Final Thoughts on Education and Teachers' Unions
Despite the heated debate, there is a great deal of common ground between me and the people I’ve been arguing with about education. I think that good teachers should be paid more, that more money should be spent on teacher salaries (though less should be spent on off-site administrators, maintenance workers, janitors, etc., at least in CA), that a child’s family income and environment impacts the education he or she receives far more than anything that goes on inside the classroom, that vouchers aren’t a cure all, that teacher’s unions are NOT the biggest problem with the American educational system, that performance pay based on test scores is a terrible idea, and that even if you could fire bad teachers easily, you’d need to do all sorts of other stuff to make our public school system adequate for its least advantaged pupils.
What I find frustrating is that so many of those arguments were offered as though they obviate the need for a better incentive structure for teachers, or an easier way to fire bad teachers. A respected newspaper launches a major investigation into one of America’s largest public school districts, documents numerous instances where unqualified teachers couldn’t be fired (and exact a hefty financial burden on the public education system), despite a concerted effort by administrators to get them off the books. The response among some in comments? It’s irrelevant, and you obviously only care about it because suddenly you’ve become a right-wing hack. Or it’s unfortunate, but the solution you’ve offered — weaken California’s teachers’ unions — is a bad idea. Given the cost to pupils, it’s the kind of moment where Freddie ought to be demanding of critics who don’t like my solution, “And then what?“
As I noted above, teacher’s unions are NOT the biggest problem with the American educational system — but they are the most powerful interest group blocking potentially viable reforms meant to address the biggest problems. (John says this quite well in this post.) In fact, I wonder whether John and I feel so strongly about this because California’s teachers’ union is a particularly powerful political player in the state, relative to teachers’ unions in many other places. As a Californian, I’ve maybe seen their shamefully dishonest campaign ads, outsize political influence, maximalist rhetoric in newspaper stories, absurdly propagandistic newsletter and intimidation of dissident teachers one too many times to write about them without an edge of disdain. Nor do I worry that absent a union teachers would be paid a pittance — the voters of California have shown themselves willing to increase taxes to fund education, to dedicate a percentage of the budget to schools, and to pay its teachers at the highest rate in the nation last I checked.
“What I find frustrating is that so many of those arguments were offered as though they obviate the need for a better incentive structure for teachers, or an easier way to fire bad teachers.”
I think you’re misreading or misunderstanding, Conor. No doubt there is some merit in what you’ve proposed. Being of conservative temperament, I always ask “Why are things the way they are?” as in what is being protected by also (over) protecting a teacher who is found with drugs or laying on top of a student. But yes, by the example you’ve cited, perhaps some reform is in order.
The problem is that conservatism generally and you specifically have no credibility as education reformers. Maybe NCLB was suppose to be a “Only Nixon could go to China” move, but it’s frickin disaster (although according to my educator friends, has actually been helpful in the worst/poorest districts;) and looking back at other GOP/conservative education initiatives and especially general attitudes towards public education, I don’t even see good intentions.
If you want people like Freddie (or me for that matter) to take your proposals as being offered in good faith, then you’re going to have to come with ideas that are genuinely innovative, and more than that, don’t look like retreads of old ideas that are (with good reason IMO) understood by your opponents to be hostile to education.
Maybe this isn’t fair. Maybe this cuts you off from making some legitimate criticism. But it is a political fact, and hitting the Google to dredge up (yet another) article with provocative examples of just how right you are isn’t going to change that fact.
I’d also be curious to know just how much is being spent on salaries for police officers who are on some sort of administrative or investigative suspension or other modified service. That would help give scale and perspective, don’t you think?
— Tony Comstock · May 7, 12:09 PM · #
Conor…it is so much more complex than that.
Take mathematics. I do math…I make 4x as much doing math as I would teaching it.
I was lucky , I had good math teachers all the way up, and I have the brain substrate to be able to do high order mathematics. Mathematics is archealogical…a single bad year will leave an insurmountable hole in the foundation of a students math domain knowledge.
OTOH, a single good lib arts teacher can inspire a lifetime of learning.
NCLB is a horrorshow, a hideous procrustean bed that stretches less-able students on a rack of agony, and lops off the intellectual limbs of the more able students with a sword of boredom.
Not..every…student…should ……go …to…college.
— matoko_chan · May 7, 02:03 PM · #
Tony, it sounds like your objection is that Conor has good points, but you don’t like the messenger, or that the messenger sounds too much like other people you don’t like. Please tell me if I am misreading you.
Conor:
If the unions are the biggest organized roadblock against solving problems, doesn’t that make them a pretty big problem?
— Blar · May 7, 02:47 PM · #
It takes a special kind of cluelessness to go straight from complaining about how powerful the CA teachers’ union to noting how California’s high teacher salaries demonstrates an inherent generosity that obviates the need for unions.
— Bo · May 7, 02:55 PM · #
Look, clearly, some reforms are needed. I would separate the need to get rid of obviously corrupt or flatly negligent teachers from the need to get rid of just poor performers, but both need to be on the table. But you’ve got to have the carrot as well as the stick, and it seems to me that, if they could be convinced that this kind of reform wasn’t the first step towards dismantling the unions, the unions themselves would be the best partners in this kind of reform.
But look, as Tony says, there are a few overlapping levels of what looks like bad faith here. It isn’t actual bad faith on your part, of course; but on the larger perspective of conservatism, I think it’s fair to ask whether people involved in the day-to-day business of education should trust proposed reforms.
First, it’s hard to take seriously the opinions of people who don’t believe in public education, period. Some/many libertarians don’t want government run schools at all. (Most of those want to just give parents money to send their kids to private schools, not abolish public funding for elementary education, of course.) When someone like that makes recommendations about how best to reform public education, it’s very tempting to ask why exactly we should listen to people who would prefer government-run schools not exist at all.
The next level, and similarly, is the unions. A lot of people want to get rid of the unions entirely. It’s pretty clear why people who believe in the teachers unions, and members of the unions themselves, wouldn’t particularly be interested in having a dialogue about how best to go about that. For myself personally, getting rid of the unions isn’t off the table, I can talk about it. But to have such a conversation I have to be convinced that eliminating the teachers unions is really a means to the end of improving education in this country, and has not become the end in itself. And I believe that, for some people, that is the case. Part of the reason many arguments for educational reform get tuned out is because the anti-union arguments are so one note and constant. They tend to be simplistic, and over time you really start to wonder whether getting rid of the teachers unions has just become the point. And into that question you have to throw in the fact that the teacher’s unions are overwhelmingly Democratic, and wonder about simple partisan antipathy.
Finally, if you’re like me, and you think that arguments about education are proxy arguments for arguments about poverty, and race, and family breakdown, it’s easy to think that conservatives are in a sense handicapped by their ideological inclinations from solving the bigger problems. Greatly reducing the amount of poverty in this country, in my opinion, would do more for our academic performance than any specifically educational reform. But that kind of widespread reduction in poverty is at least conceptually easier to produce for liberals than for conservatives. There’s just more ideological space for the kind of social engineering necessary to fix American inner cities and impoverished rural areas on the left side of the spectrum. Whether or not we offer a genuine chance to improve those problems is an open question, maybe THE question. But I often feel that conservatives offer quick-fix solutions like vouchers or union-busting because there isn’t room in small government, low tax ideology to confront larger issues.
— Freddie · May 7, 03:12 PM · #
And Conor endorses neither of these positions, so what of it?
— John Schwenkler · May 7, 03:23 PM · #
And Conor endorses neither of these positions, so what of it?
John, seriously, chill.
I’m echoing Tony and mentioning reasons why many people don’t believe conservatives argue in good faith. As far as I know, it is within the bounds of propriety to talk about larger perspectives on a given issue.
— Freddie · May 7, 03:34 PM · #
Freddie says “you’ve got to have the carrot as well as the stick, and it seems to me that, if they could be convinced that this kind of reform wasn’t the first step towards dismantling the unions, the unions themselves would be the best partners in this kind of reform.”
Why would the unions be the best partners in this kind of reform? The only reason they exist is to protect the jobs of their members — all their members. That includes the crappy ones. That especially includes the crappy ones, because good teachers don’t need to worry about getting fired. So what does the union stand to gain by helping the district lessen the union’s ranks? Here’s what the teacher union wants: Keep all of our members and pay us more and eventually the crappy teachers will retire and higher pay will induce more and better people to get into teaching. And hey, that’s not an irrational position…if you run the union. But if you’re a parent with a kid in a failing school I can see why you might be a mite bit tweaked by that stance.
— Sonny Bunch · May 7, 03:37 PM · #
Look Conor…we need to get rid of NCLB as a first priority.
It is impossible, and therefore a profound waste of funding.
What is NCLB funding per year?
It is impossible that every child in America should hit level “proficient” by 2012.
FYI, “proficient” is an actual testing level of 75-80%.
— matoko_chan · May 7, 03:40 PM · #
And heres a thought…maybe the teachers unions feel the need to protect their constituency from an IMPOSSIBLE performance evaluation.
NCLB mandates every child in America shall be above average.
Probably the teachers realize that this is IMPOSSIBLE even if Bush and Kennedy didn’t.
And they could be FIRED for failing to perform an IMPOSSIBLE task.
Jeez.
— matoko_chan · May 7, 03:45 PM · #
“Tony, it sounds like your objection is that Conor has good points, but you don’t like the messenger, or that the messenger sounds too much like other people you don’t like. Please tell me if I am misreading you.”
On the contrary, I think Conor is a beacon of light amidst the darkness. But you know how that goes. That beacon might be a lighthouse, or it might be a wrecker’s fire, lit to lure me into the shoals. In unfamiliar waters and with no charts, it’s hard to know for sure…
— Tony Comstock · May 7, 03:49 PM · #
Yes, but given that Conor has explicitly disavowed the views in question the fact that some (or even “many”) conservatives think these ways is no reason at all to treat him as offering bad-faith arguments; insisting otherwise is more than a bit like crying “Socialism!” every time a liberal proposes a spending increase – because, you know, some liberals are socialists.
Anyway, I’m bowing out of this one, too.
— John Schwenkler · May 7, 03:52 PM · #
It appears from the outside that most unionized public school systems have contracts that are very, very favorable to labor. And this isn’t a unique or surprising finding — many public sector unions enjoy contracts that would be unusual in most private sector businesses. Some people, and I am one, see this as a problem in itself for predictable public choice reasons — interests voting themselves more money at the expense of the public. This could of course be said about other interests as well.
This ‘public choice’ problem can in principle be distinguished from the ‘problem’ of American education. I’m not exactly sure what this problem is supposed to be, and like many ‘problems’ (health care, e.g.) it turns out to be concatenation of different issues, some of which may not actually be problems on closer inspection. Five problems I would highlight seem to be:
a) a sub set of schools that are essentially failing — where basic order has broken down and many students graduate without basic skills
b) a system set up with the implicit goal of everyone going to college, and without sufficient integration of vocational education
c) a system that doesn’t do enough to cultivate excellence. We don’t track enough, and my sense is that smart kids in many public schools get bored and have their educations retarded as a result.
d) a general resistance to change and experimentation
e) we spend a ton of money, and there doesn’t seem to be great correlation between inputs and outputs (shades of health care)
— Ben A · May 7, 03:57 PM · #
Why would the unions be the best partners in this kind of reform? The only reason they exist is to protect the jobs of their members — all their members. That includes the crappy ones. That especially includes the crappy ones, because good teachers don’t need to worry about getting fired. So what does the union stand to gain by helping the district lessen the union’s ranks? Here’s what the teacher union wants: Keep all of our members and pay us more and eventually the crappy teachers will retire and higher pay will induce more and better people to get into teaching. And hey, that’s not an irrational position…if you run the union. But if you’re a parent with a kid in a failing school I can see why you might be a mite bit tweaked by that stance.
Do you see how this sort of talk would reinforce the atmosphere of mistrust for people sympathetic to reform within the educational system? Why some of us find many reform-minded opinions on teachers unions shrill, simplistic and partisan?
I’m pretty sure that Sonny doesn’t know, actually, what the teachers unions want, exactly. Reducing legitimate concerns about tenure so they are nuance and discretion-free only increases the odds that genuine reform will be tuned out. We need comments which reflect that someone has genuinely confronted the myriad of complex issues that surround education and teacher compensation. We don’t need sloganeering and ax-grinding.
You can, actually, get the unions to support axing bad teachers. Many union members want to be able to do just that, because (believe it or not!) teacher’s union members are not the supervillians they are often made out to be. But every time someone insists on acting like they are, it further marginalize his or her voice in the process. Who would want to negotiate with people who call you lazy, self-serving, greedy or uncommitted?
I mean this thread is instructive: Conor makes a good faith effort to confront the problem, wonders why we can’t meet halfway, and then others jump in with the kind of vitriol that demonstrates why, in fact, we can’t meet halfway. Many in the unions would like to amend tenure. I know several union members who want just that. But they also want to preserve the unions, for a myriad of reasons— the greatest of which being that teaching is a thankless and low paying job that has rational economic value only insofar as teachers can collectively bargain. When you predicate arguments for teacher union reform with arguments for why teachers unions are fundamentally malign, you’re not going to get anywhere with the reforms you want.
So if you really want this reform, you can work to prove to the union that it isn’t a Trojan horse for smashing them, and maybe we could see less wagon-circling and entrenchment from the teachers unions. I hate the defensiveness and all-or-nothing attitudes from many within the unions. But if the opposition starts from a place that makes it clear that it wants to destroy the unions, that kind of defensiveness is natural.
— Freddie · May 7, 04:02 PM · #
How does Freddie have so much time to write these long comments, but no time to read any education scholarship even after it’s linked for him?
— Stuart Buck · May 7, 04:07 PM · #
Look…could we be pragmatic and conservative?
Public education is conservative, like Tony says.
Reform, as vouchers, is anti-conservative.
NCLB is just stupid. It is a mandated program of testing that is doomed to fail, since not “every child in America” can test above average. The bellcurve of IQ conforms to a normal distribution, and no Virginia, IQ is not infinitely plastic under environment. NCLB is therefore a waste of money.
Take the NCLB funding and make more teachers. Create an alternative licensing program where people that worked say 10 years in industry or government and have a trade school or college diploma can be certified as teachers.
Have them teach mathematics and science and english and art, but with an application perspective….it would be like cool trade schools embedded in highschools.
The selection gradient for teachers is raised, since an alternative licensed teacher would be doing this to teach, because in general they would be leaving a higher paying field.
— matoko_chan · May 7, 04:11 PM · #
Actually, Stuart, I’ve read everything you’ve ever linked to for me, as far as I know. And in my day to day academic life, I imagine, I read a lot more education scholarship than you do.
I read things like the fact that what little data we have about the benefits of school vouchers shows little to no improvement when tracking individual students from public to private, and that the students who show the most benefit are the middle-class suburban kids and not the lower-class urban kids who need the benefits the most. I read things like the fact that the presence of unions are actually positively correlated with academic performance, not negatively. I read things like the fact that the worst academic performance in this country is not actually among the unionized inner-city schools but among the largely non-union rural Southern schools. I read. I do indeed.
— Freddie · May 7, 04:17 PM · #
Freddie, my concern is less with individual union members than union leadership. I have no doubt that there are plenty of unionized teachers who want to fire the bad seeds (I even know a few of these people!), but as an entity unions are designed to protect their members. I mean, that’s just what they do. It’s why sports unions automatically appeal suspensions no matter how flagrantly guilty a player is. This is why you get stories like the one Conor linked to from the LA Times, where the union fights for seven years, at great expense, to keep someone collecting a paycheck even though he hasn’t set foot in a classroom during that time and deserved to be fired. If union leadership was more amenable to making commonsense decisions in cases like that, I’d be more amenable to giving them the benefit of the doubt.
Look at DC: In my city we have an education chancellor trying to implement a new system that will allow two things, one that will allow teachers to keep their tenure or start on a separate track with less ironclad job security but higher pay. This program is totally voluntary. You can enter either track. But the union is fighting it tooth and nail. Why? Why is this happening? It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever…unless you realize that the union leadership, as an entity, fears losing power. And I have little patience for an entity more concerned with maintaining its power than educating children.
I have no real desire to “smash” the teacher’s union. I could care less if they want to unionize. But I’m far more concerned with making sure kids aren’t getting hurt by having subpar educators.
— Sonny Bunch · May 7, 04:19 PM · #
Also! It could be a job creation program .
AND! Since we don’t really know how to discriminate “good” teachers, more teachers means more good teachers as a percentage, right?
“Common” school is a revolt against the euro-classist elite education system.
It is deeply american.
So is competition.
hehe, make a competitive union…the alternative licensing teachers union or embedded trade school teachers union. Break up the monopoly.
But teachers unions are not the big problem.
Educational romanticism is the big problem.
>:(
— matoko_chan · May 7, 04:27 PM · #
I really doubt that; reading education scholarship is my job. And if you’ve read so much, why do you never cite or link any scholarly study whatsoever? To the contrary, you say things that betray a complete unfamiliarity with the literature. For example, you say that vouchers benefit middle-class kids the most rather than lower-class urban kids, when the exact opposite is a consistent finding. Consider the following studies:
I’d also point out that your claim makes no sense in the first place: you’ll be hard pressed to find any voucher programs for which middle-class kids are even eligible in the first place (except for special education vouchers, such as in Arizona or Florida). Most voucher programs are specifically targeted at poor urban populations.
Less volubility, more reading.
— Stuart Buck · May 7, 04:27 PM · #
Stuart…none of your cites seem to control for parental involvement which is the hidden variable.
Are you familiar with the Phillipine Toaster Test?
— matoko_chan · May 7, 04:37 PM · #
The lotto study that cw cited controls for parental involvement.
— matoko_chan · May 7, 04:39 PM · #
matoko_chan,
Theorizing that the bell curve explains why kids can’t read at an 8th grade level by the time they graduate high school is like stating physics explains why not everyone can walk two miles. Part of our understanding of IQ is understanding the ability to basically function, like read. Any person with an IQ over 70 has the ability to get to an 8th grade reading level without great difficulty. That covers almost the entire school population.
— Badger · May 7, 04:39 PM · #
<i>I read things like the fact that the worst academic performance in this country is not actually among the unionized inner-city schools but among the largely non-union rural Southern schools.</i>
Can you cite any scholarly studies for that claim?
— Stuart Buck · May 7, 04:43 PM · #
I don’t understand why everyone seems to accept the assertion that the unions are the biggest obstacle to improving public education. The worst educational “reforms” don’t come out of unions, but out of teachers’ colleges, which for nearly a century have propagated foolish theories that, when implemented in schools, have weakened and watered down the education that students receive in public schools.
People also seem to be assuming that school administrators are uniformly good, wise, and fair, when they are just as or more likely to be bad than teachers. Unions protect teachers’ jobs because many school administrators are arbitrary and capricious or, as in Washington, DC, under Chancellor Michelle Rhee, because they choose sides between “good” teachers (the ones Rhee hired, who ally with her) and “bad” teachers (all the others, or anybody who was in the system before she came). Teachers can’t just calmly accept arbitrary and capricious firings because public schools are monopolies. If you get fired from McDonald’s you can go down the block and get a job at Burger King or Wendy’s, but if you get fired from a public school system you have to move out of town (or out of state) to get a job in another public school system.
And in public schools unions provide the public with protection against political interference and the spoils system. Public school teachers have tenure for the same reason that other government bureaucrats have job protection. Politicians want to bust teachers’ unions not because they’re liberal or conservative or want to improve education, but because they’re ambitious to become political bosses, and to use the unfettered hiring and firing of government employees as a way to reward loyalty and punish disloyalty to them, and to build their political machines.
— Gary Imhoff · May 7, 04:47 PM · #
— Badger · May 7, 12:39 PM · #
70 is functional retardation.
I am saying that someone with an IQ of 70 is never going to test “proficient” (== above average) on a NCLB test metric. NCLB is a testing program, that identifies non-performants with an unrealistic standand, that every child in America shall be above average by 2012.
The 8th grade reading level is a test standard that may be affected by many other variables then “bad teachers” and IQ.
Nutrition, parental involvement, and attendance to name a few.
— matoko_chan · May 7, 04:49 PM · #
“Theorizing that the bell curve explains why kids can’t read at an 8th grade level by the time they graduate high school is like stating physics explains why not everyone can walk two miles. Part of our understanding of IQ is understanding the ability to basically function, like read. Any person with an IQ over 70 has the ability to get to an 8th grade reading level without great difficulty. That covers almost the entire school population.”
In addition to spending too much time thinking about how JS expresses himself and why, I have also been trying to figure out how to say what you just said to Ms. Chan, and I have been trying to figure it out for no less than three months. Clearly there’s something in your substrate that is lacking in mine.
— Tony Comstock · May 7, 04:50 PM · #
Can’t link to JSTOR. And that’s my job, essentially, as well.
— Freddie · May 7, 04:53 PM · #
Incidentally, Stuart, you seem to be under the misapprehension that I just want to throw money at schools and educators and that I think that will solve the problem. That’s not the case. I don’t think anything will solve the problem if the underlying social decay of poverty and family breakdown are meaningfully addressed.
— Freddie · May 7, 04:58 PM · #
“Can’t link to JSTOR” is not a good excuse for never citing anything, ever. Give me the citations, and I can find anything.
— Stuart Buck · May 7, 05:04 PM · #
“Theorizing that the bell curve explains why kids can’t read at an 8th grade level by the time they graduate high school is like stating physics explains why not everyone can walk two miles.”
This is still banging in my head.
I’m sure it’s easy enough to find if you want to look, but compare contemporary high school state records in track and field to world records from a generation or two or three ago. Somehow our elite high school athletes have manage an ever upward improvement in their abilities, to the point where the state champions of today would be world champions in years gone by.
Maybe some of this is that through better nutrition and healthcare, there’s more and better raw material. Maybe some of it is equipment (Money, it’s got to be the shoes!) But I suspect that a lot of it is a matter of emphasis and expectation.
The human being that doesn’t have the “substrate” to run three miles in 25 minutes is the exception, not the rule. If you can’t it’s not because you aren’t able, it’s because you don’t put in the time and effort. For some people that amount of effort is almost none, for others it’s more than a little, but for almost no one is it impossibe.
Call me an educational idealist if you must, but I suspect there are vast oceans of human potential that are untapped because we have, as a society, low expectations and misplaced priorities regarding education. And if it takes banning belly shirts to tap even a small portion of that potential, that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
— Tony Comstock · May 7, 05:24 PM · #
Now it sounds like you think Conor is deliberately guiding you to disaster. Or maybe he’s not being deliberate, but is an unwitting shill for those who would lure public education to the shoals, as it were.
Regardless, I know that this sort of dreary speculation on the motives and susceptibilities of those making an argument is easier than actually making a counter-argument, but that does not make it an adequate substitution.
— Blar · May 7, 05:25 PM · #
“Now it sounds like you think Conor is deliberately guiding you to disaster. Or maybe he’s not being deliberate, but is an unwitting shill for those who would lure public education to the shoals, as it were.”
Prompted by AJ’s writings over at his Text Patterns blog, I have been, for about 10 days now, been on a self-imposed program to try and read everything on this blog (and elsewhere) as if it had been written by my best friend, who knows me intimately, and has only my best interests at heart; and I have been endeavoring to respond from a similar point of view.
But even before undertaking this attempt at self-improvement, I have regarded Conor as someone with whom I can parlay; which is to say I take him for a lighthouse.
As to counter argument, I’ve already said I agree with some of Conor’s observations, but in all sincerity I don’t know what Conor is proposing. My ideal is access to free, public, quality primary and secondary education. I believe this is foundational. Like other beliefs (God, representative government) this is hard if not impossible to prove; which means for the time being I am confined to discussing the manner of the discourse rather than the substance, which in turn means my laying bare what obstacles there are to my hearing Conor and taking his words at face value. If you believe this is a lot of hemming and hawing about the size and shape of the table, so be it. I’m sure I present you with no small obstacles to hearing me and taking my words at face value.
I have also mentioned else where that I’m not fundamentally opposed to radicalism. My own children’s education has included a dose of (hopefully undamaging) home-schooling and I anticipate more of the same before they leave my charge. Maybe we just need to hit the friggin reset button. It’s not what I hope for, but it seems prudent to make at least some preparation for the possibility.
— Tony Comstock · May 7, 05:47 PM · #
Stuart, let me explain the Phillipine Toaster Test to you. It is generally featured in any elementary statistics course.
In the 50’s, the Phillipine government wanted to implement a birth control program for the population. So it commissioned a study to find the highest correlate with small family size. The highest correlate was the number of small electrical appliances. So in theory, one could hand out toasters to implement birth control in the Phillipines.
Your vouchers are just toasters.
— matoko_chan · May 7, 06:23 PM · #
And I too reguard Conor as a lighthouse…..but unfortunately his sweep mode has failed and his sealed beam array is focused only the small insignificant reef of bad teachers and bad teacher unions.
— matoko_chan · May 7, 06:31 PM · #
Your vouchers are just toasters.
Why should I care about your unsupported assertions?
— Stuart Buck · May 7, 07:10 PM · #
As a long time adjunct community college instructor, I am not so sanguine that the taxpayers in the state of California are so willing to pony up the dough to pay teachers what they are worth, or that without unions there would be a smidgen of possibility of negotiating any such pay change or environmental improvements. We, as a state, tend to pay for buildings and parking lots.
I have also directed outreach programs, and I can tell you from experience students begin to zone out in the fourth grade and that those populations who have low historic college enrollment and retention rates can be vastly assisted with intensive mentoring, tutoring, and counseling programs that link up with families, community organizations, colleges and universities, their students, administrators, counselors, and faculties.
This would also require some taxpayer dollars; however, there is little in the history of California taxpaying population since the Prop 13 tax revolt, which in its wake has left what was the finest educational system in the United States down in the bottom ten, that persuades me that our society is really willing to pay for quality education that leads to quantifiable improvement.
Currently, the idea is that a teacher must be a saint in order to be professionally competent. It’s not that I don’t think reform would be salutary; it’s just that anyone who’s been around in school systems knows that the issue of reform is almost always political; the baby is always thrown out with the bathwater, and just when one way of doing things is ultimately discounted, it is always brought back to toss the new baby back into the weeds. And in the end, the systemic problems in our schools are a result of our society’s something for nothing attitude—we get what we pay for.
To stigmatize teacher unions when the fault lies in the taxevasionnation sensibilities of our populace provides a decent definition for myopia.
— CitizenE · May 7, 07:18 PM · #
“This would also require some taxpayer dollars; however, there is little in the history of California taxpaying population since the Prop 13 tax revolt, which in its wake has left what was the finest educational system in the United States down in the bottom ten, that persuades me that our society is really willing to pay for quality education that leads to quantifiable improvement.”
I was in the fourth or fifth grade when Prop 13 passed. My parents had bought a house in 1971 and in a few short years the assessment/taxes had gone up four-fold over the price they paid. Quite a windfall for the county, not so good for my folks. 35 years later the house is valued at about 40 times the original purchase price, but they’re still paying taxes based on the Prop 13 re-adjustment, which is a good thing. Neighbors in comparable have property tax bills that are bigger than what my father ever made in a single year’s work.
Similar laws out here on LI have kept my family from being taxed out of our home, which now appraises for about seven times what we paid for it, and if taxed accordingly would constitute about 1/3rd of our household income.
Fortunately we are content with the size of the house we have, because if we wanted to trade up, we’d also have to trade up from the Prop 13-style stabilized assessment on our present, to a free-market assessment on the new home, which translates to a vastly larger tax bill; and for that matter we probably couldn’t afford shift locations or even downsize without moving to another state. (I’ll add that in spite of surging property tax revenues over the last few years, our town has somehow managed to end up in the hole. This is the sort of a thing that could turn a fellow with a fairly apathetic view of taxes into one of those “starve the beast” nutters.)
So yeah, laying it all at the feet of the teachers unions and all those awful teachers we can’t get fired, probably not helpful. Taxing people out of their homes is probably not helpful either. We’ve got the pointing finger, now if we can just find the moon.
— Tony Comstock · May 7, 08:22 PM · #
Stuart,
I read one study you linked to about Milwaukee and I don’t think it said you seemed to imply it said: that pressure from competition via vouchers caused changes for the better in the milwaukee public schools. The increase in test scores was small and one time and the study did not address causation. There are also lots of studies out there that say going to private school via vouchers does not improve outcome, which I believe the author of the Milwaukee study mentioned in his introduction.
When I have time I will look at other studies you linked to.
— cw · May 7, 11:22 PM · #
/sigh
Stuart…. what do vouchers act on?
Do they magically raise the students IQ? Are private schools universally endowed with some sort of superawesome super-teachers?
None of your studies control for parental involvement, which is a candidate, as cw’s lotto example demonstrates.
Until you can tease out the hidden variable, your vouchers are just toasters.
— matoko_chan · May 8, 01:17 AM · #
You are picking the least-positive study — one done for an anti-voucher union think tank — and even that study found that there seemed to be positive competitive effects for the first two years. Check out the many other studies.
Matoko: Do you understand the concept of a randomized study? All of the people in the study were trying to get vouchers for their kids, but only some people were randomly selected to get a voucher. This means that there is no inherent reason to think that the voucher kids were any different as to “parental involvement.”
— Stuart Buck · May 8, 01:36 AM · #
This is the study I read on the page you linked to.
Can Increasing Private School Participation and Monetary Loss in a
Voucher Program Affect Public School Performance? Evidence from
Milwaukee∗
Ra jashri Chakrabarti†
Federal Reserve Bank of New York
— cw · May 8, 02:24 AM · #
All of the people in the study were trying to get vouchers for their kids
Parental involvement, dude, trying for vouchers.
Do you have to be so thick?
— matoko_chan · May 8, 05:09 AM · #
This is interesting.
It corroborates my anecdotal experience that once a “hole” has developed in a students math foundation…. math skillz become pretty intransigent under enviroment affect.
— matoko_chan · May 8, 01:45 PM · #
Matoko — your comment is incoherent. If both the control and treatment groups have equal amounts of parental involvement — as can generally be assumed in a randomized study of this sort — then the study doesn’t have to “control” for parental involvement. Randomization takes care of that.
The point you may be trying to make (however incompetently) is that randomization studies aren’t necessarily generalizable to the broader population.
— Stuart Buck · May 8, 02:04 PM · #
And even that’s not a very good point, because no one’s talking about forcing vouchers on uninvolved parents who don’t want them.
— Stuart Buck · May 8, 02:34 PM · #
The result of the study was that attending the lottery school did not result in a significant difference between the two cohorts of lottery winners and lottery loosers (that did not get a voucher).
So either this is more evidence that vouchers do not work or it is evidence that the principal component is parental involvement, since all parents in the study self-selected for that by trying for vouchers.
— matoko_chan · May 8, 06:49 PM · #
I’m not sure what study you’re describing, but off the top of my head, that looks like the Cullen/Levitt paper.
Check out all of the research in this post, and then come up with an argument that shows at least a familiarity with randomized studies.
— Stuart Buck · May 8, 07:01 PM · #
No thanku.
I am perfectly cognizant of the Law of Large Numbers and randomized studies.
The DC vouchers study showed no improvement in math, slight improvement in english.
The lotto study showed no difference.
I do not reguard BYU as an unimpeachable source of scientific excellence, sowwy.
But lets give you the benefit of a doubt, and say vouchers improve student performance.
My question is….how.
How do vouchers improve student performance?
Is it teachers? Is is the parental SES of the voucher school? Is it emulating high achiever students?
Until you can answer those questions, vouchers are toasters.
— matoko_chan · May 8, 09:18 PM · #
Given that your attitude towards scholarly literature is “no thanku” [are you just trying to be cute, or is your command of English really that poor?], then I have nothing further to say.
— Stuart Buck · May 8, 11:20 PM · #
Stuart….you can’t prove vouchers work without proving WHY they work. That is what experimental design and statistical analysis are for.
Otherwise giving vouchers is just handing out toasters.
— matoko_chan · May 9, 02:26 PM · #
You keep saying that, but that doesn’t make it true. Most people who have thought about the issue at all wouldn’t find it surprising that children are better able to achieve when they are better able to find a school that fits their needs, but in any event, it’s not clear why I owe even that much explanation to an anonymous and grammatically inept internet commenter who scoffs at the very notion of reading scholarly literature. Read the literature first. Otherwise your opinion is worthless.
— Stuart Buck · May 9, 04:52 PM · #
when they are better able to find a school that fits their needs
What are their needs?
— matoko_chan · May 10, 06:45 AM · #
It’s up to individual kids and their parents. Ask them. Think about curriculum, pacing, teaching style, etc., just to mention a few topics that would have already occurred to anyone who knows anything about education.
— Stuart Buck · May 10, 06:24 PM · #
It’s up to individual kids and their parents. Ask them. Think about curriculum, pacing, teaching style, etc., just to mention a few topics that would have already occurred to anyone who knows anything about education.
— Stuart Buck · May 10, 02:24 PM · #
I don’t actually.
Know anything about education.
I only know about math and statistics and experimental design and data analysis and sampling error and correlation coefficients.
So..those parents know all about education? Why don’t they homeschool then?
Why even have schools if the parents know better than the schoolboards?
You are an idiot.
lol
— matoko_chan · May 10, 08:30 PM · #
Your claim to knowledge isn’t convincing, given that you began this exchange with the nonsensical assertion that the problem with randomized voucher studies is that they don’t “control” for parental involvement. And now you are unable to grasp the simplest of points, i.e., that parents might have some insight into whether their child seems to do better in School A than School B, and that this element of choice might explain why students do better with vouchers.
— Stuart Buck · May 11, 02:45 AM · #
matoko says: <em>You can’t prove vouchers work without proving WHY they work. That is what experimental design and statistical analysis are for.</em>
Wow…this is pretty much exactly backwards. The whole point of randomized experiments is that they allow us to tell whether something “works” without having to know why it works. For example, there lots of drugs and treatments for which medical science has no explanation of why they work, only that they have been validated in trials.
(Why does matoko keep claiming expertise that he clearly doesn’t have?)
— ed · May 11, 08:55 AM · #