Just saw this last night in SF courtesy of the Commonwealth Club. Highly recommended.
You're shown that getting results is straightforward: get rid of poor teachers and reward good ones. One stat that was particularly interesting, from a Stanford researcher whose name I forget, was that replacing the worst 6-10% of teachers would put us on the same proficiency level as Finland.
Unfortunately, the system makes that very difficult. Many teachers are granted tenure, making them impossible to fire, and educators' compensation isn't designed to allow for performance incentives. Contracts demanded by unions are partially to blame.
Also, our education system was built for previous generations' economies. Professionals, scientists, technical workers, factory workers, and laborers were needed in different proportions than they are today. Now we have more highly skilled jobs without enough highly educated Americans to fill them. SV and schools in Redwood City and Woodside are mentioned specifically.
It examines the costs of poor education, like the staggering number of dropouts who end up in prison. Their incarceration cost could put them through private school with money left over for college.
Saying the film demonizes Weingarten is exaggerating. She doesn't look great, but there are clearly a lot of factors at work.
Waiting for Superman makes clear that the way forward is good teachers.
The problems are dual, and nobody likes the solutions.
On the one hand, yes, you have unions, which theoretically are sticking up for the workers but in practice spend a large % of their time and resources sticking up for the lousy workers who deserve to be fired anyways.
On the other hand, you have about half of the country devoted to relentlessly slashing education budgets in the name of "less government". In a small-l labor dominated industry, that effectively means smaller paychecks and/or more work for the same pay. So good teachers who are frustrated by the union shenanigans don't have a lot of other alternatives - who else is gonna stick up for them?
Real solutions would be a combination of big pay incentives for star teachers (not that I'd necessarily be a star, but why on earth would I teach at those rates when I can be an engineer?), coupled with a much looser structure on tenure, more dynamic general situation, etc. That would be the kind of incentive to empower the good teachers and disempower the bad ones. But you can't just blame the unions without addressing the other side of the coin.
why on earth would I teach at those rates when I can be an engineer?)
Because you might enjoy working reasonable hours, 2 extra months of vacation, 10 extra years of retirement, tenure and defined benefit pensions? You might (like most teachers) also not be smart enough to become an engineer?
As for that half of the country trying to bring teacher pay down to market rate, why are they are problem? Why should teachers get paid above-market rates at taxpayer expense?
Market rate isn't "what yummyfajitas thinks they should be paid", and it's not "what the 80 year old nuns down the street get paid". You'll find most charters pay higher than public schools for an equivalent amount of experience (public schools have a lot of 30 year veterans on the payroll, charters not so much).
Anyways, if you're looking for talent, then market rate is the rate required to lure in talent from other industries. You can probably pay a little less because people like the idea of being a teacher, but it can't be egregiously less, which is what it is right now - what would I make as a first year or fifth year math teacher?
That's not bad for a liberal arts grad 5 years out of college, even by NYC standards.
Market rate is "how little can we pay them before we can't fill our open positions". I see no reason to believe we are anywhere near that point, Teach For America still rejects what, 2/3 of the people who apply?
$64k/year with 5 years experience. That's up from a base of 45k just starting out.
So if I wanted to switch it up to be a math teacher, I'd be cutting my pay to 45k. After sweating it out for 5 years, I'd be up to 65k, still below what entry-level engineers can make in NYC.
And that's in one of the 2 most expensive housing markets in the country.
Regarding "How little can we possibly pay to keep a warm body in teh room" -- this is why modern conservatives should never be taken seriously on education. The idea of quality never even enters into your thinking? I'm not trying to be histrionic here, but why provide education at all if that's how you feel about it?
EDIT: More on that link. The following quote implies we're both overestimating what a 5-year veteran gets:
"NOTE: If you are eligible for the 5 years longevity, please add $1000 to your annual salary
Example: Jane smith had completed 5 years of full-time work for the DOE. She is currently on step 6a
with the Masters Differential. Her annual salary is $56,707. Her new salary code is 6V and her new
annual salary is $57,707."
That seems to imply 5 years with a master's that you got over those summers and went into debt for gets you to 57k. In New York City. What do I get in finance if I'm good at math, almost triple that?
You'd be cutting your pay to $45k ($60k annualized), working less, getting an extra couple months of vacation, and great pension benefits.
I also forgot that for teaching 5 years, you've just earned a pension of 6% of your "Final Average Salary" (average of your last 3 years). So for teaching 5 years, you've just earned a pension of $2900/year (inflation adjusted) starting at age 55 (assuming the 5 year pay is $50,000, not sure I understand the table I posted). Assuming you live to be 80, that's worth another $15k per 9 months of work.
So teachers total comp is $60k per 9 months, just starting out (equivalent to $80k/year). That's really not bad for entry level.
In finance, you are working far more hours than the teacher, and you can also be fired whenever you under perform. You also seem to be assuming that GS or JPM will give a job to just any idiot with a math degree.
"How little can we possibly pay to keep a warm body in teh room"
Not what I said at all. I said "fill our open positions" - in general, to fill a position, you must find qualified people. I'm a strong proponent of measuring performance, firing the warm bodies who don't perform, and offering rewards to those who perform well.
> So teachers total comp is $60k per 9 months, just starting out (equivalent to $80k/year).
On one hand, I understand this statement - afterall, you're getting those summer vacation months. On the other hand though... if I'm used to a salary of 80k/year, it's going to be quite a cut to go to 60k. I would have to spend the summer working somewhere else to make up the missing 20k, or else get used to a different standard of living. Maybe I can find a summer job that combines my ideas of vacation with earning some money (probably less than 20k with those goals), but the whole prospect is not that appealing yet.
People are willing to take paycuts for increased benefits, but here what we're saying is you're simply taking your 80k job and deciding not to work for three months. Sure, the annual salary is the same, but 60k is a lot less attractive than 80k. And of course it's not 60k today either, it's 45k with 15 in the future.
Anyhow, what I'm trying to say is that while the number manipulation makes things look better, 45k/y + summer vacation + 15k/y in pension does not sound like enough compensation to forgo that 80k/y engineering job yet. Especially if I need to deal with the hassle of finding alternate income for the summer months. Also, I would imagine that similarly to SF, NYC offers >80k for starting engineers (if only because of living costs).
If you want money, trade time for money. If you want time, don't make that trade. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Incidentally, the median starting salary for students at NYU/Poly (NYU's new engineering school) is only $62k/year. So it looks like teachers are getting paid the same for 9 months of work that engineers get paid for 12 months of work.
Sure, but I'm saying I want money. And given that I want money, a teaching position is a worse proposition for me than an engineering position (whether due to the annoyance of finding a high-paying summer job every year, running a second job in the extra time I have, or simply because the salary is less regardless). If this holds for other people as well, the only people a teacher's salary would attract are people who want time. Which means the salary is not high enough to attract smart people out of industry whose goal is also to make money.
Well, the nickel-and-diming attitude seems to have a strong prejudice against qualified people, even if you say "least amount for a qualified person". Engineering departments managed with that philosophy tend to be filled with mediocre hacks.
As far as teachers working less.. do you know any young teachers? We're both on Hacker News right now. Teachers have been at work since 7AM teaching in front of a classroom, and are currently doing grading and lesson planning.
Regarding the pensions, I agree it's an area for reform, and a case in point of union dysfunction. But as long as people like you come across as borderline hostile to the idea of teachers being paid well for a job well done, they're going to close ranks behind the union, and I would too.
EDIT: I don't care what some report says about hours in the aggregate, especially one that presumably intermingles running-out-the-clock 64yos with young teachers. I don't know how it was compiled but I'm sure I could find one saying the exact opposite if I cared to. I'm assuming you don't know many teachers, otherwise you would get what I'm saying here.
I don't care what some report says about hours in the aggregate, especially one that presumably intermingles running-out-the-clock 64yos with young teachers.
Please correct me if I am misunderstanding, but this seems to be flatly stating that Yummyfajitas was right in saying you do not care about the facts?
I'm assuming you don't know many teachers, otherwise you would get what I'm saying here.
I have an aunt and uncle that are teachers and a wife that is going to school to become a teacher right now, but I largely agree with yummyfajitas and he is carefully supporting his arguments with facts and links.
If he and I are wrong about it, would you mind pointing out exactly how rather than saying we just don't understand?
To start with, the fact that it's comparing some self-reported statistics between teachers and "other professionals"? And mushing them together into some total minutes worked figure?
They're estimating the hours worked by a teacher at less than 40. I've never met a teacher who put in less than 40 hours.
Then, as I said upthread, the fact that it's mashing young teachers (the topic at hand) together with running-the-clock 64yo teachers really brings it all together. Maybe this explains the sub-40 hour workweek. Unfortunately, a 5-page PDF report with 4 graphs doesn't summarize the be-all of teaching.
Also, if you bothered to read my source as far as page 2, you'd realize that it does provide breakdowns based on teacher age. Apparently it's young teachers who work less, and older (50+) teachers who work more (5.1 hours). See table 2 on page 2.
On that graph:
"NOTE: The calculations of hours worked are based on data collected about how survey
respondents spent “yesterday.” Thus, average weekly work hours are an extrapolation
based on the activity for 1 day."
I mean how much confidence do you have in this thing? And you're repeating it like it's the bible?
Let me ask you a question, do you consider all hours of work equal? What if you compared office work to, say, mining, if they worked an hour fewer, would you say you work harder?
My original point was that if you want better teachers, you need to pay them commensurate with the value they create. The private sector will generally reward professionals if their service is needed and valuable. If you grant that education is a public good, then it makes sense to pay for good workers. That means taking care of your people while disempowering the union. If you're hostile to the workers they're going to rally around that union, no matter what. You can accomplish more with effective management than with a blanket opposition to teachers being taken care of.
Your last paragraph is exactly what the DC superintendent proposed. The teachers' unions were so threatened that they didn't even allow it to come to a vote.
It also underlies much of the Obama admin's Head Start initiative.
Of course, things like that are a lot harder to mandate from the federal level. You have to get into things like measurement and (opinion here) most of the really important things about teaching are very hard to measure.
Which is why vouchers seem to be the best idea. Let the school principals decide who are the best and worst teachers, and let them figure out for themselves what they need to pay in order to obtain the best ones and fire the worst.
Maybe you could have a variable-value voucher system where the amount a school gets for having taught a kid depends on test scores at the end.
More administrative freedom for school principals is orthogonal to vouchers.
I'm all about charter schools in theory, and still am much of the time in practice, but often the way the funding is structured is ridiculous.
Back when I was in local politics, a charter school opened up in our town. For every kid who enrolled, we had to pay the charter school more than we were paying to educate the kid ourselves. AND bus them there, presumably to add insult to injury. So I'm a little suspicious of vouchers and charter schools even though they instinctively sound like good ideas to me.
>where the amount a school gets for having taught a kid depends on test scores at the end
Presumably you'd be making some assessment of value added, which would be hard of scores alone. A school in an area of high illiteracy that manages to improve literacy levels of pupils could arguably have added more value than a school in a high achievement area where achievement levels are pretty constant - moving people from a fail in Maths/English to a pass might impact their lives far more than moving them from a B to an A (or A to A* as they're now called in the UK; grade inflation FTW).
Actually I think you could just do it on absolute test scores, thus making the smart children more valuable. Schools would compete to bring in the best students, not just to fill their classrooms, otherwise there's no particular incentive to offer the best educational programs. The best schools get the best students and get the most money, the worst schools get stuck with the dumbest students.
Could lead to increased stratification. On the other hand, is it worth spending a lot of money to educate a student who is dumb as a doornail anwyay?
Well, 2 comments and we're 1 for 2 so I guess my 50% figure was right on.
I'll respond with a couple more questions: Do you place a value on increasing future "creation and innovation" by doing a good job of educating kids? If they learn exclusively from mediocre, by-the-book personalities, do you think that helps or hurts the "creation and innovation" parts of their brains?
Your question seems to be implicitly assuming that most great teachers could also have been great engineers. At the risk of stereotyping, I do not think that is true.
A great teacher must be dynamic, engaging, intelligent, able to connect with children so that they can teach creation and innovation. But an engineer must be intelligent, methodical, and able to master vast amounts of technical knowledge.
I suspect most people who make great engineers would not make great teachers, and vice versa. There will be some that could easily be great at either though.
Those, I think would better serve society by going into engineering for a few reasons. One is that the number capable of being a truly great engineer is smaller than the number capable of being a truly great teacher.
Both are significant for society, but one is more rare than the other. Also, it seems that the point of education is to be able to produce great makers such as engineers who do the work that holds society together. If we always direct our best minds to enhancing the best minds of the future, we will have highly educated children but little or no actual progress for those children to enjoy.
One great engineers contributions last forever, assuming they become part of a product that is stable enough to be reverse engineered (so software and physical both count) and is proportionate to Contribution*product. One great teachers contribution rots due to reversion to the mean.
The average teacher almost certainly has a greater marginal effect than the engineer. The 90th percentile engineer kicks the teachers ass.
"One stat that was particularly interesting, from a Stanford researcher whose name I forget, was that replacing the worst 6-10% of teachers would put us on the same proficiency level as Finland."
Us = "the teachers" or "the US school system"? If the latter, are we allowed to import the Finnish parents?
Bad teachers hang on for reasons other than union contracts. The private schools and the charters typically don't pay as well. Maybe it isn't so easy to replace a French/chemistry/history teacher, or maybe you have to do so in the last three weeks before school starts. If you get a stinker then, perhaps in a private school you can fix this after a year, but then you'll have shot a dozen or more kids' introduction to French or chemistry.
I was stunned because [An Inconvenient Truth] was so
powerful that my wife told me we couldn’t burn incandescent
bulbs anymore. She didn’t become a zealot; she just
realized that [climate change] was serious and we have to
do something.
Well, that's something, I guess. Not going to make much of a difference, though. As David Mackay says in Sustainable Energy - without the hot air, "If everybody only does a little, the impact will only be a little."
Articles about education too often end with platitudes about how we need real debate to make changes occur. I'd argue we need action... preferably from the private sector.
Judging by the lack of comments on this article so far, not many people here follow this issue. The DC public schools are a microcosm of the whole ed reform movement, and an example of how difficult it can be to navigate the politics of reforming a corrupt system.
Rhee has done a lot to improve the efficiency of the district (in terms of getting books and supplies where needed, and using school resources wisely), but at the end of the day, her approach to reform (command and control vs. consensus building) is what will likely end her tenure early.
Right now, the mayor who backed her (Fenty) is in a tight race with a candidate who is exploiting people's distrust in a government that, for better or worse, acts based on what it believes is right for the people, not what the people believe is right for them.
Or, in the tl;dr edition:
When working within the confines of politics, you can get short bursts of successful but temporary reform, or you can be safe politically while accomplishing very little. There's gotta be another way.
Could you explain how action from the private sector might help to reform the public education system. Unless you're referring to vouchers I'm not sure I understand the connection you're trying to make.
Also, I'm not sure its accurate to claim that Rhee might lose her position if Fenty isn't re-elected. His opponent seems to be on the same side of education reform as him and most of his claims to "anti government" policies are more in the realm of police and tax reform (at least as I understand it; I don't live in DC)
I apologize for the lack of clarity. Didn't want to get too far into the weeds, but I think after school is a great place to start. My favorite example of this are Japanese cram schools (Juku), which serve a much larger and varied function than most people who have heard of them realize.
Japan has an extensive network of for-profit after school programs that act as a check on the standards enacted in Japanese public schools. When the Ministry of Education decided to change its standards (which affect curriculum across the nation), the juku responded by offering tougher courses, balancing out any perceived weakening of the public schools. Rosegaard's book is my favorite on the subject of Juku: http://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Education-Cram-School-Busines...
There is some inherent unfairness to that system, mainly having to do with parents who can and can't pay for juku. But there are ways to mitigate the issues caused by socioeconomic differences. Some of those issues have already been somewhat addressed in America by the Supplementary Educational Services (http://www2.ed.gov/nclb/choice/help/ses/index.html) portion of NCLB. The program essentially forces failing schools to pay for after school tutoring.
I'd prefer a better designed SES program, but I think after school could be more promising than charters or vouchers for several reasons:
1. After school addresses the reality that children are as, if not more, affected by experiences outside of the normal school day
2. It would help avoid many of the contentious issues surrounding teachers unions
3. It would allow for innovative approaches to curriculum and teaching without the burdens of having to supply everything we expect from a school (music, art, gym programs; extracurriculars, tricked out facilities)
4. It might stimulate a growth of small, education-oriented businesses in poor/minority communities (there are several successful, minority-owned tutoring companies in my hometown that rely on SES)
This isn't to say nothing should be done to reform schools from the inside. I just think we could use a two-pronged approach.
As someone who went through the tortuous education system in Taiwan, where the culture of cram schools also existed, and standardized testing was king, I would not wish it upon anyone. In fact, I think cram schools are one of the worst ideas ever conceived in education.
All it does is created socially retarded (in the non-derogatory way) children unable to deal with anything that doesn't come out of a textbook, with no discernible life skills whatsoever.
I've spent years unlearning things from that stage of my life, and I'm still not done. Every day I'm learning social norms and life knowledge that I honestly should have found out at age 12, not age 24. When you send kids to a public school for 8 hours, then spend the next 6 hours not interacting with people, and instead cramming for their next exam so they won't be hopelessly left behind, you're creating a massive social problem for later. When your children's only free time in a day is spent wolfing down packed dinner while the taxicab speeds from one cram class to another, you are doing yourself and your children a grave disservice.
There is a fundamental difference between school and education, one would be wise not to confuse the two.
More schooling is an absolutely ass backwards solution to our educational problems. The solution is better education, not slapping de facto mandatory private schools on top and making our kids work more hours than an EA employee.
Given a choice between what we have now and a cram school culture, I would prefer the latter. At least then the (predominantly poor, black, and latino) students our public education system routinely fails would have a fighting chance at a decent life.
That said, I don't want to give the impression that cram school culture should accepted and imported wholesale to America. I used cram schools as an example of outside forces based in capitalism acting as a self-correcting mechanism for a public school system. Given the political difficulties of transforming public schools, I think it would be helpful to have at least one place students can go to receive an education.
I missed your second point. Gray, Fenty's opponent, has been elusive about his thoughts on Rhee; silence is undoubtedly playing in his favor here. Rhee has already made it clear that she won't stick around long without the level of support (and freedom) Fenty has given her so far.
ah, put it like that and I would probably agree with you. The way you phrased the issue the first time I was under the impression you were suggesting that fenty's opponent might be anti-Rhee. I was confused by this because I was under the impression that Rhee has pretty overwhelming political clout and public support. Currently it's just bad politics to be anti-Rhee in DC (unless you're a union leader). It would make more sense that Rhee would threaten to walk without continued support and unilateral power.
"Most astonishing to Rhee was how easily the contract was finally approved. “The entire time the union was fighting us, they said, ‘Our members are never gonna accept this’—then it passed by an 80 to 20 percent vote!” she exclaims."
Hah, never assume that the interests of the teachers and their union representatives (or any other set of elected officials) always coincide. Specifically, proposals to decrease the number of workers but raise their pay (and/or give large amounts of money to those layed off) often bring workers and unions into conflict.
I think that's just Rhee being dumb. You're in a negotiation. Of course they're going to say they can't accept this, until they do. Union staff almost never bargain contracts anyway. Typically it's done by a bargaining committee consisting of members, some of whom are elected officers but mostly just volunteers.
Lookit, if teachers unions were the main culprit, then education outcomes in right-to-work states (the South, mostly) would be significantly higher than states where teachers unions exist. This is not the case. The problem is one of attitudes (both familial and institutional) and one of teaching talent (the students who enroll in Schools of Education are below the median for GPA and SAT scores for universities that offer education degrees).
Attitudes are hard to explain; Friday Night Lights (the book) examines but doesn't explain. The quality of teaching stock is explainable, but no one likes the explanation - the opening of the workforce to women has taken a lot of high-quality women out of the classroom and into the previously male-dominated workforce. All those great women doctors, lawyers, managers, engineers, architects, and so on would have been teachers 50 years ago.
I don't have a good answer, but Waiting for Superman's demonization of Randi Weingarten and the unions is a terribly small portion of the problem. Boogeymen are easy to hate; it's harder to point the finger at ourselves.
Why would you believe that right to work states would not have teachers unions? It's true that a right to work state will probably not have unions the workers don't want, but that isn't the same thing.
Every state has public sector employee unions. The UAW is also in most right-to-work states. But the vast majority of employees (public and private) are not members of those unions and I'm positive that teacher contracts in RTW states are not collectively bargained.
I'm not inclined to brush aside the union issue as you do, but you do make a good point about the increased competition from other professions.
Perhaps less-skilled entrants to the profession are more vocally supportive of a union than those who are confident in their individual ability to excel. Even in right-to-work states, that would create selective social pressure which would make entry to the profession less attractive to those with a competitive mindset. An old friend of mine who tried teaching elementary (in CA) for 3-4 years before leaving in frustration said she was willing to tolerate the pay and pecking order that was in place, but it was the attitudes of the older teachers which she really struggled with.
Even in right-to-work states, public sector jobs (like teachers) may practically require union membership, and the conditions of work are largely dictated by union negotiating/political influence.
You're shown that getting results is straightforward: get rid of poor teachers and reward good ones. One stat that was particularly interesting, from a Stanford researcher whose name I forget, was that replacing the worst 6-10% of teachers would put us on the same proficiency level as Finland.
Unfortunately, the system makes that very difficult. Many teachers are granted tenure, making them impossible to fire, and educators' compensation isn't designed to allow for performance incentives. Contracts demanded by unions are partially to blame.
Also, our education system was built for previous generations' economies. Professionals, scientists, technical workers, factory workers, and laborers were needed in different proportions than they are today. Now we have more highly skilled jobs without enough highly educated Americans to fill them. SV and schools in Redwood City and Woodside are mentioned specifically.
It examines the costs of poor education, like the staggering number of dropouts who end up in prison. Their incarceration cost could put them through private school with money left over for college.
Saying the film demonizes Weingarten is exaggerating. She doesn't look great, but there are clearly a lot of factors at work.
Waiting for Superman makes clear that the way forward is good teachers.