Only 40% of UFT Voters Are Actual Teachers

April 14, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Over on NRO, Rick Hess points out that only 40% of the voters in last week’s UFT elections were actual teachers.

Do you think this sort of thing might have something to do with the problem of runaway, unfunded teacher pensions? Looks like at least one union is representing retirees at least as much as teachers.

This also sheds some light on why the unions favor policies that destroy the working environment for public school teachers. Only 40% of their voters are affected by the destruction of the teacher working environment.

And this is after the implementation of a new rule that counts each vote by a retiree as only 0.72 of a vote. If the retirees’ votes hadn’t been diluted, the teachers would only be 34% of the electorate and the retirees 46%.

In case you’re wondering, the other 22% of the UFT vote is composed of what the union calls “functional teachers,” i.e. almost entirely non-teachers (librarians, nurses, counsellors, etc.)

1 Comment | teacher union | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

The Special Ed DC Bubble

August 23, 2009

One of the (many) problems with education policy analysts is that a large number of them live in or around Washington, D.C. 

D.C. is a remarkably abnormal place.  Because of the giant distortions of the presence and subsidies from the federal government as well as the atypical set of people who live in that area, policy experiences in DC are very often quite different from the experiences in the rest of the country. 

The problem is that people tend to generalize from their immediate experiences.  If something happens to you, you hear about it from people you know, or you read about it in your local paper, you tend to think that’s the way it is for everyone.  So, DC education analysts are always at-risk of drawing policy conclusions based on incredibly atypical experiences.

For a prime example see Andy Rotherham and Sara Mead’s thoughts on special education vouchers:

In fact, if special education identification led to funding for private school attendance, it would be unusual if this did not create an incentive to participate in special education in many communities, particularly those with low-performing public schools. For example, Washington, D.C., and New York City currently contend with substantial abuse of special education by affluent parents. In addition, there are reports of parents seeking to have their students diagnosed with learning disabilities in order to gain accommodations on the SAT or for other reasons. [fn 27] 

For another example, listen to Amber Winkler, Mike Petrilli, and Rick Hess discuss our most recent study on special education vouchers (it starts around minute 11:00).  They generally do a good job of describing the study but they express doubts about our findings because they believe that parents, especially affluent parents, have considerable influence over special education placements.

On what basis do these D.C. education analysts believe that a significant number of parents, especially affluent parents, are gaming the special education diagnostic system to get access to advantageous accommodations or expensive private placements?  The evidence Andy and Sara provide in footnote 27 consists largely of newspaper accounts from Washington, D.C..  Mike and Rick provide no source and we can only assume that they are drawing upon their immediate experiences.

Of course, the antidote to mistaken generalizations from our limited and potentially distorted set of immediate experiences is the reliance on systematic data.  If we step back and look at the broad evidence, we can avoid some of the easy mistakes that result from assuming that everyone’s experience is like ours.  As it turns out, DC is a gigantic outlier.

School officials, not parents, make the determination of whether a student has a particular disability and what accommodations are necessary.  Parents are entitled to challenge the decisions of school officials, but they rarely do and even more rarely win those challenges. 

In the fall of 2007 there were 6,718,203 students receiving special education services between the ages of 3 and 21.  And that year there was a grand total of 14,834 disputes from parents resolved by a hearing or agreement prior to completion of a hearing (see Table 7-3).  That’s about .2% of special education cases that are disputed by parents or 1 in 500.

And as Marcus Winters and I described in our new study, schools prevail in most of these disputes:

According to Mayes and Zirkel’s (2001) review of the literature, “schools prevailed in 63% of the due process hearings in which placement was the predominant issue.” In cases where the matter went beyond an administrative hearing and was actually brought to court, one study cited in Mayes and Zirkel’s review found that “schools prevailed in 54.3% of special education court cases,” which the authors say is in line with the findings of other studies. In suits seeking reimbursement for private school expenses (because a special-education voucher program is unavailable), Mayes and Zirkel found that “school districts won the clear majority (62.5%) of the decisions.

In addition, as Marcus Winters and I documented in a 2007 Education Next article, private placement is amazingly rare.  Using updated national numbers from the federal government, as of fall 2007 there were 67,729 disabled students ages 6 through 21 who were being educated in private schools at parental request and public expense.  That’s only 1.13% of the 6,007,832 disabled students ages 6 through 21 and barely one tenth of one percent of all public school students.  If private placement supports Andy and Sara’s claim of “substantial abuse of special education” we’d have to redefine “substantial” to include minuscule proportions of students.

The systematic evidence clearly shows that school officials dominate special education, parents rarely challenge school officials’ decisions, schools win most of those challenges from parents, and parents very rarely get their children placed in private schools at public expense. 

So, why do Andy, Sara, Rick, and Mike ( as well as all of those DC reporters who Andy and Sara cite) believe that parents, especially affluent parents, control special education decisions?  Well, perhaps it is because in D.C. parents do have much more control than in the rest of the country. 

Remember how there were 14,384 students nationwide who resolved a dispute with their school over special education in a hearing or by agreement prior to the completion of a hearing?  DC contained 2,689 of those 14,384, or about 18% (see Table 7-3).  But DC represents only .15% of total student enrollment nationwide.  That means parents in DC are about 120 times more likely to lodge these challenges than the typical parent nationwide.

And while private placement is very rare, it is somewhat less rare in DC.  Out of 67,729 students privately placed at parental request, 1,864 of them were in DC, or about 2.75% of the total.  Again, given that DC student enrollment represents only .15% of national enrollment, DC students are about 18 times more likely to receive a private placement than students nationwide.

It’s clear that DC is just different — very different.  Making generalizations from DC experiences or newspaper articles is like saying that Seattle is a sunny place if you happen to arrive there on a day when the sun was shining.

D.C. isn’t the only outlier.  New York is also pretty atypical when it comes to special education.  Dispute resolution hearings in New York state are about 7 times more common than in the rest of the country.  And private placements are almost 3 times more common in the state of New York than they are nationwide.

It’s too bad that so many of our media and policy elites live in these two atypical places because they are giving us a very distorted picture of special education.  They need to get outside of their bubbles and rely on systematic data rather than immediate experiences.

4 Comments | special ed, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Rick Hess on Recruiting the Teachers of the Future

May 22, 2009

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

The new edition of Education Next is online, and Rick Hess has a very interesting article on modernizing the teaching profession. Rick notes that we need to update bedrock assumptions-such as assuming that the dominant model of teaching recruitment should rest on recruiting 20 year olds into colleges of education and then expecting them to teach for the next 30 or 40 years. Lots of interesting suggestions on technology, compensation and alternative certification.

Great article, well worth reading.

1 Comment | teacher pay, teacher quality | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

A Real Education Bailout

January 8, 2009

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Over on NRO, Petrilli, Finn and Hess note that yet another radical expansion of federal education funding is reportedly being considered for inclusion in the “stimulus” package, e.g. in addition to building lots of roads and bridges, we’ll build lots of schools.

PFH (as I’ll call them for short) note that more spending has not only proven itself an ineffective way to improve schools, but may actually even harm them:

Naturally, the leaders of any organization would rather sidestep problems than confront them. In good times, budgets expand, payrolls grow, new people come on board, and managers delay difficult decisions. Tough times come to serve as a healthful (if sour) tonic, forcing leaders to identify priorities and giving them political cover to trim the fat.

So instead of more money, they advocate less:

Education, then, cries out for a good belt-tightening. A truly tough budget situation would force and enable administrators to take those steps. They could rethink staffing, take a hard look at class sizes, trim ineffective personnel, shrink payrolls, consolidate tiny school districts, replace some workers with technology, weigh cost-effective alternatives to popular practices, reexamine statutes governing pensions and tenure, and demand concessions from the myriad education unions.

And while we’re at it, I’d like a pony, and a spaceship, and a million dollars.

One thing they don’t point out is that “stimulus” spending, like all pork, is notorious for going to politically useful projects rather than to projects that serve the public interest. Just because you spend more money building bridges doesn’t mean you get the bridges that you actually need. Never mind the “bridge to nowhere” – remember that big bridge collapse in Minneapolis a while back? In the immediate aftermath, some liberals rushed to blame the deaths on hard-hearted budget cutters. But it later came out that plenty of money was being spent on road and bridge repair, but it didn’t go to the bridge that needed it, despite the bridge having been rated “structurally deficient” for two whole years.

PFH then go on to ask:

Is there a way to make the impending bailout actually help those kids as well as the nation? Team Obama and its Congressional allies could take a page out of the Troubled Assets Relief Program playbook and require the various education interest groups to “take a haircut,” just like auto workers, investors, and shareholders have had to do. As the auto bailout required the U.A.W. to forfeit its beloved “jobs bank,” states taking federal dollars could be required to overhaul their tenure laws, ban “last hired, first fired” rules, experiment with pay-for-performance, make life easier for charter schools, and curb unrealistic pension promises.

I’m not in a position to throw stones since I’ve advocated the same thing, but I’m not holding my breath.

Next on their wish list, inexplicably, is a big pile of money for summer programs. If there’s any research showing that summer programs are a good investment, they don’t cite it. To their credit, they insist that solid empirical evaluation should be a condition of the money. But if we want to set up big new federally funded pilot programs for educational innovations, why not do it for an innovation that is solidly proven to work in many limited trials but has never been tried on a larger scale?

They also wish for better data systems (who doesn’t?) and, as always, whether it’s relevant to the topic or not, “national standards.” About the latter, our own Matt Ladner has already given us what I think is really the last word.

(link added)

3 Comments | money myth, politics | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

McCain and Obama Agree: Competition Good for Education

October 16, 2008

Education finally came up in a presidential debate and I heard something that I never heard before — the standard-bearers for both parties agreed that competition was good for public schools.  Sure, past Democratic candidates have endorsed school choice with charters, as Obama did.  But Obama did something new.  He specifically said that competition from charter schools was important for improving traditional public schools. 

Clinton, Gore, and Kerry embraced school choice with charters as an escape hatch for students condemned to failing public schools, sounding very much like Sol Stern, Mike Petrilli, and Rick Hess.  But Obama left previous Democratic candidates and these fellows at market-oriented (?!) think tanks in the dust by saying that choice was desirable because of competition. 

Here are Obama’s exact words: “Charter schools, I doubled the number of charter schools in Illinois despite some reservations from teachers unions. I think it’s important to foster competition inside the public schools.”

Of course, Obama wants to limit choice and competition to public schools (which include charters), while McCain wants to include private schools in the mix.  But they agree on the big idea:  public schools are improved when they have to compete to earn students and the revenue those students generate.

Just think.  Only twenty years ago school choice and competition was hardly a glimmer in Ronald Reagan’s eye.  Now the idea is so widely accepted as reasonable that the leaders of both parties differ only on the mechanism for producing choice and competition.  We’ve come a long way, baby.

Correction — Rick Hess emailed to say that he did not want to be counted among those who are unpersuaded by competitive effects from choice.  He does think that almost no current choice program is designed properly to produce competitive effects, but he thinks such effects are possible and desirable.

9 Comments | competitive effects | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Does Joel Klein Matter?

September 18, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Literature contains any number examples of the “magic child” myth- the one with mystical abilities that will become a great leader. Paul Atreides, Luke Skywalker and Thomas “Neo” Anderson are recent examples from science fiction, but there are many others.

 

For some reason, we tend to buy into the messianic myth with school leaders as well.

 

The oddest thing (to me) about the back and forth we’ve had here and elsewhere about instructional versus incentive based reform seems to center around Joel Klein’s tenure in NYC. I think Klein will ultimately be seen as a fairly inconsequential figure.

 

Let me hasten to say that I briefly met Klein at a conference a few months ago, and he seemed like a good guy, so this is nothing personal. He seems to have good intentions. Some have lauded his reforms; others have indicted him for making poor instructional choices. It seems perfectly plausible to me that Klein deserves praise for some things and criticism for others.

 

In my book, however, there are usually only two types of urban superintendents: those that have failed, and those that will fail. Rick Hess’ Spinning Wheels made this case convincingly- school systems cycle through superintendents as pseudo-messiahs as a method for kicking the can down the road. New savior arrives, tries to implement reforms, and receives a pink slip about three years later.

 

The new-new savior finds a group of half implemented reforms lying around, discards them to put in his or her own new program. Repeat process indefinitely. Longtime teachers learn to ignore the flailing at the top, knowing that “this too shall pass.”

 

Klein obviously departs from this model. He has a legal rather than an education background, and assumed control under the auspices of Mayor Bloomberg taking over the schools. His tenure has already lasted far longer than average.

 

It has never been a tenet of those of us in the choice movement that a gigantic schooling system would substantially improve if only they had the right superintendent. We emphasize market mechanisms, not benevolent dictatorships. In fact, we’ve seen some celebrity superintendents in the past: Roy Roemer in Los Angeles, Mike Moses (former state Education Commissioner) in Dallas.

 

No revolutionary improvement there, either.

 

Don’t get me wrong: I’m hoping for the best with people like Rhee and Klein. One might think that, for instance, that it shouldn’t be inconceivable for Rhee to improve the governance of the DCPS, but the track record here is not awe-inspiring.

 

If the critique of Klein is that he received a huge windfall of money but has failed so far to produce big results, what can one say other than: why would you expect anything else? Surely hope cannot have so completely triumphed over experience.

 

We should be persuaded by the evidence that instructional choices are very important. Incentive based reforms are also important. If a NYC chancellor does a little bit of one and none of the other, the results are likely to be underwhelming.

 

In other words-this too shall pass. Wake me up if and when Klein does anything truly radical- like a Jack Welch program for firing the bottom 10% of teachers and bureaucrats each year or widespread parental choice. Until then, I’ll hope for the best but not expect too much.

2 Comments | competitive effects, instructional reform | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Next Entries »
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 940 other followers