Relevant article from the San Jose Merc News:
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/opinion/4799468.htm
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Stanford's Eddie Lazear calls for California to pay its teachers more money. He strongly believes in the economist's belief that some sort of variation-and-selection emulation-of-successful and shrinkage-of-unsuccessful institutions is an important and powerful social tool to raise quality of education. But he also focuses on the fact that the best and quickest way to make teaching a more attractive profession is to pay teachers more.
EDUCATION IN CALIFORNIAEDUCATION IN CALIFORNIA / Teachers for the new century: ...The reduction in class size mandated for early school grades, for example, resulted in an increased demand for teachers without a corresponding increase in salaries. As a result, teachers had to be drawn from an inferior pool. The increased demand for teachers in the more desirable suburban schools prompted the flight of quality teachers from disadvantaged districts. They were replaced by newer, less qualified teachers, which widened the school-quality gap. There are two reasons for concern. First, schools are failing badly for some subgroups of the population. Second, education has been demonstrated conclusively to be very important both for a country's economic growth and for raising the wages of individual citizens. Each year of schooling is associated with about a 10 percent increase in subsequent annual earnings.
In most industries, firms that perform badly are replaced by other firms. However, most education is provided publicly and is protected from the market. This suggests that more competition is needed, with accountability as the guiding principle. Accountability happens automatically in a market context because if a producer does not provide quality goods, the market holds him accountable by eliminating profits.... The reality is that the public school system will be with us for years to come, and it is important to make that system stronger. Allowing more choice, so that students could move from failing schools to more successful ones, would be helpful. The money could follow the students, allowing failing schools to fail completely and to be replaced by more successful administrators and teachers, who would take over the same physical classrooms.
To improve our schools in the 21st century, it is first necessary to attract more high-quality teachers. This can only be done by improving their compensation...
URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/12/23/ED158382.DTL
How can we improve education in the United States so that the new century will not end as the last did, with the United States falling consistently behind other countries in student performance?
The answer, in a nutshell, centers on teachers. Without improving the average quality of our teachers, there is little hope of improving the system.
There are clearly some very able teachers in the U.S. educational system. A number of studies have shown that they have large positive effects on students.
But research also shows that teacher quality has declined over time.
Part of this decline, ironically, reflects reduced discrimination against women. Fifty years ago, talented, educated women had few options other than teaching, and the schools were filled with highly qualified and able teachers. Today, college-educated women have moved into other occupations, and the supply of high-quality talent available to the teaching profession has declined.
A recent study by Caroline Hoxby at Harvard University found that among public school teachers, the average SAT scores upon entering college fell in the 35th percentile in verbal and the 44th percentile in quantitative skills. This means that the people who are educating our next generation come on average from the lower half of the college achievement spectrum.
This is no surprise. Teachers are not paid very well, and many talented potential teachers have other options. National data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau (the Current Population Survey, March 2002) reveal that teachers work about 6.5 percent fewer hours per year than typical college graduates but earn salaries that are 36 percent less than the average for college graduates.
Why are teachers so important? Since most education in this country takes place in classrooms where there are many children, disruption by one child imposes penalties on other children in the class. The evidence suggests that child behavior is very sensitive to teacher quality. Data from Texas provide the most authoritative evidence that good teachers improve the quality of the classroom experience and raise performance scores.
The biggest obstacle here is that teacher quality is not closely related to any characteristic on which salaries are based -- for example, work experience or academic degrees held by the teacher.
The solution is to have a large pool of applicants, a flexible turnover policy based on teacher performance and higher teacher salaries to attract the pool and compensate for a reduction in job security.
A number of other policies have been suggested, and some implemented, that actually adversely affect teacher quality.
The reduction in class size mandated for early school grades, for example, resulted in an increased demand for teachers without a corresponding increase in salaries. As a result, teachers had to be drawn from an inferior pool. The increased demand for teachers in the more desirable suburban schools prompted the flight of quality teachers from disadvantaged districts. They were replaced by newer, less qualified teachers, which widened the school-quality gap.
There are two reasons for concern. First, schools are failing badly for some subgroups of the population. Second, education has been demonstrated conclusively to be very important both for a country's economic growth and for raising the wages of individual citizens. Each year of schooling is associated with about a 10 percent increase in subsequent annual earnings.
In most industries, firms that perform badly are replaced by other firms. However, most education is provided publicly and is protected from the market. This suggests that more competition is needed, with accountability as the guiding principle. Accountability happens automatically in a market context because if a producer does not provide quality goods, the market holds him accountable by eliminating profits.
More competition is needed in the educational arena. Despite the lack of a profit motive, there is some hope. Although vouchers are not widespread, movement toward vouchers and pressures from private schools have forced states to look carefully at charter schools and other alternatives.
But the reality is that the public school system will be with us for years to come, and it is important to make that system stronger. Allowing more choice, so that students could move from failing schools to more successful ones, would be helpful. The money could follow the students, allowing failing schools to fail completely and to be replaced by more successful administrators and teachers, who would take over the same physical classrooms.
To improve our schools in the 21st century, it is first necessary to attract more high-quality teachers. This can only be done by improving their compensation and by introducing a kind of marketplace accountability into the system. At the same time, competition should be allowed to prevail so that the weak aspects of the educational establishment can be eliminated, enabling the best part -- talented, well-prepared teachers -- to flourish.
Edward P. Lazear is Morris Arnold Cox senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and Jack Steele Parker professor of human resources management and economics at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He is editor of "Education in the 21st Century" (Hoover Institution Press, 2002).
Posted by DeLong at December 24, 2002 01:18 PM
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Here in Oregon a lot of people are irate that Oregon public school teachers are paid better than teachers in other states, and that our per-student cost is higher. These people seldom mention that results here are better too -- in Portland middle class professionals still often send their kids to public schools. (My son's teachers were excellent, and he and his classmates have been successful in proportion to their efforts -- the school did its job.)
My ex-home-state of Minnesota, I've been told, allows for free choice of schools within the public school system. This allows choice without weakening the public schools as such. It also might destroy de facto segregation (including class segrgation) in some places. Conservatives don't seem to push this idea much!
There's always room for improvement, and there are plenty of bad school systems, but the anti-public-school crowd includes some unsavory characters with hidden agendas, including apolitical people who just don't want to pay taxes, people who want the public schools to fail so that they can get vouchers, (some) conservative Christians who are not sure that education is a good thing at all, and ideological anti-government freemarketers who don't thibk that education (after 100-plus-years) should be a public responsibility.
I did a quick look through the readily-available World Almanac, and found that eight of the ten states paying least for their schools had relatively bad educational systems, and eight of the ten paying most had relatively good ones. (Cheap successes: Utah and North Dakota; expensive failures: Delaware and D.C. -- a lot of unique factors involved in these cases.)
Oregon schools are unionized with an aggressive union -- another conservative bugbear. The union is a strong advocate for schools and, to a degree, for teachers vs. administration.
Posted by: zizka on December 24, 2002 03:34 PMHas a monopolist's value-for-price ever risen after the imposition of a price increase?
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 24, 2002 06:13 PMIf you want to attract better teachers with more money, you'd better install pay-for-performance first so the *better* teachers get more money, or at least the *new* teachers get more money.
There's ample published research showing that in the typical unionized urban school district -- with lockstep pay promotion, so the worst teachers get the same pay raises as the best -- pay raises do *not* increase teacher quality.[1]
To the contrary, when all the teachers get the same raise -- and the union usually insists on that -- the bulk of raises goes to the older teachers, who don't become better teachers for it, but who do reduce their turnover since they can't get as much money elsewhere.
If there are quality problems with the older teachers to begin with -- and since you are raising pay to increase quality, presumably there are -- then you find the less able teachers decide to stay around longer, reducing the ability to hire young new better ones. Say: "union rent seeking".
At the same time, the unionized urban public schools have a bad, well-documented problem with having their best-qualified teachers quit first and worst-qualified hang on, due to the "worst the get raises as fast as the best" rule. Hey, if you were they best person in an organization but saw you would never get ahead any faster than the very worst, how long would you hang around? That's not an amount-of-pay problem.
So follow the extreme common sense advice of first adopting merit pay, like the rest of the world uses, or don't expect to buy much in the way of higher quality with your taxpayers' money.
[1]E.g.: "Can Public Schools Buy Better-Qualified Teachers?" By David Figlio, U of Flordia, in Industrial and Labor Relations Review, July 2002.
"This analysis ... uses panel data on new teachers in 188 public school districts ... For nonunion school districts, the author finds a positive, statistically significant relationship between a given district’s teacher salaries and that district’s probability of hiring well-qualified teachers. Several tests indicate that this relationship is not found in unionized school districts."
Well, as I said, the Portland school district is unionized, it may be the best urban school district in the country, and I was quite impressed with my son's teachers.
You aren't necessarily increasing teacher pay because the teachers in the system are bad and you want to replace them. You mnight be doing it to keep good teachers in the system. During my brief time in the school system, I found that many young teachers thought of it as a steppingstone to better work.
However, if an attack on unions and on the public schools is what you want to give, you're certainly going to give it.
Posted by: zizka on December 24, 2002 09:25 PMI think a lot of educated, intelligent
non-teaching professionals who'd make
excellent teachers are scared off by
the process of becoming one. It looks
like a bureaucratic nightmare of requirements
and qualifications and training and student
teaching etc etc etc.
It just seems that if someone like,
say, Robert Rubin decided to become
a high school math teacher, there should
be a path that takes his background into
account, rather than requiring him to
follow the same path as a recent high
school graduate.
There may be some places where Rubin
could start work tomorrow, but the
state and local education department
websites I've looked at didn't give
me that impression.
How easy is it to measure teacher performance? Are any performance measures in use statistically sound (to the extent that they're qualitative)?
Best,
Posted by: Stephen J Fromm on December 25, 2002 12:10 AMWhoops, that's "quantitative".
Relevant article from the San Jose Merc News:
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/opinion/4799468.htm
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I cringe every time someone begins a discussion concerning public education. There simply is no such thing as a monolithic one size fits all solution when dealing with the myriad needs and challenges of the many school districts throughout the United States. My buddy, for instance, teaches in a school district in the Houston metropolitan area that worries constantly about student law suits. Some of these legal challenges border on the the ridiculous. So much so, the comedy writers of Saturday Night Live would find a lot of usable material. One parent sued because their child who could barely handle grade school work was not chosen as a member of the high school honors program! However, many other American school districts have no idea what it’s like to be sued.
Brad DeLong currently wishes to emphasize the financial compensation of teachers. My previously mentioned friend would certainly not disagree with this goal. Ultimately, though, De Long will have to confront the enormous damage caused by the Democrat Party’s whoring after the support of the teacher’s unions. Little can be accomplished until the Democrats look into the mirror and admit: “We have met the enemy and he is us”
Posted by: David Thomson on December 25, 2002 12:37 PMMy wife is a middle school teacher in a public school system and I definitely think she deserves higher pay; seriously, based on the education required, the amount of work involved and all aspects of the work environment in which she is immersed.
However, I don't think paying teachers more will have much effect on school (student) performance ratings.
The problem, based on my observations, is not so much with low pay attracting low quality teachers and resulting in poor learning by students, but with the students and their families - in fact to say otherwise is to place the blame squarely and unfairly on the teachers. Most teachers are well educated and idealistic in their desire to educate youths when they begin their carreers. It is not the money that matters so much for most.
There are many school districts in the country where, for a variety of reasons, the residents are simply not dedicated to educational achievement.
They may go so far as to say they want better educated children, but they do not translate such talk into action by taking the necessary steps to ensure that their children maximize the available opportunities.
So paying teachers more won't change the equation.
You can lead a horse to water, but........
Probably any correlation between higher pay and better learning by students is actually due to the fact that higher pay is associated with a greater tax base in a district which, in turn, is associated with a higher family income level, which is ultimately associated with a greater emphasis on education in the home (think Tiebout model).
I am a firm believer that not all children are capable of successfully completing a college prep. curriculum. Therefore, after say middle school - perhaps sooner - those not achieving academically should be steered into trade schools. After all, many trades offer higher pay than that which is available to graduates of college programs, particularly the liberal arts.
Such action would reduce class size and limit existing seats to those interested in putting forth the effort to learn and capable of comprehending the course material.
The problem with the public school system is not the quality of the teachers, but the fact that the schools function more as baby sitting programs than institutions of learning. The trouble makers, the disinterested and the slower students detract from the potential learning experience of the dedicated and more gifted students.
Vouchers will worsen the performance ratings of some schools because of adverse selection problems. The families/students most dedicated to academic achievement will relocate in the best schools leaving the worst performing schools with only the worst students, thus further lowering standardized test performance ( though vouchers would be good for the individuals who relocate). The law says that all school age children must be educated so what can the schools burdened with lowest levels of student interest do? How can they react to the supposed "incentive" to perform better?
".....allowing failing schools to fail completely...."
That's insane! You still have the same bunch of kids.
What about action through the PTA, by voting out elected administrators that do not listen to parental demands for better education?
We're dealing with a sociological problem here that does not readily lend itself to an economics type solution.
Posted by: E. Avedisian on December 25, 2002 10:34 PMP.S. I suggest that if anyone doubts the paradigm that places blame for poor school performance on the students and their families, they should spend some time observing a few public schools.
Pick a top rated school, a moderate performer and a low performer. Observe the student bodies of each for a few days; their dress, demeanor, speach patterns, and those of the parents, if possible. This should be enough, but if possible, sit in on a few classes at each school. Ask the students about their aspirations, their feelings about education, what their parents do for a living.
Anyhow, there is plenty of objective research out there suggesting that the paradigm is correct.
Posted by: E. Avedisian on December 25, 2002 10:49 PM>>The solution is to have a large pool of applicants, a flexible turnover policy based on teacher performance and higher teacher salaries to attract the pool and compensate for a reduction in job security. <<
hrmmmmm ... so what poor schools need is a higher turnover of teachers, and the way that you can spot the really good school districts is that most of the teachers have been in the community for less than two or three years ...
How much time has this guy spent thinking about education? This is "blackboard economics" of the worst kind; Ronald Coase would have had a fit.
Jim and Zizka; it's not really surprising that strong unions characterise both the best and worst school districts; strong unions are usually found in the best and worst of everything. Workers with good solidarity, job security and self-respect are most likely to take pride in a job well-done -- otoh, there's few things quite as rotten as a rotten union.
Posted by: dsquared on December 26, 2002 03:14 AMFurthermore, I'd add that the assumption that teachers could be compensated for lack of job security by a straightforward bump-up in performance related pay (with performance assessed how?) along some simply defined risk-reward utility curve, is not so much aggressive as downright truculent.
Posted by: DD on December 26, 2002 03:19 AMFromm asks "How easy is it to measure teacher performance? Are any performance measures in use statistically sound (to the extent that they're qualitative)?"
Google for William Sanders, Tennessee, and and statistical assessment.
THe gimmick is pre-testing, and scoring on
advancement. If a sixth grade teacher gets a
bunch of kids working on a third grade level
and advances them, during the school year, to
a fifth grade level, the fact that these kids
"fail" a sixth grade test should not and does
not mean the teacher failed. On the contrary,
such an advance is rated more highly than that
of a similar sixth grade teacher who advances
kids only from fifth grade levels to the expected
sixth.
This turns out to be fairly standard statistics. The problem of deciding what skills and data are associated with what grade levels is less standard.
Posted by: on December 26, 2002 03:56 AMThe screed on parental importance is dead-on. The best predictors of academic success are an intact two parent household and a switched off television.
The unending demand for higher teacher pay is simply the monopolists' perpetual chant of "more" cloaked in the "it's for the children" rhetoric.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 26, 2002 05:18 AM"The trouble makers, the disinterested and the slower students detract from the potential learning experience of the dedicated and more gifted students."
This is mostly the fault of the Liberals who have filed numerous lawsuits to make it nearly impossible for many school districts to impose discipline. My buddy has literally been involved in at least one situation where a Liberal psychiatrist warned the school not to discipline the student who freely used vulgar language. Please note what I said earlier about the Saturday Night Live comedy writers finding a lot of material in our schools. Many times I’ve been almost in tears from laughing so hard after hearing about similar absurd outrages.
The US Supreme Court did tremendous damage by increasing the opportunities for students to sue the schools. Sometimes these rulings look good in the abstract, but in the real world they cause enormous harm. I know of one principal who claimed that a full one third of his time was devoted solely to lawsuits! In this particular school district attorneys run ads in the local newspapers encouraging parents to sue. Oh by the way, isn’t the Democrat Party also the fiefdom of the trial lawyers?
Are the Democrats responsible for the bubonic plague? Should they be blamed for every evil on the planet? No, that would be unfair. The Democrats, however, are unintentionally the true enemies of public education.
Posted by: David Thomson on December 26, 2002 05:19 AMThe pay differential between teachers and other professions has grown enormously. That should be redressed, but in exchange for substantial increases, teachers should work 9-5, with the 3-5 period for tutoring and extracurricular activities.
There should be mandatory 3 year old education --the only way to attempt to compensate for the parental deficiencies noted by other posters. Well-to-do pre-school parents move heaven & earth & stock ratings to get very well prepared kids in. Kids who are not getting what they are at home need it especially. H.S. is too late (I know -- I taught it for 20 years.)
Finally, could one problem with education since the '60s be that women have left, and not chosen teaching because of other opportunities? opportunity to
Posted by: Claudius on December 26, 2002 06:25 AMThere should be mandatory 3 year old education...
You are willing to finance this out of your pocket?
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 26, 2002 06:46 AMMy pocket and, just to name a few,
- offshore corps. that should pay taxes
- people in states that disproportionately receive Fed. dollars, as opposed to mine (NY)
- a renewed instead of repealed estate tax
- numerous undeserved subsidies
Plus - long term, I believe that investment in 3 year old education will result in productivity gains that would lower future taxes and have other benefits, both financial and otherwise.
Finally, by your logic, why should you or I finance any public education?
Posted by: Claudius on December 26, 2002 06:55 AMSomeone who self-identifies as a former teacher calling for the hiring of...thousands of teachers...is not exactly making an altruistic suggestion.
But only the self-interest of others is deemed worthy of scorn.
As for NY's net annual export of billions to DC, this pattern continued when NY's Daniel Moynihan chaired the Senate finance committee, under Bill Clinton's presidency, and continues today with Schumer and and Mrs. Clinton in the Senate. To this day I wonder why both Empire State senators voted for the absurd Christmas Tree of a farm bill.
In other words, using federal tax policy to successfully finance something actually important seems like a low probability event, even when the party that views federal social-policy action as beneficial holds the reins.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 26, 2002 07:07 AMAh -- blame Clinton again. But didn't the GOP control Congress from 1994-2001? And if Clinton, or Moynihan abetted net outflow from NY, they should have done more to change it (if they could); and Schumer and H.C. should not have voted for the farm bill. So what?
And I am a former teacher. I left after 20 years (at 40) in large part because of financial factors. Isn't that an argument for increasing teacher pay? (Assuming my staying would have been a gain for education -- I guess you'd have to ask my former students).
Posted by: Claudius on December 26, 2002 07:39 AMSo what?
Real world proof of the left's repeated failure to actually accomplish its stated goals, even when it is in power, is always treated as a non sequitor.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 26, 2002 08:01 AMThere are all sorts of examples of wonderful schools, examples that cut through class and English language status, ethnicity and regionality.
The point is that there is every reason to pay teachers more if we really do value what education is all about. Then, we need to remember that we are continuing a growing 2 century experiment in truly mass educational opportunity. We are trying to offer fine educational opportunities to anty of our children and adults from the most disparate backgrounds. I wish we might do lots more, but we have been and are doing lots. Pay teachers more, continue to stress the importance of education to our children, and there will be ever better results. Paying teachers little makes it more difficult to really claim to value education, does it not?
[I spent years working with students in urban public schools, students generally from poor families, and have any number of encouraging stories.]
Posted by: on December 26, 2002 08:32 AMPaying teachers little makes it more difficult to really claim to value education, does it not?
Sloganeering is no substitute for results.
I repeat my question from near the top of the thread:
Has a monopolist's value-for-price ever risen after the imposition of a price increase?
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 26, 2002 08:37 AMDemocrats. Democrats. Must be all those horrid Democrats keeping schools for being a garden of delights. Horrid liberal Democrats are really the responsible parties. Let us all go to
Bob Jones University and spread the word from there. Why then we could even get rid of biology. Duh. Democrats, grrr, grrr. Imagine liberal Democrats even being allowed near schools. Grrrrr.... Bob Jones, be there and leave Berkeley this moment. Nobel Prize in biology and "humanities" to any taker.
Another terrific conumdrum. I tend to agree with E. Avedisian's remarks regarding the greater influence of parental factors vs. teacher competence, which calls into question the utility of simply raising teacher's pay, even if the problem of indiscriminately increasing capital flows, regardless of actual performance, is ignored. A question: Should not, at a minimum, parents who ARE willing to make the effort to facilitate their children's education be given the opportunity to do so, regardless of income or affluence of community, and not have their efforts stymied by parents who are not willing to do so? This is incredibly harsh for those children who are unfortunately born to lousy parents, but is there any viable political or economic solution to having hideous parents? In other words, are not the children of lousy parents already getting the shaft, and in the process, also affecting the outcomes of those children who have good parents, but live in areas with lousy schools? I'm just thinking out loud here, without any concrete suggestions, due to the intractable nature of the problems involved, but maintaining the status quo, except at a higher rate of funding, is very unlikely to make things better, and could make things worse.
Posted by: Will Allen on December 26, 2002 08:49 AM"Has a monopolist's value-for-price ever risen after the imposition of a price increase?"
The answer is probably no---and we should not expect anything different regarding the powerful teachers unions. Only competition via vouchers can possibly save many school districts.
"...strong unions are usually found in the best and worst of everything."
Once a union goes bad there is little that can be done to salvage the situation. This is especially true when they are in bed with a particular political party. The odds are better that I will terrify Shaq O’Neal on a basketball court than the present teachers unions will ever be reformed. You will almost certainly have to start again at square one. The present power structure must be marginalized.
Posted by: David Thomson on December 26, 2002 09:05 AMTeachers as monopolists? Good grief. Wish that teachers simply had more bargaining power on wages. Teachers are not monopolists under the strongest of union circumstances. We show value by what we pay for. Pay teachers more and we will be showing we value education more and the show will have an effect.
Posted by: on December 26, 2002 09:40 AMYes. Teachers unions along with dread liberal Democrats are the problem. Whoooo, I am afraid. Imagine teachers being able to bargain. Why teachers should be willing to teach days for free and work evenings in WalMart, for sake of us all. At least, conservative teachers should.
Liberal teachers are foolish enough care about decent conditions for themselves and for students and decent pay.
Posted by: on December 26, 2002 09:48 AMYes. "Marginalize the power structure" of dread liberal Democratic teachers. Imagine preparing all those dear children for the University of
Texas or the University of California. Marginalize those teachers. Are there no televisions? Hey ho.
Will Allen wrote, ...the greater influence of parental factors vs. teacher competence, which calls into question the utility of simply raising teacher's pay...
I've seen claims of evidence that the effect of teacher competence is greater the lower the income of the student's family. This makes sense (even if it's not necessarily empirically true): students from wealthier families on average need less help developing good learning habits.
More to the point---if paying teachers more doesn't help, why don't suburban school districts slash teacher salaries and save everyone a lot of tax money?
More food for thought---there is a claim, reproduced in Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate---that family-related environmental factors (as opposed to the "rest" of the environmental factors, and genetic factors) explain very little variance (0-10%) of the expression of intelligence and personality traits. While I don't necessarily believe this, and while the claim has an important caveat (namely, it's variance explained within a particular ensemble, so if conditions deviate significantly from the ensemble, the claim cannot apply), it's certainly provocative. One possible further claim would be that the child's neighborhood, friends, etc is more important than his parents. Again, I don't necessarily buy it, but it's an interesting claim.
Best,
Posted by: Stephen J Fromm on December 26, 2002 09:58 AMRe unionization: it's important to remember that unionization might represent increased job security for most people, which (again, for most people) has economic value. Thus, if one moved to a purely merit-based system (whether such is feasible is another matter), you'd have to increase pay, IMHO. I'm only speaking as someone who once held a tenure-track position and was aware of the proposals to abolish tenure in the long run: you'd simply have to either pay professors more, or contend with a lower supply (or a lower quality).
About merit: I can't speak directly about child education, but at a university, it's very influenced by student evaluations. For some reason, no one thinks it necessary to "regress out" two obviously influential factors that will bias student evaluations: (a) the average grade meted out by the prof, (b) the composition of the class (primarily, is it a required course for non-majors, as was the calculus I was teaching, or is it a course populated by majors?).
Best,
Best,
Posted by: Stephen J Fromm on December 26, 2002 10:04 AMThere's an
article in today's Boston Globe about the problems the new federal education law, No Child Left Behind, is causing for smaller school districts. Not about salaries, so perhaps a bit off-topic, but still interesting.
Finally, what is the rationale for unequal funding of schools in different districts? I can't think of any reason why schools should be funded locally, other than people wanting to fund their own children and not other people's, which I don't consider just.
Best,
Posted by: Stephen J Fromm on December 26, 2002 10:08 AMThere is a Chinese-English language public school in New York City to which African-American parents happily send their children, because they consider the environment highly desirable and imagine knowledge of Chinese will distinguish their children. Is it parents? Is it environment beyond the home? Is it genetics? Is it a finely skilled loving teacher in a Chinese-English school? Is it New York providing the special school? All, all, all. Imagine.
Posted by: on December 26, 2002 10:09 AMYes. When given a *choice*, urban blacks are every bit as capable of upgrading their children's education as are affluent whites. The paternalistic idea that poor folks aren't smart enough to make decisions about their kids' schooling, so the decisions must be made by the education experts/elites/bueaucracy, is proven wrong every time it is put to the test.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 26, 2002 10:18 AMWe could treat teachers like Enron employees, though on the cheap. Evaluate teachers each 6 months and get rid of the 10% who get the poorest ratings. Scared teachers are happy teachers with happy children well learning.
Posted by: on December 26, 2002 10:18 AM"The paternalistic idea that poor folks aren't smart enough to make decisions about their kids' schooling, so the decisions must be made by the education experts/elites/bueaucracy, is proven wrong every time it is put to the test."
Important point to be sure! Parents need to be reached out to again and again by teachers and counselors and administrators. Of course this takes resources.
Posted by: on December 26, 2002 10:25 AM"There is a Chinese-English language public school in New York City to which African-American parents happily send their children, because they consider the environment highly desirable and imagine knowledge of Chinese will distinguish their children. Is it parents? Is it environment beyond the home? Is it genetics? Is it a finely skilled loving teacher in a Chinese-English school? Is it New York providing the special school? All, all, all. Imagine."
This ia a wonderful example of what can be so right about educational opportunity.
Ann
Posted by: on December 26, 2002 10:30 AMParents need to be reached out to again and again by teachers and counselors and administrators. Of course this takes resources.
Parents need the "resources", that is, the ability to select the manner of their children's education.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 26, 2002 10:32 AMDecember 16, 2002
A Chance to Learn
By BOB HERBERT - NYTimes
GASTON, N.C.— The first thing you notice about the school is how quiet it is. The kids are absorbed in their studies and except for the low roar of conversation in the cafeteria during lunch, or the enthusiastic screeching of band practice, you hardly hear a sound.
The Gaston College Preparatory School in this rural town just across the border from Virginia is housed in a new low-rise building on land that until recently was a peanut and soybean farm. Farm equipment outlets and a cotton field or two line the roads leading to the school.
There are only two grades, fifth and sixth. A seventh and eighth grade will be added over the next two years.
I wanted to visit Gaston College Prep because I'd heard it was a remarkable school. It's in a region that is struggling economically and is not known for its academic excellence. Most of the students at the school are black and nearly all of them are poor. Most of the other schools available to them are burdened with problems that show no signs of easing.
At Gaston Prep, which the kids call G.C.P., the atmosphere is almost idyllic. The children are well behaved and the classroom work is intense. "We don't have any fighting here, or any of that picking-on-people stuff," said Shanequa High, a sixth-grader whose reading ability improved dramatically in just one year, and who was the lead dancer in the school's production of "The Lion King" last year.
Another student, 12-year-old Paris Gatling, said, "We're here to work, and we work hard."
Gaston Prep is one of 15 KIPP schools in the United States. KIPP is short for the Knowledge Is Power Program, an effort that began in Houston and has grown into one of the most energetic and academically sound public school programs in the nation....
Posted by: on December 26, 2002 10:34 AM"Scared teachers are happy teachers with happy children well learning."
I think SJ Fromm probably has it more correct: Scared teachers are unhappy teachers who are looking for a more secure job.
I mean, implementing Enron's policies isn't a good idea, is it? One thing this will guarantee is that teachers will adopt Enron's standards for reporting performance.
Posted by: Matt Weiner on December 26, 2002 10:35 AM>>Has a monopolist's value-for-price ever risen after the imposition of a price increase?<<
To the extent we're talking about a monopoly facing a monopsony, I don't think the answer is so clear-cut. It's a bargaining game we're talking about. I can imagine public schools being able to bargain for more competitive hiring and productivity requirements in exchange for higher salaries.
But that won't happen as long as the ennemy dreams of destroying public education as the foundation of the American society... Don't get me wrong: I am one of those who believe that the public and private sector when mixed together can generate a very beneficial form of competition (lower prices cum higher quality). But for that to happen, we have to allow the public sector to actually compete with the private sector...
Posted by: Jean-Philippe Stijns on December 26, 2002 10:42 AMwe have to allow the public sector to actually compete with the private sector...
What is the public sector's market share in K-12 education?
The only sense the public schools aren't "competitive" is in the quality of their output. Side-by-side parochial schools in the inner city perform far better than their "public" neighbors, with far fewer resources and similar student bodies.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 26, 2002 10:50 AMI have no opinion as to whether teachers "should" be paid more, since, unlike Major League shortstops, the individual teachers are not receiving their salaries as a result of a freely made decision to give them the money, based upon the giver's estimation of what the future individual performance is likely to be worth. Also, if the shorstop doesn't meet the expectations, the giver is free to decline further association with the shortstop. Thus, I can say with confidence that Alex Rodriguez is getting exactly what he "should", because the Texas Rangers have freely decided that he is worth it (I'll leave out the absurdity of having taxes partially paying Rodriguez's salary for now, via a tax subsidized stadium). Of course, pricing individual shortstops is much easier than pricing individual teachers, because we have decided that every child needs the services of a teacher, and that most of those teachers will paid by taxes, since universal public education is considered essential to a functioning society.
Should teachers be paid more? Who knows? I suspect that some school districts pay higher salaries to have a competitive edge over poorer districts in attracting better performers, but increasing overall funding isn't going to lessen the competitive advantage, it will just make that advantage more expensive. More importantly, simply increasing salaries may provide incentive for more competent people to choose teaching as a career, but it will do nothing to cut off the flow of money to incompetent performers, whether they be teachers, administrators, school board members, or parents. The entities which once supplied capital to Montgomery Wards eventually stopped doing so, and Montgomery Wards disappeared, because Montgomery Wards proved to be wholly incompetent in the employment of that capital. If the suppliers of capital to Montgomery Wards had, instead of finally saying "no more", had increased increased increased capital flow by 25%, in order to increase salaries, would it have been expected that the retailer would suddenly transform itself? Of course not, and no, this is not to say that all the employees of that company were incompetent. The point is that their model was broken, in terms of providing a service that the users of their service were satisfied with, in comparison to other alternatives. The problem with education is that too often the users of the service have no alternative, and the capital continues to flow unimpeded to entities which have proven to be incompetent in it's employment. Would increasing the capital to what , in many cases, although certainly not all , are entities which are incompetent in the employment of the capital they now receive, really deliver considerably better results? I have my doubts, unless something is done to fundamentally change the current model of employing that capital. No, I don't have any magic solutions, but any entity which impedes experimentation, as the teacher's unions do in a most reactionary manner, is certainly an enemy of the foremost people who are ostensibly supposed to be served by the current model, children who need to be educated.
Posted by: Will Allen on December 26, 2002 11:10 AMBucky Dent says: "Side-by-side parochial schools in the inner city perform far better than their 'public' neighbors, with far fewer resources and similar student bodies."
But how much of that difference is due to selection effects? Parents have to take an active role in getting their kids enrolled in private or parochial schools, so I would guess that that selects for parents who are actively involved in their children's education. Also, as several people have pointed out, private schools have an advantage over public schools in that they have the option to reject students who are badly behaved.
If, as E. Avedisian suggests, differences in student performance are largely attributable to differences in children's willingness to learn, then I don't see how competition with private schools (via vouchers) could possibly help.
Very selective public schools do extremely well. For example, graduates of the Bronx High School of Science often go on to become Nobel Prize winners. But the public school system has an obligation to educate *all* students, regardless of ability or motivation. The only way that vouchers (i.e., competition with private schools) could possibly improve the education of the most unruly, least interested students is if private schools were *also* required to educate those students. I don't see that happening.
Posted by: Daryl McCullough on December 26, 2002 12:03 PMhow much of that difference is due to selection effects?
Not enough to account for outperforming public schools in the face of a 3:1 funding disparity.
The only way that vouchers (i.e., competition with private schools) could possibly improve the education of the most unruly, least interested students is if private schools were *also* required to educate those students.
The fixation on those least-abled is laudable. But those with brains and motivation have rights too.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 26, 2002 12:11 PMThere is a place for public, a place for private, a place for private parochial. There are however any number of children receiving fine fine educations in urban areas in public schools that draw significantly from "poorer" families. We need to look to the strengths of our system as well as difficulties. There is Rice, there is the U of Texas. There are fine fine unban public schools with all sorts of a mixture of children. Study them, copy them as much as possible.
Respect and admire teachers for the sake of the profession.
Posted by: on December 26, 2002 12:21 PMBucky Dent writes: "how much of that difference is due to selection effects?
Not enough to account for outperforming public schools in the face of a 3:1 funding disparity."
Why do you say that? As I pointed out, very selective public schools such as the Bronx High School for Science, do extremely well. (I'm sure they are very well funded, as well, but I think it is the selectivity that makes the biggest difference.)
Going to a voucher system is not, in my opinion, an actual attempt to improve the education of all children. Instead, it represents abandonment of the goal of universal education.
I wonder if Jean-Philippe thinks this public school represents "the foundation of the American society":
http://overlawyered.com/archives/01/jan2.html#0117a
<<----------quote------------
District of Columbia Public Schools
Office of the General Counsel
Labor Management and Employee Relations
November 16, 2000
Dear Ms. [name withheld]:
On June 23, 2000, you were informed by letter that you would not receive an offer of employment with the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) based on the results of your criminal background check. Based on your subsequent presentation of documentation that your 1984 charge for Uniformed Controlled Substance Act, Cannabis was no papered; that your 1984 charge for shoplifting was nolle prosequi; that your 1984 charge for assault with a dangerous weapon, razor was no papered; that your 1984 charge for destruction of government property was nolle prosequi; that your 1986 charge for assault with a deadly weapon was dismissed; that your 1987 charge for soliciting for prostitution was nolle prosequi; that your 1989 charge for assault with a dangerous weapon, razor was no papered; and that your 1992 Uniform Controlled Substance Act, possession with intent to distribute cocaine was dismissed. You are eligible for employment with DCPS.
If you have any questions or concerns, kindly contact Labor Management and Employee Relations at (202) 442-5373.
Sincerely,
Delores Hamilton
Acting Director of Human Resources
------------endquote---------->>
Darryl's post goes to my original question, which was whether there were viable political or economic solutions to having lousy parents, and whether we should allow children with lousy parents to destroy the educational opportunities of those motivated to take advantage of them, simply because they are are poor or live in a lousy school district. Frankly, poor children who are motivated to learn need to have the ability to segregate themselves from children who are destructive of an environment conducive to learning. If vouchers help motivated learners to do this, good for them.
Posted by: Will Allen on December 26, 2002 12:29 PMBucky Dent writes: "how much of that difference is due to selection effects?
Not enough to account for outperforming public schools in the face of a 3:1 funding disparity."
Why do you say that? As I pointed out, very selective public schools such as the Bronx High School for Science, do extremely well. (I'm sure they are very well funded, as well, but I think it is the selectivity that makes the biggest difference.)
I say that because it is transparently true. In Brooklyn's Bed-Stuy, parochial private schools charging ~$3,000/year/kid out-perform their neighboring public schools, which "charge" ~$11,000/year/kid.
They draw from the same neighborhood, which is poor and black. They do not go through a selection process like the Bronx HS of Science, which has formalized testing.
Of course, the kids who go parochial have motivated families, etc. But to overcome 3:1 funding, there's clearly more at work than selection bias.
There's a point where the excuses for the failure of the public schools come up short, and this is it.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 26, 2002 12:40 PMBucky Dent writes: "Of course, the kids who go parochial have motivated families, etc. But to overcome 3:1 funding, there's clearly more at work than selection bias."
Why do you say that? The sort of selection you are talking about is *enormously* important. Much more important than funding differences, I would think.
Posted by: Daryl McCullough on December 26, 2002 12:48 PMYou would think that if you didn't know the neighborhood or the people or the institutions.
The public schools are mis-managed to a nearly criminal degree, with no discipline and less education. In Brooklyn, children are routinely attacked by other kids in the schools, with no consequences for the perps. Who can learn in that environment?
The problem is less subtle and nuanced than it is made to seem. Those public schools are failing because no amount of money dumped into a broken system will fix that system. The school across the street with the same demographics and 1/3 the funds is doing a better job. What could be more obvious?
This is like the folks who said the two Berlins didn't prove Communism was a failure. Or the two Koreas. Or Hong Kong in the last 50 years.
At some point, if you want to interact with the real world, you accept hard facts.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 26, 2002 12:59 PMBucky Dent wrote:
"The school across the street with the same demographics"
Not the same demographics. They don't have the
kids who attack other kids. They don't have
to take them. They don't have to retain the
kids who are disruptive. They don't have to
retain the kids who are violent.
How can you say they have "the same demographics"?
How can you say they have "the same demographics"?
When was the last time you were in Bed-Stuy?
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 26, 2002 01:36 PMBucky, I don't understand what point you are making. Obviously, if in one school kids are routinely attacked by other kids, then that accounts for the difference in learning. So when you say that the private school does a better job, you really are saying that there is less misbehavior in the private school.
Is there some reason that private schools do a better job at controlling violence than public schools? If so, why?
Posted by: Daryl McCullough on December 26, 2002 02:20 PMDaryl, please explain why there is a societal obligation to keep children who wish to learn in the same setting as children who wish to commit assaults.
Posted by: Will Allen on December 26, 2002 02:29 PMObviously, if in one school kids are routinely attacked by other kids, then that accounts for the difference in learning. So when you say that the private school does a better job, you really are saying that there is less misbehavior in the private school.
What I am saying is that one school is able to manage its students, and the other is not.
The violence I cite is just one parameter of the problem.
EVEN if you allow for public-schools-as-dumping-grounds, that cannot possibly account for the 3:1 funding imbalance.
I am not in the parochial schools enough to explain why they succeed where others fail, despite the resource imbalance. It is enough to know that success is possible, and migrate the students away from failure and toward success.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 26, 2002 02:31 PMBucky, I still don't understand what your point is.
You say: "EVEN if you allow for public-schools-as-dumping-grounds, that cannot possibly account for the 3:1 funding imbalance."
I didn't realize that you were trying to account for why public schools have more money than private schools. Surely the explanation for that has to do with the different funding sources---taxes versus tuition. I thought you were trying to account for why public schools perform worse than private schools in spite of that advantage. The dumping ground explanation seems to work for that.
Bucky Dent wrote, Side-by-side parochial schools in the inner city perform far better than their "public" neighbors, with far fewer resources and similar student bodies.
Regarding "fewer resources," how much of this is due to a supply of cheaper labor not available to the public sector, and (more importantly) not scalable? That is, for sake of argument, suppose that one reason things are cheaper at Catholic schools is that nuns are willing to teach for far less than your average Joe. (I admit that this might not be an important factor--I don't have the data.) Two things are apparent: (a) this pool of labor is unavailable to the public sector, (b) this pool of labor is quite limited---there aren't that many people willing to work for wages that nuns are willing to work for, so while you could help a few kids, you couldn't help all that many.
I echo the objections of the other posters about the kids being "similar." If you grant the principle that the public schools are obliged to teach everyone, then its utterly unfair to compare public schools to private schools that are allowed to select their student bodies. (Pop quiz: how much of budget of the Federal D. of Ed is devoted to "special needs" children?)
You can question the principle and argue against it, but that's a separate issue.
Best,
Posted by: Stephen J Fromm on December 26, 2002 03:15 PMMy wife tells me that in her school district children are not held back if they do not master (or at least get through) the course material. Rather, they are passed on to the next grade level via what is called a "social promotion"; the idea that it would be harmful to stigmatize a child as a failure and remove him/her from cohorts. Kids know this and will simply goof off all year. By the time they reach eigth grade they know nothing and, in various ways, damage the educational experience for the few that do want to learn.
Parochial and private schools don't have this problem.
Any parent willing to invest a portion of his or her income (in addition to local taxes) is concerned enough and sufficiently invested to ensure that the child learns. The extent of the selection bias for better students in private schools should be obvious.
Then there are programs like IDEA - that placed children with learning disabilities back into the regular class room - that are underfunded or not funded at all.
The difficult kids are in the class, but the extra help is not there.
Again, private schools don't have to face these situations.
I could go on to mention a myriad of other mandated handicaps (excuse me, challenges) that public schools must meet that private do not have to . I don't see how anyone can glibly compare performance and funding ratios. Public and private schools are like apples and oranges.
As I and others have pointed out it's the model that's broken not the teachers. I think that the idea that solid academic education is not for everyone is a bit too scary for liberals politicians (and economists) to examine and for conservative politicians to say out loud. So stick your heads in the sand and blame the teachers.
And discuss a teacher monopoly and monopolistic pricing and blah, blah, blah...... a hollow pseudo-intellectual exercise.
Johny can't read because he doesn't give a damn and his parents are willing to discipline him.
Johny thinks he's going to be the next Michael Jordan, or a successful drug dealer, or a movie star, or enlist in the military, drive a truck like his old man. His parents work in the service sector, don't work at all, work blue collar, work so much they're not there. Most of the time they're pretty clueless themselves.
Welcome to the reality of many public schools.
Posted by: E. Avedisian on December 26, 2002 03:20 PMI think Daryl's point is that in this situation you are comparing apples and oranges. On the one hand we have schools that must keep all memebers of society and another than can pick and choose which ones it wants to educate.
The major problem that I have not seen addressed is that the voucher system encourages poor performance of these more difficult cases, so that the parents of these kids, at least the ones who care, send them somewhere else.
I would advocate testing out a few voucher programs to see if they work (lets not try it with the religious schools as that is too contentious, and it would be impossible to get fair options for minority religious groups)- also try testing out some other things like reducing class size to 5, 10, and 15 students, and see if that makes a difference. Try tripling the spending in some districts to see if that works.
I would feel a lot more comfortable with the voucher movement's agenda if they seemed more willing to try all options. Take religion out of the mix and experiment with ideas that they do not agree with and maybe we can get somewhere.
Oops.....are *not* willing to discipline him......
Posted by: E. Avedisian on December 26, 2002 03:25 PMThe dumping ground explanation seems to work for that.
If the difference were 1.5:1 or even 2:1, I could accept that. But 3:1 is way too much.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 26, 2002 05:38 PMI don't see how anyone can glibly compare performance and funding ratios. Public and private schools are like apples and oranges.
Again, 2:1 maybe, but not 3:1.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 26, 2002 05:40 PMit's the model that's broken not the teachers
Even the staunchest school choice advocate will acknowledge that. Ironically, the *union* that represents the teachers is among the largest impediments to reforming the broken model.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 26, 2002 05:42 PMI would advocate testing out a few voucher programs
I believe that's been done, and the results range from neutral to positive.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 26, 2002 05:44 PME. Avedisian wrote, Rather, they are passed on to the next grade level via what is called a "social promotion"; the idea that it would be harmful to stigmatize a child as a failure and remove him/her from cohorts.
YEAH! I've got a bumper sticker that says "Don't blame Dubya. He's a victim of social promotion."
Bucky Dent keeps referring to "3:1" in funding, (~$3,000/year/kid out-perform their neighboring public schools, which "charge" ~$11,000/year/kid.). But in addition to the point I made above (that that might be due in part to the special availability to Catholic schools of a cheap labor pool), BD is eliding something---he's comparing the cost in the public school system to the tuition in the parochial system. What makes him think that the tuition in the parochial system fully reflects actual costs?
As to BD's description of voucher system outcomes as I believe that's been done, and the results range from neutral to positive, the results were pretty mixed.
Best,
The school voucher system has indeed been tested, although only in a few districts and only in a few states.
The results were not statistically significant.
One major study that reported positive results was conducted by a "non-partisan non profit group" that is, in reality, neither, but is instead a front for the Republicans.
Their study has been thoroughly and appropriately criticized on a number of important points to the extent that it is rendered meaningless, if not down right fraudulent.
A Google search on "school voucher programs" or something similar will bring up a number of informative hits.
I would add to the number of posts mentioning reasons to take Bucky's 3:1 ratio with a grain of salt that the public schools *must* implement a number of mandated special programs that the private schools do not have to.
Example:
Where I live some 12% of funds allocated to the largest school district in the county go to a program that is all but in name the old bussing program. That's 12% of available education money spent to move kids out of neighborhood schools and into schools on the other side of town.
It's the Feds that enforce that one. In fact, many of the costs imposed on public schools come from the federal level.
BTW, the bussing has not improved performance of the bussed. It has correlated with lower performance of the schools receiving the bussed.
Education is one area where liberal ideology has been extremely misguided and detrimental.
You want an economic solution? Get the kids and their families invested. Some people discount the future at a more accelerated rate than others. Get them involved in a program where they can see the pay-off for their efforts.
Maybe Johny just can't stand English lit., falls asleep during history and gets horribly confused by what he sees to be the pointless study of chemistry. But Johny loves working on hot rod cars. Well, a master mechanic makes pretty good bread and provides a necessary service in our economy.
School performance will improve when only willing, able and ready students are in the class room. Selection of students should be blind to race, color, religious affiliation, zip code or income level.
Provide trade/technical school education to the rest in accordance to their interest and ability.
Posted by: E. Avedisian on December 26, 2002 09:35 PM
Whenever this issue is raised I expect to see the following:
1. Using the worst schools as characteristic of the whole national system.
2. Exaggerating or misrepresenting the degree to which today's graduates are dumber and more criminal than past graduates.
3. Blaming all problems on the schools, the teachers, and the unions. (And lawyers).
4. Using the school question as vehicle for arguing the larger anti-government, free-market, anti-union agenda (or the religious pro-voucher agenda).
The point of view I'm talking about has hardened into concrete and there's really nothing to talk about.
There was enough of this here that I'm glad I didn't participate. I think that a certain proportion of the posts here would have been interesting in some other context, but not here.
I doubt that I'm missed, but I can't stand to post on this site any more. Brad's own contributions are wonderful.
Posted by: zizka on December 26, 2002 09:54 PMWhenever this issue is raised I expect to see the following:
1. Using the worst schools as characteristic of the whole national system.
2. Exaggerating or misrepresenting the degree to which today's graduates are dumber and more criminal than past graduates.
3. Blaming all problems on the schools, the teachers, and the unions. (And lawyers).
4. Using the school question as vehicle for arguing the larger anti-government, free-market, anti-union agenda (or the religious pro-voucher agenda).
The point of view I'm talking about has hardened into concrete and there's really nothing to talk about.
There was enough of this here that I'm glad I didn't participate. I think that a certain proportion of the posts here would have been interesting in some other context, but not here.
I doubt that I'm missed, but I can't stand to post on this site any more. Brad's own contributions are wonderful.
(For the record: I don't work in the public schools. In 1980 I had a chance to become a high school teacher, but I let it slip because I thought they worked too hard for what they got out of it. My son had at least 5 highly superior HS teachers during his 3 years in a Public HS, to whom I am eternally grateful.)
Posted by: zizka on December 26, 2002 09:59 PMI know I've said the same thing several times. Apologies.
What I meant to say before I went off on a worn tangent is that
there is plenty of evidence out there demonstrating that the main source of problems with student performance is a student's attitude toward education and his/her family's attitude toward education. I am not just speaking from personal anecdote.
Two years ago I wrote a white papre concerning the educational needs of Hispanic students. In the course of doing so I discovered the following:
Hispanic students under-perform across the board; even when compared to other immigrant and/or minority groups.
Interestingly, when the Hispanic students are interviewed and their attitude toward education is measured by various instruments, they score far lower (negative) than all other groups. Parental support of educational endeavors is also lower.
In fact, for all groups the level of interest and positive attitude toward education was related to the level of academic achievement.
So there is a proven strong correlation between student/parental attitude - or interest - in education and achievement.
If I could find the paper I'd post the links. The info is out on the net. Just use Google if you are interested.
Posted by: E. Avedisian on December 26, 2002 10:04 PMTwo points to Bucky:
>>The best predictors of academic success are an intact two parent household and a switched off television<<
Not in any studies I've seen. The best predictor of academic success is a decent chunk of cash in the parental bank account. Once you've allowed for income levels in even quite a crude way, single-parent households don't have a statistically significant effect.
And further, regarding the 3:1 disparity. I have no idea why you're so hung up on this figure of 3:1, but let's do even some relatively simple-minded thinking about the effects of selection.
Let's assume (wrongly), a linear distribution of children's ability, so that there are equal numbers in each decile. Let's further model the differential costs of educating lower-ability children by assuming that it costs $100 to bring a child in the bottom decile up to the educational level where he passes his exams, $90 for a child in the ninth decile, $80 in the eighth and so on. This is actually a ludicrously oversimplified model, but there you go.
Now, assume that I open up a parochial school, and impose a selection criterion such that I recruit only from the top two deciles. My average cost per child is going to be $15, while the rest of the school system is going to have an average cost of $50. That's a cost advantage of 3.3:1 right there. If I get even more selective and cream off the entire top decile, then I can educate them for $10/pupil, while the school system is now left with the average cost of the bottom nine deciles ($60), and I can now put up a cost ratio of 6:1 -- if the actual funding disparity is only 3:1, I'm clearly going to outperform massively. Obviously, this model is ludicrously oversimplified, but I think it does raise questions about how rock-solid your intuition about the 3:1 ratio ought to be.
I also query your assertion that pupils whose parents are paying $3000 are likely to have "the same demographics" as pupils getting their education for free.
Posted by: dsquared on December 26, 2002 11:16 PMWalter Williams has a column on this today:
Casey Lartigue, policy analyst for the Cato Institute, has written a report in the Dec. 10 issue of Policy Analysis that constitutes a devastating indictment of public education. The title is "The Need for Education Freedom in the Nation's Capital."
The title suggests the solution — namely, education reform must be more than simply spending more money to prop up schools that are little more than holding pens. Washington politicians must create a climate where education entrepreneurs can flourish and thereby produce education competition. Parents must have control over the education of their children. Tuition tax credits or education vouchers wouldfacilitate both objectives.
"That's not the answer, Williams," you say. "More money and smaller class sizes are what's needed." That's what the education establishment would have us believe. However, if money were the answer, Washington public schools would be the best in the nation, if not the world. Per student expenditures are $10,500 a year, second highest in the nation. With a student-teacher ration of 15.8, they have smaller-than-average class sizes. What is the result?
In only one of the city's 19 high schools do as many as 50 percent of its students test as proficient in reading, and at no school are 50 percent of the students proficient in math. At nine high schools, only 5 percent or fewer of its students test proficient in reading; and in 11 high schools, only 5 percent or less are proficient in math. The story gets worse when we look at the percentages for "below basic" performance, which means that the student has little or no mastery of subject skills.
At 12 of the 19 high schools, more than 50 percent of the students test below basic in reading, and at some of those schools the percentage approaches 80 percent. At 15 of these schools, over 50 percent test below basic in math, and in 12 of them 70 percent to 99 percent do so.
But that's not the worst of the story: Each year, more than 80 percent — and up to 96 percent — of high school students are promoted to the next grade. This is nothing but fraud, dishonesty and deception, plain and simple. While the education establishment can rightfully point to education problems beyond their control — irresponsible parents, students with alien and hostile minds, and rotten teaching conditions — these people bear the sole responsibility for fraudulent promotions and fraudulent diplomas.
The bottom line is that if one didn't know better, one would think that Washington's predominantly black public school system was being run by the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, hell-bent on a mission to sabotage black academic excellence. Instead, it's a system being run by blacks for blacks. As such, it means generation after generation of blacks will not be able to academically measure up. Calls for racial quotas and preferences will exist in perpetuity. And, in a world of increasing technology, many blacks are condemned to near uselessness in the job market.
But what about Sen. Trent Lott? You say, "What in the world does Trent Lott have to do with rotten education received by blacks in Washington?" I'd say nothing, but judging by the time and political capital spent by black politicians and civil rights groups attacking Mr. Lott, you would think that he was the No. 1 black problem, followed closely by the Confederate battle flag.
The attachment of black politicians and civil rights groups to spending resources on symbolism rather than substance is equivalent to Nero's fiddling while Rome burnt. I'm sure that if the outrage directed toward Mr. Lott's indiscreet remarks were instead directed at fraudulent education delivered to black youngsters across the nation, solutions might be found.
I also query your assertion that pupils whose parents are paying $3000 are likely to have "the same demographics" as pupils getting their education for free.
I speak from direct extensive personal knowledge. I have no incentive to lie or distort the facts. None.
And nit-picking methodologies doesn't alter the clear-as-day reality that is obvious upon simple inspection.
The denial of clear reality, and substitution of statistical strawmen, makes it impossible to actually solve the problem.
Of course, a cynic would say that is the goal of the only people prosepering under the current system, a group that emphatically does not include the children.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 27, 2002 04:02 AMWith respect, Bucky, I'm sure that you are not intentionally distorting anything, but the points you make in your post above aren't true.
First, I don't see how you can have "extensive and direct personal knowledge" of other people's bank accounts. I really don't see how people with a spare $3000 per child/year can be assumed to have the same demographic profile as people who don't.
Second, your assertion that a 3:1 funding disparity can't be balanced by selection is neither "clear as day" nor "obvious reality". As anyone reading my post can see, I'm not setting up strawmen, statistically nitpicking or attempting to make any point of my own; I'm just trying to explain to you that what is "obvious" to you isn't "obvious" to anyone else.
I don't see how you can have "extensive and direct personal knowledge" of other people's bank accounts.
Have you ever been to Bed-Stuy? Have you ever lived in or near what used to be called "ghetto" communities? Have you ever employed people who live in said communities? Have you ever observed what people purchase/transport on mass transit into such neighborhoods? Are you familiar with census tract data on incomes in those neighborhoods? Can you infer an income level based on housing selection? What are the income limitations placed on public housing residents?
We ain't talking about Stanford vs. Greenwich CT here.
I am reminded of the old joke: An economist is someone who sees something happen in practice and wonders if it’d work in theory.
In this case, the economists insist something should work in theory [an enormous public education system costing more than $10,000/student] and are at a loss when they see it utterly fail in practice.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 27, 2002 05:15 AM>>The best predictors of academic success are an intact two parent household and a switched off television<<
>Not in any studies I've seen. The best predictor of academic success is a decent chunk of cash in the parental bank account. Once you've allowed for income levels in even quite a crude way, single-parent households don't have a statistically significant effect.<
Single parenthood has a *major* effect. Even divorce-and-remarriage, so the children have two parent but not their biological ones, has a major effect. And that's after controlling for income.
E.g.: Over 90% of the students in Ivy League colleges are from intact families with both their biological parents -- a pretty impressive statistic in our world where 50% of all marriages end in divorce and a whole lot of parents never get married in the first place.
"Children who do not consistently live with two biological parents are only half as likely to ever attend a selective college, even after researchers take into account factors such as income and parent education ... students not living with two biological parents are educationally disadvantaged in a variety of ways ... If this quality difference is reflected in later life income and other benefits, as other studies suggest, then these children will be disadvantaged in other life outcomes as well."
-- "Family Composition and College Choice: Does it Take Two Parents to Go to the Ivy League?", paper by Dean Lillard and Jennifer Gerner, economists, Cornell University.
>> Now, assume that I open up a parochial school, and impose a selection criterion such that I recruit only from the top two deciles...<
You'd be assuming you have a pig that flies. Catholic schools in NYC, which is where you are talking about, accept all applicants (and expel fewer students than do the public schools -- yes, public schools expel students.) It is the parents who choose the school, not the school that chooses the students.
There's no shortage of studies that show Catholic schools perform better than public schools in NYC, adjusting for type of student population, in spite so spending only about 30% as much money.
E.g.: NY Times, 3/22/01: "A study comparing Catholic and public schools in New York City finds their students perform similarly in the fourth grade, yet by eighth grade those in Catholic schools perform better, providing tantalizing evidence that Catholic schools are doing something right ... "Looking at it from the parents' perspective, especially with the English exams, there's a very significant difference," Mr. Viteritti (of New York University) said ... The report found that Catholic schools were able to educate students with fewer resources. There is only one teacher for every 21 students in the Catholic schools, compared with one teacher for every 16 students in the public system ... The study, was sponsored by New York University and was conducted by a public school advocate teamed with a proponent of taxpayer support for private and Catholic schools in the form of vouchers"
But you don't even have to look at academic results -- just look at the schools themselves, physically. Catholic schools are all clean and functional. The public schools, with three times the money per student, are notoriously falling apart -- 200 hundred of them still have 100-year old coal furnaces! The Board of Ed is the NY egion's biggest consumer of coal, now in the 21st Century.
One reason for the difference is when something goes wrong at a Catholic school, the principal calls a plumber or whoever to fix it. Simple and cost-effective.
Principals in public schools can't do that -- they must go to their "custodian". But custodians in public schools are legally (a) self-employed independent contractor *not* answerable to the principal, who manage their own budgets for their own benefit; and also (b) unionized workers with building tenure who can never be fired. (AFIK, there is no other group of workers with this legal status in the US). Of course, with this institutional set-up if a custodian gets irritated at the principal, too bad for the principal and the school. (The custodians also are notorious for corruption and nepotism).
*Then*, if the repair job is significant, the custodian must refer it to the central repair bureaucracy, which is itself a monster. E.g., there is a line 7-feet up around the walls of most schools -- two different groups of union workers are employed to paint above and below that level, etc. The principal can't even order shades for the windows.
Result of it all: *Much* higher cost, *much* slower and lower-quality building maintenance.
BTW, it is the custodians who preserve the coal furnaces -- it boosts their budgets and hiring (patronage) power since so many more people must be hired to run them, 24/7, 12 months a year.
Now here's a *radical* idea for attracting new teachers to NYC: Get rid of the coal furnaces, and the grotesque legal/political/union arrangements that preserve them. Let public school principals direct school repairs on their own, just as Catholic school principals do!
Then spend the couple of billion dollars saved annually by getting rid of the whole repair bureaucracy (from the system's $12 billion budget) on *actually* improving the schools, physically.
Nicer schools will attract better teachers!
Thank you, Mr. Glass.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 27, 2002 07:29 AMD Squared has managed to get both the blackboard economics and real life experiences WRONG.
As have several other posters to this thread. Has no one here (with the exception of Jim Glass) ever heard of Hoxby, Hanushek, Petersen, Greene? If any of the usual suspects would like to pass from being fact free posters, I'd suggest acquainting yourselves with some of the above economists. Here's a good place to start:
http://www.nber.org/books/schools/
I suggest beginning with Hoxby's:
School Choice and School Productivity
(or Could School Choice be a Tide that Lifts All Boats?)
It is simply amazing, after the history of the 20th century has been fully examined, that there are still extremely intelligent people who remain unbending advocates of central planning, at least in regards to some goods and services. It says much about the power of Faith to trump gained experience via observable phenomena.
Posted by: Will Allen on December 27, 2002 07:53 AMI seem to remember posting "maybe they do, maybe they don't" halfway through my post; I have no horse in this race, never having really given the matter much thought. If the facts are as Jim says, then fair enough, though I still suspect that there is some implicit selection simply through charging three grand a year (if, indeed, that is what these schools do).
I do think it's rather poor for Bucky to be pretending "yeah, that's what I was saying all along", when his actual position was that no amount of selection could possibly make up for a 3:1 funding deficit.
Jim: I hesitate to raise this issue, but is there not some implicit selection in Catholic schools simply by being Catholic? The point I am trying to make (since we are all capable of being adult around here on matters of race) is that, if I understand it correctly, black Americans are more usually Protestant than Catholic; are we sure that the "Catholic schools outperformance" effect is not just picking up the race problem in the USA? In any case, we are surely looking at two problems here; one problem of absolute outcomes and one of cost-effectiveness.
Patrick: you have a bloody nerve talking about "blackboard economics" when you then turn round and start advocating school competition, one of the most untried blackboard solutions it is possible to imagine!
And on a general note, I'd point out that the experience of the UK public school system is that competition has not driven out poor academic achievement in such schools as Harrow and Uppingham.
Posted by: dsquared on December 27, 2002 08:24 AM>> The school voucher system has indeed been tested, although only in a few districts and only in a few states.
>> The results were not statistically significant.<<
For better informed comments:
http://www.nber.org/books/schools/peterson6-7-02.pdf
<<-------quote---------
Black students who switched from public to private schools in the three cities scored after two years, on average, approximately 6.3 percentile points higher on the Iowa Test of Basic
Skills than comparable blacks who remained in public schools. After three years, private
school attendance in two cities had an impact of 6.6 percentile points, an impact of 0.30
standard deviations.
At this point we do not know why the gains from switching to a private school are
evident for black students after two and three years, but not for students from other ethnic
backgrounds.
-------endquote-------->>
However, Joseph Viteritti has a plausible answer for this:
http://www.brook.edu/dybdocroot/pa/books/viterit0999.htm
<< [Viteritti] explains how denying choice to the poor undermines the redistributive social agenda of the modern liberal state, and how a strict standard of church-state separation is out of touch with the culture of poor minority communities where the church is the most viable institution for social progress. Viteritti warns that by failing to appreciate the crucial role that religious congregations play in inner-city neighborhoods, liberal social analysts have compromised the civic vitality of poor communities. >>
Posted by: on December 27, 2002 08:29 AMcharging three grand a year (if, indeed, that is what these schools do).
I know they do because I see the bills.
his actual position was that no amount of selection could possibly make up for a 3:1 funding deficit.
No. My position was that the minimal selection bias I have personally observed and seen reported independently could not account for the results/resources disparity.
we are all capable of being adult around here on matters of race) is that, if I understand it correctly, black Americans are more usually Protestant than Catholic; are we sure that the "Catholic schools outperformance" effect is not just picking up the race problem in the USA?
The Catholic schools in now-black neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy were often founded by white immigrant Catholics like the Irish and Italians, but now serve their poly-denominational neighborhoods.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 27, 2002 08:36 AMdsquared, I'm no expert either, but it is my understanding that many students at Catholic schools, particularly in NYC, are not Catholic.
Posted by: Will Allen on December 27, 2002 08:37 AMD Squared; usually in error, but never in doubt!:
>> Patrick: you have a bloody nerve talking about "blackboard economics" when you then turn round and start advocating school competition, one of the most untried blackboard solutions it is possible to imagine!<<
As I said, if you want to change from being a fact-free poster, try acquainting yourself with the work of, for example, Caroline M. Hoxby:
http://www.educationnext.org/20014/68.html
<<--------quote-----------
For the most part, the research is in on the question of whether students in private schools, using a publicly funded voucher or paying tuition, perform better than their peers in public schools after adjusting for all the background characteristics that affect achievement. Studies comparing students in private Catholic schools with students in public school, and students who receive a voucher to attend a private school with those who don’t, show substantial achievement gains as a result of attending a private school. How competition affects the students who remain in public schools, however, is a relatively unstudied question. ....
It is important to recognize, before discussing the effects of charters and vouchers on public schools, that these new forms of choice simply add to the varieties of de facto choice already available in many parts of the country. It is not at all unusual for parents in a metropolitan urban area to be able to choose from among many schools and many school districts and from a variety of low-cost private school options. These kinds of choice have been around for so long and are so universally taken for granted that we tend not to think of them as choice. But take a family living in the Boston area. They can choose among 70 independent districts located within a 30-minute drive of downtown and many more in the metropolitan area. Towns looking to attract families and raise property values face clear incentives to safeguard the quality of their schools.
Other metropolitan areas offer far less competition among local districts. A family living in Las Vegas, Miami (where one school district, Dade County, covers the entire metropolitan area), or Hawaii (where the entire state is one school district) will be served by the same school district no matter where they choose to reside; the district has a virtual monopoly over public schooling in the area. Comparing public school performance in highly competitive metropolitan areas with performance in less competitive areas is one way of discovering how competition affects public schools. ....
My comparison showed that all schools perform better in areas where there is vigorous competition among public and private schools. Areas with many low-cost private school choices score 2.7 national percentile points higher in 8th grade reading; 2.5 national percentile points higher in 8th grade math; 3.4 national percentile points higher in 12th grade reading; and 3.7 national percentile points higher in 12th grade math.
In short, both traditional forms of choice—choice among school districts and between public and private schools—influence public schools in a positive manner. To place the influence of competition on school performance in perspective, if every school in the nation were to face a high level of competition both from other districts and from private schools, the productivity of America’s schools, in terms of students’ level of learning at a given level of spending, would be 28 percent higher than it is now.
--------endquote----------->.
By the way, for the suspicious in the audience, Hoxby is the daughter of public school teacher/administrators. Her father served in Jimmy Carter's Dept of Education.
Towns looking to attract families and raise property values face clear incentives to safeguard the quality of their schools.
The commuting suburbs of NYC include scores of districts spanning three states, with highly nuanced variations in disirability.
Neighboring towns like Greenwich and Stamford CT see enormous differences in home prices, partly because of the differences families perceive in the local schools.
On Long Island, lovely beachside towns see houses "go begging" because clued-in parents know district-by-district how the schools fare.
Lack of school choice has contributed to a bizarre situation where the real estate market mediates/filters educational opportunities.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 27, 2002 08:57 AMD Square also strikes out on his speculations about blacks and catholics:
http://economics.uchicago.edu/dneal/jep.pdf
From which:
<< I find that attainment gains associated with Catholic schooling are much larger among urban African-americans and Hispanics
than any other group. Using the public school graduation rate for urban African-americans and
Hispanics as a baseline, my estimates of the effect of Catholic schooling imply at least a 26
percentage point increase in high school graduation rates. Further, while I find modest attainment
gains among urban whites, I find little evidence of gains from Catholic schooling among suburban
students regardless of race. ....I find no evidence that positive selection into Catholic schools on unmeasured student traits affects the estimated impact of Catholic schooling....>>
More from the Derek Neal paper cited above, for D Squared to factor into his imagination:
<<---------quote----------
The “teacher effects”
literature supports the notion that a crucial task in managing a school is identifying, retaining, and motivating talented teachers.
However....the personnel systems that govern compensation among public school teachers are inflexible even by government standards. ....
...a number of empirical
results in the literature on teacher labor markets suggest that public school personnel policies are inefficient and further that large scale vouchers might create important changes in the practices that govern hiring, promotion, and pay among teachers....
It is reasonable to suspect that [a school] district could increase the quality of
its math and science faculty while sacrificing little or nothing in terms of the quality of its
humanities faculty by simply raising wages for math and science teachers while simultaneously
reducing wages for humanities teachers.
Hoxby (2002) provides strong suggestive evidence that charter schools and private schools
do deviate from public school salary schedules in just this manner.....
Ballou and Podgursky (1995 , ch. 6) present evidence that private schools
employ a much more flexible wage structure. .... salaries in private and charter schools do vary with the few measured characteristics of teachers that are correlated with measured performance.
Hanushek (2002) reports that teachers with stronger academic records and test scores do perform better in the classroom, and Hoxby (2002) shows that, compared to salaries in the public sector, salaries within the private and charter school sectors vary more with the SAT scores of teachers and the quality of a teacher’s undergraduate institution. Hoxby also shows that charter and private school teachers come from more selective colleges and report higher test scores than teachers in neighboring public schools.
-----------endquote---------->>
More evidence from other than the blackboard:
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewNation.asp?Page=/Nation/archive/200105/NAT2001050
8a.html
<<----------quote-------------
Milwaukee Public Schools on the Rise
By John Rossomando
CNSNews.com Correspondent
May 08, 2001
(CNSNews.com) - Ten years of school choice in Milwaukee are showing
dramatic results for the city's 100,000 public school students.
[snip]
The program has shown positive results for the entire public school
system. It has been forced to make positive changes. Vouchers have
caused the Milwaukee school board to become more responsive to
parental demands and to new ideas.
School choice has completely altered the way the public schools
operate. Prior to school choice, the school board made all of the
decisions, but today a process of decentralized decision-making has
begun.
[snip]
Competition has caused the Milwaukee Public Schools to compete with
private schools for students. The public schools have resorted to
advertising to encourage parents to enroll their children in public
schools rather than private or parochial schools. One Milwaukee
middle school has purchased a billboard to advertise its best
students.
"In some areas, principals have gone door to door inviting parents to
visit their students, to attract parents and their children," Street
said.
A study conducted by Harvard researcher Caroline Hoxby found that the
quality of education improved more in elementary schools where
vouchers were available than in those where vouchers were
unavailable. Hoxby found an improvement in standardized test scores
among students enrolled in these schools.
----------endquote-------------->>
Sigh...Patrick Sullivan......always more interested in winning an arguement than working to reveal the truth.
So quick to carefully edit and select out *only* the info. that lends itself (in the context presented by Patrick) to making Patrick's point.
Fact is, Private school teachers are paid *less* than public school teachers.
What does that tell you? Hmmmm.......
Maybe the teachers are more interested in working with motivated students and in a positive environment than with maximizing salary.
It should also be obvious that it is indeed selection bias towards better students in the private schools (and worse in the public) not teacher salary that makes the difference in performance.
Patrick sited a study or two; none are without serious criticism under peer review.
Finally, we need to be honest about the correlations between race and socio-economic level and educational achievement.
It is well established that within the same school district the following racial order of scholastic achievement will be found (with differences between groups increasing with age): Hispanics, Blacks, Whites, Asians with Hispanics being the lowest achievers and Asians the highest.
There is little chance that these differences can be attributed to, say, some form of racism on the part of teachers and administration as that has been controlled for in some studies.
So how can we seriously continue to deny the apparently massive impact of culture, attitudes towards education in the home, and other factors pertaining to students on educational achievement?
It should be so obvious that any students enrolling in a voucher program are not normal or average. The vouchers do not cover the entire cost of enrolling in a school outside their neighborhood. Why, the transportation cost and hassle alone is enough to discourage all but the more serious parents. And the willingness to to part with old cohorts proves a high dedication to academics and a disdain for the "boys in the hood" on the students' part.
Posted by: E. Avedisian on December 27, 2002 10:14 AMRe: E. Avedisian
What is your point?
If vouchers allow those parents and students who are motivated to obtain a better education to do so, by segregating themselves from those who do not wish to put forth the same effort, is this not a positive development? Is it contended that those who go to the effort of attending a different school would have done as well if they had been forced to stay put; in other words, that they are uuable to discern which school is better for them? What is the societal obligation to those who are unwilling to recognize the importance of becoming educated, and behave accordingly? IS there a political solution to having parents who are unwilling to do those very basic things which improve the likelihood of their children having minimally successful lives, things as basic as socializing children to behave respectfully towards others, doing homework, or even more basically, waiting until one is in a committed marriage prior to procreating? Who does society owe the greater responsibility to, those who are willing to make those efforts, or those who are not? Unfortunately, these discussions get sidetracked by battles with straw-men with silly, and ultimately, destructive, rhetoric about saving every child or leaving no child behind. There ain't any Heaven on this Earth, and the effort to create one, where no parent's or child's individual efforts, or lack thereof, results in that child being left behind, creates a situation where many children who ARE willing to make the needed efforts DO get left behind. The perfect becomes the enemy of the good.
Posted by: Will Allen on December 27, 2002 11:01 AMSullivan, if you want me to respond to you, you're going to need to
a) not constantly cite the same three studies
b) not try to score silly debating point
c) give some impression of being interested in discussion
d) give me any reason to believe it's not a massive waste of my time
and
e) not cite the "liberal" political credentials of your sources in order to forestall accusations of being a political hack that were never made.
All in all, you're probably better off emailing your information to Jim Glass, who is much less likely to be ignored.
Now on the substantive issues:
1) I still don't understand how it can be asserted that parents prepared to pay $3k/child/year form a homogeneous population with the public school system. Given that nobody appears to have any evidence at all on the effects of selection, I still maintain that we shouldn't make off the cuff statements about the size of this effect.
2) Re: Catholic schools. Are they really not run by the Catholic church any more? I'm quite prepared to accept Jim's point about cost effectiveness and the problems of custodians, but I'm still interested in the question of absolute educational achievement. And for that, I still think we need to know more about the extent to which they select in order to know whether their model can be generalised.
3) Re: Milwaukee. Has anybody heard of the Hawthorne effect?
Posted by: DD on December 27, 2002 11:30 AMJust a note further to the above.
The reason that I consider privatisation of education (which is what we're talking about here, unless "school choice" is only meant to mean something like the British system) to be blackboard economics is that I've never seen any consideration of the dynamics (as opposed to comparative statics), or of the problem of inequality.
Since an education cannot be repeated, and its quality can only be assessed ex post, it strikes me that there is a very good case for its regulation in order to establish a baseline standard of quality (the same sort of argument as with pensions and medicines). I take empirical support from this from the fact that countries like France, Germany and Japan, which have prescriptive national standard curriculums, seem to do much better than countries like the UK, Ireland, Spain and the US, where schools are provided (for historical reasons) by independent regional boards. I am told that the best natural experiment in this regard is Scotland versus England, but don't know enough about the specifics to say anything.
I'd be interested to know how the voucher advocates propose to do something about the inequality problem, or indeed if it has been considered. As I say, I'm prepared to be convinced on this issue, but it'll take quite a bit.
btw, the sentence: "Vouchers have caused the Milwaukee school board to become more responsive to parental demands and to new ideas." looks like as clear an example of the Hawthorne Effect as any I've seen in a while. What's the argument against a national curriculum for the USA (which would also have the advantage of ensuring that all students learned about evolution)?
Yes, Catholic schools are run by Catholics, but one need not be Catholic to attend them. Again, treading out on the thin ice where I lack expertise, I believe a substantial percentage of the students in NYC Catholic schools are non-Catholic.
Posted by: Will Allen on December 27, 2002 11:58 AMI still don't understand how it can be asserted that parents prepared to pay $3k/child/year form a homogeneous population with the public school system.
They are as homogenous a group as kids who do their homework and kids who don't. Some parents are motivated to scrape together $9/day toward their kids' future, and some aren't.
nobody appears to have any evidence at all on the effects of selection, I still maintain that we shouldn't make off the cuff statements about the size of this effect.
Only someone who has never seen the schools and the kids can assert pupil selection is
the key variable. If you feel the need to hunt for "evidence", fine.
I still think we need to know more about the extent to which they select in order to know whether their model can be generalised.
Paralysis by analysis has been the current eduacation establishment's "high road" to forestalling reform. Meanwhile, another generation of primarily poor, black kids gets shafted.
there is a very good case for its regulation in order to establish a baseline standard of quality
Is there any field with more testing, standards-setting and benchmarking? And how does this fit with the recent movement away from the SAT and its ilk?
I'd be interested to know how the voucher advocates propose to do something about the inequality problem
You mean the inequality problem whereby now only folks who can cut checks for large amounts of money have school choice?
What's the argument against a national curriculum for the USA...?
Who writes it? The politics would be overwhelming. See above remark on the failure/allure of central planning.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 27, 2002 12:39 PM>>. See above remark on the failure/allure of central planning<<
See Germany, France and Japan. This isn't a hypothetical, Bucky.
Furthermore, "paralysis by analysis" is not necessarily a bad thing. Change is bad for an education system per se.
But thanks for basically admitting that there is a problem in generalising from the current experience of selective parochial schools:
>>Some parents are motivated to scrape together $9/day toward their kids' future, and some aren't.<<
Indeed (though I think you're making a bit of a stretch in assuming that everyone can "scrape together" two hours' of minimum wage). But that means that you shouldn't assume that a system that worked for the parents who can, will work for the parents who can't.
Posted by: DD on December 27, 2002 01:07 PMSee Germany, France and Japan.
See countries with school populations a fraction the size of the US', and far less "diversity"'.
Change is bad for an education system per se.
Only if you think the odds are that change will make things worse. That is far from the highest probabilty bet, given the status quo.
thanks for basically admitting that there is a problem in generalising from the current experience of selective parochial schools
Thank YOU for proving that facts and logic are meaningless to a determined ideologue.
you shouldn't assume that a system that worked for the parents who can, will work for the parents who can't.
Nor should one assume a system that is demonstrably failing nearly everyone is worth keeping. And, of course, people who strive have rights too.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 27, 2002 01:20 PMI attended a school in which Rousseau was taught in an uncritical fashion, as if it were Received Truth, and consider that to be nearly as negligent as failing to mention Darwin. I can't even imagine what tripe would be foisted upon the urchins with nationalized standards. The states may do it as well, but at least there are fifty opportunities for improvement.
Posted by: Will Allen on December 27, 2002 01:21 PMThe states may do it as well, but at least there are fifty opportunities for improvement.
The central plan advocates never EVER take into account the possibility that control may fall to their ideological foes.
Given history, as has been pointed out, that is just astonishing.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 27, 2002 01:25 PMWe're dealing with a sociological problem here that does not readily lend itself to an economics type solution.
There's ample published research showing that in the typical unionized urban school district -- with lockstep pay promotion, so the worst teachers get the same pay raises as the best -- pay raises do *not* increase teacher quality.[1]
Hmm. I'm not sure what to do with the school systems, but here's a question I've never seen answered: *why* are teachers paid so badly?. It's practically equivalent to social work; the pay is crap, but there's a ton of training and debt acquisition that goes in to it, so only people who want the job for non-compensation reasons take it. For that matter, why the gigantic gulf in compensation between college and high school educators, and the tiny gap between elementary and high school?
I'm not sure, but maybe it's a holdover from the days when it was one of the only jobs available to women, and they could be more-or-less forced to take low wages?
Posted by: Jason McCullough on December 27, 2002 02:13 PMWell, non-coms in in the Armed Forces aren't paid particularly well, either, for the the amount of responsibility they have, particularly in combat units. As I stated above, I have no idea what teachers "should" be paid, and I doubt anyone else does either. I just doubt that increasing pay will do anything to markedly improve the education of children, as long as the current model is employed.
Posted by: Will Allen on December 27, 2002 02:41 PM>>Thank YOU for proving that facts and logic are meaningless to a determined ideologue.<<
Sadly, the Bible is not taught in American schools, so my remark about motes and beams will presumably pass over your head.
Posted by: DD on December 27, 2002 04:00 PM>> Hmm. I'm not sure what to do with the school systems, but here's a question I've never seen answered: *why* are teachers paid so badly? <<
Well, here in NYC public school teacher salaries reach $82,300 after 22 years, and start at $39,000 for beginners with no experience. Plus quite generous benefits, for working 180 days a year, 6 hours and 40 minutes a day. (Many take other summer jobs.) Plus they get a "sabbatical year" with pay, usually taken the year before they retire (so the sabbatical need not add to their teaching skills, and they don't have to do anything to make it do so). Plus job security that is *absolute*.
So if two senior teachers marry each other they'll have income in the top 5% of households. (I dunno -- would they be "the rich" everyone's been talking about lately?) And a single teacher just starting with no experience has the median NY household income, $39k.
That really doesn't seem a pay level that is "so bad" -- and if you pro-rate it to the 240-day or so year that most people work, it's about one-third bigger.
And as the teachers' union constantly reminds everyone, the schools systems in all the surrounding areas pay a lot more.
So while it's a big country and things may be different where you are, the perennial (alleged) teacher shortage around these parts really doesn't seem to be due to poor pay, IMHO.
Jason, That is a good question.
However, teacher pay is pretty much equal to the compensation received by many types of line level civil service employees whose work either requires a fairly extensive education or is hazardous like the social workers you mentioned, nurses, police and fire dept. workers..............if you take a look at the federal job opportunity board you will see that even masters (and with some experience) level economists are entering the government work force at earnings of $35k to $45k a year.
So I'm not so sure it's a hold over from the days when women with little other opportunity took the position. I think that it's more that such wages are just what regular Joes and Janes make -regardless of education - if they are not involved in some sector of the economy concerned with profiteering (earning rents).
Now the few that become pricipals do better and some administrators make well into six figures. I think they are the ones that should be held accountable to the extent that, all things being equal, their respective schools or districts are failing.
However, as many of us have stated (ad nauseaum) there is little reason to believe that things are equal across school populations and districts.
One last time before I quit this thread.....
Givin the differences in the populations that each school must attempt to educate I see performance based pay raises as a means of rewarding those who have it easiest by virtue of possessing superior student bodies and punishment to those teachers who already have it the toughest by virtue of possessing the most difficult student bodies.
Vouchers will have the same effect by removing the most motivated students from the roughest schools and leaving those schools with an even more difficult to educate population.
Debating Brad's original post is like discussing ways by which one might improve the weave of the emperor's new clothes. It misses the point entirely.
On a positive note, many school districts are solving the problem of providing education to motivated students by removing them from the general poulation and placing them in "honors" classes. Give the schools more money for these programs and your problem is solved; provided you are willing to accept that college prep. is not for every child in America, but only for those ready, willing and able.
When I wrote that public schools should be allowed to compete with private schools, I also had in mind allowing public schools some degree of choice of who they want to admit. If a kid comes to school to fight, there is simply no point in forcing this kid to come to a regular school. For that kind of kid, special ed is the answer.
Of course, these things have civil liberties consequences... But I don't see how messing up every kid's future in an inner city school is going to help with furthuring the advancement of people of color, or for that matter lower-class kids in general.
In other words, public schools are faced with hiring and acceptance constrains that make it impossible to compete seriously with private schools. I think liberals should come to grip with the idea that postponing the reform of American public schools is only going to make reform harder, and risk the very existence of public education as we know it.
Can I get any more "even-handed" than that? :) Now, of course, the challenge is not to make this much needed reform the greatest opportunity for white racists to reseggregate education. Another reason for timely and efficient reforms in the public education system...
Posted by: Jean-Philippe Stijns on December 27, 2002 06:10 PM"The best predictor of academic success is a decent chunk of cash in the parental bank account."
Possibly, but it can't be the only substantive factor -- or rich men's sons would be Einsteins. Notoriously, they are not.
Money helps, but there is really no substitute for an intact home and parents who fiercely want their children to excel.
Posted by: Erich Schwarz on December 27, 2002 06:33 PM>>I hesitate to raise this issue, but is there not some implicit selection in Catholic schools simply by being Catholic? ... black Americans are more usually Protestant than Catholic; are we sure that the "Catholic schools outperformance" effect is not just picking up the race problem in the USA? <<
Um, yes, we can be sure. First, the study authors like those I cited aren't so dim as to not adjust for student characteristics. Second, Catholic schools in the inner cities now often have largely non-Catholic student bodies, some are even majority non-Catholic. Much like there's a special Chinese public school in NYC that African Americans send their children on long trips to attend, because it is a good school. (As someone mentioned earlier) The *poor* in this city want better schools than they've got.
In this regard we could note the Children's Scholarship Fund which offered poverty-level families 40,000 *partial* scholarships to mostly Catholic schools around the nation -- and got 1.2 million applications, 30 for every seat. Over a million poverty level families wanted to more than $1,000 each annually to get their children out of free public schools. That's them trying to vote with their feet.
Now, since there were so many fewer scholarships than applications they were awarded by lottery. This is interesting because it offers the first rigorously unbiased comparison of kids going to public schools and private schools on a voucher equivalent -- there's no difference between the kids. The program is too young to measure academic results, but so far the parents of the kids in the private schools report being much happier with the schools than do the parents of the kids in the public schools.
See An _Evaluation of the Children's Scholarship Fund_ at http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/pepg/execsum.htm
>> Vouchers will have the same effect by removing the most motivated students from the roughest schools and leaving those schools with an even more difficult to educate population...
On a positive note, many school districts are solving the problem of providing education to motivated students by removing them from the general poulation and placing them in "honors" classes.<<
And by setting up selective "magnet schools" too!
So the fantasy that vouchers might remove the best students from regular public schools -- any evidence of that seen in Milwaukee or Cleveland in the last decade? -- means that vouchers are bad.
But the reality of public schools *actually* removing the best students "from the general population" of students in regular public schools shows that public schools are good!
This reminds me of one of my favorite NY Times editorials ever. It (1) condemned a proposed voucher experiment in NYC saying it would result in "cream skimming" and deprive the neighborhood public schools of their best students; then (2) went on to say vouchers aren't necessary anyhow, as evidenced by the high academic standards of Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, whose practices only have to be emulated by the rest of the school system for it to fix itself.
Of course, Stuyvesant and Bronx Science cream skim the top 2% of the students from the entire NYC public school system, depriving all the neighborhood public schools of their best students. ;-)
Unfortunately, Jean Philippe, reform has taken exactly the wrong direction.
IDEA is a recent reform that ended special ed. and placed all of those kids back in the general population; and without the funding to deal with them through extra staff.
Public education policy is so liberal that it smacks of pure communism and suffers from all the limitations that economists recognize as being assocoiated with that philosophy.
The public school system is crippled by misguided legislation and litigation.
Even doubling teacher compensation won't make a difference in school performance regarding most schools that are currently performing badly.
Allow the schools to flunk students that don't learn material, to expell those who act out in class, accept that not all can achieve to high standards and then provide alternative programs for them.
This would be real reform.
Problem is that no politician can pursue this tact. Constituents would be too offended.
How much easier to depict the students as victims and the teachers as villians; a little morality play that draws us into the Republicans' machinations to scuttled public education along with every other egalitarian social program in the country.
Posted by: on December 27, 2002 10:00 PMJim, you seem to imply with your last post that we are some how at odds.
I just object to the idea of "letting failing schools fail".
As I said before, that's insane! Where would all the kids go? Out on the street? Bussed to far away districts where people may have moved to avoid elements of that population in the first place? And at what costs? As I have said bussing is quit expensive. What are the costs in terms of impact on the now overcrowded schools accepting the bussed kids?
And anyhow, schools will continue to perform badly as long as they must educate *all* students without the ability to hold them accountable for behavior and achievement.
I absolutely agree with you that students that want to achieve should have the opportunity to do so - away from the distraction of those who do not.
But, I don't trust the motivation behind the voucher system and I don't trust any aspect of the voucher system to function in a wholey disirable manner when implemented on a large scale.
To my mind, honors classes are a good compromise. Magnet schools are too expensive (partly because of bussing costs).
Posted by: E. Avedisian on December 27, 2002 10:49 PM"A recent study by Caroline Hoxby at Harvard University found that among public school teachers, the average SAT scores upon entering college fell in the 35th percentile in verbal and the 44th percentile in quantitative skills. This means that the people who are educating our next generation come on average from the lower half of the college achievement spectrum. "
Yeah, so what were their scores after *graduating* college?
We don't know, from this, anything about how they actually achieved in college. Maybe they worked hard, learned alot and emerged brilliant while the students who went in with high SAT scores drank, fooled around and learned nothing.
This is absolutely my last post here. But I must say that the material that set off this whole thread is shoddy. The author is a snake oil salesperson and I'm glad the thread took some tangents because the original wasn't worth serious discussion.
Posted by: E. Avedisian on December 27, 2002 11:10 PMSo Hoxby's research finds that class size matters.
Then we go to a voucher system.
Self interested individuals will seek to send their children to the best schools.
Now the best schools are overcrowded.
So performance there, drops. True, the money follows the student, but what about the need for more bricks and mortar in the popular schools that receive the influx? what about new transportation costs? I can imagine a district receiving a large influx of students as being financialy overwhelmed.
And if the students are not allowed to switch districts then how can vouchers do what they are supposed to? within a district the district still has a monopolistic hold over the students (eg) in situations where an entire district is performing sub-par, which is often the case.
Regardless of ability to cross districts, do the students then migrate to the next school that is performing better as increased costs and increased class size drive down performance at the current school of choice? Do we have a perpetual cycle of student migration year after year like consumers switching brands?
Several people on this post have pointed out some other serious questions that go to the fundemental reality of what is negatively impacting public education and what cannot be fixed by vouchers.
As an economist attached to a school of public administration, Hoxby (like so many of the school voucher proponents) has a remarkable ability to avoid addressing the tough questions. She sounds more like an idealogue working to get grant funding, her name out there, and published (not necessarily in that order of importance).
Despite some serious critiques that find flaws with voucher program research, the programs may indeed work on a small scale in some instances, but until the above questions are thoroughly examined we better hold off on large scale implementation.
Posted by: Johny on December 28, 2002 05:02 AMI've long felt the best proof of homo sapiens' ability to spontaneously organize mammoth successful vital operations is the conspicuously UNcentral planned daily feeding of New York City. [I learned of Frederic Bastiat's famous quote "Paris gets fed" late in life.]
On this thread and in the councils of govt, many assume for themselves the deus ex machina ability to manage confiscated resources beyond their ken to control the lives of complete strangers to ends (formal and fixed equalities) only historically approached at a cost of horrific suffering.
The laudable goal of leaving no child behind is subjugated to the fear that some child somewhere, God forbid someone whose family has acquired its own resources, may see her prospects brighten.
The totalitarian impulse, applied to children on a continental scale, is dressed up in lovely pseudo-scientific jargon, but its core controlling premise is repugnant. The millions of American families voting with their feet at extreme financial cost tells you all you need to know about the current state of play.
The homeschooling movement alone, more than a million strong, is damning evidence of the failure of the current system. Most studies show homeschooled kids perform no worse than their public schooled peers. Usually, they do better.
And what more damning evidence of the professional education elite's faux skill set than the examples of complete amateurs out-competing them?
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 28, 2002 06:03 AMSomehow I can't resist paraphrasing a famous economist recently quoted in another thread on this blog: DD says I'm wrong. Then he froths at the mouth:
<<--------quote------------
Sullivan, if you want me to respond to you, you're going to need to
a) not constantly cite the same three studies
b) not try to score silly debating point
c) give some impression of being interested in discussion
d) give me any reason to believe it's not a massive waste of my time
and
e) not cite the "liberal" political credentials of your sources in order to forestall accusations of being a political hack that were never made.
All in all, you're probably better off emailing your information to Jim Glass, who is much less likely to be ignored.
----------endquote----------->>
In order: (a) Gee it's great that I'm not restricted to three cites since just one of mine:
http://www.nber.org/books/schools/
contains 8 papers all by itself.
But I'm puzzled why DD would require more studies, when he doesn't seem to be able to deal with any of those already cited.
(b) Would that be like asking if anyone knows about the "Hawthorne effect"? But, it has been my experience that people who complain about others trying to score "debating points", are well aware that they are losing the debate.
(c) Why isn't directly responding to other posters claims such evidence?
(d) You think it a waste of your time to acquaint yourself with the empirical research of other legitimate scholars?
(e)I mentioned Hoxby's pedigree for the benefit of those who make claims like:
>> Democrats. Democrats. Must be all those horrid Democrats keeping schools for being a garden of delights. Horrid liberal Democrats are really the responsible parties. <<
or: >>One major study that reported positive results was conducted by a "non-partisan non profit group" that is, in reality, neither, but is instead a front for the Republicans.<<
And finally, Jim Glass is already aware of these studies, since, unlike most posting here, he bothers to read the relevant literature BEFORE shooting off his mouth.
<<-------quote--------
Then we go to a voucher system.
Self interested individuals will seek to send their children to the best schools.
Now the best schools are overcrowded.
So performance there, drops. True, the money follows the student, but what about the need for more bricks and mortar in the popular schools that receive the influx?
--------endquote-------->>
Gee, does anyone think the average college student in an introductory econ class couldn't answer this one? But for the curious, try the amusing, WHAT IF SUPERMARKETS
WERE RUN LIKE SCHOOLS, at:
http://www.schoolchoices.org/roo/harris1.htm
<--------quote--------
Due to the importance of equality of opportunity to buy groceries and to protect children from starvation due to negligent and ignorant parents buying the wrong groceries, we have government provided supermarkets, financed by taxes, at which shoppers can get a basket of groceries for free.
Customers are forced to shop at the supermarket in their suburb, and can only change to another government supermarket with permission, and subject to room at that supermarket. There are private supermarkets, but customers have to pay for their groceries there. Entry of new supermarkets is heavily regulated. New supermarkets are not allowed in areas of declining population. The government favours private supermarket proposals from the large national chains.
The public supermarkets in each State are run by huge Departments of Supermarkets. Pay, staffing and working conditions are centrally determined, by negotiations with the unions. Some regions find it difficult to attract staff. Employment conditions are strictly regulated, with rigid job classifications (check-out operator, shelf-stacker, trolley retriever, price labeller). Hours worked and tasks are strictly mandated. The number of staff in each position in supermarkets is strictly regulated. Pay rises tend to be uniform across all classifications. Although the public supermarkets seem to be overmanned, particularly when compared to the private sector, checkout queues are much longer and shelves are frequently empty.
-----------endquote--------->>
>> The reason that I consider privatisation of education (which is what we're talking about here, unless "school choice" is only meant to mean something like the British system) to be blackboard economics is that I've never seen any consideration of the dynamics (as opposed to comparative statics), or of the problem of inequality.<<
Let's have a little more empirical evidence on the effects of competition (or the Hawthorne Effect, as DD wishes to call it):
http://www.schoolchoiceinfo.org/what/milw_impact.jsp
<<------quote----------
The Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel has frequently reported that the MPCP [Milwaukee Choice Program] has such an effect on
MPS [Milwaukee Public Schools]. A November 15, 2000 Journal Sentinel story listed several MPS schools
that had sought, and received, "more freedom to shape their programs than
traditional [public] schools." The paper explained: "The schools clearly
were aiming to reshape themselves to be more appealing in a more competitive
school market."
On November 28, 2000, The Journal Sentinel cited changes in "the fundamental
realities of how many [public] schools operate in Milwaukee." It described
"decisions to make schools more independent, more innovative, more attuned
to their communities - and, most of all, more popular with parents in an era
where Milwaukee parents have more choices for publicly funded education than
perhaps anyone in American history."
A January 7, 2001, story by the paper's senior education reporter said, "the
spirit of choice is permeating the Milwaukee Public School[s] . [S]chools
are trying with once-unthinkable earnestness to win over parents." A January
23, 2001, editorial said, "Milwaukee's choice program [has] put pressure on
Milwaukee Public Schools to improve."
Further illustrating the positive new environment, MPS launched an extensive
campaign to encourage parents to choose public schools. The campaign
included radio, newspaper and television ads, a 30-minute infomercial about
the district, billboards and district-wide open houses.
Milwaukee Superintendent Spence Korte readily agreed that MPS is trying to be
competitive, saying:
"Like many other monopolistic operations, you get a little bit complacent
when you're the only game in town .We needed to be able to compete, to
really get better, and to be more sensitive to what parents are telling us
they need."
[Patty Lowe, "The School Down the Block," on "Weekend," Wisconsin Public
Television, WMVS-TV, Milwaukee, January 12, 2001.]
--------endquote----------->>
The pleasure of coming to a discussion of education in the middle is that there is a mountain of disinformation to clear away.
Take, for example, the assertions that teachers are so well paid, which come off as some attempt at dark humor by those who live on them. Among college educated professionals with advanced degrees, teachers earnings are at the very bottom of the salary scale, below not only doctors, lawyers and business executives, but also accountants, nurses, sales supervisors, writers and artists, and social workers. This remains the case even after the ameliorative effects of widespread unionization and collective bargaining in the late 1960s and early 1970s. [What Matters Most: Teaching for America’s Future. Summary Report of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future. New York: 1996. p. 13.]
Or take the assertion, based on nothing but economic theory, it would appear, that an increase in teacher salary has no effect on teacher quality. For decades following the fiscal crisis of 1975, New York City's pubic school teacher salaries lagged signficantly below those of the surrounding suburbs -- somewhere in the range of 25 to 30%, prior to the adoption of a new contract last June. And, during the same period of time, New York City was the only jurisdiction in the entire state which had a significant number of uncertified teachers -- that is, teachers who did not meet the minimum qualifications for a state license [a BA with an appropriate major, a number of education courses, passage of minimum competency entrance exams known as the Praxis series produced by ETS, the same folks who do the SATs, etc.]. By the start of the 2001 school year, as many as 1 in every seven NYC public school teachers were uncertified. And if you think that does not matter, understand that these teachers were very highly concentrated in the lowest performing, inner city schools, where there was a near perpetual turnover in the staff.
Under the pressure of a state mandate to eliminate all uncertified teachers by the school year 2003-2004, the city reached a collective bargaining agreement with the teachers union which provided a 16% salary increase [6% of which involved an increased day], thus reducing -- not eliminating -- the gap with suburban pay by about one-half. Lo and behold, NYC was able to begin this school year without one new uncertified hire, finding thousands of certified teachers for the new salary. As Richard Rothstein noted in his _New York Times_ education analysis column [September 25, 2002], the much vaunted "teacher shortage" problem, nationally as well in NYC, is not a problem of supply, but of retention. As a result of the relatively low rate of remuneration and the relatively high rate of stress which accords with the position [tendencies that are accentuated in urban school settings], close to 1 in every 2 new teachers leave the profession within the first five years, with higher rates of turnover in urban schools. Those who do stay, often feel the economic need to move to school districts with higher rates of pay.
Teaching is a profession which involves a rather complex set of skills which must be performed simultaneously. It takes a minimum of two years of practice to master the fundamental skills, and constant professional development to be a master teacher. When there is a high turnover in staff, with a constant influx of large numbers of novice staff, the quality of teaching diminishes. When experienced staff is retained, and the novice staff is properly mentored into the profession, the quality of teaching is at least maintained, if not improved.
I have to run to pick up the wife and kids now, but more debunking of disinformation soon.
Posted by: Leo Casey on December 28, 2002 03:35 PMThe pleasure of coming to a discussion of education in the middle is that there is a mountain of disinformation to clear away.
Take, for example, the assertions that teachers are so well paid, which come off as some attempt at dark humor by those who live on them. Among college educated professionals with advanced degrees, teachers earnings are at the very bottom of the salary scale, below not only doctors, lawyers and business executives, but also accountants, nurses, sales supervisors, writers and artists, and social workers. This remains the case even after the ameliorative effects of widespread unionization and collective bargaining in the late 1960s and early 1970s. [What Matters Most: Teaching for America’s Future. Summary Report of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future. New York: 1996. p. 13.]
Or take the assertion, based on nothing but economic theory, it would appear, that an increase in teacher salary has no effect on teacher quality. For decades following the fiscal crisis of 1975, New York City's pubic school teacher salaries lagged signficantly below those of the surrounding suburbs -- somewhere in the range of 25 to 30%, prior to the adoption of a new contract last June. And, during the same period of time, New York City was the only jurisdiction in the entire state which had a significant number of uncertified teachers -- that is, teachers who did not meet the minimum qualifications for a state license [a BA with an appropriate major, a number of education courses, passage of minimum competency entrance exams known as the Praxis series produced by ETS, the same folks who do the SATs, etc.]. By the start of the 2001 school year, as many as 1 in every seven NYC public school teachers were uncertified. And if you think that does not matter, understand that these teachers were very highly concentrated in the lowest performing, inner city schools, where there was a near perpetual turnover in the staff.
Under the pressure of a state mandate to eliminate all uncertified teachers by the school year 2003-2004, the city reached a collective bargaining agreement with the teachers union which provided a 16% salary increase [6% of which involved an increased day], thus reducing -- not eliminating -- the gap with suburban pay by about one-half. Lo and behold, NYC was able to begin this school year without one new uncertified hire, finding thousands of certified teachers for the new salary. As Richard Rothstein noted in his _New York Times_ education analysis column [September 25, 2002], the much vaunted "teacher shortage" problem, nationally as well in NYC, is not a problem of supply, but of retention. As a result of the relatively low rate of remuneration and the relatively high rate of stress which accords with the position [tendencies that are accentuated in urban school settings], close to 1 in every 2 new teachers leave the profession within the first five years, with higher rates of turnover in urban schools. Those who do stay, often feel the economic need to move to school districts with higher rates of pay.
Teaching is a profession which involves a rather complex set of skills which must be performed simultaneously. It takes a minimum of two years of practice to master the fundamental skills, and constant professional development to be a master teacher. When there is a high turnover in staff, with a constant influx of large numbers of novice staff, the quality of teaching diminishes. When experienced staff is retained, and the novice staff is properly mentored into the profession, the quality of teaching is at least maintained, if not improved.
I have to run to pick up the wife and kids now, but more debunking of disinformation soon.
Posted by: Leo Casey on December 28, 2002 03:36 PMHow about stopping to make public schools a stay in or drop out issue? Let's simply accept the idea that there should be several levels of education in high schools as well as there is for universities. I haven't heard anybody yet arguing that UC Berkeley should accept unconditionally all high school graduates from the Berkeley district (although I do have heard arguments going in that direction, of course.)
By the way, even Sovietic schools could get pretty elitist... :) And I would bet that the Chinese educational system is elistist all the way from kindergarten up to college... Why? Because, nationalism aside, true egalitarianism is not about equal outcomes but equal opportunities. And opportunities are dependant on talents, ambitions and personalities... (could I write something more obvious?)
(No, I am not communist! Genuine communists generally think I am their most subversive ennemy.)
Posted by: Jean-Philippe Stijns on December 28, 2002 04:19 PMTeaching is a profession which involves a rather complex set of skills which must be performed simultaneously. It takes a minimum of two years of practice to master the fundamental skills, and constant professional development to be a master teacher.
Which means homeschoolers should underperform conventionally educated kids. But they don't.
Among college educated professionals with advanced degrees, teachers earnings are at the very bottom of the salary scale, below not only doctors, lawyers and business executives, but also accountants, nurses, sales supervisors, writers and artists, and social workers.
You must know different writers and artists than I do.
I will also point out that most of the occupations cited involve competitive economic models, while teachers live in a substantially closed, non-competitive environment. Perhaps that accounts for the different comp?
I would imagine a true "master teacher" would make a large multiple of today's wages if the field were open to competition.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 28, 2002 05:09 PMP.S. and there would be no more nor less reasons to use Affirmative Action in a public, differenciated, high-school system than in public universities. That would actually be a more effective and more productive way of desegragating high schools!
Smart African American kids would be able to study in high standards white neighborhood schools and weaker white students would study in lower standards schools. Wouldn't that be fun?
Posted by: Jean-Philippe Stijns on December 28, 2002 05:19 PMMr. Casey, it might clarify things if you informed other posters of your professional interest in this topic.
...the real difficult task is reworking public education
so that it reflects this idea of 'complex equality.'
Leo Casey
United Federation of Teachers
260 Park Avenue South
New York, New York 10010
http://www.edc.org/GLG/edu-democ/hypermail/0078.html
What ever Sullivan. Anyone really interested in imperical reasons that the studies claiming voucher effectiveness are flawed and not sufficient to use as a basis for policy formation doesn't have to believe me.
I'm sure that these guys have credentials enough....
www.epinet.org/studies/vouchers-full.pdf
It's more than a soundbite.
Note to self....never say "done here".
I don't know which way to go here. I hate the American public school system. My parents were both public school teachers who quit the system because it's horrible. Teacher qualifications are a bit of a joke even among teachers. The American public schools I've been in were at best little more than state subsidised daycares, at worst, they are prisons for children, except in prision you don't usually have to ask for permission to pee and don't get punished because you're bored.
So, let me advance a real, radical leftist agenda for education. One you will never hear a well-meaning believer in education ever propose.
School should be free and universally accessible to everyone, regardless of their age, previous school record, economic condition or immigration status, for exactly the same reason people should have equal access to the courts and the vote: because it is an essential human right. The right to free self-development is the most important human right, one that subsumes within it the freedom from slavery, the freedom of the press, freedom of speech, of faith, freedom from harrassment and every other freedom worth a rat's ass. It should be the core value of anyone who dares to call themselves a humanist. And there is no self-development without education in some guise.
This freedom can not be guaranteed by a free market - if for no other reason than that free markets are not guarantors of any freedom, including the freedom to buy what you want. It can't be guaranteed by teacher's unions and it sure can't be provided by Prussian model public schools. And like all freedoms in practice, it has limits in the real world.
So if you think this value is important, forget vouchers. At best, they may move a handful of lucky poor kids into schools where the average family income is higher than their own, because I have read a lot of studies of educational outcomes over the years, and the only solid predictor of school outcomes is the median income of your peers. At worst, it will be like the transition from publicly owned prisions to private ones: from a tolerable hell to an intolerable one.
What I most fear from vouchers is schools that keep children locked inside until 6pm because it's more convenient for parents. I fear schools that promise to test your child for drug use every month. Schools - public and private alike - have little conception of the notion that children have rights, and free market education will quickly find easy profits in pandering to parents' paranoia and forgetting all about education.
In almost every developed country in the world, the state offers some subsidy to private education - including religious education - and takes some role in setting standards and regulating their activities. I have no in principle objection to this. But vouchers encourage parents to look at schools not in terms of what is best for their children, but as an immediate cost, like buying a car. That is what's wrong. Society has to subsidise education if it is to benefit everyone equally.
And don't pass off this crap about how American schools are worse than state subsidised schools in Canada and Europe because American schools are more diverse. What crap. Bad schools in awful, immmigrant neighbourhoods in Belgium still graduate children who can read and write in two or more languages and still send more kids on to university than all-white schools in lower middle class neighbourhoods in the US do. Diversity has no impact at all on educational outcomes when samples are controlled for income.
Is there a single nation in the whole world where free market education has ever raised eduational outcomes? How is it that people who constantly decry governments experimenting in untried social programs are in favour vouchers?
Instead, if you want good schools, abolish manditory education. If a 14 year old is happier and more productive as an apprentice in a print shop, let them work. When a student is disruptive and uninterested in school, let them do something else. Children want to learn, sometimes desperately. This is something we beat out of them by sending them to schools where they have no power over any aspect of their lives. Children are not magically transformed into adults on their 18th birthdays. If at 18 they can choose what's best for themselves, they can at much younger ages too.
But there is a flip side to this. When the child who has left school and as a adult decides they now wish they had a good education, we have to provide for this the same way we provide children.
The only reform agenda I support is one where schools are free - and that means extensively if not exclusively tax-payer supported - and open to all who can profit by them, but where no one is ever forced into them. Deciding who can profit by school is not a trivial problem, but is no worse than college admissions. If working parents need state subsidised daycares then by all means build state subsidised daycares, but stop calling them schools and let the children play if they want to.
The great irony of teaching is that it isn't even hard. Basic literacy and numeracy can be taught by most any literate and numerate person who is reasonalby good with children. What's hard is being a prison guard for 20 to 50 children while trying to teach them. Yes, reduce classroom sizes. Yes, raise teacher wages to encourage better people to go into the field. With smaller classrooms, the paper qualifications of teachers become relatively unimportant when compared to qualitative measures like whether children like them.
Vouchers... vouchers replace a bad system with an easily cut entitlement. Forget vouchers. Ask yourself what school is for and ask what schools are doing. That should be what motivates reform.
Posted by: Scott Martens on December 28, 2002 07:27 PMI don't know which way to go here. I hate the American public school system. My parents were both public school teachers who quit the system because it's horrible. Teacher qualifications are a bit of a joke even among teachers. The American public schools I've been in were at best little more than state subsidised daycares, at worst, they are prisons for children, except in prision you don't usually have to ask for permission to pee and don't get punished because you're bored.
So, let me advance a real, radical leftist agenda for education. One you will never hear a well-meaning believer in education ever propose.
School should be free and universally accessible to everyone, regardless of their age, previous school record, economic condition or immigration status, for exactly the same reason people should have equal access to the courts and the vote: because it is an essential human right. The right to free self-development is the most important human right, one that subsumes within it the freedom from slavery, the freedom of the press, freedom of speech, of faith, freedom from harrassment and every other freedom worth a rat's ass. It should be the core value of anyone who dares to call themselves a humanist. And there is no self-development without education in some guise.
This freedom can not be guaranteed by a free market - if for no other reason than that free markets are not guarantors of any freedom, including the freedom to buy what you want. It can't be guaranteed by teacher's unions and it sure can't be provided by Prussian model public schools. And like all freedoms in practice, it has limits in the real world.
So if you think this value is important, forget vouchers. At best, they may move a handful of lucky poor kids into schools where the average family income is higher than their own, because I have read a lot of studies of educational outcomes over the years, and the only solid predictor of school outcomes is the median income of your peers. At worst, it will be like the transition from publicly owned prisions to private ones: from a tolerable hell to an intolerable one.
What I most fear from vouchers is schools that keep children locked inside until 6pm because it's more convenient for parents. I fear schools that promise to test your child for drug use every month. Schools - public and private alike - have little conception of the notion that children have rights, and free market education will quickly find easy profits in pandering to parents' paranoia and forgetting all about education.
In almost every developed country in the world, the state offers some subsidy to private education - including religious education - and takes some role in setting standards and regulating their activities. I have no in principle objection to this. But vouchers encourage parents to look at schools not in terms of what is best for their children, but as an immediate cost, like buying a car. That is what's wrong. Society has to subsidise education if it is to benefit everyone equally.
And don't pass off this crap about how American schools are worse than state subsidised schools in Canada and Europe because American schools are more diverse. What crap. Bad schools in awful, immmigrant neighbourhoods in Belgium still graduate children who can read and write in two or more languages and still send more kids on to university than all-white schools in lower middle class neighbourhoods in the US do. Diversity has no impact at all on educational outcomes when samples are controlled for income.
Is there a single nation in the whole world where free market education has ever raised eduational outcomes? How is it that people who constantly decry governments experimenting in untried social programs are in favour vouchers?
Instead, if you want good schools, abolish manditory education. If a 14 year old is happier and more productive as an apprentice in a print shop, let them work. When a student is disruptive and uninterested in school, let them do something else. Children want to learn, sometimes desperately. This is something we beat out of them by sending them to schools where they have no power over any aspect of their lives. Children are not magically transformed into adults on their 18th birthdays. If at 18 they can choose what's best for themselves, they can at much younger ages too.
But there is a flip side to this. When the child who has left school and as a adult decides they now wish they had a good education, we have to provide for this the same way we provide children.
The only reform agenda I support is one where schools are free - and that means extensively if not exclusively tax-payer supported - and open to all who can profit by them, but where no one is ever forced into them. Deciding who can profit by school is not a trivial problem, but is no worse than college admissions. If working parents need state subsidised daycares then by all means build state subsidised daycares, but stop calling them schools and let the children play if they want to.
The great irony of teaching is that it isn't even hard. Basic literacy and numeracy can be taught by most any literate and numerate person who is reasonalby good with children. What's hard is being a prison guard for 20 to 50 children while trying to teach them. Yes, reduce classroom sizes. Yes, raise teacher wages to encourage better people to go into the field. With smaller classrooms, the paper qualifications of teachers become relatively unimportant when compared to qualitative measures like whether children like them.
Vouchers... vouchers replace a bad system with an easily cut entitlement. Forget vouchers. Ask yourself what school is for and ask what schools are doing. That should be what motivates reform.
Posted by: Scott Martens on December 28, 2002 07:28 PMI don't know which way to go here. I hate the American public school system. My parents were both public school teachers who quit the system because it's horrible. Teacher qualifications are a bit of a joke even among teachers. The American public schools I've been in were at best little more than state subsidised daycares, at worst, they are prisons for children, except in prision you don't usually have to ask for permission to pee and don't get punished because you're bored.
So, let me advance a real, radical leftist agenda for education. One you will never hear a well-meaning believer in education ever propose.
School should be free and universally accessible to everyone, regardless of their age, previous school record, economic condition or immigration status, for exactly the same reason people should have equal access to the courts and the vote: because it is an essential human right. The right to free self-development is the most important human right, one that subsumes within it the freedom from slavery, the freedom of the press, freedom of speech, of faith, freedom from harrassment and every other freedom worth a rat's ass. It should be the core value of anyone who dares to call themselves a humanist. And there is no self-development without education in some guise.
This freedom can not be guaranteed by a free market - if for no other reason than that free markets are not guarantors of any freedom, including the freedom to buy what you want. It can't be guaranteed by teacher's unions and it sure can't be provided by Prussian model public schools. And like all freedoms in practice, it has limits in the real world.
So if you think this value is important, forget vouchers. At best, they may move a handful of lucky poor kids into schools where the average family income is higher than their own, because I have read a lot of studies of educational outcomes over the years, and the only solid predictor of school outcomes is the median income of your peers. At worst, it will be like the transition from publicly owned prisions to private ones: from a tolerable hell to an intolerable one.
What I most fear from vouchers is schools that keep children locked inside until 6pm because it's more convenient for parents. I fear schools that promise to test your child for drug use every month. Schools - public and private alike - have little conception of the notion that children have rights, and free market education will quickly find easy profits in pandering to parents' paranoia and forgetting all about education.
In almost every developed country in the world, the state offers some subsidy to private education - including religious education - and takes some role in setting standards and regulating their activities. I have no in principle objection to this. But vouchers encourage parents to look at schools not in terms of what is best for their children, but as an immediate cost, like buying a car. That is what's wrong. Society has to subsidise education if it is to benefit everyone equally.
And don't pass off this crap about how American schools are worse than state subsidised schools in Canada and Europe because American schools are more diverse. What crap. Bad schools in awful, immmigrant neighbourhoods in Belgium still graduate children who can read and write in two or more languages and still send more kids on to university than all-white schools in lower middle class neighbourhoods in the US do. Diversity has no impact at all on educational outcomes when samples are controlled for income.
Is there a single nation in the whole world where free market education has ever raised eduational outcomes? How is it that people who constantly decry governments experimenting in untried social programs are in favour vouchers?
Instead, if you want good schools, abolish manditory education. If a 14 year old is happier and more productive as an apprentice in a print shop, let them work. When a student is disruptive and uninterested in school, let them do something else. Children want to learn, sometimes desperately. This is something we beat out of them by sending them to schools where they have no power over any aspect of their lives. Children are not magically transformed into adults on their 18th birthdays. If at 18 they can choose what's best for themselves, they can at much younger ages too.
But there is a flip side to this. When the child who has left school and as a adult decides they now wish they had a good education, we have to provide for this the same way we provide children.
The only reform agenda I support is one where schools are free - and that means extensively if not exclusively tax-payer supported - and open to all who can profit by them, but where no one is ever forced into them. Deciding who can profit by school is not a trivial problem, but is no worse than college admissions. If working parents need state subsidised daycares then by all means build state subsidised daycares, but stop calling them schools and let the children play if they want to.
The great irony of teaching is that it isn't even hard. Basic literacy and numeracy can be taught by most any literate and numerate person who is reasonalby good with children. What's hard is being a prison guard for 20 to 50 children while trying to teach them. Yes, reduce classroom sizes. Yes, raise teacher wages to encourage better people to go into the field. With smaller classrooms, the paper qualifications of teachers become relatively unimportant when compared to qualitative measures like whether children like them.
Vouchers... vouchers replace a bad system with an easily cut entitlement. Forget vouchers. Ask yourself what school is for and ask what schools are doing. That should be what motivates reform.
Posted by: Scott Martens on December 28, 2002 07:28 PMI don't know which way to go here. I hate the American public school system. My parents were both public school teachers who quit the system because it's horrible. Teacher qualifications are a bit of a joke even among teachers. The American public schools I've been in were at best little more than state subsidised daycares, at worst, they are prisons for children, except in prision you don't usually have to ask for permission to pee and don't get punished because you're bored.
So, let me advance a real, radical leftist agenda for education. One you will never hear a well-meaning believer in education ever propose.
School should be free and universally accessible to everyone, regardless of their age, previous school record, economic condition or immigration status, for exactly the same reason people should have equal access to the courts and the vote: because it is an essential human right. The right to free self-development is the most important human right, one that subsumes within it the freedom from slavery, the freedom of the press, freedom of speech, of faith, freedom from harrassment and every other freedom worth a rat's ass. It should be the core value of anyone who dares to call themselves a humanist. And there is no self-development without education in some guise.
This freedom can not be guaranteed by a free market - if for no other reason than that free markets are not guarantors of any freedom, including the freedom to buy what you want. It can't be guaranteed by teacher's unions and it sure can't be provided by Prussian model public schools. And like all freedoms in practice, it has limits in the real world.
So if you think this value is important, forget vouchers. At best, they may move a handful of lucky poor kids into schools where the average family income is higher than their own, because I have read a lot of studies of educational outcomes over the years, and the only solid predictor of school outcomes is the median income of your peers. At worst, it will be like the transition from publicly owned prisions to private ones: from a tolerable hell to an intolerable one.
What I most fear from vouchers is schools that keep children locked inside until 6pm because it's more convenient for parents. I fear schools that promise to test your child for drug use every month. Schools - public and private alike - have little conception of the notion that children have rights, and free market education will quickly find easy profits in pandering to parents' paranoia and forgetting all about education.
In almost every developed country in the world, the state offers some subsidy to private education - including religious education - and takes some role in setting standards and regulating their activities. I have no in principle objection to this. But vouchers encourage parents to look at schools not in terms of what is best for their children, but as an immediate cost, like buying a car. That is what's wrong. Society has to subsidise education if it is to benefit everyone equally.
And don't pass off this crap about how American schools are worse than state subsidised schools in Canada and Europe because American schools are more diverse. What crap. Bad schools in awful, immmigrant neighbourhoods in Belgium still graduate children who can read and write in two or more languages and still send more kids on to university than all-white schools in lower middle class neighbourhoods in the US do. Diversity has no impact at all on educational outcomes when samples are controlled for income.
Is there a single nation in the whole world where free market education has ever raised eduational outcomes? How is it that people who constantly decry governments experimenting in untried social programs are in favour vouchers?
Instead, if you want good schools, abolish manditory education. If a 14 year old is happier and more productive as an apprentice in a print shop, let them work. When a student is disruptive and uninterested in school, let them do something else. Children want to learn, sometimes desperately. This is something we beat out of them by sending them to schools where they have no power over any aspect of their lives. Children are not magically transformed into adults on their 18th birthdays. If at 18 they can choose what's best for themselves, they can at much younger ages too.
But there is a flip side to this. When the child who has left school and as a adult decides they now wish they had a good education, we have to provide for this the same way we provide children.
The only reform agenda I support is one where schools are free - and that means extensively if not exclusively tax-payer supported - and open to all who can profit by them, but where no one is ever forced into them. Deciding who can profit by school is not a trivial problem, but is no worse than college admissions. If working parents need state subsidised daycares then by all means build state subsidised daycares, but stop calling them schools and let the children play if they want to.
The great irony of teaching is that it isn't even hard. Basic literacy and numeracy can be taught by most any literate and numerate person who is reasonalby good with children. What's hard is being a prison guard for 20 to 50 children while trying to teach them. Yes, reduce classroom sizes. Yes, raise teacher wages to encourage better people to go into the field. With smaller classrooms, the paper qualifications of teachers become relatively unimportant when compared to qualitative measures like whether children like them.
Vouchers... vouchers replace a bad system with an easily cut entitlement. Forget vouchers. Ask yourself what school is for and ask what schools are doing. That should be what motivates reform.
Posted by: Scott Martens on December 28, 2002 07:29 PMLeo Casey, apparently of the United Federation of Teachers, wrote:
>>... there is a mountain of disinformation to clear away. Take, for example, the assertions that teachers are so well paid, which come off as some attempt at dark humor <<
The assertion regarding NYC teachers was that they get paid from $39,000 to $81,200. If that's so wrong as to constitute "dark humor", please feel free to correct the UFT web site, from which the numbers came.
>> ... Among college educated professionals with advanced degrees, teachers earnings are at the very bottom of the salary scale, below not only doctors, lawyers and business executives, but also accountants, nurses, sales supervisors, writers and artists, and social workers<<
Well, gosh -- doctors, lawyers, CPAs, and the like need graduate school degrees to get a job, while teachers don't. But you think teachers should be paid as much as them nonetheless?
As for the rest, the Statistical Abstract of the US for 1997 gives "average earnings for highest degree earned -- Bachelors, $36,980" and also "average salary and wages public school systems -- classroom teachers, $38,706." So that indicates teachers were making above average salaries for their education level.
Though they might well have been expected to make below-average pay, given both their 180-day work year and the fact that according to ETS college graduates who pass the Praxis II test to become teachers have SAT scores that average 55 points below the average for all college graduates.
>> Or take the assertion, based on nothing but economic theory, it would appear, that an increase in teacher salary has no effect on teacher quality <<
It wasn't a mere assertion of theory. It was a peer-reviewed presentation of factual data. I would hope a teacher with the job of instructing young minds would know the difference.
Theory would say that raising wages *would* raise teacher quality -- as the data says it in fact does in non-union districts.
>> Richard Rothstein noted in his _New York Times_ education analysis column [September 25, 2002], the much vaunted "teacher shortage" problem, nationally as well in NYC, is not a problem of supply, but of retention.... <<
Correct, which shows salaries are sufficient to attract people to the job, it's the work conditions they find after they ariive that turn them off. Such as the most capable teachers finding they are confined to lockstep raises with the least capable. Which is one reason why the retention problem is worst with the highest qualified.
BTW, Rothstein also noted that since even the teacher shortage as it does exist is confined to a few limited subject areas, such as science and math, the obvious efficient course is to increase wages just in those areas, not across the board, to attract science and math teachers as needed. A simple and sensible idea that the UFT is yet to endorse. ;-)
All right, here's my problem with Mr. Lazar's piece:
> The evidence suggests that child behavior is very sensitive to teacher quality....
> The biggest obstacle here is that teacher quality is not closely related to any characteristic on which salaries are based -- for example, work experience or academic degrees held by the teacher....
Yes, and that's important! Teacher quality is not related to what teacher salaries are based on today.
> The solution is to have a large pool of applicants, a flexible turnover policy based on teacher performance...<
Sounds good -- "pay for performance". But something important is missing here....
> most education is provided publicly and is protected from the market. This suggests that more competition is needed, with accountability as the guiding principle...<
Yes? Yes? ... But then Mr. Lazar says no more! *Accountability* surely is the guiding principle, as he says, for without it just *how* is his "flexible turnover policy based on teacher performance" going to be implemented? "Flexible turnover" means, of course, the poorest teachers are dismissed, with "higher teacher salaries to ...compensate for a reduction in job security."
But the billion dollar question is: What method of *accountability* does he propose to use, so his "flexible turnover" actually does cull out the low-quality teachers?? I mean, more pay is easy, accountability through "flexible turnover" *hard*.
After all, he himself says "teacher quality is not closely related to any characteristic on which salaries are based" now -- so if he's just for raising salaries based on the characteristics pay is based on now, he's pretty much guaranteed to throw money away.
Without new measures of accountability, performance related turnover is just a Christmas wish.
Accountability also is the tough political nut to crack, since performance-related "reduction in job security" is anathema to the teachers unions.
(Even here in this thread there are people saying, "How can anyone tell what makes a good teacher, to justify pay for performance"? Geeze, can you imagine the people in any other $800 billion service industry saying "We have no idea how to judge if anyone does a good job in our line of work. So give us *all* more money!")
Now, as it happens, a NYC school teacher asked the top people in the NYC Teachers' union and in the Board of Ed about this very accountability issue some while back, and wrote up what she learned in a book she wrote -- nominated for a Pulitzer prize -- from which I've extracted a relevant section that's posted at the link below.
BTW, she herself is an object lesson for the "hiring good teachers" issue. She was a Stanford graduate in economics who worked after college for eight years as a prize-winning journalist, who then decided to try teaching as a noble calling -- *exactly* the kind of top quality person the public schools so sorely need.
But she hadn't gone to Ed School, alas. So she had to get a special subject license to teach. She asked to teach journalism or English in high school -- but was denied, because she hadn't had enough college credits in English. The fact that she *was* a journalist didn't matter. So she asked to teach math --- but was denied, because she only had one class in advanced calculus in college. She'd made the mistake of being smart enough to take all her other calculus classes in high school so they didn't count, and neither did her Stanford economics courses. So she was assigned to teach "social sciences" - for which, she says, she was in fact totally unqualified.
Hey, does anyone see a possible way to increase the pool of qualified teachers apart from raising pay? (To be fair, here in NY a few steps in the right direction have been taken in this regard, though there's still a long way to go.)
But on to her discussion of accountability -- without which "teacher perfromance related" higher turnover is just a dream of Mr. Lazar's, devoutly to be wished, but no closer to reality under his proposal.
http://www.mindspring.com/~jimglass/ed_accountability.default
And that's my last comment here -- except to remind the good people of California to take a look at Prof. Figlio's paper and others like it.
So while it's a big country and things may be different where you are, the perennial (alleged) teacher shortage around these parts really doesn't seem to be due to poor pay, IMHO.
Hmm, further poking around the web shows that teacher salaries are actually pretty close to the median for the country (ignoring the silly extrapolation from 180 to 240 days that everyone does, as if teachers can easily get a comparable wage job for just 3 months). Not that it necessarily means a lot (I've no idea what median degreed wages are), but they're not starving. The constant bitching everywhere about a lack of science and math educators at that pay level makes sense though.
Oh, a parallel I've noticed: you can no more "fix" the public school system by a radical imposition of vouchers/homeschooling/etc (a few kids get horrible educations for one generation to save it) then you could have "fixed" welfare in the 1990s by just completely cutting off benefits. The short-term cost is just too horrible.
Posted by: Jason McCullough on December 29, 2002 12:48 AMMr. Martens' comments are quite provacative, with much to agree with while at the same time disputing others. As to disagreement, the notion that anyone has a "right" to an education is either totalitarian or fatuous. Obtaining an education, like obtaining health care, is dependent on the labor and ingenuity of others, and one cannot have a "right" to the labor and ingenuity of others without tacitly arguing that slavery is legitimate, which Mr. Martens rightly argues against in another context. The state may have a legtimate interest in providing education, just as it has a legitimate interest in providing for defense, but individuals no more have a "right" to the labor of teachers than they have the "right" to the labor of a United States Marine.
However, the notion of not forcing those people into classrooms who have no desire to be there, and therefore will not cooperate with others in the process of becoming educated, is a concept that should be explored. The first obligation is to those who will cooperate, and if forcing the uncooperative harms the interests of the cooperative, then a great harm has been done. The notion of providing state assistance for education beyond the normal childhood years may have some merit, but at certain point it is not unreasonable to ask people to take reponsibility for educating themselves.
Any educational reform movement, however, which does not address the fundamental problem of how to cut off capital to those entities, whether they be teachers, administrators, or school boards, which prove to incompetent in utilizing that capital, is doomed to failure. If capital were allocated in the automotive industry in the same manner as it were in the education industry, the Corvair, or it's equivalent, would be the most widely owned car in America. Hell, we might still be driving black Model Ts! There is the implication in Mr. Marten's post that parents are, as a whole, incapable of making competent choices reagarding their children's educations. Well, if this is the case, the entire debate is moot, for no amount of central planning by "experts" will compensate for parents who can not or will not pursue their childrens' best interests. Are parents perfect? Of course not. Are some hideous? No doubt. The notion, however, that there is some administrative, state-sanctioned fix for hideous parents is false.
Posted by: Will Allen on December 29, 2002 09:58 AM>> What ever Sullivan. <<
In other words: "Hey, I come here to spout my prejudices, not to learn anything. Sullivan, you've got a lot of nerve actually providing the group with facts. Go rain on someone else's parade.".
I think the above is a corollary to the doctrine of revealed preferences.
>> Anyone really interested in imperical reasons that the studies claiming voucher effectiveness are flawed and not sufficient to use as a basis for policy formation doesn't have to believe me.
>> I'm sure that these guys have credentials enough....
>> www.epinet.org/studies/vouchers-full.pdf <<
Well, if it's going to be a question of credentials, then your guys lose.
However, let's take a look at what actually is in the above url. Such as:
"...Greene’s claim that vouchers caused the observed gains in
Florida may or may not be true, but the evidence he presents is not sufficient
to support his case."
and,
" The results of the first round of studies in Milwaukee and Cleveland
suggest that parents who receive vouchers and use them (actually send their
children to private schools) are more satisfied with their schools than are
parents of similar socioeconomic background whose children attend public
schools. There is general agreement on that point. "
and,
" The results are less clear on the achievement effects of vouchers in
Milwaukee and Cleveland. Results varied according to which researchers
did the studies. The Peterson group produced the most favorable results for
vouchers in each of the two cities. When all the results are compared, it
appears that voucher-using (choice) students in Milwaukee probably made
greater gains by their third and fourth years in private schools—at least in
math—than did students in public schools. But the achievement effect was
not large, and only a fraction of voucher students stayed in private schools
for this long even though the voucher fully covered tuition. In Cleveland,
the most reliable results suggest that, after two years, choice students who
used their vouchers to attend existing (religious) private schools made greater
gains in science than did non-choice students but not in other subjects."
Not exactly damning evidence against vouchers. Especially given the hurdles that were constantly put in the way by the NEA, People for the American Way, and various anti-religious bigots.
BTW, here's the Paul Peterson referred to in the EPI paper:
<<-------------quote------------------
A lot of the arguments against vouchers are ad hominem arguments. This argument is used against me repeatedly. I used to say that I voted as a Democrat my entire life, and how can you make these claims? They were repeated so regularly that I decided that it was pointless to be taken aback by that. Actually, you're right. I voted for Ralph Nader last time. The point is that, yes, there is a lot more diverse support of vouchers than the rhetoric that you hear from the union leadership and people from the American right who keep saying this again and again and again.
It is true that vouchers have strong support from social conservatives who are interested in creating schools with a religious affiliation and having help in paying for the cost of sending their children to those schools. It is true that people who believe in a market economy tend to be more on the conservative wing of the spectrum. The voucher principle, which really is to use government dollars to fund public education consistent with the preferences of the family, is not necessarily a conservative idea. You can argue very persuasively that it is an egalitarian idea, more egalitarian than the system we currently have, where in order to get your preferred school, you have to buy a house in a preferred district, which really ties school choice to being able to have the capital to purchase the school that you want your child to attend.
Vouchers would greatly equalize educational opportunity as compared to this system.
-----------endquote------------->>
Scott Martens wrote:
>> School should be free and universally accessible to everyone....<<
Well, under a voucher scheme they would be, so what's your problem with them?
Also, as to:
>> Is there a single nation in the whole world where free market education has ever raised eduational outcomes? <<
Prior to Horace Mann, the United States was the most literate nation in the world (probably second was Great Britain). Tocqueville took note of this in his famous travel book.
Not to mention the thriving newspaper industry, the sales of books by Washington Irving, James Fennimore Cooper, Noah Webster etc. All before the establishment of the public school systems. Ditto for Great Britain.
Posted by: Patrick R. Sullivan on December 29, 2002 10:46 AM1) I believe most of the folks on this thread who currently, or at one time had, a personal financial stake in the educational status quo, speak strongly against serious, effective change.
2) I believe most of the people here who already enjoy educational choice due to personal financial resources (myself included) speak against the status quo.
3) Mr. Casey must have been delayed after picking up his family.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 29, 2002 01:39 PMDeclaring that everyone opposing you is doing it because they make money off the public school system isn't very nice.
As to disagreement, the notion that anyone has a "right" to an education is either totalitarian or fatuous.
Totalitarian: of or being a political system in which those in power have complete control and do not allow people freely to oppose them
a totalitarian regime/state
In totalitarian systems, everyone tends to suspect everyone else, even members of their own circle of family and friends.
What on earth are you talking about? Totalitarian?
Posted by: Jason McCullough on December 29, 2002 02:47 PMThe self-interest of the left is one of the great unmentionables of modern discourse.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 29, 2002 03:09 PMWell goodness, Jason, if there is a "right" to an education, any, even a majority, who infringe on that right by failing to teach, or to provide capital for others to teach, are legitimately subject to physical sanction, and thereby deprived of their freedom to not provide that education. They are, in effect, slaves to those who wish to have their "right" to an education fufilled. If you have a "right" to an education, I cannot freely oppose your wish to exercise that right by use of my labors. I have become your slave. Contrast this "right" to the right of free speech, which entails no demand on the labor or ingenuity of others to fufill. Now, if your right to free speech meant that I had the obligation to buy you a thirty second spot on "Friends" during a sweeps rating period, then the "right" to an education would be analogous. This is precisely why publicly funded campaigns are morally illegitimate.
Posted by: Will Allen on December 29, 2002 10:38 PMSullivan has materially misrepresented the EPI study by selective quotation. I'm sure that nobody believed that he'd have been straight-up on this one, but in case you were wondering, he wasn't.
Posted by: dsquared on December 29, 2002 11:29 PMAvedisian: I'm sure that these guys have credentials enough....
www.epinet.org/studies/vouchers-full.pdf
Sullivan has materially misrepresented the EPI study...
Sullivan mis-represented the union-funded education professor-written study?
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 30, 2002 05:01 AMFrom today's NY Daily News. Race angle highlight added by me.
| New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com |
Thugs rule school at Lafayette High By JOE WILLIAMS DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER Monday, December 30th, 2002 It's high noon at high school.
Lafayette has a long history of racial tension, with much violence aimed at the Chinese and South Asian immigrant students, who make up nearly 20% of the school's population.
Monday, Oct. 14
Tuesday, Oct. 15
Thursday, Oct. 17
A girl, 15, admits she wrote "Baby Blue" graffiti on the fourth floor.
A boy, 14, is pulled into a corner of a stairwell by two boys. He is punched and robbed of his portable compact disc player.
Outside school, a girl, 15, asks another girl: "What you said?" Then she pulls the second girl by the hair and starts punching her. Another girl joins the fight, which eventually is broken up by police. |
Will Allen: I have no more desire to compel teachers to teach than I would wish to compel anyone to be a marine. However, a marine doesn't get to choose who they wish to defend and currently teachers get no choice of who they wish to teach.
There should be a public right to education, and this right compels the state to tax people and spend funds in a particular way. This is no different than the right to vote, the right to security, the right to a jury trial or the right most conservatives seem to believe they have to the ownership of property: all these rights compel the state to enforce laws and spend money sustaining them. They are in each and every case a call upon the resources of society at large, and no right exists without such a call.
The reasons why I believe that just such a right to public education should exist are philosophical, complicated, and a bit beyond the topic at hand, but since accusing me of being socialist is about on par with accusing the sky of being blue, let me point towards my reasons with a quote from the Big Man himself:
In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
That is the purpose of public education.
If capital were allocated in the automotive industry in the same manner as it were in the education industry, the Corvair, or it's equivalent, would be the most widely owned car in America.
If capital had been allocated to the military in the 30's and 40's in the fashion in which it is allocated in the car industry, the whole of Europe would be speaking German today (or perhaps Russian.) All rights, and all freedoms, have a price tag. That's surely true. Why, oh why, do Americans seem to treat their political rights as if they can be socially allocated in the same way as potato chips? Walmart may do a good job of allocating social resources to the Frito-Lay corporation, does anyone really want Walmart-type thinking to allocate education?
I realise that a lifelong right to education is an unrestricted entitlement and as such can not be offered without restrictions. I am satisfied that nations as wealthy as America can afford to offer it with fairly loose restrictions. I would be satisfied, for example, if we said that people under 18 can always go to school, without charge, if they wish to, regardless of their past record. People over 18 who have not met some minimal educational requirement (basic literacy and nummeracy for example) have unrestricted access until they reach such a level. Everyone else over 18 should have to demonstrate credible interest and ability to gain from education, in the form of a combination of college entrance-type admissions procedures and the payment of a moderate, means-tested sum (not the full market price of their educations) as proof of good faith.
As to the implication that parents are not fully competent to choose for their children, you have accurately assessed my unstated disagreement with this principle. However, you have inaccurately assumed that I believe some professional agency, be it teachers, education professionals, or the state as a whole, should choose instead. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, such a view is utterly contrary to my stated aim of abolishing manditory education altogether. I want children to choose for themselves. I want the state to say that no child who wants to be in school can be denied a public education for any reason whatsoever, even the objection of their parents. And, I want the state to forbid any child from being compelled to go to school if they don't want to, even when their parents wish it.
Now, since this statement will no doubt unify left and right alike in reaching for their pitchforks to hunt me down as a monster, let me address the arguments everyone inevitably makes against this idea.
1- Children don't know enough to choose for themselves.
Au contraire. It's true that a six year old can't decide if they want to be a doctor or a fireman. But no one is asking them to. They have to decide whether or not they want to learn how to read, and yes, six year old children are competent to make that decision. Not only are they competent to decide, they do so every day that they are in school. We cannot compel children even under compulsory education to learn, we can only compel them to sit in their seats and be quiet. And literacy is such an obvious, empowering, desirable thing that few children will ever choose not to learn to read. The few children who will not gladly learn how read if offered the choice are the children who are already not learning to read in the existing school system. Letting them opt out simply stops us from punishing them for no apparent reason and gives us some hope that they will change their minds later, when the benefits have become more clear.
Considering that we are lucky today if public schools graduate fully literate children, I think even if we fail to convice children beyond that small end to choose education, we will still have better schools. Older children can make more sophisticated decisions. I repeat, children are not magically transformed into adults on their 18th birthdays. Voluntary schools can offer them choices appropriate to their maturity.
2- Children will just become hooligans and drug dealers if they are not in school.
You mean they aren't now?
I agree that there is probably a need for state subsidised daycare, and that parents, not children, should get to decide if children have to go to daycare. But daycare workers don't need university educations, and in daycare children can play if they want to, or take a nap, and they can use the bathroom when they need to, without having to ask.
3- Parents should have the right to impose their own narrow minded, bigoted ideas on their children.
Actually, few people make this argument in exactly those terms, but invoking some God-given right to parental choice usually amounts to the same thing. This is not a God-given right. It is a right given by law and tradition. And it's one of the reasons we have religious fundamentalists running around blowing stuff up.
4- It would just never work.
This is how those who disagree with me on this usually end their arguments. It's not an argument, it's a belief, and it never ceases to surpise me to hear it from people who agree with me about how horrible the public schools are.
American public schools are bad. They are overcrowded, underfunded, ill-managed and ill-planned. But they are also disempowering prison cells for children, with the social dynamics of a maximum security penetentiary. Even if schools were less crowded, better funded, better managed and better planned, they would still be prisons.
As to Patrick Sullivan's question as to why I oppose vouchers, I made it plain: I am not opposed to state monies going to private education. I am opposed to introducing market pricing in education - which is the plain intent of the voucher system - and I am opposed to it for exactly the same reason that I would oppose introducing market pricing in access to jury trials. The cumulated cultural knowledge of man is the property of no one, and its dissemination is a matter of such foundational and fundamental importance that it is meaningless to speak of the state, of culture, or of civilisation without it. Access to it is the birth right of every human being, one and all, and if a nation can afford to make it equally available to all, it is a priority that it should be.
Prior to Horace Mann, the United States was the most literate nation in the world (probably second was Great Britain). Tocqueville took note of this in his famous travel book.
And how did Tocqueville work this out? Standardised testing? But for the moment, let me concede the facts to make a better point. Education in the US in Tocqueville's era was not provided by the free market. It was provided by parents, churches and local government - separately and in conjunction - at little or no fee. Only the rich directly paid full price for schooling. America's pre-1836 schools were essentially socialist in their funding.
Lastly, for Bucky Dent, who believes "most of the folks on this thread who currently, or at one time had, a personal financial stake in the educational status quo, speak strongly against serious, effective change", I am the child of two public educators. The wages my parents received out of public funds paid for the food I ate, the clothes on my back, and for my own private and public school educations, from kindergarden to the age of 21 when I finally quit school the first time. I - personally - received a monthly check from the managers of my father's teacher's pension as an orphan's benefit until I was 21 years old, and it paid my rent through grad school the first time I went. My mother is no longer a public teacher, but is still to a significant degree paid for her tutoring of handicapped students by state education funds. I am a very major beneficiary of the existing public school system in the United States.
And yet, whether you disagree with me or not, I think I have argued for more radical change to the existing school system than anyone else here.
Posted by: Scott Martens on December 30, 2002 06:59 AMLet's give the adults who work at Lafayette more money; that's the ticket!!......
Posted by: Will Allen on December 30, 2002 07:13 AMI am satisfied that nations as wealthy as America can afford to offer it...
Your satisfaction is comforting.
Surely, with a per capita GDP over $35,000, we can also "afford" to feed, house and clothe the nation via taxation and central direction. How about "free" health care? All are vital to human well-being and are arguably "rights".
It is refreshing to see someone still quoting Marx favorably, even if they decided, for some reason, to not name him as author of the cited text.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 30, 2002 07:24 AMSurely, with a per capita GDP over $35,000, we can also "afford" to feed, house and clothe the nation via taxation and central direction. How about "free" health care? All are vital to human well-being and are arguably "rights".
Gee, Bucky, we agree completely. I never would have taken you for a tax-and-spend social democrat though. :^)
It is refreshing to see someone still quoting Marx favorably, even if they decided, for some reason, to not name him as author of the cited text.
I quote myself:
since accusing me of being socialist is about on par with accusing the sky of being blue, let me point towards my reasons with a quote from the Big Man himself
I thought that between the quote being so well known, and the broad hint implied by a "socialist Big Man" it would have been pretty obvious. And to make the citation complete, it's from the Communist Manifesto and is the last paragraph of section II.
I thought that between the quote being so well known, and the broad hint implied by a "socialist Big Man" it would have been pretty obvious.
It is more refreshing still to find someone who assumes broad familiarity with the Communist Manifesto.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 30, 2002 07:44 AMI like to think of it as faith that on a blog full of economists, I can expect some familiarity with Karl Marx' singularly best-selling work, and that the rest can google it.
Posted by: Scott Martens on December 30, 2002 07:50 AMPerhaps I grew up in some horrendous dystopia, but the actual facts of the matter with respect to Lafayette High School seem pretty underwhelming to me. I used to carry a knife to school, for the same reason all teenage boys carry knives; to feel like a big man. Didn't mean I stabbed anyone, and nor did the pupils at this school (though the reporter tries like hell to give the opposite impression, the only reference to deadly weapons is one in which they are found and confiscated). And a lot of the grand guignol of violence at this school is rather undermined when the reporter reveals that this is a school which sends people to hospital over a bloody nose arising from a punch-up. And one in which teachers claim to have their "ears injured" by the noise of a firework. Other than that, all we see in the factual record is a couple of incidents of bullying per day. I think that perhaps, the sensitive flowers of this high school need to toughen up a bit.
Finally, I'd note that, once more, Patrick is misrepresenting De Tocqueville. Anyone would guess from his offhand remark that De Tocqueville had written about how literate the Americans were in so many words. This is not true; he says some favourable things about the education of women, and refers to the number of newspapers that were available in America, but this is in contrast with France, and it is clear in context that De Tocqueville is making a point about freedom of the press.
It is true that other European travellers did note the high levels of educational achievement in the USA, and the 1840 census reported 90% literacy ... among white men. Which is of course part of the key to understanding this factoid. America in the early 19th century was a very different country to most of Europe. A large part of the agricultural labouring class (typically quite rich in illiterates) was made up of black slaves who weren't counted in the census. It is disingenuous in the extreme to pretend that the backward progess in the first half of the twentieth century represents the effect of public schooling rather than mass immigration of a class of people who were in general much poorer and worse educated than the Americans; the Irish famine would probably have created a significant blip in literacy rates.
And finally, the system praised by travellers in the 1830s was nothing like a market system with competition. It was a strung out network of local monopolies; in organisational form they looked much more like co-operatives than entrepreneurial businesses, and they were based around small towns and churches. It is not obvious at all how this model might be transferred to, say, modern New York.
Posted by: dsquared on December 30, 2002 08:19 AMWell, as I said Mr.Martens, I do agree with you in some respects, and perhaps some of our differences are semantic in nature. When you said there was a "right" to an education, I took it as meaning an individual right, which may be accurate, given that you analogized with the right to free speech or the right to vote. The fact that the state may have a legitimate interest in taxing to fund a particular state activity does not confer an individual right. I do not have a individual right to the protection of the 101st Airborne Division if the majority decides to no longer fund that organization, while I do have the individual right to possess a firearm, and to rent a billboard that says that George Bush is the offspring of Mussolini and Alfred E. Neuman (if I held that view), regardless of what the majority may desire that I do. If I have an individual right to an education, any who will not do my bidding in providing it to me, whether they wish to or not, or whether they are in the majority or not, are violating my rights in an illegitimate fashion, which would give me legitimate reason to use physical force against them. This is wrong. If an individual is prevented from making political statements, armed resistance can be entirely legitimate, even if the majority agrees that the individual's political speech is to be stifled. If an individual does not gain the cooperation of others, or the majority, in obtaining an education, that individual cannot legitimately use force to compel others to do his bidding. The individual does not have a "right" to an education.
Now, whether, the state is the best tool for providing the educations which are essential to a functioning society, and to what degree the state should control the process, is the question at hand. Perhaps I am misinterpreting, but you seem to have posited that the vast majority of people will gladly pursue the education that they need, but that market forces will fail to allocate resources in such a way that allows those people to fufill that pursuit. The reason that the market would have been inadequate to the international security challenges of the 30s and 40s is because there ain't a helluva lotta individual demand to to get machine gunned on Omaha Beach or on the shores of Iwo Jima, and the failure to pursue those invasions would have meant the destruction of this society. In contrast, if people, as a whole, are as enthusiastic about getting educated as you suggest, then market forces will do a terrific job of providing an excellent service in an efficient manner, just as they do with anything else in which large numbers of people have great enthusiasm in obtaining, and the means to do so. No, I am not advocating abandonment by the state in providing resources for education, but I am suggesting that the desire for education should be harnessed in a fashion that allows resources to flow to those entities which do the best job of satisfying that desire, and to cut off resources to entities fail to do so. I agree with you that the first step in doing so is to stop forcing people who don't wish to cooperate in the process of education to be in the company of those who do, because doing so merely harms the cooperative, to no positive end.
Now, to your contention regarding the inadequacy of parents, well no there is no doubt that some are, but your suggestion that children be allowed to select their school is pointless. The vast majority of parents have the ability, if they so desire, to socialize their children according to any belief system they prefer. Children absorb the beliefs of those that raise them, so if a child is raised by those who believe that a secular school is an awful place to be, the child will not want to go to a secular school. If a child is raised by people who think a religious school is an awful place to be, the child will not want to go to a religious school. Sorry, short of state-compelled intervention on a truly totalitarian level, there just ain't any way to prevent children's preferences to be greatly influenced by parent's preferences.
Posted by: Will Allen on December 30, 2002 08:31 AMSince the beginning of the school year, there have been 26 serious fights or assaults at Lafayette - an average of one violent incident every three days.
I think that perhaps, the sensitive flowers of this high school need to toughen up a bit.
Well.
If the schools can't even assure the physical safety of their students...forget about educating them...it is the fault of the students for not being tough enough.
As an aside, would you be as dismissive if the pattern were white-on-black violence instead of the black-on-asian or black-on-black violence rampant at this school?
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 30, 2002 08:35 AMI suspect turning this into an argument over the nature of rights is probably unproductive and beside the point. We do appear to agree in many ways.
So I'm just going to skip to the last point about parents, and then the previous point about free markets.
Yes, parents can raise their children however they please, so when children decide for themselves, we are fooling ourselves to believe that parents have no part in that decision. Parental influence is sufficiently pervasive in a child's life that I don't think the school system has any need to further protect parental rights by, say, allowing parents to decide that their children shouldn't hear about evolution or get a sex ed class. If a child doesn't want to hear about it, that is their perogative. But if they want to get that high school biology credit they need to get into medical school, schools have no obligation to provide an evolution-free biology class.
I have no desire to impose totalitarian ideological education on anyone or deny parents the opportunity to teach their children about whatever ideologies they many have. That's part of the point. Parents already have the right to teach their children as they please. I think children should also have the right to hear about things their parents don't want them to hear about. We - parents, society, the state, whatever - just don't have the right to force anything down children's throats.
One (of the many) problems of American public education, and it is a problem which vouchers only make worse, is that schools are not being run for the benefit of children. They are being run for the benefit of school boards, parents and to some degree teachers. That is why I want to place choice in the hands of children. Since children haven't the money to pay for their own educations, and because it is neither realistic nor desireable for them to make long-term cost/benefit analyses of their own educations, I want the children to choose and the state to pay. I think my position is compatible with equitable state support of private schools of all types. I have no problem with non-state agents running schools with state funds, subject to what I think are fairly sane and reasonable regulations.
But this is not, in any way that I can see, compatible with a free market in education. In a market education system, parents pay. I see no way to let children choose but make parents pay.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Somehow, I tend to believe that if some white kids were yelling "Get the nigger!" while they punched out a black kid, rather than having some kids punch out others as part of a repeated pattern of robbery, the reaction would be different. I wonder, dsquared, if you were approached on the street, smashed in the face, and your pockets rifled, what would your reaction be if the response to such activity was merely an assertion that you were a "sensitive flower who needs to toughen up?"
Posted by: Will Allen on December 30, 2002 09:01 AMIn case it isn't obvious, my remarks above were directed to Bucky Dent and dsquared. Mr. Martens, we are in agreement in many ways, in that ultimately children are the "consumers" of this good, so the more closely their desires are followed, the more likely it will be that resources are allocated in an efficient and effective manner. If this means parents will have to take more care in shaping those desires, all the better.
Posted by: Will Allen on December 30, 2002 09:11 AMBucky and Sullivan, I know that if you still believe that voucher program tests are an unqualified success then you are probably simply not interested in an objective view of reality. Rather, you are motivated by blind adherence to theory or ideology.
For those who are open minded, see the work of Witte, that of Peterson, and that of Metcalf.
Each of these three individuals finds sreious flaws with the methodology of the voucher programs.
In the New York study a major confounding variable was present. Students given vouchers went from large class rooms to small class rooms (number of students in the class room). They also went to better funded schools that had more class room educational materials available.
It is impossible to rule out the possibility that any positive results attributed to the vouchers weren't simply due to the impact of smaller class room populations (which have been shown conclusively to positively impact learning).
In other words, the students may have done just as well in their original school if the class room size was reduced there. We just don't know and it's not right to conclude that the vouchers worked per se.
In fact the New York study could be just as easily (though with equally flawed validity) used to support the teachers' claim that what is needed is more money per school to fund more staff for smaller class rooms and better materials in each room.
I mst say that I find it very disturbing that PhDs from major universities can produce such obviously compromised research and then make big noise about the ramifications of their findings; especially when their findings can impact policy that effects millions of children.
...if you still believe that voucher program tests are an unqualified success...
No one has characterized them in that manner, least of all me.
Of course, when parental demand for vouchers vastly exceeds their supply, home-schooled kids often outcompete those educated with tax dollars, and private schools costing a fraction of their public neighbors offer better learning environments, empirical reality drives proponents of the current failing system to misrepresent their opporents' positions. The clear-cut facts offer them no succor.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 30, 2002 10:03 AMBucky wrote:
>>If the schools can't even assure the physical safety of their students...forget about educating them...it is the fault of the students for not being tough enough.
As an aside, would you be as dismissive if the pattern were white-on-black violence instead of the black-on-asian or black-on-black violence rampant at this school?<<
I merely pointed out that this school seems to regard a punch in the nose in the playground as a "serious assault" meriting hospital treatment. I would always regard white-on-black violence carried out by schoolchildren as much less serious than white-on-black violence carried out by adults, because schoolchildren are by their nature more clannish and aggressive than adults.
At my school it was native Welsh-speakers versus English, and we had dust-ups like this all the time.
>>. I wonder, dsquared, if you were approached on the street, smashed in the face, and your pockets rifled, what would your reaction be if the response to such activity was merely an assertion that you were a "sensitive flower who needs to toughen up?" <<
I am tempted to say tu quoque and enquire what your own reaction would be if this story had been presented as a case of a student suing the school for $1m. But in all honesty, I can answer your question without shamefacedness. I've been beaten up in a pub in the last couple of years; it was pretty fucking horrible at the time, but I didn't turn it into a massive thesis about the horribleness of everything and the desperate need to fundamentally change the whole system of licensed victuallage in Scotland. If I had, I would have expected someone to take me aside with the clear creulty that only close friends can provide and tell me not to be such a big Jessie about it.
I think I may have some common ground with dsquared.
He should have the right to finance and place his children in schools where a baseline level of violence is accepted.
I hope he would allow me to finance and matriculate my kids in a somewhat different educational environment, more in keeping with my views on pedagogy.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 30, 2002 10:15 AMHow about simply incarcerating those commmitting assaults, or, at the least, banning those who commit assaults from frequenting the pub again? Would a pub owner be a "big Jessie" in deciding that having his patrons beaten up by thugs is undesirable, thereby acting to keep thugs out of his pub? Or would a pub owner, when confronted by a series of robberies by assault in his pub, tolerated by the management of that pub, decide that the rational course of action would be to increase the salaries of all the employees, regardless of their previous performance? Might the pub owner decide that a housecleaning is in order? Of course, if there was a bar keeps union which prevented such a housecleaning from occurring and a pub owner who could be forced to increase salaries regardless of the robberies that victimized the pub patrons, and most importantly, patrons who could be forced to continue to enter the pub, regardless of being assaulted, we might have an analogous situation.
Now that I have more information about you, dsquared, let me reformulate the question. If every time you entered a pub there were people there who could continue to beat you, and you were mandated by law to enter, and thereby take your beating, and the managers of pubs who allowed such beatings were on the public payroll, would you think that a call to change the way in which pubs were managed to be that of a "big Jessie"? Please answer honestly; think back to that fucking horrible experience and imagine having to be FORCED to re-live it again, while those ostensibly charged with preventing such activity tell you that the status quo is just fine, shut up and take your beating. You have now taken the position that it is acceptable to force people into an environment in which regular robbery by assault is a tolerable state of affairs, and that calls to end that status quo are made by people who are insufficiently tough. This is too silly for words, and would be the basis of a decent Monty Python skit: "Don't be such a baby; it's only a robbery! Come now, chin up, stiff upper lip and all that!! Tut! Tut!". This is truly pathetic.
Posted by: Will Allen on December 30, 2002 10:47 AMWell, all I can say is that it didn't do me any harm!
Will: I take your point; to a degree, I was speaking with tongue in cheek. Perhaps, however, you might take some of the rage you eloquently express on behalf of those who suffer every day from an inequality of physical strength, and extend it to those who suffer every day from the inequality of economic resources, and who are similarly trapped by the legal structure and prevented from ever escaping. Maybe we should do something for them both.
Posted by: DD on December 30, 2002 01:07 PMwho are similarly trapped by the legal structure and prevented from ever escaping
Are there people in the US who are not convicted criminals yet are "trapped by the legal structure" and unable to make lives for themselves?
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 30, 2002 01:45 PMWell, it is the legal structure, as constituted by the current status quo in the education system, which forces children into an environment in which they do not receive the tools needed to improve their lives, and it is the forces of reaction, in the form of teachers unions, administrators, school boards, and some parents which keeps them in their squalor. There is little worth conserving here; better to let those parents and children who are motivated to improve their situation to do so, status quo be damned.
As to the problem of inequality of economic resources vs. the problem of being physically set upon by predators, the only reason I don't advocate complete abandonment of state involvement in education is because I recognize that without such state involvement, a substantial number of children may not receive the tools they need to function and prosper, to the danger of society as a whole. In a society as wealthy as this, however, when most of the people who are considered poor have no trouble meeting their caloric needs, what trouble they have obtaining shelter is to a large measure created by govt. impediments to the creation of new housing stock, and they also know comforts that were unheard of by even the wealthiest, only a few generations ago, lack of economic resources pales in comparison to the problem of being violently preyed upon. Poor people need physical safety above all else, so as to take advantage of the wealth that this society offers, if one has the knowledge and skills that others find useful.
Posted by: Will Allen on December 30, 2002 01:49 PMI'm hardly surprised to learn that dsquared has recently been beaten up in a pub, given the manners he displays on this blog.
>> Sullivan has materially misrepresented the EPI study by selective quotation. I'm sure that nobody believed that he'd have been straight-up on this one, but in case you were wondering, he wasn't.<<
Which is merely an appeal to authority...his own authority. Worth exactly what what he has been paid for it. But we can check for ourselves what he had to say about Tocqueville:
>> Patrick is misrepresenting De Tocqueville. Anyone would guess from his offhand remark that De Tocqueville had written about how literate the Americans were in so many words. This is not true; he says some favourable things about the education of women, and refers to the number of newspapers that were available in America, but this is in contrast with France, and it is clear in context that De Tocqueville is making a point about freedom of the press.<<
Tocqueville(Volume I, Chapter 17)
<<-------quote--------
If [the observer] singles out only the learned, he will be
astonished to find how few they are; but if he counts the ignorant, the
American people will appear to be the most enlightened in the world. ....
In New England every citizen receives the elementary notions of human
knowledge; he is taught, moreover, the doctrines and the evidences of his
religion, the history of his country, and the leading features of its
Constitution. In the states of Connecticut and Massachusetts, it is
extremely rare to find a man imperfectly acquainted with all these things,
and a person wholly ignorant of them is a sort of phenomenon.
....
...as we advance towards the West or the South, the
instruction of the people diminishes. In the states that border on the Gulf
of Mexico a certain number of individuals may be found, as in France, who
are devoid even of the rudiments of instruction. But there is not a single
district in the United States sunk in complete ignorance
....
Americans are the persons who, year by year, transport their dwellings into
the wilds, and, with their dwellings, their acquired information and their
esteem for knowledge. Education has taught them the utility of instruction
and has enabled them to transmit that instruction to their posterity.
....
At the extreme borders of the confederated states, upon the confines of
society and the wilderness.... As soon as the pioneer reaches the place which is to serve him
for a retreat, he fells a few trees and builds a log house. ....
Who would not suppose that this poor hut is the asylum of rudeness and
ignorance? Yet no sort of comparison can be drawn between the pioneer and
the dwelling that shelters him. Everything about him is primitive and wild,
but he is himself the result of the labor and experience of eighteen
centuries. He wears the dress and speaks the language of cities; he is
acquainted with the past, curious about the future, and ready for argument
about the present; he is, in short, a highly civilized being, who consents
for a time to inhabit the backwoods, and who penetrates into the wilds of
the New World with the Bible, an axe, and some newspapers. It is difficult
to imagine the incredible rapidity with which thought circulates in the
midst of these deserts. I do not think that so much intellectual activity
exists in the most enlightened and populous districts of France.
------------endquote-------------->>
And,from Volume II, chapter 13:
<< The literary genius of Great Britain still darts its rays into the
recesses of the forests of the New World. There is hardly a pioneer's hut
that does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember that I
read the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin. >>
I guess I should be honored to be treated with as much honesty as was Ronald Coase.
dsquared indulges his creative streak (as he did with Coase's writings):
>> It is disingenuous in the extreme to pretend that the backward progess in the first half of the twentieth century represents the effect of public schooling rather than mass immigration of a class of people who were in general much poorer and worse educated than the Americans; the Irish famine would probably have created a significant blip in literacy rates.<<
First, when did I say anything about the first half of the twentieth century, much less anything about "backward progress"?
Second, the great Irish famine was in the 1840s.
Third, the American education system in the first half of the twentieth century was much more productive than it was in the latter fourth. And dsquared would have known that had he bothered to read the Hoxby article I cited for him.
One of the reasons for this may well be less competition. In the first few decades of the twentieth century there were over 100,000 public school districts in the U.S., but only about 15,000 today.
E. Avidisian should be more careful what he wishes:
>> For those who are open minded, see the work of Witte, that of Peterson, and that of Metcalf.<<
John Witte is in favor of some voucher programs, including the Milwaukee Choice Program. Read all about it at:
http://www.heartland.org/archives/education/may00/witte.htm
Harvard's Paul Peterson, is of course, one of the leading researchers who finds many benefits to the voucher programs he has studied. I don't know "Metcalf", but if pointed to any work done by him/her I will read it.
Being an open minded guy requires it. Now, would any of you open-minded voucher opponents like to try reading some Hoxby?
Posted by: Patrick R. Sullivan on December 30, 2002 04:13 PMFor the big spenders out there, John Witte's book,
The Market Approach to Education: An Analysis of America's First Voucher Program.
is available at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0691089833/qid=1041293810/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/104-1067554-5970326?v=glance&s=books
From a review:
<< Witte, a political science and public affairs professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, shuns the simplistic view that vouchers will either reinvigorate or destroy public schools. Instead, he lays out the pros and cons in a detailed, scholarly manner, complete with charts and thick footnotes. His primary message: vouchers can be a lifeline for poor families struggling with inferior inner-city schools by giving them a choice where none existed before.
Witte's final stance has surprised the antichoice movement, which used his earlier research results to argue against vouchers.>>
Patrick, every single freaking quote of yours which I have checked, has been taken out of context. This is true of the EPI and de Tocqueville material.
For example, you have chosen to omit de Tocqueville's chapter heading:
>>What is to be understood by the education of the American people--The human mind more superficially instructed in the United States than in Europe--No one completely uninstructed--Reason for this--Rapidity with which opinions are diffused even in the half-cultivated states of the West--Praetieal experience more serviceable to the Americans than book-learning.<<
Which hardly paints the picture you wanted it to. Furthermore, your ellipsis before you quote "as we advance towards the West or South", picks up a sentence of de Tocqueville's in the middle and substantially alters his meaning. The words you have chosen not ot trouble us with are:
"What I have said of New England must not, however, be ap- plied to the whole Union without distinction"
Every single time I've checked a quote from you, it's been somewhere between "quite dishonest" and "outrageously dishonest". And further, every time I've checked a quote from you, I've realised that I'm wasting my time, because you haven't actually made an argument; you've just dumped down undigested material without any attempt to take a position of your own. You have now moved from my "always check" list to my "assume to be a bullshitter in the absence of proof to the contrary" list.
Posted by: dsquared on December 30, 2002 11:45 PMAccusing someone of spinning de Tocqueville is about as trivial an exercise as I can imagine, given the importance of the the topic here.
One can't honestly spin the disparities between side-by-side schools operating under different models, or parents' overwhelming support of school choice, or the horror show that is day-to-day life in many de facto monopoly govt school districts.
That school choice opponents are driven to fixate on minutae such as frictional population differences or quotes from dead white European males, speaks to the vacuum at the center of their position.
Deny, obfuscate, study, lather, rinse, repeat.
Another election cycle passes, another cohort of education establishment members get their pensions, another generation of children cheated.
And don't forget to accuse your opponents of being greedy, hateful and racist!
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 31, 2002 05:38 AMThe slow loading of this now gargantuan thread threw up this gem which I would otherwise not have noticed. Patrick, in reply to someone who said that that some effect or other was "not statistically significant", cut and pasted:
>>After three years, private
school attendance in two cities had an impact of 6.6 percentile points, an impact of 0.30 standard deviations<<
Did anyone do enough basic stats to know whether a difference of 0.3 sd is usually considered "statistically significant"? Typically, one would be looking for 1.96 sd before declaring something significant at the 95% level; 0.3sd is indistinguishable from noise in most econometric applications.
I have no real desire to go back to the Peterson paper to check whether there were other results which supported Patrick's claim, but this one, on its own, supports the opposite claim -- that the effect was statistically insignificant. Perhaps Patrick would be kind enough to explain, either in his own words or by excerpting a more relevant extract, why it was that he chose to support a claim of statistical significance by telling us that the effect was 0.3sd?
Posted by: dsquared on December 31, 2002 05:57 AMBucky: If you had a stronger argument about the performance of church schools, then I'm afraid I missed it in the whirlwind of Sullivan posts. Would you care to repeat? Otherwise, all I can remember you coming up with is the argument from relative funding levels. And if that were to be our main criterion, then perhaps the USA ought to be copying Cuba for its educational system, where extremely favourable educational outcomes are generated on hardly any money at all.
Will: Your premise that >>Poor people need physical safety above all else, so as to take advantage of the wealth that this society offers, if one has the knowledge and skills that others find useful. << is flawed in two ways.
First, empirically, poor people do not act as if they value physical safety above all else. They regularly put their lives and health at risk in dangerous occupations. Because of this, I don't understand what you mean by "need".
Second, if your concern is genuine, why do you restrict it to those who have "knowledge and skills that others find useful". Some people don't. Why don't you care about them -- their lives have just as much potential for joy and misery?
Posted by: dsquared on December 31, 2002 06:03 AMWell, if one poster can favorably cite Marx, there's no reason another can't chat up Castro's regime.
If nothing else, we are getting down to the first principles of the anti-school choice movement.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 31, 2002 06:13 AM>>After three years, private
school attendance in two cities had an impact of 6.6 percentile points, an impact of 0.30 standard deviations<<
As I was saying.........
dsquared, you are, of course, correct in your statistics.
Posted by: E. Avedisian on December 31, 2002 06:18 AMDsquared gets richer in irony by the minute. He now claims:
<<------quote-------
Patrick, in reply to someone who said that that some effect or other was "not statistically significant", cut and pasted:
>>After three years, private
school attendance in two cities had an impact of 6.6 percentile points, an impact of 0.30 standard deviations<<
------endquuote----->
Which is totally bogus. I did no such thing, DD made that up out of whole cloth. AND, he did this just after claiming:
>> Every single time I've checked a quote from you, it's been somewhere between "quite dishonest" and "outrageously dishonest". And further, every time I've checked a quote from you, I've realised that I'm wasting my time, because you haven't actually made an argument; you've just dumped down undigested material without any attempt to take a position of your own. You have now moved from my "always check" list to my "assume to be a bullshitter in the absence of proof to the contrary" list.<<
So, what kind of "bullshitter" should we conclude DD is for making up things?
As to his ludicrous claims about my taking Tocqueville "out of context", first, a chapter title far more qualifies as "out of context" than the actual text from that chapter.
Second, his:
>> Furthermore, your ellipsis before you quote "as we advance towards the West or South", picks up a sentence of de Tocqueville's in the middle and substantially alters his meaning. The words you have chosen not ot trouble us with are:
>> "What I have said of New England must not, however, be ap- plied to the whole Union without distinction" <<
Is truly a riot, since DD himself leaves out what I did quote, which was:
"...as we advance towards the West or the South, the
instruction of the people diminishes. In the states that border on the Gulf
of Mexico...."
So, how does DD justify claiming that, "substantially alters [Tocqville's] meaning"?
"as we advance towards the West or the South", clearly means (to the geographically non-challenged) leaving New England.
"the instruction of the people diminishes", means that they aren't as well educated as New Englanders.
And, "the states that border on the Gulf
of Mexico", again clearly distinguishes some of the South from New England".
In light of this, would DD put his considerable ego at risk by explaining just what he thinks is changed by: "What I have said of New England must not, however, be ap- plied to the whole Union without distinction" ?
Green, et al claimed great success in the Milwaukee voucher program in the write up portion of the report, but when you observe the attached data tables you notice that not only are the results statistically insignificant, they are different than what Green says they are. Furthermore, there are missing data enteries (blank cells). Witte also noticed this.
Soundbites are no substitute for good analysis of data obtained through well designed research.
The research and analysis associated with voucher programs has been pretty poor to date. I mentioned the Milwaukee study as one example. As I said a thousand posts ago, anyone peddling voucher programs (and the whole school competition theory) as a proven panacea for the school system is nothing more than a snake oil salesperson. There is simply nothing academicly solid enough to support the claims and any PhD involved in the field should know better (then again, maybe the education system is far worse than anyone realizes. Are PhDs now issued on the basis of social promotions?)
Thus, Witte, in his book, concludes that vouchers do indeed help a handful of individuals in certain situations (and should therefore be available), but that vouchers/ competition is not the answer to the question of how to improve education in this country.
Witte recognizes that there are many other systemic reforms that could be more effective.
Brad, would you consider doing a piece on the influence of funding on academic quality and integrity?
I mean, we agree that campaign finance reform is a good thing because of all the negative impacts of all that special interest money on political decision making.
Are academicians so psychologically different that the quest for grants and consulting fees and tenure and other prizes wouldn't influence their work?
Has there been a change in the nature of and/or quantity of extra-salary compensation for academics?
Should we pay prof.s more so as to reduce the impact of extra- salary compensation as an incentive to skew research (not only in quality, but also in focus. Think of all the interesting and potentially useful topics not researched because the money isn't there).
Posted by: E. Avedisian on December 31, 2002 07:18 AMWhat was meant by physical safety was safety from the predators who prevent or impede poor people from engaging in the voluntary exchange of value which is essential to wealth development. Yes, people take dangerous jobs in return for money. The point is that they get the money. When predators make businesses unprofitable, through repeated robberies, for instance, a business owner fails, likely destroying wealth accumulated through much time and toil, employees lose their jobs, which even if minimum wage, are essential to developing habits which will generate more wealth in future years, and customers lose a place of convienience to purchase the goods they need, which likely means more time spent obtaining them elsewhere. Similarly, when a school
devolves into an environment in which assault by robbery is a regular and tolerable feature, children lose the opportunity to learn the skills that are useful to other people, which, in the final analysis, is the only guarantor of wealth generation; the ability to provide a service that others find useful. First and foremeost, if poor people are to generate wealth, they need to be safe from physical predation, so as to be able to develop those skills.
Are there people who are completely unable to develop skills that others find useful? Sure, but it is an exceedingly small percentage of the population, so small, in fact, that providing the subsidies needed to meet basic material needs is not statistically significant. I personally have relatives with Downs syndrome, and others who were adopted out of hyper-abusive households, leaving them with life-long physical and mental scars that they battle with daily. I have witnessed them learning the skills to make themselves useful to others. They hold productive jobs, and live in homes, small to be sure, that are equipped with creature comforts that the wealthy and middle class would have found incredible only a few generations ago. Air conditioning! Washing machines! Automobiles! Television! Are there people who, due to physical or mental illness, who cannot make themselves as useful to others? Sure, and they should be helped, but there is far too much daily evidence of people with what are normally thought of as severe limitations who do provide useful service to others to dismiss the idea that a large percentage of people cannot do so. The irony lies in the fact that it is the voluntary provision of useful service to others, not material goods, that is the key to human dignity, and such provision, in a voluntary exchange, is the most dignified method of obtaining such goods. The greatest help that can be extended to anyone, then, is to provide an environment free from physical predation, in which the skills that are valued by other people can be obtained.
Posted by: Will Allen on December 31, 2002 07:26 AM>>What was meant by physical safety was safety from the predators who prevent or impede poor people from engaging in the voluntary exchange of value which is essential to wealth development. <<
Will you at least admit that this is a somewhat unusual definition?
Ctrl+F "deviation" finds the quote which I "invented out of whole cloth", btw. Patrick didn't sign that particular post, but Ctrl+F "http://www.nber.org/books/schools" shows that it's him that's citing this work.
I repeat ... "I've realised that I'm wasting my time, because you haven't actually made an argument; you've just dumped down undigested material without any attempt to take a position of your own."
Posted by: dsquared on December 31, 2002 07:48 AMI plead guilty to being insufficiently specific in defining the type of physical safety required to allow people to improve their material situation.
Posted by: Will Allen on December 31, 2002 08:09 AM>> Are academicians so psychologically different that the quest for grants and consulting fees and tenure and other prizes wouldn't influence their work?<<
How amusing coming from someone who, (1) has a financial interest (his wife is a public school teacher) in higher pay for teachers, and (2) has been relying on this:
www.epinet.org/studies/vouchers-full.pdf
to attack the likes of Hanuchek, Hoxby, Nechyba, Greene, Peterson, and Neal. EPI, is a notoriously left-wing outfit founded by the likes of Lester Thurow, Robert Reich, Barry Bluestone, and Robert Kuttner.
And Carnoy conspicuously fails to tell us who funded this paper. Unlike Peterson and Greene. In fact, a visit to epi.org finds that they are very coy about where their funding comes from. But clearly a lot of it is from labor unions.
Posted by: Patrick R. Sullivan on December 31, 2002 08:09 AMJim Glass writes:
This reminds me of one of my favorite NY Times editorials ever. It (1) condemned a proposed voucher experiment in NYC saying it would result in "cream skimming" and deprive the neighborhood public schools of their best students; then (2) went on to say vouchers aren't necessary anyhow, as evidenced by the high academic standards of Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, whose practices only have to be emulated by the rest of the school system for it to fix itself.
Well, both points are true: vouchers only succeed by "cream skimming", and public schools can do cream skimming perfectly well without vouchers. The harder problem, which isn't addressed by vouchers or by magnet schools, is how to improve the education of those who are not the cream of the crop?
Posted by: Daryl McCullough on December 31, 2002 08:13 AMOf course, "cream" is nebulous term that needs to be defined if the question is to be answered. Is there a reason to believe that children who utilize vouchers have innately greater intelligence? I'm no expert, but I think it far more likely that the use of vouchers simply indicates a greater motivation, and perhaps ability in some instances, by parent or child, perhaps both, to go to greater lengths to obtain the educational environment they prefer. If some people do not utilize vouchers because they simply don't wish to go to the extra effort of doing so, well, there really isn't a solution to the problem of children or parents who do not value education. Not all problems are solvable. The problem which is solvable, however, is to allow those who do value education to segregate themselves from those that do not. Whether vouchers are the best way for them to do so is not something I can answer in an unqualified fashion, but I know for certain that some mechanism must be provided for those who have a desire to obtain an education to segregate themselves from those who have an interest in committing assaults in the course of robbing their fellow students, like what commonly occurs at the aforementioned Lafayette H.S..
Posted by: Will Allen on December 31, 2002 08:34 AMThere appears to be a difference of opinion on whether or not vouchers have helped any students.
Here's a question: Is there any empirical study NOT funded by the teachers' union that shows students to have been HARMED by educational choice?
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 31, 2002 09:14 AM>Jim Glass writes:
>> This reminds me of one of my favorite NY Times editorials ever...
>Well, both points are true: vouchers only succeed by "cream skimming"...<
Well, you keep saying that, but I asked you before if you had any evidence at all from the actual voucher programs that have been running for a decade that these programs in reality cream skim *at all*. Do you?
Repeating a fantasy does not make it reality.
> and public schools can do cream skimming perfectly well without vouchers.<
Indeed they can and do. And the point you missed -- well, snipped actually -- here, is that in a single editorial the NYT damned vouchers because they *might* cream skim and leave the weaker students behind in the local schools, while endorsing named public schools that *actually* cream skim and *do* leave the weaker students behind in the local schools.
I.e., when something is fantasized as an effect of vouchers it's a fault, but when the very same thing is an actual effect of public schools it's a virtue!
C'mon, it's funny. The Times can be very amusing.
Posted by: Jim Glass on December 31, 2002 09:17 AMIt nearly rivals The Onion in this regard. To be fair, the unsigned editorials of the WSJ can be pretty funny, too, but with the Times, the comic effect extends from masthead to the sports pages. I really got a chuckle from the front page story a couple years back, when the supposed extraordinary existence of open water at the North Pole was produced as evidence of man-made global warming . Hell, I'm no oceanographer, but I know a thigh-slapper when I see one; I think it took the Times about a month to run a correction! Since the advent of the Age of Raines, the laughs keep comin' at an even greater rate.
Posted by: Will Allen on December 31, 2002 09:51 AMA little more data on Catholic and public schools here in NYC....
http://www.nysun.com/sunarticle.asp?artID=444
The Sun story url'd above:
If New York City’s public school system could educate a child for what it costs to educate a child in one of New York’s Catholic schools, the city would be spending about $6.5 billion less on its Department of Education each year. That’s setting aside special education, which is a topic for another editorial.*
In 1962, New York educated a student population of about one million with about 40,000 teachers. Today, the city educates about 100,000 more students, but the number of teachers has doubled to about 80,000. Has the quality of education improved by a factor of two? If the question doesn’t make you cringe, you haven’t seen the latest test scores for New York City’s schools. Only 29.8% of the city’s eighth-graders, to take but one of many examples of the public school system’s failings, were able to test to standard on the math test.
The cost to educate the students in New York’s Catholic schools averages $3,200 a pupil for Kindergarten through eighth grade and $5,800 a pupil for high schoolers, according to a spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of New York, Nora Murphy. Most of that comes from tuition, but contributions from graduates and other donors cover a 10% to 20% share. The public schools spend nearly double that, about $10,000 each in elementary and middle schools and more than $9,000 for each high-school student.
The two largest factors that account for the difference in costs are the government bureaucracy surrounding the schools and the enormous power of the city’s teachers union. These two factors, minimized in the Catholic school system, are the biggest obstacles to education reform in New York’s public schools.
The Archdiocese of New York is able to administer to about 110,000 students with a total central administrative staff of 28. At that level, the city’s school system would have no more than a few hundred administrative staff. But New York has almost 9,000 administrators, secretaries, clerks, accountants, and other assorted bureaucrats. In total, the city’s school system employs more than 136,000 persons, a ratio of about one employee for every nine students.
When asked what makes the Catholic schools stand apart from the public schools, Ms. Murphy of the Archdiocese said the differences are a lower average teacher salary, less top-down management, an administrative consciousness toward cost-effectiveness, and small schools. New York’s Catholic schools have few assistant principals. They don’t centrally budget everything that goes into making a school run.
Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Civic Innovation had a different way of expressing the bureaucratic obstacles to improving the city’s education. In the Catholic schools, teachers and administrators “trust each other,” he said. Because the teachers share a sense of philanthropy and there are fewer rules and administrators to enforce them, Catholic schools offer a better work environment and a sense of mission, something that allows the schools to attract teachers who will work for about half the salary of a New York City teacher.
Granted, some of the Catholic school teachers are nuns and priests. By definition, these teachers do not have families to support or other expenses that non-clerical teachers have. But, despite the popular stereotypes to the contrary, Catholic school teachers are not primarily nuns — religious figures make up a minority of these teachers. Also, the public school system does provide some services to the private religious school system, such as transportation. These costs are added to the Department of Education’s budget and diminish the per-pupil cost of Catholic schools. Catholic schools also have a limited special education program. Still, says Mr. Greene, the per-pupil costs would still be much lower for Catholic education with these factors figured in.
A sense of philanthropy is hardly something that is missing from potential teachers in New York’s pool. The New York City Teaching Fellows program saw a 21% increase in applications this year. What is missing is the sense of urgency. Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has made some steps toward improving the way the schools do business —laying off administrators and moving to privatize some of the school system’s accounting functions. But the city faces a $6 billion budget gap and already high taxes. It’s hard to see how the politicians can go on claiming there is no room to cut when the Catholic schools are educating students at half the price that the city bureaucrats are — and with better results on standardized tests. Parents seem to realize this: When private philanthropists offered 7,500 scholarships to New York City private and parochial schools in 1999, applications were filed for nearly 170,000 students.
The city could try wrestling concessions out of its unions, laying off administrators, and increasing class sizes until it could educate a student for what it costs the Archdiocese — and then try improving quality so that it attains the same results.
But a simpler way might be to just offer a publicly funded voucher to any student who wants one, and let the schools sprout up to fill the need. If the demand for vouchers is still at 1999 levels, that would mean 162,500 students channeled out of the public school system. Assume that it costs $7,000 to educate each one — far more than the current level of spending on Catholic schools, but enough to adjust for whatever backdoor transportation funding the public schools are currently providing and for some of the capital costs of space for the influx of new students. The city still saves $406 million.
________________
*“Special Ed Savings,” The New York Sun, November 29, 2002.
Sullivan, as far as I'm concerned you have moved down on my list of bloggers from not to be trusted, to incredulous beyond hope of redemption.
True my wife is a teacher. However, from the beginning of this thread I have argued that increasing teacher compensation will *not* result in a pronounced positive impact on education because the quality of teachers is not, at this point in the evolution of the public school system, one of the key issues concerning low academic achievement by the enrollees.
Yes, I said she deserves more money based on her work load and the credentials required to obtain the position, but I can think of a lot of people out there working in various capacities that pay less than they should based on education, skill, effort, etc. Maybe there are market failures in the labor market (think of CEO pay), but I digress.
I have also argued that one solution based on research would be to pay teachers the same wage, but spend more money on education in general such that there would be more teachers for each grade, resulting in fewer students in each class room.
If anything, this assertion on my part demonstrates that I am not inclined to alter my academic perspective to further self interest via monetary gain.
Finally, Sullivan, I am not you. I actually read academic and professional journals. Then I read referenced material. Then I think about the material. I am not relying only on the EPI study. I recently stated (this a.m.) that I had read the original study out of Milwaukee to the extent of examining and analyzing the data tables in the appendix. I have indeed read several other published studies and reports concerning school voucher programs, including those that you mentioned.
What I find amusing is that you are ready to accept as truth- on blind faith or blind ego?- anything that agrees with your preconceived notions. Yet, (in this example) you recognize - only when things aren't going your way - that funding source can influence research results. Anything to sway an arguement.
Then again I'm not the first to point out this little problem of yours.
So, if I even respond to you again, you will now have a better idea of what I mean when I say something to the effect of "what ever Sullivan".
Posted by: E. Avedisian on December 31, 2002 11:38 AMI have also argued that one solution based on research would be to pay teachers the same wage, but spend more money on education in general such that there would be more teachers for each grade, resulting in fewer students in each class room.
--E. Avedisian
In 1962, New York educated a student population of about one million with about 40,000 teachers. Today, the city educates about 100,000 more students, but the number of teachers has doubled to about 80,000. Has the quality of education improved by a factor of two? If the question doesn’t make you cringe, you haven’t seen the latest test scores for New York City’s schools. Only 29.8% of the city’s eighth-graders, to take but one of many examples of the public school system’s failings, were able to test to standard on the math test.
http://www.nysun.com/sunarticle.asp?artID=444
Posted by: Bucky Dent on December 31, 2002 11:58 AM>> Sullivan, as far as I'm concerned you have moved down on my list of bloggers from not to be trusted, to incredulous beyond hope of redemption.<<
That's really distressing coming from a guy who couldn't grasp the obvious irony in his whining:
>> Are academicians so psychologically different that the quest for grants and consulting fees and tenure and other prizes wouldn't influence their work?<<
When his own household income is, in a probably significant way, determined by the ability of a near-monopoly to extract rents from taxpayers. And also, that he doesn't realize that any charges he makes about academics being influenced by their funding sources would be equally true of the academics he cites.
BTW, I'm well aware of the surfeit of self-esteem you possess (a trait you share with several other regular contributors), so spare me the indignation. Instead try making valid arguments, you might find it novel.
Interesting that no one here has mentioned the real impact of unrestrained physical violence on the achievement of students.
Since bullying and violence are directed disproportionately at the best students, it serves as a disincentive to study and to do well. So schools which allow such bullying are allowing hoodlums to defeat the very purpose of the school's existence by deterring students from learning. The best teachers, the prettiest buildings, and the best textbooks cannot teach a student who is not willing to learn, and to allow students to be actively deterred from learning in the middle of a school is completely insane.
While we're on the subject of incentives, let us note that the best students generally must endure a childhood of the same length as the mediocre students. They get little in the way of tangible rewards, and (as I just noted) often endure extra punishment. If well-performing students were allowed to finish their childhoods and go on to college or other adult pursuits sooner than mediocre students, that would be a powerful incentive, and you would end up with better performing students without doing anything else at all, or spending any more money, and you would increase our offsprings' effective lifespan to boot.
Posted by: Kenneth Uildriks on January 1, 2003 01:14 PMSo schools which allow such bullying are allowing hoodlums to defeat the very purpose of the school's existence by deterring students from learning...
Indeed.
The people who labor to force kids to remain in such environments have a lot to answer for.
Posted by: Bucky Dent on January 1, 2003 06:01 PM