August 14, 2007
Richard Cohen, whom I regarded a good columnist when we lived in Washington, D.C., had made an odd turn in the past decade or so. Where normally he’d stand up for public institutions and the people who run them, he just sounds cranky lately. In short, he’s turned into a person who likes Bush Republicans. Oh, my, it erupted in his recent column which is just grousing about how much education costs in the District of Columbia, with an ambiguous, implicit claim that maybe there’s too much money going into education there.
(Well, maybe too much for the results gotten compared with a few suburban districts; not enough to boost performance on the tests.)
Jason Rosenhouse at Evolutionblog Fisks the column, Fisks Cohen, and generally supports teachers — it’s worth a read.
It’s worth a read especially if you’re one of those who, like Richard Cohen, think we should suppress the pay for teachers until they improve, ignoring all the lessons you might ever have learned about getting what you pay for, and about the economics of hiring the best, the brightest, or just the heroes necessary to make a change. Here’s part of Rosenhouse’s commentary:
But that is not the main subject of this post. Instead it’s that gratuitous slap at the unions that struck me. Cohen, like a trained seal, has learned that mindlessly bashing teacher’s unions will never get you into trouble. That is why he feels no need to provide any specifics about what, exactly, the unions are doing wrong. Instead, when it comes time to reveal those subtleties of the education problem about which Democrats need to be instructed, Cohen only produces this:
Only one candidate, Barack Obama, suggested that maybe money was not all that was lacking when it comes to educating America’s poor and minority children. Parents had a role to play, too. “It is absolutely critical for us to recognize that there are going to be responsibilities on the part of African American and other groups to take personal responsibility to rise up out of the problems we face,” he said. What? It’s not just a question of funding?
Parents! Of course! How could those money grubbing teacher’s unions and their slavish Democratic puppets have overlooked such a thing? All this focus on making sure schools have the funds to heat their buildings in the winter and patch the roof when it leaks, this crazy idea that a school using twenty year old textbooks needs money if they are to procure new ones or that science labs are not exactly inexpensive, and they simply overlooked that parents have a role to play in their children’s education. One can only hope the Democrat’s pay attention to someone as perceptive as Cohen.
::heavy sigh::
The U.S. is not alone. Australia has some teacher pay and facility issues, too, according to Matt’s Notepad. Another interesting read.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
June 19, 2007
That headline was pre-Murdoch, wasn’t it?
It fits this situation, too. Just read. I’m too steamed to comment.
At TexasEd .
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Posted by Ed Darrell
June 7, 2007
A reader named Sam left this comment, in response to my post on teachers being overworked and underpaid, and I elevate it because it demonstrates, once again, how teachers get dumped on in ways that other professions don’t; Sam makes a good point:
It would be interesting to take into effect that teaching is one of the few jobs where people expend large quantities of their own money to do their job. I was a principal in a large urban district before I left education for a private sector consulting job. Part of the reason I left was the paper rationing that occurred during my last two years on the job. Our school district limited our teachers to three sheets of paper per student per week in an attempt to cut costs. Even the best, most engaging hands-on learning takes more than three sheets per week. Add in the lunch menus, report cards, and parent letters that need to go home and it would guarantee that our paper supply usually ran dry by March 1 or so and my teachers ending up buying their own paper.
Could you imagine the uproar that would occur in the mortgage department of a bank if suddenly employees were required to buy their own copy paper? Why is that acceptable for our teachers?
The U.S. Internal Revenue Service even has a specific standard deduction for teachers to use to cover the materials they take to the classroom, that would be supplied by other employers, that should be supplied by the schools. Isn’t it odd that we make provisions in the tax code to try to offset this error, rather than try to fix it?
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Posted by Ed Darrell
May 30, 2007
Commenter Bernarda sent a link to a Washington Post story by Robert Kaiser about Finland, a nation who redesigned its education system with rather dramatic, beneficial results. Among other things, the Finns treat teachers as valuable members of society, with high pay, great support, and heavy training.
Finland is a leading example of the northern European view that a successful, competitive society should provide basic social services to all its citizens at affordable prices or at no cost at all. This isn’t controversial in Finland; it is taken for granted. For a patriotic American like me, the Finns present a difficult challenge: If we Americans are so rich and so smart, why can’t we treat our citizens as well as the Finns do?
Why not? Why can’t we treat our citizens as well as the Finns? Their system boosts their economy and leads to great social progress — which part of that do we not want?
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Posted by Ed Darrell
May 26, 2007
Long-time friend John Florez erupts at the Deseret News in Salt Lake City from time to time. Back on April 2, when the Utah legislature was still wrestling with vouchers, a budget surplus and a vastly underfunded education system, Florez had some gentle advice to policymakers everywhere: “Policy makers must heed teachers’ views.”
Politicians ought to listen to what the teachers think is needed to improve education. For starters, they want smaller class sizes and an environment that gives them the opportunity to do the most important thing: challenge and motivate students to learn. One wrote that after 30 years of teaching he has “…discouraged … nieces and nephews from taking up the career. What a shame when there is so much possible with all these young minds.” Another wrote that her school had a student teacher quit halfway through, frustrated because the students wouldn’t work; phoning parents resulted in getting an earful, and the principal made little effort to back her up.
The following year, the school had an opening so they phoned her “…to see if she wouldn’t try again at our school.” The reply: “Thank you, if I ever came back it would be there, but never. I have a job now with great opportunities to grow and a great working environment.”
But, John — would better working conditions really help pass the standardized tests?
Some principals and administrators of which I am aware haven’t found the sign yet, but would put it up if they had it:
The daily floggings of staff will continue until morale improves!
They wouldn’t mean it as the joke it was originally intended; or even if they did, the staff would know differently.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
April 15, 2007
Where do Ed Brayton and P. Z. Myers find the time to blog so much?
Here are some things that deserve consideration, that I’ve not had time to consider.
Dallas is only #2 on the national allergy list: #1 is Tulsa. This is a ranking one wishes to lose.
The Texas Senate passed a bill to change the current state-mandated test for high school students. Tests are not a panacea, and the current structure seems to be doing more damage than good, in dropout rates, and especially in learning. What will take the place of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS)? No one knows, yet. Much work to do — but there is widespread understanding that TAKS is not doing much of what was hoped.
Incentive pay for teachers: Despite a cantakerous and troubled roll-out in Houston’s schools, and despite widespread discontent with the execution of incentive pay programs that appear to miss their targets of rewarding good teachers who teach their students will, Texas has identified 1,132 schools in the state that are eligible for the next phase of the $100 million teacher incentive program. Some administrators think that, no matter how a program misfires, they can’t change it once they’ve started it. ‘Stay the course, no matter the damage,’ seems to be the battle cry. (And you wondered where Bush got the idea?)
Saving historic trains: History and train advocates saved the Texas State Railroad earlier this year; now they want $12 million to upgrade the engines, cars and tracks, to make the thing a more valuable tourist attraction and history classroom. Texas has spent a decade abusing and underfunding its once-outstanding state park system. Citizens are fighting back.
Maybe you know more?
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Posted by Ed Darrell
March 10, 2007
That the program was not well thought out, untimely, and poorly understood, almost guaranteed that the Houston Independent School District’s ballyhooed incentive pay plan would get jeers.
But it gets worse. The District programmed the formula incorrectly. It has asked about a hundred teachers to return as much as $2,790, each. Could you make this stuff up?
Motivation? That’s not a game many educational institutions seem to know much about.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
March 7, 2007
A business group advising Texas Gov. Rick Perry released their report, Excellence in the Classroom, earlier this month, in time to affect legislation in the hopper in Austin at the Texas Lege. The report gets attention simply because Sandy Kress is a part of the reporting team — Kress is a former chair of the Dallas Independent School District Board, and was advisor to President George W. Bush during the push for the No Child Left Behind Act.
On one hand, the report advocates modest spending boosts for “good” teachers. On the other hand, it’s ambiguous in its call for tougher classroom standards, and most of the recommendations that have any teeth will bite teachers in the classroom.
Teacher groups coolly greeted the report, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:
The ideas in “Excellence in the Classroom” generally got a thumbs-down from area educators.
“The problem is, business councils expect kids to be just like parts,” said Larry Shaw, executive director of the United Educators Association of Texas. “If I’m a farmer and I get a crop I don’t like, I reject it. Nobody lets us reject the kids that we get. We take them where they are, and we do the best that we can with them.”
Karen Moxley is a teacher at Cross Timbers Middle School in Grapevine and president of the local chapter of the Texas State Teachers Association. She is critical of the report.
“Children and lives aren’t products. They’re really lovely, wonderful, messy things that have their peaks and valleys,” Moxley said. “We can’t control that. It’s grossly unfair to say that teachers are the only solution.”
A key quote from the report, used by Kress in his press advance, cites Erik Hanushek’s claim that students lagging behind can catch up with just five years with an effective teacher. The problem is, of course, that effective teachers tend to quit after five years, because the rest of the system is so fouled up.
More later.
Tip of the old scrub brush to TexasEd, “Do As I Say – It’s Not About the Money.”
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Posted by Ed Darrell
February 27, 2007
Gifted with a surplus of funds due to a good economy, the Utah legislature hiked education spending in almost every category, providing pay increases for teachers, more teachers, more schools, more books, more computers — adding more than $450 million, raising the total state education check to $2.6 billion for elementary and secondary schools.
Much of the increases will be consumed by rising enrollments.
Through much of the 20th century Utah led the nation in educational attainment, but fell in state rankings as population growth accelerated especially through the 1980s and 1990s. The Salt Lake Tribune’s story sardonically noted:
The budget package increases per-pupil spending by more than 8 percent. But because other states may also boost school funds this year, fiscal analysts can’t yet say whether the new money will move Utah out of last place in the nation in money spent per student.
Classroom size reduction is excluded from the increases, because the legislature thinks earlier appropriations for that purpose were misused, according to the Associated Press story in the Casper (Wyoming) Star-Tribune:
The extra $450 million will have little effect on reducing classroom size, however, because even as Utah hires more teachers, every year brings more students.
Lawmakers said they were withholding money for reducing classroom sizes until legislative auditors can investigate reports that districts misappropriated some of the $800 million dedicated for that purpose since 1992.
Every teacher and librarian should get a $2,500 pay raise and a $1,000, one-time “thank-you” bonus. Starting pay for teachers in Utah averages barely over $26,000 now.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by Ed Darrell
February 8, 2007
Amazing.
Via Education and Technology, I hear of a study that says teachers may not be undercompensated, with a supporting opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, “$34.06 an hour: That’s how much the average public school teacher makes. Is that ‘underpaid?'”. The study comes from the Manhattan Institute, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) figures, by Jay P. Green and Marcus A. Winters.
My escaped-sewage detector started clanging. Check out the lengthy explanation of methodology in the actual report. Such apologies up front should be a warning.
Of course, this raises issues about all the methodologies of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by Ed Darrell
January 26, 2007
Advocates of using pay to improve teacher performance grow excited over the addition of federal money to supplement local district pay incentives. But maybe they shouldn’t.
Contrary to other provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), there is little research to demonstrate that paying a few teachers more will improve student performance. Cheapskates looking for quick solutions advocate pay incentives, though, and some districts have plunged headlong.
Houston is reaping the whirlwind at the moment. Incentive pay went out earlier this week, and disparities showed up immediately.
The Houston Chronicle’s columnist Rick Casey very briefly explains in today’s edition:
It would be appropriate, in a way, for Houston teachers who are upset that they didn’t get bonuses to protest by calling in sick.
Or by stamping their feet and crying.
Or by holding their breath until they turn blue.
It would be appropriate, in a way, because it would be an immature response to an immature accountability system.
I’m not being snide about HISD’s bonus formula, despite some of the anomalies that have been identified, including no bonus for a teacher whose entire class passed the TAKS test nor for a teacher who had been recognized as bilingual teacher of the year.
There are several articles available on the payout, the way the plan is structured, and the problems. I understand the Houston Chronicle also has a web site featuring details of the payouts, including teachers by name, and amounts paid.
This is a great de-motivator. Who thought this through? No one.
Other sources:
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Posted by Ed Darrell
December 16, 2006
I’m a bit surprised. Chester Finn, president of the Fordham Foundation, recommends we read and take seriously the recommendations of the New Commission on Skills of the American Workforce. I had thought he’d be a lot more skeptical a lot earlier.
Which means a couple of things: One, we ought to read and take seriously the report, as Finn urges; two, Finn continues to think originally about problems of education, and can’t be pigeon-holed into positions that he personally finds difficult to defend on the evidence, or into positions that others “think” he ought to have.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
December 15, 2006
If we continue to get education wrong, a new report argues, America’s decline will follow. So, the report urges radical changes in U.S. education.
The report of the New Commission on Skills of the American Workforce departs from other recent reports in a number of interesting ways, including advocating a national system of teachers, with higher pay. It urges abandoning requirements for four years of high school, moving instead to a more European model where students may leave after 10 years for junior college. It is titled Tough Choices or Tough Times, published by Jossey-Bass for $19.95.
An earlier commission in 1990 issued a report titled High Skills or Low Wages. The new report continues in that vein, warning that international competition and automation threaten all low skill jobs in the U.S.
This commission was assembled with funding from the Gates Foundation and other sources.
Some details are available in The New York Times. A longer, much different view in in the Chicago Tribune. From the Tribune’s summary of how testing would allow 10th graders to get out of high school early:
How the testing would work
PASS
In 10th grade, students would take a rigorous test.
With a passing grade, the student and parents would choose between two options:
OPTION 1: Stay in high school for junior and senior years to prepare for elite 4-year university or to enter state university with college credit.
OPTION 2: Enroll at community college with possibility of moving on to 4-year university.
FAIL
If the student fails, he or she would stay in high school to take remedial courses and retake test until he/she passes it.
The executive summary is available here in 28 pages. The report is the cover story for the December 18 edition of Time magazine. You’ll probably see it in your local newspaper today.
More to come, surely.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
December 9, 2006
It’s just good economics to think that raising the pay of teachers will improve the overall ability of the teaching corps, knowing that higher pay attracts higher-qualified workers in other situations.
Now comes a study from Australia making the same point. Two researchers at the Australian National University’s Center for Economic Policy Research looked at changes in the quality of education over time, and concluded one change for the worse was pay for teachers and a resulting decline in quality of teachers. Andrew Leigh and Chris Ryan write:
For an individual with the potential to earn a wage at the 90th percentile of the distribution, a non-teaching occupation looked much more attractive in the 2000s than it did in the 1980s. We believe that both the fall in average teacher pay, and the rise in pay differentials in non-teaching occupations are responsible for the decline in the academic aptitude of new teachers over the past two decades.
Is that a surprise? U.S. Education Sec. Bill Bennett used to tout his “$50,000 solution” to improve schools — get a good principal. That action generally would improve the support for teachers and improve things across the school. Today, the amounts are higher, and the need is greater after more than three decades of economic starvation of public schools.
Raising teacher pay is a good market solution to improve the achievement of students.
Tip of the old scrub brush to Andrew Leigh’s blog.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
