Education, Cont'd
Freddie argues that a teacher’s job security constitutes “the single most powerful incentive for someone to teach.” Let’s say he is right. Is that an incentive structure he wants to defend? It doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that someone chose their profession because even if they weren’t very good at it, they’d get to keep their job.That incentive structure attracts some people you don’t want, and repels ambitious, talented, motivated people who realize that if they become a teacher, their career advancement will be blocked and their compensation lessened by hack colleagues who happened to enter the classroom a decade or two sooner.
I’d like to change this compensation structure, pay talented teachers higher salaries, reduce barriers to entry in the profession, and fire the worst teachers more cheaply. Can anyone guess what powerful political organization would stand athwart my proposals yelling “we’ll spend millions of dollars opposing any politician who dares favor this!”
In fact, as a voter, the only option I have, so long as teacher’s unions stay as powerful as they are, is to back salary increases meted out in the way the unions prefer. That means pay increases disproportionately absorbed by teachers with the most seniority, and teachers who’ve accrued the most credentials (read: masters degrees from the University of Phoenix). I am disinclined to go along with that bargain, thank you very much.
Were I trying to assemble a coalition to pass an education bill in California, I’m pretty sure I could sell a compromise that eliminated teacher’s unions and substantially raised teacher salaries to 90 percent of Republicans. Especially the elected ones. They hate teacher’s unions. I doubt I could find five Democrats who’d go along with that deal. On this matter, it is the Democratic Party that is ideologically committed to backing a powerful special interest group that makes government work less well. It is the left that allies itself with an organization that tries to thwart even the most modest attempts to experiment with new models in education, disproportionately hurts poor people and minorities with the policies they back, and by its very nature privileges teacher needs above student needs in the educational process.
What happens when the Los Angeles Times documents numerous instances where teacher’s unions fought tooth and nail on behalf of teachers demonstrably unqualified to do their jobs, thereby robbing hundreds of students every year of a good education? Will the union-backed policies responsible for these outrages be changed? Or will they continue to occur? California is a state where the legislature and the Los Angeles City Council are dominated by Democrats. I’m betting that even after they don’t make the obvious, appropriate reforms to a system that is also dominated by liberal Democrats, Freddie will continue insisting that it’s “conservative ideology” holding back public education.
Conor says:
“I’d like to change this compensation structure, pay talented teachers higher salaries, reduce barriers to entry in the profession, and fire the worst teachers more cheaply.”
Okay, but then you’d have to measure who are the talented teachers and who are the worst teachers. And there are a few problems with that, which were figured out by James S. Coleman in 1966 on LBJ’s dime. The first problem is that teachers and schools don’t make that big a difference compared to the difference in quality of students.
The second, as Coleman noticed, is that an honest campaign to hire better teachers and fire worse teachers would have “disparate impact” — more whites would get hired and more blacks would get fired.
In “Race and Education: 1954-2007” by U. of Delaware historian Raymond Wolters, he reports:
“ For Coleman, these findings were unwelcome. Personally, he favored more spending for education. And Coleman’s dismay was compounded by another correlation that emerged from the data. Both black and white children seemed to do better on tests if their teachers had done well on a standard test of vocabulary. This was especially problematical because black teachers were “on the whole less well prepared, less qualified, with lower verbal skills, than their white counterparts.” This led to “the conjecture that [students] would do less well on average under black teachers than under white teachers.” If so, “a major source of inequality of educational opportunity for black students was the fact they were being taught by black teachers.” Yet this possibility was so heterodox that the Coleman report did not pursue the matter. In 1991 Coleman expressed regret over the decision “not to ask the crucial question.” “A dispassionate researcher,” he wrote, “would have gone on to ask the question we did not ask.” …
“ Poring over the statistics, he noted that African American teachers, on average, had slightly more years of formal education than their white counterparts. But the black teachers lagged behind whites in vocabulary and reading comprehension.”
See the problem? Do you really think the Obama Administration is going to push for, in effect, firing blacks and replacing them with whites?
— Steve Sailer · May 6, 08:09 AM · #
Dear Conor:
If you want to crack open a big story that nobody is reporting on, it’s not teachers’ unions, it’s principals’ unions.
In lots of cities, principals have their own union! You would think that principals are the epitome of “management,” considering that they manage dozens or even hundreds of employees, but, no, in many cities they have their own union, which sometimes also includes downtown bureaucrats.
For example, in LA, the principals’ and bureaucrats’ union is called the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles. Their website explains
“The Associated Administrators of Los Angeles (AALA) represents the Middle Managers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. AALA is organized into four departments: Adult School Administrators, Elementary School Administrators, Secondary School Administrators and Supervisory Administrators.”
http://www.aalausd.org/
— Steve Sailer · May 6, 08:21 AM · #
Dear Conor:
Clearly, one bad principal can have more detrimental effects on students than one bad teacher. Everybody in America has heard about teachers’ unions (even in places where there aren’t teachers’ unions), but almost nobody has heard about principals’ unions.
Here’s the history of LA union of Principals and Downtown Bureaucrats from the AALAusd.org website:
“The Associated Administrators of Los Angeles (AALA) proudly celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2006. AALA was formed in 1981 when AESA (elementary association), LAASSA (secondary association), CDS (supervisory association) and AEAA (adult association) joined forces to form a single association to represent all middle managers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. During the first ten years, AALA members were represented in dealings with the Board of Education by the Superintendent, and membership in AALA was voluntary. Ten years later in 1991, AALA requested and was granted supervisory status in order to become the exclusive bargaining unit representing all certificated middle managers except confidential and personal service contract senior staff. Supervisory status was accomplished by means of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that codifed the administrative regulations in the 4000 series of the Board Rules as the AALA/LAUSD “Contract.” Starting in 1992, agency fee status was ratified making AALA membership or agency fee dues mandatory for all middle managers eligible for AALA membership. In 2004, AALA agreed to a formal union contract with the District. This contract replaced the MOU that had been in effect since 1991.”
So, over the last 28 years, the principals in LAUSD, the nation’s second biggest school district, have gone from being management to having a union that has exclusive bargaining status with mandatory dues.
And barely anybody has ever heard of principals’ unions!
— Steve Sailer · May 6, 08:34 AM · #
Weird. I’d never heard of principals unions. I’ll look into this.
— Conor Friedersdorf · May 6, 10:33 AM · #
Could you get a deal with Republicans where the seniority/tenure rules are largely removed and the pay is raised? Swapping pay raises for union elimination is trading a tactical advantage for a strategic one. Pay can always be cut again, unless that 90% of Republicans is willing to raises taxes to provide a dedicated funding source.
I’d be very surprised if even with that trade-off the pay raises were revenue neutral. Teaching, as presently done, is a labor intense field and I doubt you can really attract skilled teachers by offering lower salaries at the front end than are presently offered even with the incentive of performance pay.
Thus, given California’s budget problems, I’d argue that you’ll need a revenue steam. If you can get 90% of Republicans to back a tax hike, let’s say post 2010, I’ll be very impressed.
Regardless, John Kerry was willing to support performance pay and cutting away at tenure rules
. Many Dems are willing to support higher pay in exchange for more options to fire. Last time I checked, Washington DC, which is working on that now, isn’t a Republican bastion.
The problem is that higher pay for no unions is an uneven deal. I know I’d be willing to offer some concessions on guns if the NRA was dismantled in return. Why? Because it would mean I could easily implement preferred options in the future because their wasn’t a countervailing powerful lobby.
— Greg Sanders · May 6, 12:35 PM · #
Good gravy, Sailer. Quit plucking your one-string guitar.
Freddie is wrong: Tenure is the most powerful incentive for teachers to HOLD A TEACHING POSITION. Pride is the most powerful incentive for teachers to teach.
— Klug · May 6, 12:52 PM · #
Is that an incentive structure he wants to defend?
Nope! If you want to replace tenure with a significantly better pay scale, I think you’d do a lot of good. But I would say that, in general, we have to have modest expectations for any administrative approaches to educational reform.
Pride is the most powerful incentive for teachers to teach.
Here’s the problem: pride motivates some of the teachers. It motivates many of the best. But it is not the kind of incentive structure that we can pragmatically expect to entice the most qualified candidates to the profession. Look, in the previous thread, people kept invoking markets. OK, I’m cool with that. But you can’t invoke markets and then expect teachers to be irrational actors. Pride and dedication to kids are wonderful motivators for teachers, but I don’t think you can build a national educational system on them.
The problem is that higher pay for no unions is an uneven deal. I know I’d be willing to offer some concessions on guns if the NRA was dismantled in return. Why? Because it would mean I could easily implement preferred options in the future because their wasn’t a countervailing powerful lobby.
Exactly right. Which is why we need to involve the teachers unions as partners in the task of eliminating the bad teachers, and make sure they understand eliminating tenure is not a first step towards destroying the unions but rather a mark of a new union/management spirit of cooperation. I do believe that we can achieve such a level of cooperation, but it can’t be reached with people who want to destroy the unions.
— Freddie · May 6, 01:08 PM · #
I agree that exchanging job security for higher salaries will benefit students. The question of course is whether most communities can afford such a trade-off.
Being risk adverse doesn’t necessarily mean incompetent, but that seems to be the hypothesis put forth in these two posts. Thus to attract the best to education, you will need to hire people away from the private sector where salaries tend to be hirer.
I don’t have the salary stats for primary & secondary education, but I think comparing salaries of profs at 4yr colleges to industry is illustrative. Just looking at physicists, the median salary of a mid career prof at a 4yr university (prorated to 12months) ranges from 72k http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/highlite/salary/salary04.htm. However, the median range for a mid-career physicist in industry is 120k.
If the salaries of the people we want to hire to replace bad teachers scale similarly (engineers, architects, lawyers, etc…), then employment salaries will need to increase something like 70%. Do you really want to hire people foolish enough to take on the risk of the private sector and the salary of the public sector?
What will a 70% increase in teacher salaries (and the inevitable increase for administrators) do to a budget? Since salaries are a huge fraction of local school budgets, let’s say that results in budget increases of 35% and further that this increase is spread out evenly.
Imagine the pitch. We’re going to raise your property/sales tax 35% so we can hire better teachers. I wonder how many people will decide that those few bad apples aren’t quite so bad?!
— anon prof · May 6, 01:24 PM · #
I hate to be the bearer of bad news.
1) The professionalization of the teaching profession has not shown significant gains in student achievement.
2) The marginality between great and good teachers appears to be extremely low. It is sort of like talking about performance based oil changes.
3) Being public doesn’t seem to be intrinsic to a school being poor performing. The demarc seems to be the start of public busing (cue Sailer.) Coincident with public busing was the centralization of schools, which I think was the greater issue. We know and have known for a while that middles schools have been a complete failure in concept, and yet no schools are deviating from the K-4, 5-8, 9-12 groupings.
— Badger · May 6, 01:25 PM · #
Sigh.
NCLB mandates that all children SHALL be above average.
Now I guess now we should have another FAIL-law that mandates all teachers SHALL be above average.
— matoko_chan · May 6, 02:52 PM · #
Steve is right about this one, actually: the principal’s unions are a big problem. They’re also easier to tackle than the teacher’s unions. That’s why Bloomberg and Klein have taken them on much more directly than they have tackled the UFT – they have greater leverage (smaller, less sympathetic target, but with a big impact on the functioning of the system and school culture).
You can also do more to change principal incentives with less money. NYC’s DOE now offers $25k and even some $50k bonuses to principals willing and able to turn around tough, failing schools. That’s a lot of money – but not a lot in aggregate, because there just aren’t that many principals.
Freddie and Greg are right about a lot of things too, though. Most of the advocacy for charter schools, for example, is coming from “reform” or “progressive” Democrats – i.e., opponents within the Democratic Party opposed to the urban “machine” politicians. The GOP is basically not terribly relevant to the whole question because the GOP doesn’t have an urban agenda or an urban presence to speak of, and the issues here mostly relate to big-city school systems. The suburbs have their own problems, but nobody is particularly talking about charters, vouchers, or what-have-you as solutions to those problems. Maybe they should, but they aren’t. And the clout of the unions isn’t a big political issue in suburbs the way it is in the cities either.
Increasingly, we’re also going to see a fight about this within the labor movement. The card-carrying members of the SEIU send their kids to schools staffed by card-carrying members of the AFT and NEA. If the unions are responsible for holding back their kids, that’ll lead to some tension between the unions themselves. To some extent, this is already happening.
I owe the readers of TAS a big post on this topic, given my involvement in the charter movement. Maybe later today, if I can find the time.
— Noah Millman · May 6, 02:52 PM · #
matako:
- “NCLB mandates that all children SHALL be above average.”
Isn’t that an oxymoron?
In any case, this is a great discussion and well worth having. I think another big problem is how districts are formed. In some areas there are simply far too many administrators eating up far too much of the budget. That goes back to autonomy though.
— E.D. Kain · May 6, 03:41 PM · #
I’m pretty sure I could sell a compromise that eliminated teacher’s unions and substantially raised teacher salaries to 90 percent of Republicans.
Right. But could you sell the tax hikes necessary to pay for those substantially raised salaries? IIRC last time I checked in on California Republicans, they were bloc-voting to torpedo the budget their own party’s governor had asked for in response to a $40 billion budget shortfall, because it included modest tax increases in addition to the usual array of spending cuts and bond measures. I’ve found Republicans are perfectly happy to spend more tax dollars … it’s just the actual paying more tax that they’re against.
And really, even if that were true, all it proves is that Republicans hate unions. I knew that already. Unfortunately, once you get past anecdote-driven whining, most studies have shown that teacher unionization rates correlate positively with improved SAT, ACT, and NEAP scores, graduation rates, etc. A short roundup is here . Of course, they also correlate with higher educational expenses. So, sadly, the real trade-off isn’t such a great soundbite: Get rid of unions if you want slightly inferior teaching at bargain prices. I mean, I look at that now and think ‘How much of a bargain?’, but I suspect once I have kids I’ll be less impressed by that tradeoff.
— Bo · May 6, 03:48 PM · #
- “NCLB mandates that all children SHALL be above average.”
Actually its impossible. But that is actually what the law says.
“The apotheosis of educational romanticism occurred on January 8, 2002, when a Republican president of the United States, surrounded by approving legislators from both parties, signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act, which had this as the Statement of Purpose for its key title:
The purpose of this title is to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education and reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging State academic achievement standards and state academic assessments.
I added the italics. All means exactly that: everybody, right down to the bottom level of ability. The language of the 2002 law made no provision for any exclusions. The Act requires that this goal be met “not later than 12 years after the end of the 2001-2002 school year.”
The reason charter schools are effective, is they mandate parental involvement, which is the single highest correlate with student achievement, along with parental SES.
— matoko_chan · May 6, 04:25 PM · #
Which is why students in schools in neighborhoods with high SES (rich, well educated parents) perform better.
By bussing or vouchers you just change the parental SES of the incoming student. Enough bussing or vouchers would theoretically just dilute the SES back to the norm of the incoming students.
— matoko_chan · May 6, 04:34 PM · #
And the answer to this dilemma is not performance regulation of teachers…..but good trade schools.
But how do you tell 100 million people that their children don’t actually need to go to college?
And, sadly, the 40% of the bellcurve (between the mean and the lower 10% of functional retardation) is profoundly over-represented in the conservative base.
— matoko_chan · May 6, 04:40 PM · #
“That means pay increases disproportionately absorbed by teachers with the most seniority, and teachers who’ve accrued the most credentials (read: masters degrees from the University of Phoenix).”
Well, that’s a problem with No Child Left Behind and it’s “highly qualified teacher” language, which has been interpreted by many, many school districts (and, AFAIK, CA DOE and the Feds) as requiring a Master’s in the subject you teach.
If you (that’s a generic “you,” not Connor specifically) want to eliminate teacher’s unions, then you have to put in employment protections that attract teachers to unionize: the ability to collectively bargain their employment contracts, protections from arbitrary “at will” firings (as my dad put it to the office clerk he fired, “You’re an at will employee: I can fire you because I don’t like your haircut. Get out.”), and so on. Direct service professionals unionize in order to protect themselves. If an employer has a lot of those protections built-in, then unionization becomes unnecessary.
— James F. Elliott · May 6, 05:21 PM · #
Extended response (again) here:
http://www.ordinary-gentlemen.com/2009/05/teachers-unions-performance-pay-and-autonomy/
— E.D. Kain · May 6, 06:39 PM · #
Why do you care what Freddie thinks? He’s quite voluble on the subject of education, but that’s it. Every time I’ve tangled with him (on this website alone: on the subject of vouchers, homeschooling, private schools, and the role of poverty in causing poor academic performance), he just writes whatever he feels must be true, and then completely ignores all counter-evidence as well as all requests that he provide evidence of his own.
— Stuart Buck · May 6, 07:23 PM · #
And I’m sorry to be so personal there; it’s just frustrating to try to have so many conversations with someone who seems relatively intelligent and well-spoken, all of which invariably follow the same pattern:
Freddie: “Unsupported proposition.”
Me: “Can you provide citations? Or, can you answer these citations that disprove your claim?”
Freddie: Complete silence.
Me: “So are you here for discussion, or just to cut-and-paste your education soliloquy?”
— Stuart Buck · May 6, 07:39 PM · #
Stuart, are you really claiming that correlation between academic performance and socioeconomic status is “unsupported”?
— Freddie · May 7, 12:03 AM · #
A response! But a misguided one. What I said, more than once, and in terms too clear to misinterpret, is that correlation is not causation, and that there’s no prima facie reason to suppose that giving poor people more money (which may be a good idea for other reasons) will magically make their kids better at algebra.
— Stuart Buck · May 7, 03:00 AM · #
Yes, what is it about stealth unions? I’ve never heard of principals’ unions and, from my humble position as a preschool teacher’s aide, I can say that when I was hired in January no one mentioned unions during our classified employee orientation—which was extensive (bottom-numbingly extensive). Last month I found out that the classified employees union voted to reduce our pay by 2.7%. A classified employees union? Quelle surprise!
— Joules · May 7, 03:14 AM · #
Consider the following study regarding the Moving to Opportunity experiment, which took families in public housing and randomly assigned them to three groups: a control group, a group that got regular housing vouchers, and the experimental group that got housing vouchers to be used only in neighborhoods with a poverty rate under 10%. Researchers who expected to find that the experimental group did better academically were disappointed.
To be sure, that last sentence is important: many of the people given housing vouchers to use in low-poverty neighborhoods ended up with their children attending new schools that were not a whole lot better than before; some even kept their children at the same schools (as this followup article reveals). So while the MTO experiment doesn’t fully predict what would happen if you took the most impoverished inner-city kids and somehow brought them out of poverty altogether, it does indicate the limitations of improving one aspect of their lives (housing) and hoping that will somehow affect academic achievement.
— Stuart Buck · May 7, 03:14 AM · #