The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
As a child I took them seriously and modified my learning with the aim of improving my scores. Was I harming my education by taking the examinations seriously? Why do concerns about the quality of the examinations come out now, when teachers' pay is on the line? Why not earlier when children's qualifications were at issue?
The teacher's union party line, that "merit pay leads to teaching to the test and that would be bad" is a slap in the face to studious children who took their examinations seriously. It destroys the credibility of the profession.
Is it possible to construct good tests? http://www.maths.qmul.ac.uk/~fv/books/em/EssentialMaths.pdf is an interesting example of a test aimed at ensuring minimum standards at the start of a university mathematics course.
The usual technique for gaming an examination is to memorise answers to a core set of questions that keep coming up. For example one games a calculus examination by memorising cos 2x => -2 sin 2x and the examiners play along by providing enough easy questions that you can reach the pass mark with doing the hard questions that make the examination look tough.
In the article the examiner, Franco Vivaldi, is refusing to play the game. Instead of designing the test so that it can be broken and students can be passed even though they haven't learned the essential technique, Vivaldi takes the opposite tack and tries to design a test with enough variety that students have to learn the relevant mathematics.
Would teaching to this test do any harm? Drilling the techniques to get faster and more accurate in pursuit of a higher score would be harmful. Vivaldi needs his students to be competent because these techniques occur as basic techniques in the more advanced material that he aims to teach. He needs his students to be fluent enough that difficulties with the basics do not distract them in the course of advanced work, but beyond that their time is better spent on the advanced work, not on acquiring greater fluency with the basics. Knowing this he sets the test as pass/fail.
The success of merit pay will depend on improving the tests. It will be an interesting battle to watch.
Either way the family will be making $50,000, only one way their expenses are $20,000 more and the other involves the mother being at home 40 hours more a week, accomplishing more household tasks and essentially returning us to the 1940's.
It wouldn't necessarily be the wife however, as in my household I'm the one earning the 2/5ths and would have little problem being a stay at home daddy/teacher. In fact, being an uber-nerd I have a strong feeling I'll be teaching more math and science skills to my offspring than any educational facility anyway, and having worked as a writer I know I'm going to be teaching far better English skills at an early age than any primary school education will give my kids at a 30:1 child:teacher ratio. So being paid $20,000 to stay at home and do what I'd be doing in my free time anyway, seems like a win-win.
I am just advocating for the child. As parents we're in the best position(mostly) to judge what our children's needs are.
By comparison, average private school tuition is $6600 and Catholic school tuition is $4254.
Spending is probably not the problem.
Quick google says catholic schools are financially "twice as efficient spending less money per pupil" as public schools: http://www.gothamgazette.com/iotw/catholicschools/
From 2002, so you can probably do better.
That said, the public schools in NYC are (mostly) a disaster, and it's disgusting to me (as an NYC taxpayer) that their return on investment, so to speak, is so poor. (Even the good schools will commonly have class sizes of 35-40 students. Lots of long writing assignments for high school students? Not likely...)
First NYC is larger than Manhattan and there are plenty of schools with 20-25:1 teacher ratios that would provide a better comparison.
The citation itself was the first I could find, simply to verify the outrageous sounding numbers. At private schools in Manhattan, numbers of 25,000-30,000 are now "normal". I don't know the rates for schools in the outer boroughs, but I'm willing to bet that Brooklyn rates are right behind or equal to Manhattan rates.
My larger point was just that comparing NYC public school to average private school rates was off-center.
Also, just fyi, no matter what they say, those private schools do not offer a 1:4-1:10 student:teacher ratio. 1:12-1:20 is far more common now by high school.
That list contains TOP schools some of which were founded in the 1600 and 1700s and who are so selective that some reject 80% of applicants. That was not a typical list of private schools.
And I actually believe their claims of teacher ratios -- at least on that list.
While I accept, NYC private schools cost more than the national average - they are essentially charging taxpayers $20K a year to not educate kids.
Fair enough - also funny. I did read it. I don't think it says that other schools in NYC cost much less. The numbers are normal for Manhattan and Brooklyn now. I can't get you the weblink for every private school in Manhattan and Brooklyn, but here are two more links chosen pretty much at random. The number you will see over and over in articles and blogs on this is $30,000.
http://www.nysun.com/new-york/parents-facing-sticker-shock-o...
Mentally handicapped, ESL, and problem students are easily booted from or denied entry to private schools.
My son (who is and will remain in public school, though we live in a wealthy suburb and so enjoy de facto private schooling) had trouble socializing in 1st grade and was "diagnosed" by a school functionary as having an "autism spectrum disorder". After consulting with my mom, a full-time LD/BD teacher in the Chicago Public Schools, we argued for over a month against assigning an IEP to him. "You need the IEP to get occupational therapy services" (read: handwriting lessons). Yeah, and, we can count on never getting rid of the IEP, or getting him into any selective program anywhere.
(He's concluding 5th grade now, and besides issues getting his homework in, he's doing great. Late bloomer.)
The fact that private schools can be selective about students and can expel them virtually without cause is not a spurious concern. It's a very real issue.
I think their ability to resist this is tied to whether the economy gets substantially better in the next two years; if so the pension problem may fall out of focus (even though it will actually only be getting worse, but such are the vicissitudes of democracy), if it doesn't, I suspect the teacher's unions will end up spending themselves politically bankrupt at which point who knows what will happen? There's a lot of "reformedness" that's built up over the years, everyone's going to want to take a crack at it.
There is a potential here that there hasn't been for a while.
FWIW, I mean most of the above as descriptively as possible, without endorsement of the desirability or lack thereof of anything mentioned. Personally I would like to see substantial "reform", but only certain ones, not others. (For instance, I would oppose increasing hours spent in school; I think they are already far more than are necessary to meet current goals and to the extent goals are not being met it is not for lack of hours. So simply slapping an initiative to increase school hours with the label "reform" does not make me approve of it.) I perceive no guarantee that even if reform happens, I will like it.
“Things that will destroy our economy” is primarily the financial services sector taking up 30 or something percent of the entire profit of the economy for several years, and decreasing tax rates for the last 30 years until by now they’re lower than they’ve been since the 40s, to the point that the federal government pays for things by taking loans instead, including sucking money out of the social security fund and using it as a general revenue source. Schools are less well funded now than they have been for decades, especially where I am in California where the public school system has been on a consistent tragic slide since Reagan was governor, from once being among the best in the nation.
Blaming teachers (or blaming “scary teacher unions”) for that is a tremendous distortion; teaching is only a reasonable profession because of a long history of hard fighting for decent wages. Most of the teachers work their asses off, for all of our children, and heaping scorn on them is one of the most reprehensible of the talking points of the right in America over the last 30 years.
(disclaimer: my mother is a teacher)
That's the past tense, what tanked our economy in the past few months. Looking forward, what will kill us is unfunded mandates. You know how I know this? Because even if we completely fixed the financials industry, completely and utterly tamed it and turned it entirely into a non-profit organization while still somehow retaining its efficiency, we still choke on our unfunded mandates in 10 to 20 years, tops. They're growing faster than inflation, faster than the economy, and faster than any conceivable first-world economy could possibly grow even if $YOUR_FAVORITE_ECONOMIC_THEORY was perfectly instituted and it worked exactly as you expected.
All of the unfunded mandates are gloriously sweet and wonderful things. Money for teachers. Money for old people. Money for retired firefighters and police. Money for public servants. Money for sick people and especially money for sick old people. Our political inability to say no to the sweet and kind and needy people is what brought them to us in the first place. But it doesn't matter how gloriously wonderful they are. They are unaffordable. We physically lack the resources to fulfill the mandates. When I say "physically", I mean, physically. We lack the energy and materials and manpower they are. When I say "physically", I mean that one way or another we will not pay those unfunded mandates, because we are actually, factually incapable of it. The only question is how we will fail to meet those mandates.
Yeah, the teachers have had a role in that. Not much I can do to prevent that from being the outcome. I can point out there are hardly alone, though. There's a lot of people lined up at the trough of unsustainable mandates. Thanks to Social Security and Medicare, that list is "Pretty much every citizen of the United States and a fair number of non-citizens". Outrage changes nothing. Here we are.
("Defined benefit payouts" ought to be striken from our vocabulary. They are physically implausible. What happens when you build huge chunks of the economy on a physically-implausible primitive should hardly be a surprise.)
Besides, I seriously question the marginal value we're getting out of the part of the investment that's killing us, which isn't salary, benefits, facilities, or management costs. We've been trained by various things that the answer to "Do schools need more money?" is simply "Yes", regardless of context, but that produces pathological economic policies. At some point the answer becomes "No", and personally I think we long passed that point.
See also: "Do we need more money for crime enforcement?" "Do we need more money to fight drugs?" "Do we need more centralized power to fight terrorism?"
I am totally willing to reconsider that question as circumstances change. Reform things, start outputting better graduates (according to my rather strict standards which involve actual training to think and such, not just better test scores), and demonstrate that under these new circumstances the bottleneck is money and I'll be happy and overjoyed to reconsider.
* forces teachers to be layed off in seniority order
* spends decades failing to come up with a measurable actionable definition of teacher effectiveness
* squelches any attempt at merit or incentive pay
* proscribes any mandates to put in effort above the lowest common denominator of class prep and student intervention, and then
* attempts to enforce a monopoly on school management
... is naturally going to distort and retard any attempt to improve the system, which is demonstrably producing poor outcomes.
It's not about the teachers, it's about the system. Unfortunately, the things that are wrong with the system are all framed in terms of the welfare of individual teachers, so we're all jammed up.
I absolutely agree with you that our current methods of selecting, training, and critiquing teachers are deeply flawed. But they’re flawed for a whole host of reasons, and the teachers’ unions that fought against the often worse problems of the pre-union past are not by a long shot the biggest problem facing the education system.
Responsible? Yes, along with all kinds of other entites. But all that isn't terribly relevant to my actual point, which is that the political capital that will be expended on maintaining those benefits will create openings to oppose the teacher's unions in other ways.
If you want names named, the SEIU is the biggest problem of the bunch. But it's all the same problem, unfunded defined-benefit mandates. It doesn't matter who is getting them when they exceed what society can afford.
I still had a steady stream of high school graduates showing up in my college program that could not read a paragraph, could not write a sentence, who could not add, subtract, multiply or divide fractions or decimals, yet they were proud gradates of the local school district.
What's broke? No idea, but I do know that if that district had done even the most trivial of standardized testing, those students would have been flagged for remedial work long before they started college. Instead the college, with about 40 full time faculty, dedicated 3 of those faculty to 4th through 8th grade remedial math and reading.
Unless you taught a long time ago or are in a very strange state, odds are those children were tested with standardized tests, probably multiple times. I live in Michigan, so I can guarantee that pretty much every child coming out of Detroit has been tested in a standardized manner by the state at least three times while in school (conservatively, I remember having more but I'm not sure what all they were), and they still come out with problems. You can't even get a real HS diploma without passing these tests. (At least when I graduated you would get a diploma from the school but it lacked some sort of state endorsement.)
I don't think total lack of standardized testing is the problem. The problem is they are either being cheated on or gamed, or nobody really knows how to solve the problems being identified.
I stopped teaching twenty years ago. There were standardized tests in high school, but they were not used to determine progress or as graduation requirement. Social promotion was common - students were not held back under any circumstances, as it was assumed that the social stigma would be worse than the failure to actually learn anything.
We tested the students at the time they applied to college. Because were were publicly funded, open entry, we accepted all high school graduates regardless of how they scored. If they scored low, we moved them into remedial programs/courses.
The fact is it takes effort to make changes that would earn this money and the school districts who are willing to make that effort are the ones that already care. So while it’s great to reward teachers and school districts that excel those people were probably already doing good jobs (or at least competent ones). So giving them more money is nice but doesn’t really solve the problem.
The problem is the lethargic ones. The ones who are so lazy and incompetent that they wouldn’t even try for this money. The districts that are so pulled down by incompetent teachers who can’t be fired that improvement is all but impossible for them. Fixing education means finding a way to deal with those people and this push doesn’t seem to address them at all.
Moreover, the program was structured so that simply assembling an application kickstarted reform efforts.
My read is that the actual money being disbursed is kind of a red herring. The real benefit of the program is that it forces a bunch of states to start piloting teacher-tenure and seniority reforms, which, a few years from now, may serve as models for the rest of the states.
completely ridicules. to my mind a district that pays their top teachers 120000 solves the entire problem. Imagine the competition for teaching positions in a district in which you start at 70000 at after 7 year you can be making up to 120000. What young ambitious twenty something wouldn't want a job were you could make 120000 a year a have three months guaranteed vacation time in a field in which you can feel confident that you are making a difference and there is clear tangible progress from your work.
These people would do well in a lot of high-paying professions. It is also not a coincidence that the lack of good teachers is most severe in math and sciences. Even if they may choose to be a teacher out of personal desire to make positive change for a few years, most cannot stand seeing their classmates, who are sometimes less capable, earn twice or even thrice their income for decades.
In the society we live in, it is important to pay people what they are worth. Would you personally choose this noble path if it means a 50 or 60% permanent reduction of your income and an almost zero possibility of hitting it rich?
Wow. That's got to be one of the most perverse arguments to continue our tradition of treating teachers like shit.
Compensation issues are never strictly rational.
What do you think it would do for morale at your favorite tech company if all salaries conformed exactly to a published table, and advancement on that table was based solely on years of service and number of Microsoft certifications earned? Rockstar or plodding clockpuncher, makes no difference: you get paid what the scale says. The company gradually attracts folks for whom this makes sense, and the whole culture becomes worshiping that table. One of the most common topics of discussion is how many years you have to retirement (highlighted in bold at the top of the table), how much you'll make in retirement, and what you'll do after retirement.
Somebody in accounting felt up the receptionist three years ago and was placed on administrative leave, but he's still collecting paychecks exactly as the table mandates. He comes in at 9, checks into an office specially prepared for misfits, leaves at 2:57 and 30 seconds, and earns 240% of what you do due to his seniority.
A friend of mine -- a Democrat whose eyes burned with missionary zeal when he talked about the responsibility we have to educate the poor -- was very disappointed with me when I abandoned my career plans as an educator, and took up with Teach for America at one of the worst schools in NYC. They broke him.
I don't say this lightly: there is a sickness of the soul in public education.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
It seems to me that the only piece missing from the current system is the ability to fire bad teachers.
I'm generally pro-union, but I believe unions do themselves a disservice by propping up bad teachers from legitimate dismissal as well as protecting good teachers from unfair treatment.
Even a weak teacher can guide a class of students through the chapters of a textbook. Sure, the kids would learn a lot more from a good teacher, but they are shaped far more by their peers. Crummy parents produce rotten kids, who slow the class down, cause disruptions and set bad examples. Furthermore, there are many talented teachers who are poor baby sitters.
http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/phase1-applications...