown to be, to put it mildly, a crock. My point was just that the very same skepticism that Freddie is applying to studies on public vs. private education needs to be applied to studies on preschooling; if the data are inconclusive in the first case then by the same standard they are – at best – inconclusive in the second.

    You’re right that teacher’s unions can be a problem. They’re not THE problem, though.

    And that’s just because there’s no such thing as “THE problem”.

    — John Schwenkler · May 6, 05:12 PM · #

32. And yet, Schwnekler, UC Berkeley pays more than almost all American public universities, and I’ve seen professors get pretty steep pay increases when they threaten to leave. So I think that their own community isn’t that impressed by the “benefit” of tenure — and that’s because, when I say that most tenured Berkeley profs can probably get a job somewhere else, I mean, most tenured Berkeley profs can probably also get tenure somewhere else — that’s how that system works. Note that’s it’s not quite applicable to the public schoolteacher scenario where when (if) you move you lose your seniority right out, so in the schools tenure makes incompetents want to sit, whereas at Cal, screw it: they aren’t firing most of their tenured profs nohow, and those guys can go sit lots of other places as long as they want. Also note that tenure at Cal is performance based so the observation that tenure is a vastly larger incentive for the incompetent doesn’t apply like it does in a public school.

    I’d argue that for most tenure is less appealing for its “stability” and more for its prestige. Granted the assistant prof working his ass off may feel differently.

    — Sanjay · May 6, 05:45 PM · #

33. The relative job security of teaching is not solely due to the inability to get fired. After all, budget cuts can get you laid off. The job security is that you are a professional in a field with high demand that’s not going away and is more insulated from the economic ebb and flow than most any other occupation. Allow teachers to be fired and it will still be among the most reliable forms of employments out there.

    Give administrators the ability to fire teachers and they’re not going to willy-nilly fire every incompetent teacher. How easily the teacher’s are replaced is going to factor into the decision. But if they have an incompetent or problematic teacher and <i>can</i> replace them, I want them to be able to do so.

    I don’t view this as a silver bullet or anything, though. The incompetent teacher, because of demand, will probably get a job elsewhere and be failing to teach a bunch of other students. But a teacher who keeps getting tossed out will rightfully have more difficulty finding work. And hopefully get weeded out of the profession.

    If there is a danger here, it’s that allowing schools to fire teachers will allow the nicer school districts to create openings and pilfer from the more troubled districts. So yeah, it’s not the end-all-be-all, but it is a necessary step (in my view) for other changes to be implemented.

    //Now what? Seriously, what happens next? Teaching is already an unattractive enough profession that we have a shortage, particularly in math and science and in difficult school districts. Do you really think that folks like you are now going to pour into the profession on the promise that (in exchange for less job security) they won’t have to work with sub-par colleagues? Maybe that applies for a hard-charger like you, but I think it’s already well-established that you don’t represent the average applicant.//

    Among other things, you can make it easier for people to get into teaching. I would really like to try my hand at teaching, but I don’t want to have to go back to college and spend tens of thousands of dollars to find out if it’s the right opportunity for me. I know the subject matter of what I would teach. I know that there are openings for it. I even have a minor in education, but the hoops that I would have to jump through make it untenable for me to get into a classroom for quite some time. What I would have to do to get standard certification and what I would have to do to get an MBA are starkly different.

    Letting more people into the profession can be a risky thing, sure. I could be a lousy teacher. Maybe there’s something in the College of Education that would give me insights into being a better teacher (though the CoE classes I did take suggest otherwise…). But if I’m a lousy teacher, I could then be fired. Allowing administrators to fire teachers could also allow them to become more creative.

    Oh, and this is to say <i>nothing</i> of my best friend’s wife, who has full certification in Arizona and four years in can’t get a job in Oregon except as a tutor or at private schools.

    — Trumwill · May 6, 06:03 PM · #

34. Among other things, you can make it easier for people to get into teaching.

    Amen. And who’s one of the biggest forces behind the push for costly and time-intensive certification requirements?

    (All together now …)

    — John Schwenkler · May 6, 06:19 PM · #

35. “Yes, and those data have been convincingly shown to be, to put it mildly, a crock.”

    Do you happen to have any links to publicly available discussions of that data (i.e. not Lexis-Nexis or academic search engines)? I would be extremely interested to read it, since my employer, California’s Regional Center system, is deeply involved in early intervention, as is my wife.

    — James F. Elliott · May 6, 06:33 PM · #

36. Long response here:

    http://www.ordinary-gentlemen.com/2009/05/teachers-unions-performance-pay-and-autonomy/

    — E.D. Kain · May 6, 06:38 PM · #

37. I’d have to dig a bit to find the studies, James, but here’s a column I wrote for Culture11 that has a few relevant links: http://culture11.com/article/36135. Note that my position isn’t anti-preschool*, just anti-universality.

    * Well, I am anti-preschool, with an exception for the case of kids whose home environments are especially nightmarish. The issue in that column, though, was just funding, not schooling per se.

    — John Schwenkler · May 6, 06:46 PM · #

38. Oh, I’m with you on funding. I was against California’s universal preschool referendum because, based on my policy analysis, it was going to totally fail to do what it said it would. I’m also not just a “pre-school for all!” guy in that I think it is extremely possible to replicate the non-academic benefits of preschool in a home/community environment. If preschool’s going to stay as expensive as it is now, I’d like to see more tools available to parents to pool their own resources to create such environments. In fact, I’m pushing my wife to write a book based on her early intervention methodology with that in mind.

    But back on topic. Bad teachers. Boo!

    — James F. Elliott · May 6, 07:51 PM · #

39. About.com picked the 3 best job boards for job seekers. The top 3 –

    www.linkedin.com (professional networking)
    www.indeed.com (aggregated listings)
    www.realmatch.com (matches you to jobs)

    good luck to all.

    — steven · May 9, 05:06 PM · #

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