Let the Principals Decide
E.D. Kain offers one objection to performance pay:
There are obviously cases where you’ve got an exceptional teacher. Everyone knows they’re great. The students love them. The parents love them. Other teachers love them. And then there are cases where teachers are obviously bad. They’re disliked, have terrible results, etc. But I’d say most of the time the situation is much, much more difficult – most teachers are hard to quantify. It’s hard for many reasons, including who their students are, where their school is, how the funding is at that school, how the teachers at the school work together, who the principal is, and so on and so forth. So the government wants to quantify the performance (for whatever reason, not currently teacher pay, though) and the only way to do that is to use standardized tests, graduation rates, and future success of students.
Even a system that merely allowed us to pay the obviously good teachers more, and to fire the obviously bad teachers, would be a significant improvement. The obviously bad teachers exact a tremendously high cost on students, and reduce the morale of everyone else at a school.
But what about the bulk of teachers who are neither obviously exceptional nor atrocious? How can merit pay or performance pay work if there isn’t any obvious way to quantify the relative performance of the teachers? I’d first point out that Jim Manzi has yet to attempt a quantitative metric to evaluate teacher performance. So there’s a chance we may yet have a better measure than we now enjoy. But say things remain as they are today. I must confess that I don’t see the problem. I acknowledge the flaws in pegging pay to test scores, or student evaluations, or any other single metric. But isn’t job performance in myriad fields difficult to quantify by an objective measure that is accurate and fair all the time?
Consider a surgeon. The overall success rate of his surgeries doesn’t account for the fact that he may operate on particularly difficult cases. Patients aren’t knowledgeable enough to create reliable performance evaluations. Does anyone therefore argue that we ought to pay all surgeons based on their seniority, that we ought to make it very difficult to fire bad surgeons, etc?
I’ve worked as a camp counselor for special needs kids, a phone operator at the number people called when their Mazda vehicles broke down, a marketing staffer at a judicial arbitration and mediation firm, a newspaper reporter, a magazine editor, and a consultant for a financial services firm. My friends growing up worked as lifeguards, retail employees, tennis instructors, bartenders, and waiters. All these jobs are difficult to evaluate by any consistent, objective measure. Even so, we can all imagine what would happen at all the restaurants if the waiters, rather than relying on the obviously imperfect tipping system to differentiate pay, instead found themselves forced to pool tips and redistribute them at the end of the night on the basis of seniority. What do you think might happen to the quality of service and morale?
Just give principals the same power over pay and firing decisions as managers in most other fields. They won’t make perfect, objectively fair compensation decisions. There isn’t any compensation system that yields such results (though the principal system at least offers a theoretical possibility that might happen). It isn’t as though the average principal is itching to fire proficient teachers. Even absent tenure, educators will still be protected by employment law, the fact that it’s costly and time-consuming to hire a new employee rather than improving the performance of an existing one (I went to Catholic school for 14 years, where teachers had no protection, and I remember only one termination), and the fact that even if a teacher runs across one unfair principal there are a lot of schools out there.
E.D. writes:
By paying teachers based on abstract and arbitrary national (or even local) standards, we are going to sabotage teacher performance because we’re going to ignore how kids learn, and inevitably how teachers ought to teach. Any professors out there want to start teaching to national standardized tests?
That’s an objection to pay based on test scores, but I don’t see how it’s an objection to pay based on principal discretion, the system that strikes me as the best among imperfect options.
My experience, through my wife and friends as teachers is that I haven’t met many principals that were all that objective. But that being said I don’t have a better method. We need to be encouraging the best teachers to be teaching with the students that are most in need, where good teachers really can make a big difference.
— Adam S · May 6, 09:12 PM · #
You raise some good points Conor but…
1) Unions do not horribly complicate most firing decisions (though they do provide assistance with appeals) and do not at all complicate firing teachers in their first two or three years who can simply have their contracts dropped. Like many other work-places, in our schools principals have to follow due process to fire a teacher, which often includes giving them fair warnings on performance, working out improvement plans, etc. If that fails, the principal has to work with other administrators to fire the teacher as a means to ensure fairness, to prevent political or personality conflicts, etc. Often in the private world this is similar. Many retail store managers cannot simply fire their employees without first instituting a similar plan and then working with their superiors to terminate employment. It’s honestly not that different, and there are creative ways that administrators and unions can work together on this.
2) Comparing teaching to other more mainstream “market” jobs is unfair. Teacher performance is too objective (which is not to say it can’t be quantified to some degree, nor that terrible teachers shouldn’t be fired and with more swiftness then they are now). But teachers aren’t making sales or marketing goods, or even building products people want to buy. They are working with what they’ve been given – the students, parents, etc. that fall into their lap. Maybe there’s a problem with this model – it’s possible – but the fact is, we’re not escaping it anytime soon. So long as there are disadvantaged kids out there, it’s going to be a problem.
3) I am in favor of allowing local communities (and principals) to pay their better teachers merit pay though I worry to some extent the role favoritism will have. Nevermind that. I would say that this has to be based on community standards, though, and in any case it will be meaningless in the end unless we can create environments that talented people want to teach in – with autonomy and creative control over their classrooms. We’re not going to be able to pay teachers enough to make the job a suitable lifestyle choice for many talented people unless they have some say over their classes’ destinies.
Lots more to say of course but I’ll finish with that. Thanks for the mention…
— E.D. Kain · May 6, 09:21 PM · #
I’m not sure I understand your second objection. Did you mean to say that teacher performance is too subjective? And if so, is teacher performance really more subjective than doctor performance, or massage therapist performance, or bartender performance, or retail clerk performance?
— Conor Friedersdorf · May 6, 09:43 PM · #
Unions do not horribly complicate most firing decisions
This is not my understanding. Based on comments from friends who are teachers and friends who work with other public sector unions, my impression is directly opposite. Certainly, I know of no private schools that offer anything like the teacher tenure provisions described by my public school teacher friends. It would be great to bring some data to bear on this.
Comparing teaching to other more mainstream “market” jobs is unfair.
I am not certain this is correct, as many service jobs are likewise hard to quantify. But let’s grant the point and instead make the comparison to private schools. I suspect (although I do not know) that if one were to investigate private school salary practices they would look nothing like the seniority-based rigid pay scales seen in public schools, and include much more administrative discretion.
Let me turn the question to E.D. Kain. What evidence would make you revise your judgment on the above two points? And if, e.g., it turned out that a) unions contribute significantly to the difficulty of firing teachers (as measured perhaps by time from complaint-to-firing, or yearly termination rate) and b) most private schools had more flexible salary systems than public schools, how would that change your thinking about pay-for-performance?
(I should add that I agree with both you and Conor that a quantitative testing-based metric should be judged guilty until proven innocent. Bad metrics of performance can be worse than no metrics…)
— Ben A · May 6, 09:56 PM · #
Sorry Conor – let me rephrase. Teacher performance is too unquantifiable, too ethereal, too prone to taste, etc. Whose to say a teacher is bad or good – perhaps a teacher is a real hard-ass, everyone hates them, but they get great results? The measurements aren’t quite similar to say a salesman or a doctor.
Ben A –
A) I think unions and schools need to work together to provide better solutions to the firing of teachers, no argument there. I am a supporter of things small. So, I favor local control of both the schools and the unions. Small unions, working together with local schools to produce creative results. Call them “school guilds” or something. Metrics like “complaint-to-fire” are hard to assess given that complaints could be BS as easily as they could be true, and termination rate is not necessarily good or bad given its correlation to turnover rate.
B) Should public schools try to learn from their private counterparts re: pay, etc. Probably. There should be lots of room for openness between private and public educational organizations. Creativity is lacking, no doubt about it – but I put most of the blame in recent years at least on this gloomy march toward uniformity.
— E.D. Kain · May 6, 10:03 PM · #
I think we should have merit-based pay for policeman and fireman too.
— Tony Comstock · May 6, 10:14 PM · #
Tony, back in the late 19th century police worked on commission. One of the great corruption removers in the cities was getting off that system.
Did you mean to say that teacher performance is too subjective? And if so, is teacher performance really more subjective than doctor performance, or massage therapist performance, or bartender performance, or retail clerk performance?
This point, and this line of argument, is completely wrong.
Massage therapist performance is determined by how much they earn, bartender performance is measured in tips and drink sales, retail clerk performance is measured in marginal profit from employing them. This is (somewhat) easy to measure in a for-profit firm – I can google the marginal profit of an employee’s hour at Walmart, for instance. If a massage therapist ‘performs’ better in a way that doesn’t increase the bottom line, it is worthless (in terms of her compensation).
How do we do this for teachers and schools? Teachers are providing a serivce whose marginal profit, an investment in human capital, is measured across the whole lifespan. It’s very difficult to measure in the short term, and I’m not sure if that’s the basis we want to base merit pay on anyway.
— rortybomb · May 6, 10:31 PM · #
To put that point a different way, assuming that we can use the “performance = marginal profit” metric of most labor for teaching doesn’t strike me as that useful. One can find some sort of metric for teaching that one could base pay on, but it should be clear that we aren’t necessarily using market principles to guide it.
— rortybomb · May 6, 10:42 PM · #
“Based on comments from friends who are teachers and friends who work with other public sector unions, my impression is directly opposite.”
As a former special ed teacher and a current public sector union member, I gotta back Ben on that one.
— James F. Elliott · May 6, 10:44 PM · #
Sorry to sound like a broken record, but if school choice were increased then the collective decisions of parents and their children, like those of brokers and buyers on the stock market, would go a long way toward resolving this problem.
— John Schwenkler · May 6, 10:53 PM · #
“ if school choice were increased then the collective decisions of parents and their children, like those of brokers and buyers on the stock market, would go a long way toward resolving this problem.”
Don’t parents already have the same range of choices they can avail themselves of if they are not satisfied with the police and fire protection their municipalities afford their families?
— Tony Comstock · May 6, 11:06 PM · #
Umm … yes. But don’t tell someone who lives next-door to Oakland that police departments should be the model for our public schools.
— John Schwenkler · May 6, 11:13 PM · #
Also, I’m not satisfied with the quality of my municiple water supply. I would like a government issued voucher to drill a well or buy Evian.
— Tony Comstock · May 6, 11:13 PM · #
“Teachers are providing a serivce whose marginal profit, an investment in human capital, is measured across the whole lifespan. It’s very difficult to measure in the short term, and I’m not sure if that’s the basis we want to base merit pay on anyway.”
This is why nothing will be done until it’s too late.
We’re still coasting on a cushion of human capital built up over decades of having a public education system that was the envy of the world, and we won’t feel the real effects of having collectively turned our backs on education for another 10-20 years.
There’s plenty of blame to go around, from the GOP who have gleefully used ejamakation as another code word in their (hopefully now obvious to all) fantastically divisive Southern Strategy; to liberal education theorist who don’t know the difference between discipline and sadism; to the parents who think school is a baby sitting service to help them maintain a two-income lifestyle.
John wants vouchers, and I’ll be damned if I want to pay more taxes, and there’s nothing special about either of us, so all this talk about “attracting better teachers” is just that a bunch of talk. No one wants to spend any money on it.
You want to fire the worst of the worst? Fine by me, but it’s not going to make a damn bit of difference if you’re not sitting at the kitchen table with your kid each night for an hour or two, any more than keep condoms out of schools is going to keep your kids from humping, or putting them in school is going to keep them from getting pregnant.
It’s going to all pile on at once: a work force that doesn’t have what it takes to compete in a global economy, upside-down demographics, and the end of oil. And you know what the answer will be, don’t you?
“Take your family out to dinner. Go to the mall and go shopping.”
— Tony Comstock · May 6, 11:35 PM · #
I may not have this exactly right, but it’s my understanding that many states, particularly in the South, do not permit teachers’ unions as bargaining units. Many of these Southern states generally rank in the bottom 10 in terms of educational quality. It would seem that something other than the intransigence of teachers’ unions must be used to explain the performance of these systems. Doesn’t this undercut (at least to some extent) the argument that it is teacher quality that is largely to blame for subpar results in public schools?
— Steven Donegal · May 6, 11:48 PM · #
$5 to Mr. Comstock.
— Badger · May 7, 12:02 AM · #
I’m puzzled. I’m familiar with qualities that are unquantifiable, ethereal, and prone to taste. And I’m familiar with bureaucratic procedures shaped by union contracts and litigation. But I’ve never heard anyone suggest, until now, that the second of these are the proper way to evaluate the first.
— y81 · May 7, 12:09 AM · #
Conor-
The main issue with letting principals make pay decisions is that principals have to work a zero-sum game when it comes to school budgets. Each district (and consequently, each school) is provided a certain amount of funds in a given year. If unions were not negotiating contracts that set some sort of standardized pay structure, administrations would not have that baseline to work with.
Aside from those issues, are we actually operating under the premise that teachers are overpaid? Teachers don’t get paid for work they bring home because there isn’t enough time to do it during the school day. They don’t get paid for the time they spend after/before school helping students who need it. They don’t get paid for the time they spend planning effective new units and lessons during ‘vacation’ time. For those trying to make comparisons to private schools, yes they are different. Those at private schools get paid LESS than public school employees. They also are not required to be highly qualified and certified teachers and the students who attend them actually do (on average) LESS well on standardized tests. In the age of NCLB, in many states you have to have a Master’s degree just to be hired as a teacher. Those extra letters behind your name aren’t cheap. How many professions requiring a Master’s degree as a minimum level of education have a $35K starting salary and a $50K maximum salary?
Also, pay structure is not all that unions do. They protect funding for professional development opportunities to get better (and no matter how good a teacher is, they can ALWAYS get better; world keeps changing after all). They protect class sizes from getting too large. They protect teacher prep time so that quality lesson planning can happen. They protect resources so that health benefits are provided. They protect teachers from being forced to work 16 hour days (though most do it voluntarily.. 7am-2pm school day + after school clubs + working to staff sporting events/theater productions/etc until 9pm) And yes, they protect academic freedom. If the union doesn’t defend every teacher-member, then the union has to draw lines between black and white when there are shades of gray. For every substandard teacher that is hard to fire, there are good teachers who need the union to defend sound educational practices from those who think they know how to teach better than those who were trained to do it. Far too many think they are experts on the teaching profession because they were a student. I drive a car, have a banking account, and eat vegetables; that doesn’t mean I can fix a transmission, invest your 401(k), or run a farm.
There’s a fundamental ideology difference at work here: Those who attack unions are often, though not always, those who think that people are motivated solely or mostly by self-interest. Unions aren’t just there to protect teachers, they’re also there to protect students.
Attacking teachers and teacher unions is, quite simply, blaming the victims. We have cut or limited education funding so often that we forget that our schools are grossly underfunded to begin with. To be more specific, our CHILDREN are underfunded. It is extraordinarily difficult to effectively teach students without access to medical care, reliable transportation, and basic needs like food, heat, and electricity. These children miss school regularly and for long periods of time. The school could be one of the best vehicles for intervention if they had the funding to also have social workers and need-providers, but instead we are cutting positions and raising class sizes. There isn’t this giant cadre of great teachers out there that can’t get jobs because we can’t fire others. It’s often a job that receives little thanks except from the students who know they are cared about. Fortunately, that’s enough.
— Rich Coker · May 7, 12:10 AM · #
Also, I’m not satisfied with the quality of my municiple water supply. I would like a government issued voucher to drill a well or buy Evian.
Exactly right. What John’s constant appeals to “school choice” occlude is that school choice already exists. Anyone who wants to put their kid in private school can. Many do. What they cannot do is take public money to pay for it, just like how someone who doesn’t like the bus can’t take money from public transportation to buy his own car, just like someone who doesn’t like the cops can’t take public money to hire his own police force, just like someone who doesn’t like the military can’t take public money to form his own militia, just like someone who doesn’t like the fire department can’t take public money to hire a cadre of men with buckets. Sorry. That’s not a right you have. I don’t see John arguing for any of those things. Public education, like many public goods, is based on an economic model of shared resources. You can’t just withdraw your portion like someone withdraws money from a bank. Sorry! That’s human governance for you. That’s democracy for you.
— Freddie · May 7, 12:11 AM · #
jeezus h christ inna handcart.
What is wrong with you people?
Not….everyone….should….go….to…college.
Deal.
Sorry to sound like a broken record, but if school choice were increased then the collective decisions of parents and their children, like those of brokers and buyers on the stock market, would go a long way toward resolving this problem.
Schwenkler….just when I was strating to think you weren’t an idiot.
We already HAVE a free market application of school choice.
It is called SES of the parents. I guess what you are proposing is socializing our education system through vouchers.
Socialist!
— matoko_chan · May 7, 12:22 AM · #
Freddie and matoko_chan: Are you really as dense as you just made yourselves seem? Of course parents who have the money can send their kids to private schools, or move, or homeschool, or whatever – but what of it? I was talking about increasing people’s capacities to move their kids to what they regard as better academic environments, and never claiming that the current baseline wrt school choice was zero. Nor did I ever say that there was a “right” to anything in the vicinity – though I don’t think, for example, that there’s not a “right” to health care, either. (Though suppose I’d written: “Anyone who wants to take their kid to the doctor can. Many do. What they cannot do is take public money to pay for it, just like how someone who doesn’t like the bus can’t take money from public transportation to buy his own car, just like someone who doesn’t like the cops can’t take public money to hire his own police force, just like someone who doesn’t like the military can’t take public money to form his own militia, just like someone who doesn’t like the fire department can’t take public money to hire a cadre of men with buckets.”) Nor, for that matter, would a voucher-based or otherwise choice-maximizing system be based on anything other than “an economic model of shared resources”. And so on, etc.
Oh, and Tony: you don’t need a voucher to drill a well, but you probably do need a permit, and I’ll gladly stand with you in your case against that requirement. But buy your own damn Evian. :)
— John Schwenkler · May 7, 12:51 AM · #
Schwenkler, vouchers redistribute SES….so according to current conservative socio-economic theory, that is…..socialism!
All vouchers will do is dilute is the parent SES of the high performance school by raising the parent SES of the incoming student. That is socialism, redistribution of of resources, not the evolution of the free market place.
Besides, the discriminant is parental involvement and SES, not teacher quality. There was a recent study where the highperformant students, didn’t actually have to attend the charter school…..just applying made a performance difference, the same difference as the actual attendees. So what is the best way to approximate parental involvement? More teachers.
Smaller class size. And FYI, you don’t need a masters degree in mathematics to teach highschool trig and algebra. NCLB is like the nexus of stupid.
— matoko_chan · May 7, 01:12 AM · #
Yes well maybe I don’t buy the “current conservative socio-economic theory” that equates everything to socialism, hmm? But I’m perfectly happy to hear empirical arguments for alternatives to vouchers; the same attention has to be given, though, to such arguments when they’re given for them.
THIS I agree with, and I’ve said similar things about credentialing many times. Just don’t tell the unions.
— John Schwenkler · May 7, 01:19 AM · #
And….do you know what the discriminant is for outstanding teachers? People that want to teach.
At that salary, they have to.
In other words, it not the teachers…its the horrible procrustean bed of one size fits all american education.
The procrustean bed of NCLB. Where every student is required to be proficient.
— matoko_chan · May 7, 01:37 AM · #
But I’m perfectly happy to hear empirical arguments for alternatives to vouchers; the same attention has to be given, though, to such arguments when they’re given for them.
But there aren’t empirical arguments for vouchers. The limited data that we have regarding individual students who have moved from public schools to private schools using vouchers have shown very modest gains if any at all, and almost always within the margin of statistical error. And the question isn’t merely whether there is enough compelling statistical evidence to justify an enormous change in our educational system, but whether that evidence is upwardly scalable to a huge degree.
And if you hadn’t become so dismissive when it comes to this issue, you might note that I have given, in fact, a great deal of attention to the empirical arguments for vouchers, if you’d care to read them: http://lhote.blogspot.com/2008/08/vouchers.html
— Freddie · May 7, 01:39 AM · #
Random thought, but if the problem is too many bad teachers and not enough good ones, why not videostream the good teachers into the classrooms of the bad ones, using the bad ones as disciplinary “managers”, tutors and assignment collectors — connected via twitter, or IM (is that still used), or VOX chat, to the “help desk” of the good teachers? Yeah, videostream has many shortcomings, but nothing a little creativity couldn’t fix.
The primary problems with this are, what, interactivity? — teacher responsiveness? — the lecture format? — steamrolling the dumber ones?
I don’t think those problems are any more daunting than what we’re looking at now. And if it worked, the fix would be cheap by comparison. And hell, each district could vote for which teachers got the gig, with big bonuses for being selected by your peers.
— Sargent · May 7, 01:39 AM · #
God, Freddie, you are absurd. There are empirical arguments for vouchers, it’s just that they’re imperfect. But such is life, and such are the uncertain circumstances under which monumentous decisions are made.
And by the way, increased school choice =/= vouchers. You can obviously have the former without the latter.
— John Schwenkler · May 7, 01:46 AM · #
Sargeant has a good idea.
Also, all vouchers can do is dilute the SES of the achiever school. Schools that aren’t selected cant get competitive except by moving into a high SES neighborhood. So inner city schools would close while the SES of private, charter, and high SES neighborhood schools just would regress to the mean.
And…..I thought a lot of charter schools require parent participation….are you going to issue vouchers for that too John?
My reccommendation? More teachers + cool trade schools. Sargeant’s proposition is a way of adding more virtual teachers. I like it.
;)
— matoko_chan · May 7, 01:49 AM · #
Vouchers would do nothing to solve a problem that most pundits and politician talk about so frequently but barely have a grasp on (name me a pundit or politician that actually has expertise and experience in education). And the problem is, this country does not do a good job educating its poor kids (our middle class kids do fine). That is becasue most poor kids enter kindergarten a year or more behind middle class kids and they bring with them all the issues of poverty: stress, diet, culture, bad parenting, language…. the list goes on and on.
The school-based soloution to this is to give these kids a lot of extra help to compete with middle class kids. Kipp charter schools, for instance, who have had some success in educating poor kids have 10-12 hour days. The teachers work enormous hours and do all kinds of extra stuff.
But vouchers don’t provide in any way for these extra resources. In fact they would actual end up taking resources away. Every kid that leaves a public school via a voucher takes money from that school, but infrastruture costs mostly remain. That’s $6000 (or whatever) less to pay for heat, maintence, smaller classes, school paychologists, special ed-assistants, support staff, non-core classes like music and art…
There’s lots of other problems too. Kids in private schools do better—if they even do do better—becasue private schools do not have to educate poor kids. THey don’t have to, and are not going to educate kids with real difficulties. They don’t have the experinece or resorces to deal with them anyway. But it doesn’t even matter because there are not enough private schools seats to accomodate more that a tiny fraction of public school kids. Basically, they are going to have a few seats open and are going to fill them with kids they think they can educate: kids who are good students with active parents. So vouchers would drain the public schools of good families making the public school they left worse. WOrse because good students and their families make schools better and worse because the funding for that student goes away but the infrastructure costs at that school remain the same. So vouchers improves the lot of a few but makes the system on a whole worse. They don’t address the real problem.
Vouchers are just a conservative/libertarian talking point. It’s just a magic word for pundits and politicians (who know nothing about, and have no real interest in, education beyond how it affects their election chances or interfaces with their ideology) to pronounce in columns and speeches. It’s a conservative rallying call, like “Remember the Maine!” It sounds all conservative, ticks off all the boxes, and that is it’s only real purpose.
If you really care about choice AND educating poor kids, charter schools have a lot more potential. It’s still really dodgy becasue it’s really hard educate poor kids and to run a school. But a district full of small schools dedicated to different interests like arts or computers or business or the environment, run by people who actually understand education, and held to basic standards would be good for all students, poor and middle class. It wouldn’t solve all the problems of educating poor kids but it would go a ways in that direction. It might be one part of a solution.
— cw · May 7, 03:31 AM · #
I’ve read that post, and haven’t been able to tell that it links or cites or even betrays the slightest knowledge of the many scholarly papers that have been written on randomized voucher experiments.
As it happens, though, I can produce links to every single study that has been done so far. Here is a link to all of the studies about the systemic effects of vouchers (how they improve system-wide performance), and here is a link to all of the studies about the effects of vouchers on the voucher students themselves.
I would highly recommend that you cut back on your volubility here, and start reading up on the literature first.
— Stuart Buck · May 7, 03:55 AM · #
It may be that you can Google the marginal cost and marginal benefit of a Wal-Mart clerk, but can you Google those figures for two specific Wal-Mart clerks? You cannot. Their managers decide how good a Wal-Mart clerk they are relative to other Wal-Mart clerks, and use their imperfect estimations to figure out who to give raises, promotions, and other perks.
— Conor Friedersdorf · May 7, 04:06 AM · #
I kept trying to butt into this debate, but I keep getting much too worked up over it, due to personal and relatively recent issues (well, six-year-old issues), to form a coherent response so far. I may put up a post on it sooner or later though.
Until then though: what Tony said. And to some extent, what cw said. And even if it were easier to fire bad teachers, the fact that there are simply not anywhere near enough good teachers would still be true.
— Joseph FM · May 7, 05:38 AM · #
Stuart Buck,
RE the studies about systemtemic change in Milwaukee due to voucher-induced competition. THose studies showed a small one year jump in test scores in some subjects and that might have been due to fear of competition (becasue each voucher means money lost to the public school) but the gains were not sustainted. Neither was there any evidence produced about what the public schools actually did to improve test scores, if anything. There may be correlation between vouchers and the small jump but there’s nothing about causation.
(see Vouchers and Public School Performance: A Case Study of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program
By Martin Carnoy Frank Adamson Amita Chudgar 10-02-07
http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/book_vouchers/
I haven’t looked at the studies for Florida but there is very little to lead one to say that vouchers improve systemic performance in Milwaukee. And going to a differnernt school definitely did not improve the performance of chilren who used vouchers.
I stick to my assertion that vouchers don’t deal with the root of our education problem: the disadvantages poor children bring with them to school.
— cw · May 7, 05:53 AM · #
“Oh, and Tony: you don’t need a voucher to drill a well, but you probably do need a permit, and I’ll gladly stand with you in your case against that requirement. But buy your own damn Evian. :)”
You don’t need vouchers to send your kid to private school, but that doesn’t stop people from asking for them, does it? I stand ready to receive public monies for my well project.
As to the permit, from time to time I am vexed by considerably more imposing incursions of local authoritarianism into liberty; and over issues of considerably less interest to the state than the tapping of an aquifer that extends beyond the boundaries of my property.
The next time I find myself so embroiled, I do hope I’ll see your shoulder next time mine (shields held high port and all that.) Never mind the Evian, when the battle’s over, win or lose, I’ll buy you a beer.
— Tony Comstock · May 7, 11:35 AM · #
And you don’t need government funds to send your kid to the doctor, but that doesn’t stop the whining either. In any case, I noted just above that increasing school choice =/= vouchers, and vouchers weren’t even a part of the discussion until you brought them up. (Check the record.)
— John Schwenkler · May 7, 12:12 PM · #
“And you don’t need government funds to send your kid to the doctor, but that doesn’t stop the whining either.”
I was unaware that are people who qualify for publicly funded healthcare who are demanding vouchers so they could go to doctors, clinics and hospitals that do not take Medicare, or pursue “alternative treatments” of dubious efficacy.
In any case, have I misunderstood your position, John? Do you favor or oppose education vouchers? If you oppose, you have my apologies.
— Tony Comstock · May 7, 12:30 PM · #
So the private schools at which some parents would hope to use vouchers are ones that … don’t take vouchers? Somehow this analogy doesn’t quite work.
I do favor experimenting with voucher programs, though I’m also open to hearing empirical arguments against them. My point was just that given that it was Conor’s and my critics, not Conor and I, who brought that topic up, the charges of “right-wing cliches” and the like are a bit funny in this context; it’s you all who have the obsession with vouchers, not us.
— John Schwenkler · May 7, 12:43 PM · #
“So the private schools at which some parents would hope to use vouchers are ones that … don’t take vouchers? Somehow this analogy doesn’t quite work.”
Given your academic credentials, I didn’t think I’d have to draw it out for you, and I suspect you’re being willfully obtuse, but on the off chance you’re merely dense, here we go:
We have a public healthcare system through which some people are provided healthcare. (For the time being let’s leave aside whether or not this is a good thing or a bad thing.)
There are healthcare options that not available inside of this system.
We do not provide public monies to people who are not satisfied with the public healthcare system so they can pursue healthcare options outside of the public system.
We have a public primary and secondary education system.
There are education options that are not available inside of this system.
We do not (at present) provide public monies to people who are not satisfied with the public educations system so they can pursue education options outside of the public system.
Also, John, you have an odd habit I’m trying very hard to understand. You express yourself in a profoundly antagonistic manner, and when you get just the sort of response you seem to be hoping for, claim exasperation. Or at least that’s how it looks to me. I spend most of my lawn mowing time yesterday ruminating over it.
— Tony Comstock · May 7, 01:02 PM · #
It’s you who’re missing the point, Tony. It’s simply not true, at least so far as I understand it, that in the case of health care there are some doctors or hospitals who are prohibited by law from receiving public monies. Rather, some of them choose not to take patients on Medicare for one reason or another, and that’s their right. In the same way, a private school might decide that it would rather not take voucher dollars – perhaps because the state isn’t good at actually paying, perhaps because they’d prefer not to have the extra oversight, perhaps because they’re wildly principled libertarians opposed to the creep of socialism, or whatever. But just as we don’t require Medicare recipients to go only to state-run hospitals, or recipients of Pell Grants to attend only state-run universities, so it might make sense not to restrict public funding of elementary or secondary schooling to institutions that are run by the state. I’m not putting that forward as any sort of argument in favor of vouchers, but only as an illustration of an inconsistency – or at least a tension – in a certain sort of argument.
Apologies for my antagonism.
— John Schwenkler · May 7, 01:15 PM · #
Wow, I missed that bit of inanity earlier. Needless to say, the reason that we have one military or one fire department per community (not 1,000 per community) is because it would be ridiculously confusing and duplicative to have 1,000 of those institutions.
But there’s absolutely no reason that schools fall into that same category of “there must be one and only one per community.” Schools are more like stores. It’s a good thing if a community has a bunch of different stores of all kinds — grocery stores, electronics stores, shoe stores, etc. — rather than just one Wal-Mart at which everybody has to shop. Same here: It’s a good thing if there are lots of different schools in a community, because different people all have different desires for what they hope education will be. Some people like an incessant focus on math scores, some don’t. Some people want a focus on the arts, or on science. Some kids are “at-risk” of dropping out, and there are schools that focus on that. Some schools take a freer Sudbury-type approach. Some schools are more rigid, with uniforms and longer hours. People have widely differing opinions as to sex ed, phonics, new math, and every aspect of the curriculum.
All of which is to say that in education, it’s by far better if a thousand flowers bloom than if everyone is crammed into the same model just from lack of choice.
And — this is the key point, one to which liberals never have any response — if you want the state to pay for schooling at all, there is no reason, none whatsoever, to screw the many people who may have different preferences about education.
Moreover, as John Schwenkler already pointed out, the exact same (heartless) argument could be made as to healthcare. Want healthcare for your kids? Well, you already have the right to choose a doctor. You just don’t have the right to make someone else pay for it. Sorry, that’s democracy.
That’s also stupidity. The whole point in the healthcare debate is whether we, as a democracy, should decide help more people get healthcare. And the whole point of the voucher debate is whether we, as a democracy, should decide to help poor people have more of the same educational choices that rich people exercise every day (usually by deciding to live in a nice suburb).
— Stuart Buck · May 7, 01:22 PM · #
I believe cw is absolutely correct about the disadvantages poor students bring with them into the classroom. Thus sending these kids to the same private school upper-middle class kids attend won’t help. They need a fundementally different style of education to make up for their SES and “social captial” deficits. Everyone interested in this topic should really read this Paul Tough article that someone kindly linked to around here (or maybe the League) yesterday:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/magazine/26tough.html
John,
My understanding is that the data from the Chicago school choice program showed that there’s no real gains to be had from school choice programs. It turned out that kids who won the lottery and got to go to their preferred schools did just as well as kids who entered the lottery and lost.
http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/schoolchoicelottery.pdf
Although students often take advantage of winning a lottery by attending that school and, on average, the schools lottery winners attend are better on observable dimensions than the schools attended by lottery losers, we observe no systematic evidence of benefits to lottery winners (and even in some cases, significant declines) on traditional outcome measures such as graduation rates, test scores, and school attendance.
This is consistent with the thesis above. Successful schools are successful because they have high SES students. Just moving low SES students to those schools won’t really help. Instead we need a different style of education entirely for those low SES students. This is why I’m an advocate of KIPP-style charter schools.
— cwk · May 7, 01:35 PM · #
That’s fine, though “found” would be better than “showed”; it was only one study, and others have had different results. This is why I favor a federalized approach in which different states and communities are allowed to experiment with the various alternatives, and see which approaches work best for them.
And I’m hugely in favor of charter schools, too.
— John Schwenkler · May 7, 01:42 PM · #
there is no reason, none whatsoever, to screw the many people who may have different preferences about education.
Stuart, you are not listening. All vouchers can do is change the parental SES of the student by averaging it in with higher SES communities.
Also: There is only kind of intelligence. “Emotional intelligence” is crapology. All schools, public and private must conform to state educational standards. Whacky educational methods don’t work.
Charter schools work because they largely mandate some level of parent involvement.
Vouchers are educational welfare.
I thought conservatives were against welfare.
And……..Not everyone needs to go to college.
— matoko_chan · May 7, 01:45 PM · #
What is this, the new “evo. psyc. rulz”? :)
And tell it to Obama, please – I don’t think you’re going to get much disagreement from conservatives.
— John Schwenkler · May 7, 01:48 PM · #
And P.S.
So is public schooling. If it helps, think of the push for school choice as an attempt at welfare reform …
— John Schwenkler · May 7, 01:50 PM · #
I appreciate your apology, though I’m not sure I’m the one to whom it’s owed. In any case, you seem to be well respected by people whom I respect, so perhaps the fault lies with me. Moving on.
“I’m not putting that forward as any sort of argument in favor of vouchers, but only as an illustration of an inconsistency – or at least a tension – in a certain sort of argument.”
I regard universally accessible public primary and secondary education as being in league with police protection, fire protection, safe drinking water, sanitation, vaccinations, road and highways; ie it is overwhelmingly in the public interest to provide these services at fairly high quality, out of competition with the private sector.
That doesn’t preclude private security, or private schools, or taking your child to a private doctor for vaccinations. But the diversion of public moneys from these fundamental functions of that state to private alternatives is corrosive to the governments mandate to provide for the common welfare.
Of course there are holes and gaps in this ideal. For example, I understand there are municipalities where houses are allowed to burn if the owner has not subscribed to the local fire service. My family’s excrement goes into a large tank in our front yard, and we are entirely responsible for the maintenance of this system, despite the benefit that the community enjoys from it’s proper functioning.
Similarly, recent changes to our municipal drinking supply have rendered it unfit to drink, at least for me (I don’t know why, but it gives me a stomach ache when I chug a glass.) By your and my arguments both, I should have a expectation that the state help me when my septic tank overflows, and issue me a voucher to drill a well, or at least to buy bottled drinking water.
Of course that’s just nonsense, and you and I both know why, and picking nits of inconsistency, or if you prefer “pointing out tensions” doesn’t change anything.
If you’d like to make the case that primary and secondary education is not in the same category as police protection, vaccinations, etc, then make the case. The rest is sophistry.
— Tony Comstock · May 7, 01:59 PM · #
John,
We don’t disagree as a matter of law. I absolutely agree that a locality should have the right to implement a school choice program if that’s what that locality’s voters want. I just wouldn’t be one of the people advocating for it, because I’m convinced that what low SES kids need are new schools with new pedagogical methods.
Lucky for me the city in which I live is aggressively pursuing a charter school program in bipartisan fashion. Unluckily for me the state government is considering significantly restricting it.
— cwk · May 7, 02:06 PM · #
Seconding Schwenkler that Freddie is absurd. There’re excellent empirical arguments for vouchers. There’s also been fantastic work done on school choice using all kinds of settings; some of the best just has to do with looking at the density of school districts on the ground. I went from opposing school choice — which I felt early on when Weld brought it to MA — to supporting it based largely on those results and the passion for education I saw when working with charter school teachers, as opposed to the dead hearts I encountered volunteering in public schools.
— Sanjay · May 7, 02:09 PM · #
So why not state-run medical clinics, then? I mean, why shouldn’t they be preferable to private ones?
The answer seems obvious: medical care is something that private entities can provide just as effectively and efficiently as public ones, if not more so, and because of that we’re happy to treat such private entities as the public goods that they are. Clearly the same doesn’t generally hold for police or fire stations, but there’s an empirical case to be made that it can be true, to some degree or another, for highways, waterways, mass transit systems, etc. That the government has a “mandate to provide for the common welfare” doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t sometimes draw on the resources of private actors when they provide the best or most just means of doing that.
And by the way, we don’t discourage recipients of WIC dollars or food stamps from shopping at private supermarkets, either.
— John Schwenkler · May 7, 02:12 PM · #
And……..Not everyone needs to go to college.
What is this, the new “evo. psyc. rulz”? :)
And tell it to Obama, please – I don’t think you’re going to get much disagreement from conservatives.
— John Schwenkler · May 7, 09:48 AM · #
Sure, or the new “cognitive anthro rulz”.
w/e
Unfortunately Obama’s gamespace is constrained by pre-existing moron-derived conditions(NCLB), just like the economy and Iraq and Af-Pak.
the push for school choice as an attempt at welfare reform
But vouchers simply can’t work…if enough student-families are enabled to choose, the parental SES will just regress to the mean, making good schools into bad schools and closing the really bad ones.
Under vouchers, bad schools have no way of becoming competive…involved parents will flee the district, leaving only the children of noninvolved parents….your market analogy is a fail.
— matoko_chan · May 7, 02:25 PM · #
This is a completely unsupported hodge-podge of unrelated subjects. There’s a good case, yes, that the state should pay for its young citizens to be educated somehow, but it is illogical to believe that this requires that the education must be provided in state-owned buildings under state-mandated curricula by state employees, any more than the state requirement of vaccinations means somehow disfavoring shots provided by private doctors.
— Stuart Buck · May 7, 02:37 PM · #
“So why not state-run medical clinics, then? I mean, why shouldn’t they be preferable to private ones?”
I don’t know why you’ve jumped from vaccinations to all of medicine, so one more time, then I’m done (for now)
By allocation of public monies, almost everywhere in the country, vaccinations are available at low or no cost. We do this because it is a really good idea.
We don’t let people say “I don’t want to get vaccinated at the county clinic. I want to get vaccinated at a private doctor, so I want the money that would have been spent on me at the county clinic in the form of a voucher to take to my private doctor.” We don’t do that because doing that would be a really bad idea.
If you want to pick the nit that sometimes these publicly funded vaccinations are made available through private entities, be my guest. I will mow my lawn and contemplate the tension.
If you want to pic the nit that WIC dollars go to grocery stores, I will mow my lawn and contemplate the tension.
If you want to pic the nit that Section 8 monies go to private property owners, I will mow my lawn and contemplate the tension.
I am more than willing to allow that in some narrow cases it may make sense to provide public monies for private alternatives to public primary or secondary education; just as in some narrow cases it may make sense for the state to pay for a child to be vaccinated by a private doctor instead of at the country clinic. If that’s what you mean by “experimenting with vouchers” then count me as an ally.
But these narrow cases do not even begin to contradict the simple fact that this country needs a quality vaccination regime to be universally available; and it needs quality public primary and secondary education to be universally available as well. I am not yet convinced that the wide-spread use of vouchers, even as intermediary step, serves that objective; and indeed, at this point it is my belief that it would be counter-productive, and I have my suspicion that it is often (though perhaps not in this case) offered in bad faith.
— Tony Comstock · May 7, 02:42 PM · #
Yes, we do. My son is on a state-run insurance plan, and we go to a private doctor for his vaccinations and everything else. If you can give some reason why this should be regarded as a “really bad idea”, or show that our case is the exception rather than the rule, I’ll mow my driveway and contemplate my density.
— John Schwenkler · May 7, 02:55 PM · #
It’s those who object to vouchers that seem to be arguing in bad faith. Do they object to the fact that there is a federal daycare tax credit of up to $3,000 per child, thus essentially providing a federal subsidy for daycare? Not that I can tell. Do they object to the fact that Pell Grants are available for use anywhere, not just state-run universities? Not that I can tell.
So by what principled position is it OK for the government to subsidize private educational expenses up to age 6, and after age 18, but not in between? I’ve never seen anyone come up with even an attempt at a good faith reason for that view. And little reason: it makes no sense. It’s as stupid as if the food stamp program had the following rule: “Food stamps may be used at private grocery stores, but only if you are between the ages of 21 and 36, or over the age of 52-and-a-half. If you’re between 36 and 52-and-a-half, you have to go to the county food bank to get all of your food.” Or, “Section 8 housing vouchers can be used anywhere, but not if your last name begins with the letters M through R. Then you have to stay in state-owned housing.”
— Stuart Buck · May 7, 03:00 PM · #
“Charter schools work because they largely mandate some level of parent involvement.” —Matoko
It is my understanding that charter schools don’t improve outcomes for poor kids, which was one big rational for them. They often do provide good alternatives to traditional schools. I have a 9 year old daughter who would really benefit from a less traditional program but there is nothing offered through the district and the only private school that might have been a good match is 30 minuets away and cost $10,000 a year.
“There’re excellent empirical arguments for vouchers. “—- sanjay
That’s not really true. There is very little evidence that kids who use vouchers improve their performance. And there is only a tiny bit of highly inconclusive evidence that public schools improve becasue they don’t want to lose students to vouchers.
I was thinking about this last night. I actually really like the idea of vouchers. It would be great to have a lot of different choices. The problem that our current system is not set up so that vouchers would work. For them to work there would need to be an wide array of schools in any given area. And to generate any competition there would have to be a large surplus of available seats. So at any given time, a fair amount of schools have to be on the verge of not having enough students to pay for their operation. Which is not a school you want your kid in. Uncertainty over funding is one negative factor in school quality. You can’t hire until the last minute, you don’t know what kind of resources you can afford…. It is not a recipe for success.
Another thing required to make vouchers work for everyone, if you want to try to educate poor kids, you would have to give them more money. That would make them attractive enough so that schools would develop the expertise and resources to educate them.
And there’s all these other problems like transportation and balancing SES and cream skimming. And beyond that, most of the proponents of vouchers don’t really care or know anything about education. It’s just an ideological buzz word people pick up off the radio. All these people flapping their lips in bad faith poison the process. They are the last group of people you want designing an education system. I’m not talking about anybody here. I’m talking about those beholden to Rush.
Small charter schools sharing infrastructure with other charter schools or regular public schools is a better option. But they have to meet basic educational standards. Because they were desperate about the state of their schools, Milwaukee went big time into charter schools, giving just about anyone who walked upright a charter. But from what I heard there were/are all kinds of horror stories. There were some success stories too, but mostly in schools that offered alternative education to middle class kids. From what I have read, Kipp schools are one of the few charter schools who have had consistent success improving the outcome of poor kids (there are probably some others I have not heard about). But those interested in the “education crisis” should look at their program (very very time, resource, and labor intensive, requires extremely dedicated teachers) to see an example of what it really takes to improve the outcomes of poor kids. It’s not easy. We most likely don’t have the political will.
— cw · May 7, 03:10 PM · #
“It’s those who object to vouchers that seem to be arguing in bad faith. Do they object to the fact that there is a federal daycare tax credit of up to $3,000 per child, thus essentially providing a federal subsidy for daycare? Not that I can tell. Do they object to the fact that Pell Grants are available for use anywhere, not just state-run universities? Not that I can tell.”
I oppose day-care tax credits and Pell grants both.
“This is a completely unsupported hodge-podge of unrelated subjects. There’s a good case, yes, that the state should pay for its young citizens to be educated somehow, but it is illogical to believe that this requires that the education must be provided in state-owned buildings under state-mandated curricula by state employees, any more than the state requirement of vaccinations means somehow disfavoring shots provided by private doctors.”
“So by what principled position is it OK for the government to subsidize private educational expenses up to age 6, and after age 18, but not in between?”
At the risk of sounding like a conservative, the position (principled or not) is that universal free public primary and secondary education is a part of our national tradition that has served us well, and dismantling into a hodge podge of disparate public and private entities is not an undertaking that should be entered into lightly. The damage done to our educational tradition by assaults from both the left and the right would seem to bear this out, or at least that’s how it looks from my vantage point.
If you care to argue that the result of these assaults (or simply changing times) is that our educational tradition that is broken beyond repair or hopelessly out of step with modern realities; and that it needs to be scrapped in favor of a new system that will have to be built through experimentation, I have an open ear for that. But that strikes me as a radical proposal. Mind you, I’ve no position (principled or otherwise) against radicalism. But let’s call it what it is.
— Tony Comstock · May 7, 03:25 PM · #
And also, imagine how surprised I am looking in the mirror and seeing a James Poulos reflection; with the minor difference being that he blames it on 13 year old girls wearing belly shirts, and I blame it on them not doing their math homework.
— Tony Comstock · May 7, 03:28 PM · #
If that’s what you think, I’d make the same recommendation that I made to Freddie last night: less volubility, more research. Follow the links I provided.
— Stuart Buck · May 7, 04:02 PM · #
“Do they object to the fact that there is a federal daycare tax credit of up to $3,000 per child, thus essentially providing a federal subsidy for daycare?”
But this isn’t a “day care” credit. It’s the Child Tax Credit. The logic is something like this: 1) Kids are awesome, at least in part because they turn into adults that pay for stuff, like taxes and food and automobiles. 2) Having kids is damned expensive, which discourages the having of them. 3) We, as a society, want kids. 4) Therefore, making some of their care refundable ($3,000 bucks covers about two months of crappy day care for a toddler in the Bay Area) relieves some of that expense, thus making the having of children more feasible. Yay!
Now, granted, it’s a tad more complicated than that, but that’s the nutshell.
There’s actually an argument for vouchers that I’m sympathetic for: If we, as a society, value education (and we should and do), then what is important is parents having their children educated, not necessarily that it’s in the publicly-funded system. Logically, and morally, some sort of tax deduction, credit, or voucher should be made available up to a certain point (such as the proportion of state, local, and federal taxes for an individual that goes to pay for the public system). Such a credit/voucher/rebate would have to be calculated using a complex formula, since funding for public education is similarly complex.
That said, such a voucher (to use the word as an all-encompassing term) simply will not make up the entire cost of tuition at a private institution, the best of which, after all, can cost tens of thousands of dollars annually. These vouchers will not — and demonstrably do not — aid all students to achieve something like school choice. Absent the institutions choosing to have sliding scale fees or scholarship programs, many private schools will remain out of reach for lower-income voucher recipients due to an inability to pay the balance of the tuition.
There are numerous confounding factors that all play in to student achievement. The simple act of a parent pursuing a charter school or voucher may indicate something that is proven to be of far more value in a child’s academic and social success: an engaged and concerned adult. It’s a self-selecting group of already-motivated individuals that makes up the sample pool, and this will unavoidably screw up the data.
School choice, through vouchers and charter schools, are only part of the puzzle. Not all private institutions are the same, nor is a charter school, by virtue of having liberty to be innovative, necessarily a good innovation.
— James F. Elliott · May 7, 06:18 PM · #
<i>That said, such a voucher (to use the word as an all-encompassing term) simply will not make up the entire cost of tuition at a private institution, the best of which, after all, can cost tens of thousands of dollars annually.</i>
If you had vouchers that were equal to the state per-pupil funding, that would more than cover the vast majority of private schools. There are a few elite private schools in major cities, yes, but those are the exception. Even in DC, there are plenty of private schools that don’t even charge the full $7,500 tuition that a voucher would pay for.
— Stuart Buck · May 7, 06:29 PM · #
$7,500!?
If I can just keep the cash, and home-school my kids I am so down with this voucher stuff! If you want me, I’ll be somewhere between Panama and the Marquesas!
— Tony Comstock · May 7, 06:41 PM · #
But a voucher equal to the state’s per-pupil expense would not be a fair voucher, because it would, in many cases, FAR exceed the tax liability of the individual receiving it.
— James F. Elliott · May 7, 08:20 PM · #
Never mind fair! I want my $15K!
— Tony Comstock · May 7, 08:31 PM · #
Um, so what? If the kid is in public school, that school will get the per-pupil expense from the state, regardless of what the kid’s parents pay in taxes.
— Stuart Buck · May 7, 09:33 PM · #
You’re not going to argue in favor of me getting my money, are you Stuart? :-(
No peach ice cream for you!
— Tony Comstock · May 7, 09:54 PM · #
Something that no one has talked about and is a very big issue, is special education. Special Ed accounts for around 20 to 25 percent of most school districts budgets. Most voucher programs want to give $5-6k but many special ed students cost 20-30k. Very few private schools or charter schools can accept special ed students. So you give the average cost of educating a student as a voucher or you allow parents to chose charters you leave the very expensive kids back in the regular public school system that now has less money to pay for them.
No educational reform can really be realistic if it does not address special education and neither vouchers nor charter schools (as usually conceived) do that. We are producing autistic students at a rate of 1 out of every 160 students right now. Those autistic students cost on average $30k. Special Ed as we currently do it is expensive and not that effective. But the average school district has 10 to 12 percent of their students labeled as special ed.
— Adam S · May 8, 05:03 AM · #