Checker’s Case for World Government (and Common Core)

December 13, 2011

In the current issue of the Education Gadfly and on the Education Next blog Checker Finn offers an unusual argument for adoption of K-12 national standards.  He likens opposition to national standards to rooting for the Euro to fail:

If you hope the Euro crashes, that this week’s Brussels summit fails, and that European commerce returns to francs, marks, lira, drachma, and pesetas, you may be one of those rare Americans who also seeks the demise of the Common Core State Standards Initiative in U.S. education.

It’s odd that Checker should pick the Euro as a way to make the case for national standards since the Euro’s difficulties wonderfully illustrate the problems with national standards.  The Euro is in trouble because it was an attempt to impose a common currency on countries that were too diverse in their economic needs and political traditions.  The Euro is too strong of a currency for countries with un-competitive labor forces and undisciplined budget deficits, like Greece, Italy, and Spain.  But if the European Central Bank significantly loosens the currency to bail out these countries, it will create serious inflation problems in countries like Germany and others with more skilled labor forces and reasonable deficits.

The Euro is not in trouble because some people “hope the Euro crashes.”  It’s in trouble because it is a centralized institution that does not fit the diversity of its members.

Similarly, national standards will fail because it is not possible to have a centrally determined set of meaningful standards that can accommodate the legitimate diversity of needs, goals, and values of all of our nation’s school children.  To have an effect national standards inevitably drive the assessments that are used to measure student achievement as well as the methods of instruction that are used to produce that achievement.  “Tight-loose” is just an empty slogan (or part of a drinking game).  In reality standards, assessments, and instruction are closely connected unless they are just irrelevant things.

In a country as large and diverse as ours there is no single, right set of knowledge for all students to possess, no single, best way to assess that knowledge, and no single, best method for teaching it.  The attempt to impose a nationalized system onto this diversity is doomed to fail just as the Euro is doomed to fail in imposing a common currency on such diverse economies and political systems.

The fact that the Euro is in such trouble and creating such political and economic turmoil ought to scare us away from trying to impose a centralized solution on too much diversity.  The Euro crisis is an argument against national standards, unless we are eager to have similar difficulties here.

No one is rooting for those failures, per se.  Some of us just recognize that reality is not created by repeating slogans to each other over catered lunches at DC think tank conferences.  Reality actually exists out there in the world and no matter how many chardonnays I’ve had while listening to the keynote speaker and no matter how many grants the Gates Foundation sprinkles on me and my friends, centrally imposing institutions on too much diversity is doomed to fail.

Of course, there is a way to overcome that diversity and improve the chances for centrally imposed institutions to succeed — force.  If European countries relinquish power to make their own budgets to a central authority, the Euro might work.  Similarly, if individual schools, school districts, and states relinquish power over daily operations to a central authority, the nationalized education movement might succeed.

But achieving that type of centralization in the face of diversity requires an enormous amount of coercion.  People who disagree have to be suppressed, or at least denied the ability to do anything about their dissent.  Local folks no longer get to make the meaningful decisions.  They can just implement the decisions that are centrally made.

This could work but it would be awful.  Some people say they would favor a World Government if only it were possible to do it.  I’m not one of those people.  World Government would be awful because it would require an enormous amount of coercion to overcome local diversity.  To a much lesser degree, a nationalized education system in the US could be done but it would run roughshod over the needs and legitimate interests of many individuals.

But some people are nevertheless attracted to centralized solutions.  I think Tears for Fears has a song that might explain why.

24 Comments | National Standards | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Parenting Advice from Sara Mead

December 12, 2011

Sara Mead takes issue with my recent post that puts misconduct by some McKay schools in perspective.  I noted that those reacting to reports of misconduct by calling for the elimination or heavy regulation of McKay do not similarly react to incidents of misconduct in traditional public schools.  She likens this to a misbehaving child saying “he did it first.”  Sara urges us to be tough parents who don’t accept such weak excuses:

I was a very naughty child. When I was inevitably caught misbehaving, I often tried to justify it by saying “So-and-so (usually my sister or a classmate) did it first!” Not surprisingly, that argument never won the day or kept me from being punished.

I was reminded of this by Jay Greene’s recent blog post about reports of malfeasance and fraud by operators participating in Florida’s McKay Scholarship program for children with disabilities. Jay cites a series of examples of abuses in public school districts–basically a grown-up “he did it first!”–before stating that “existence of misconduct in traditional public schools in no way excuses the misconduct that has been uncovered in the McKay program.”

Glad we agree on that one!

Let’s ignore that I clearly said (in the comment she quoted!) that misconduct by McKay providers is inexcusable.  And let’s ignore that she mis-characterizes my call for perspective.  And let’s ignore my argument that the direct operation of schools by the government or heavy regulation of private providers unfortunately does not eliminate misconduct.

Instead, I would like to offer some parenting advice of my own.  When I was a child I sometimes tried to persist in making an argument, even when the evidence contradicted it.  My parents correctly taught me that when you are wrong, you should admit it.

I was reminded of this when thinking about Sara Mead’s repeated claim that the McKay Scholarship program provides incentives to increase the over-identification of students as disabled.  In 2003 she and Andy Rotherham released a report that made a series of speculative allegations against McKay, including:

special education vouchers may actually exacerbate the over-identification problem by creating  a new  incentive for parents to have children diagnosed with a disability in order to obtain a voucher. 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.

And in 2007 Sara Mead repeated the claim:

Offering vouchers to children with disabilities—and only children with disabilities—creates an incentive for parents to seek out a special education diagnosis in order to get a voucher. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some parents seek out diagnoses of learning disabilities or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to get their children additional help and accommodations on tests. McKay’s offer of a voucher for students with disabilities creates an even stronger incentive for parents to “game the system.” And Florida psychologists who diagnose youngsters with ADHD and other disabilities have told reporters that they see some Florida parents who are seeking these diagnoses just so they can get a McKay voucher.

But in 2009 Marcus Winters and I released an empirical examination of the issue that actually found the opposite.  McKay actually provided incentives to reduce the excessively high rate at which students are identified as disabled.  And in June of this year, the leading quantitative AERA journal, Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis, published our article with this finding.

Nowhere has Sara Mead said that she was mistaken.  And last week Education Sector responded to reports of misconduct in McKay by urging people to read the 2007 report with this (and other) false or unsubstantiated claims.  People shouldn’t persist in repeating false claims.

I hope we can agree on that one.

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

The Rise of the Zune Monopolists

December 12, 2011

(Guest Post by Jim Stergios)

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“Understand, I am not for monopoly when we can help it,” Louis Brandeis said in 1912. “We intend to restore competition. We intend to do away with the conditions that make for monopoly.” (Wikipedia)

Brandeis had some inkling of what hare-brained schemes philanthropists could come up with. Remember the Simple Spelling Board Andrew Carnegie set up in 1906?

The New York Times noted that Carnegie was convinced that “English might be made the world language of the future” and an influence leading to universal peace, but that this role was obstructed by its “contradictory and difficult spelling.”

105 years later, Sam Dillon of The New York Times produced a terrific piece of journalism in a May 2011 Sunday article on the overweening ambitions of the Gates Foundation and its list of DC-based clients, vendors and trade organizations like the National Governors Association; the Chief State School Officers; the Fordham Institute; Achieve, Inc.; as well as the Gates Foundation’s strategy to leverage, really to drive, federal policy in the Obama Administration’s US Department of Education. In the May article, Dillon wrote:

For years, Bill Gates focused his education philanthropy on overhauling large schools and opening small ones. His new strategy is more ambitious: overhauling the nation’s education policies…In some cases, Mr. Gates is creating entirely new advocacy groups…[The Gates Foundation] is bankrolling many of the Washington analysts who interpret education issues for journalists and giving grants to some media organizations.

Dillon continued:

The foundation spent $373 million on education in 2009, the latest year for which its tax returns are available, and devoted $78 million to advocacy — quadruple the amount spent on advocacy in 2005. Over the next five or six years, Mr. Golston said, the foundation expects to pour $3.5 billion more into education, up to 15 percent of it on advocacy…Given the scale and scope of the largess, some worry that the foundation’s assertive philanthropy is squelching independent thought, while others express concerns about transparency.

Yup. The Gates Foundation and the enormous financial interests associated with the Washington education lobby have decided that the U.S., despite its 222-year history to the contrary, needs a nationalized K-12 education system. No matter that the arguments for it are flimsy:

  1. Nations with national curricula do better than ones without on international tests

    2. . Not true.

  2. The national standards raise the bar set by states. For some, for some it’s a wash, and for some it is a step backwards. Prominent researchers and subject experts (Stotsky, Wurman, Milgram, Porter and others) find the standards lacking in comparison to international benchmarks. Basically the Gates folks are setting up a community college readiness set of standards.
  3. The new national standards will give us the ability to craft better tests. No one knows. They are not complete. And we have no idea where proficiency levels will be set, whether they will build off of Massachusetts’ content frame or the frame of other state tests, which are more skills-based.
  4. The new national standards will be serious content-based standards. Uh, no. The fact that one of the Gates Foundation allies, the Council of Chief State School Officers, absorbed the Partnership for 21st Century Skills is more than a whiff of evidence to the contrary.
  5. The new national standards will save money. Implementation of the standards, through textbook purchases and professional developments, as well as technology and other actions necessary to implement the tests will cost tens of billions of dollars. States and localities will pay for 90 percent of this if history is any guide.
  6. The new national standards will improve accountability. The reset of state standards means a loss of longitudinal data on student performance and will take at least half a decade to amass. Again, without the knowledge of where proficiency will be set and what the tests look like, this is fanciful thinking.
  7. The new national standards will help improve teacher quality. Huh? Not sure how they came up with this one. Perhaps it will cure the common cold as well. The fact for Massachusetts is that the new national test and standards will undermine one of the “secret sauces” of the Bay State’s success: the teacher test (MTEL) is aligned with student tests and the standards to ensure that teachers are able to teach the materials required in the state test. We will now have to refight that battle with the unions based on the new national standards – and it will be a tough battle drawing in national lobby groups. That’s going to be hard to win.
  8. The new national standards will drive innovation. Yeesh. I hear this from virtual learning providers all the time. Of course, if you set one set of standards, then your product development is easier and less costly in the short run. But this is the Zune argument (see below) and it’s stupid. Think about this: Most of the countries with national standards (think Finland) are the size of a state in the U.S. and often relatively homogeneous. Instead we are forging standards for 53 million kids from very diverse backgrounds.

We need one set of standards as much as we need one exclusive operating software, one keyboard for the world, and one Zune. You remember the Zune, right?

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Thankfully, because consumers have the freedom to choose the products they buy, it got killed by the iPod. Curtis Cartier of The Seattle Weekly blog noted even this past March that the Zune, Microsoft’s signature paperweight, hasn’t seen a significant upgrade, or really anything in the way of marketing or promotion, in almost two years . . . No, really, they still make the Zune. I know, right? Microsoft bloodhound Mary Jo Foley writes at ZDNet about “Project Ventura,” a music- and video-based service that seems to be exactly what Zune and the Zune Store is, but thankfully, not the Zune.

Ventura, from what my tipsters tell me, is the name of a set of services being developed by Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices (E&D) unit. These services are focused on music and video discovery and consumption.

Wikipedia notes:

On October 3, 2011, Microsoft announced that it has discontinued all Zune hardware, encouraging users to transition to Windows Phone.

Aw, shucks. And I was waiting for the new and improved Zune. Just holding my breath. And I know we all have such high expectations for Ventura.

Then there is # 9. Experts creating the standards have built off state successes. That’s hardly the case with the Massachusetts standards or the California standards, which were among the best in the country. So, maybe they built off Bob Wise’s West Virginia standards, Gene Wilhoit’s Kentucky standards, Jeb Bush’s Florida, and Checker Finn’s Ohio state standards. These are all people who promote national standards. And their state standards were mediocre and worse. No wonder they look at the community college readiness standards as a step forward.

Make no mistake about it, this is an effort built from the mainframe developed in 1992 by Marc Tucker, then president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, who in his famous 18-page “Dear Hillary” letter called for

a seamless web that literally extends from cradle to grave and is the same system for everyone,” coordinated by “a system of labor market boards at the local, state and federal levels” where curriculum and “job matching” will be handled by counselors “accessing the integrated computer-based program.

Such words may please Bill Gates, given his less than warm view of the liberal arts. The drive to nationalize education is so important to the DC lobbying crowd and the Gates Foundation that they are willing to overlook some “niceties,” such as the fact that it violates provisions in three federal laws (including the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the US Department of Education’s 1979 enabling legislation, and No Child Left Behind). Perhaps understanding the rule of law is a 20th-century skill.

Only this time, the DC advocates for this sort of educational lobotomy (which places workforce development above the formation of free citizens) have learned lessons from the past, when national standards efforts died off because they were done in the light of day. As Pioneer’s Jamie Gass noted a year ago in The Providence Journal:

When it comes to the national standards, the line dividing public officials and trade organizations has become so murky that Pioneer Institute recently submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for correspondence between state education officials and organizations like NGA, CCSSO, the Gates Foundation and the Common Core State Standards Initiative. It’s particularly unfortunate that public education is the setting for this circumvention of democracy and the public trust. Even as we teach our children about the sanctity of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Federalist Papers, they watch adults develop ever-more-clever ways to brush aside the principles those documents exemplify.

Those comments are based on experience. A year after Pioneer submitted a basic Freedom of Information Act search of the national standards in Massachusetts we’ve received more delays and stonewalling than any concrete FOIA results.

What I want is a debate on the merits of this effort before we call the game over. And when we have that argument, the national standards folks lose. Consider the fact that in August the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an association of conservative legislators, debated the merits of model legislation to pull out of the national standards at their quarterly meeting in New Orleans. Given the fact that most state legislatures and legislators are Republican, this is an influential group.

At the last minute, as Kris Amundson of Education Sector noted, Jeb Bush wrote “to the ALEC delegates urging them to table the resolution.”

They did and instead set up a series of sessions debating the issue at the end of November in Scottsdale, Arizona. The debate was open and frank. And as Catherine Gewertz of EdWeek reported, and Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation notes in her blog, the ALEC Education Task Force debated model legislation that would aid states seeking to “exit the national standards project and regain control over what is taught in local schools.”

4 Comments | National Standards | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Perspective on McKay

December 10, 2011

Ed Week, Ed Sector, and others are picking up on a hyperventilating story from the free weekly Miami New Times about misconduct in Florida’s McKay Scholarship voucher program for disabled students.  The piece is actually a re-hash of a story the New Times ran 5 months ago about private schools participating in McKay that mishandled money, hired incompetent staff, or failed to provide adequate services.

The stories were embarrassing, but the reaction by the New Times and others has been completely lacking in perspective.  Organizations receiving government funds are unfortunately even more prone to misconduct than typical organizations.  This is also true of public schools.  For example in the Detroit Public Schools we see:

 Five Detroit Public Schools employees have been charged with embezzlement in an ongoing probe into the “culture of corruption” that took hold in the state’s largest district, a prosecutor said Wednesday….

A series of audits into district finances have been ordered. Two separate audits announced last week revealed the district has been paying $2.1 million per year for health coverage for ineligible dependents, and bought 160 unused BlackBerries and 11 motorcycles.

“It has been said that the accomplice to corruption is frequently our own indifference, and I agree wholeheartedly with that,” Worthy told reporters in announcing the charges.

“My office was not surprised about the culture of corruption that we’ve been seeing in the past in the Detroit Public Schools system,” she said. “What did surprise even us, though … is how rampant, how overt and how conspicuous and downright bold-faced the corruption is, allegedly, in some of the cases that we’ve been looking at.”

And from Springfield, MA public schools we learn:

A 13-month audit recently concluded at Putnam Vocational Technical High School found that some employees abused a student association checking account that operated independently from the city and school system in apparent violation of Massachusetts law.

McCaskill was in charge of that unauthorized account, which averaged about $200,000 annually in transactions since late 2005, but was managed with a manual ledger that never matched bank statements, according to the report from Springfield’s Office of Internal Audit….

“There is no excuse for the disgraceful, dishonest practices that appeared to have run rampant among a group of employees at the school for several years,” Ingram also wrote in a post on his official blog.

And right in the backyard of the Miami New Times we find the mysterious absence of $3.8 million from the Broward County teacher union accounts, the prior head of the Broward teacher union in jail for soliciting sex from a minor, and the former head of the Miami-Dade County teacher union in jail for corruption and embezzlement.

And while the New Times was repeating the complaints of Miami-Dade superintendent  Alberto Carvalho about McKay, they somehow failed to mention Carvalho’s own history of manipulating newspaper coverage through a reporter with whom he was reportedly having an affair.

But these are just selected anecdotes.  In a systematic study of scandals in public and private schools, Greg Forster and Matthew Carr found that misconduct was actually slightly more likely in regulated public schools than in largely unregulated private schools.  That is, some amount of scandal is unfortunately unstoppable and increasing regulation or government operation of schools is unlikely to eliminate the problem.

Of course, the existence of misconduct in traditional public schools in no way excuses the misconduct that has been uncovered in the McKay program.  But then again no one calls for the public school system to be shut down as a result of these scandals like folks are calling for an end to McKay.  And Diane Ravitch, in her typical, scholarly fashion, responds to the McKay reports by tweeting “Legalized child abuse in Florida?”, but appears to have no reaction to similar reports from traditional public schools.

My point is that the reaction to reports of misconduct in the McKay program are lacking perspective.  Yes, abuses need to be stopped.  And the regulations on the books, if enforced, could keep those abuses to a minimum.  As former Senator John McKay told a Florida newspaper in response to calls for more regulation:

Kriseman suggested nine issues to increase accountability, including mandatory site inspections of facilities. He said the Department of Education should review and sign off on personnel criminal background checks in facilities seeking to receive McKay dollars. And teachers in a school accepting McKay dollars should have a state teaching certificate.

Former State Senate President John McKay — who created the law — agrees. McKay listened to Kriseman’s full list of suggestions.

“A number of his suggestions are quite positive,” McKay said. “Many of the things he’s asking for are already in the statute.”

McKay suggested asking officials with the Department of Education to enforce the law.

“It’s nice to have words in a statute,” McKay said. “Unless someone does something, it’s kind of meaningless.”

And of course, all of these criticisms of McKay fail to mention the proven positive effects of the program.  It improves student achievement for disabled students, reduces the rate of new identification of disabilities, increases the chances that students will receive needed services, and is overwhelmingly loved by parents.  I wish we could say the same about all traditional public schools, including those riddled with misconduct.

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

Liberty for Me But Not for Thee

December 6, 2011

I’ve been chatting with some students about how exceptionally rare liberty is.  In all of human history there has been wide-spread respect for liberty in only a small portion of the globe for a brief stretch of time.  The problem isn’t that people lack desire for their own liberty.  The problem is that people are not usually inclined to extend liberty to others when they have the power to get what they want and constrain what others want.  That is, respect for the liberty of others is not natural or automatic.  It takes some sort of miracle for people to resist the corrupting temptation of power to protect their own autonomy while denying it to others.

George Washington performed one of these miracles to establish the foundations of liberty.  Faced with the opportunity to become dictator for life, he voluntarily relinquished power.  Keeping that power would have allowed him to best protect his own autonomy while promoting his own vision of “the good” for others.  Instead he put at risk his own autonomy and denied the natural inclination to impose on others by voluntarily leaving office.

If this seems routine to us today, try to name others who voluntarily walked away from total power.  Napoleon couldn’t resist the temptations of absolute power.  He’s reported to have declared with disgust as he was being dragged away to Elba that they thought he would be another Washington.  But Napoleon was no Washington and almost no one else is either.

Remember that Hitler was democratically elected.  The Iranian revolution began democratically.  The Arab Spring is quickly turning into an Arab Winter, with parties opposed to liberty and tolerance winning elections.  It is quite common to see a country’s first, free democratic election turn into its last.

Even the English respect for liberty was not derived from leaders voluntarily relinquishing power.  Financial distress forced limits of power on English monarchs, leading to the gradual growth of respect for liberty.  The current German and Japanese respect for liberty was imposed on them through conquest.

The only other major example of a leader voluntarily relinquishing power that I can think of is King Juan Carlos of Spain refusing to be Franco’s dictatorial successor and also putting down an attempted coup.  Of course, Juan Carlos’ example helped change expectations about leaders throughout Latin America, which helped ignite an expansion of liberty.  And the English example planted seeds of liberty in its former colonies.

But other than Juan Carlos and Washington, how many examples could we cite of leaders who truly had the opportunity for absolute power who refused to grab it?  If the desire to extend liberty to others were so natural and common, this sort of thing should happen all of the time.  It doesn’t.  It takes miracle-makers like Washington and Juan Carlos to establish the social expectation so that others tempted to grab power will be prevented from doing so.  That’s why we should study their example and sing the praises of these liberty miracle-makers.

1 Comment | politics | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

National Standards Shows Cracks

December 5, 2011

Last week the education task force of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) endorsed measures urging states to oppose adoption and implementation of the federally “incentivized” Common Core standards.  According to Catherine Gewertz at Ed Week:

A package of model legislation opposing the common standards gained ground yesterday at the American Legislative Exchange Council.

The organization’s education task force approved the package, we learned from a couple of folks who attended those sessions of ALEC’s meeting this week in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Gewertz added that the measures do not become official ALEC policy until they are approved by the board of directors.  A similar proposal was proposed last summer by members of the education task force but was tabled until the recent meeting.  Allies of Jeb Bush and the long, gilded arm of the Gates Foundation pulled out the stops to block the measure and may yet succeed at the board level.

I fear that even if the measure is approved by ALEC’s board, the battle over adoption may effectively be finished.  An effort to repeal Common Core standards in Alabama failed despite the fact that the governor proposed the repeal and votes on the state board of education.   If you can’t repeal national standards in Alabama under such favorable conditions, it may be very hard to repeal it in any of the other 40-some states that have signed on.

But just because the adoption debate is winding down doesn’t mean the national standards war is over.  Far from it.  So far states have done the costless and non-constraining step of adopting a set of standards.  Once the nationalizers try to make the standards concrete and binding by incorporating them into newly designed high-stakes testing, we are likely to see a lot more resistance.  And adopting those new tests, revising teacher training, professional development, and textbooks to fit the national standards and testing will require considerable effort and expense — causing more states to rethink their initial support for Common Core.

The ALEC anti-Common Core measure will be important for mobilizing opposition as those next hurdles have to be jumped.  Even if the nationalization effort successfully runs this gauntlet, which they may do, the probability that national standards and assessments will actually produce the end goal — significantly improved student achievement over the long term — is near zero.  If nationally setting goals and ordering progress toward those goals were the path to success, the Soviet Gosplans would have produced their economic triumph over the West.  We all know how well that turned out.

3 Comments | National Standards | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Teacher Union Blues

November 28, 2011

My colleague, Bob Costrell, and I each had a piece published last week about problems with teacher unions.  Bob’s appeared in the Wall Street Journal and focused on the fiscal dangers of public sector collective bargaining, especially over benefits and especially at the local level.  My piece appeared in Education Next as part of a forum with Richard Kahlenberg and focused mostly on the harms to students and their families posed by unchecked teacher collective bargaining over working conditions, hiring, and termination procedures.

I don’t want to repeat what I wrote in Ed Next and I don’t want to speak for Bob, so I would just urge you to read these pieces for yourself.  But just to anticipate objections, let me emphasize that I have no problem with unionization and collective bargaining in a competitive private market.  People should be free to associate and free to negotiate the terms of providing their labor.

The problem with teacher unions and public sector collective bargaining is that the checks and balances provided by market competition are absent.  So, public sector unions can get “management” to increase revenue for the industry and for union members without having to improve productivity.  They can just increase taxes or shift spending from other public purposes.  Private sector collective bargaining is constrained by the reality that they cannot just print their own money and must agree on productivity improvements so that there is more revenue to split.

In addition to the lack of incentives to improve productivity in public sector collective bargaining, we have the additional political distortions that unions, as a more concentrated and well-organized interest, have enormous political influence.  So, the unions are essentially sitting on both sides of the bargaining table.  This problem is more severe at the local level, since local political contests are less salient and more easily captured by well-organized interests.  At least in the private sector management usually tries to represent the interests of shareholders, but in the public sector the diffused interests of taxpayers are much less likely to be represented.

And in case any of you have idealized visions of teacher unions protecting the worker dancing in your head, a little snippet from the Education Intelligence Agency should awake you from your slumber:

In August, the American Federation of Teachers began an audit of the Broward Teachers Union’s (BTU) finances. Who at BTU asked for the audit is a matter of contention, but AFT uncovered several anomalies in the course of its two-month investigation.

Among them was the apparent reimbursement out of union dues for campaign contributions made by 26 ”employees, board members and their relatives.” This is, needless to say, illegal. The Broward State Attorney’s Office and the Florida Elections Commission were notified, and both agencies opened an official investigation.

Members of BTU’s executive board accused union president Pat Santeramo of not only being complicit in the reimbursement, but also covering up a $3.8 million budget shortfall and accepting salary overpayments….

Whatever Santeramo has done, he is actually the least reprehensible recent BTU president. He took over the position in 2001 after his predecessor was charged and plead guilty to attempting to entice a minor into a sex act and sending child pornography over the Internet. He was sentenced to 48 months in prison. And Santeramo’s actions are small potatoes when placed aside those of Pat Tornillo.

2 Comments | teacher union | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

The Dysfunction of Non-Profit Organizations

November 15, 2011

I have almost always worked for non-profit organizations.  They’ve generally been great jobs, but I can’t say that I’m impressed by how they operate.  I understand that all organizations are flawed and inefficient, multiplying the flaws and inefficiencies of the people working for them.  But non-profit organizations strike me as particularly flawed and inefficient.

At the heart of the problem is that non-profit organizations lack the discipline of the profit motive.  There are no shareholders seeking to maximize the return on their investments.  Instead non-profit organization are answerable only to a board, who must ensure that the organization has sufficient resources to work toward a mission or set of missions that the board designates.

The need to raise funds can provide discipline to a non-profit organization, but if the non-profit receives government funds or has an endowment, the financial discipline of getting donors to voluntarily pay for operations is lacking.  The only source of accountability for endowed or government-supported non-profits is from the supervision of the board.  But we all understand that monitoring costs are very high for boards that are determined to exercise an accountability function.  And over time board are quite often captured by the employees of non-profit organizations, so they rarely attempt to exercise real supervision.

Without much financial accountability what do senior managers of non-profits tend to pursue?  There are limits to their salaries, so once they have obtained as much compensation as they can reasonably expect they tend to use their autonomy to build empires.  They tend to increase the size of their organization to employ more people, have more buildings, and have their hands in more activities.  Bigness increases the status and power of the non-profit managers since they have a larger patronage machine, shiny facilities to impress others, and can intervene in more arenas.

There has been insufficient attention to the problem of gigantism in non-profit organizations.  When for-profit organizations become too large they are either broken-up by regulators with tools like anti-trust or they are divided by shareholders who recognize that the parts are worth more than the whole.  The conglomerates of the 1970s fell victim to corporate raiders who made a fortune by breaking up overly large and inefficient profit-seeking organizations.

But where are the raiders in the non-profit world?  They don’t exist.  So nothing stops government funded or endowed non-profits from getting way too big.

I’m not talking about non-profits getting so big that they possess too much power or influence.  That’s a discussion for another post.  I’m simply talking here about non-profits getting too big to efficiently pursue their mission anymore.

I’m not sure what if anything should be done about this problem.  If donors endow a non-profit understanding that they can easily suffer from gigantism, then why should anyone else care if they are wasteful with their money?    Some might say that the government should care because it granted non-profits a tax-advantage for which it should expect the efficient pursuit of the public good.  But that perspective assumes that not having your money taxed is a privilege because all money ultimately belongs to the government.  I don’t believe that.  Besides, the government is almost certainly less capable of ensuring organizational efficiency than non-profit boards and would likely be even more wasteful if it received the money instead of the non-profit.

But I can’t help being bothered by the clear dysfunction of non-profit organizations.  I just hate waste.  Perhaps the real problem is that gigantism among non-profits crowds out the possibility of more efficient operations by profit-seeking organizations.  An overly large non-profit sector grabs more talented people who could instead be working more efficiently in the private sector.  Big non-profits also compete with services provided by profit-seeking organizations but their tax-advantage allows them to do so more inefficiently.

Perhaps all organizations, non-profit or profit-seeking, should be taxed in the same way and at the same level.  If the tax burden were spread across all types of organizations, the tax rate could be lower.  And as the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award has taught us, profit-seeking individuals and organizations often do far more good in the world than do non-profits who claim to exist for the public good.

And perhaps wealthy individuals should have a clearer understanding of the tendency of non-profits toward gigantism before they endow them.  They could address this problem with spend-down requirements so that non-profit managers cannot build a permanent empire for themselves.  They could also address this by investing more of their money in profit-seeing organizations rather than giving it away, since those profit seeking organizations may end up doing more good.

It’s true that wealthy individuals can’t take it with them when they die, but they don’t have to permanently endow self-serving non-profit empires.  If they can’t think of any better way to control gigantism in non-profits, they could always just give their money to their fellow shareholders.  Yes, there are no tax-advantages for that way of disposing of one’s assets after death, but at least those wealthy individuals could know that the money was going to their business partners and hope that it would be reinvested in new, profit seeking enterprises that might make the world a better place.

14 Comments | Al Copeland Humanitarian Award | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Crystal Bridges Art Museum Opening in Arkansas

November 9, 2011

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (pictured above) is opening this week in Bentonville, Arkansas.  Much has already been written (see this for example) about the significance of this new museum and I doubt that I could add much to that discussion.

What I can do is highlight an artist, Thomas Hart Benton, whose work I love and is part of the Crystal Bridges collection. Benton’s work, such as Plowing it Under pictured below, was part of the Regionalist art movement in the 1930s.  As Hart described the Regionalist movement in his autobiography:

We came in the popular mind to represent a home-grown, grass-roots artistry which damned ‘furrin’ influence and which knew nothing about and cared nothing for the traditions of art as cultivated city snobs, dudes, and aesthetes knew them.  Regionalist we became and the victims thereby of a lot of odd and inaccurate definitions which the word suggested…I [became] just an Ozark hillbilly.  We accepted our roles.

It is strange that some have criticized Crystal Bridges for drawing great works of art away from big coastal cities (see this for example) to semi-rural Arkansas.  More accurately, the big coastal cities often drew great artists away from mid-America.

Thomas Hart Benton was born in Neosho, Missouri — just 40 miles from Crystal Bridges.  The city of Bentonville Arkansas was actually named after Thomas Hart Benton’s great uncle.  Benton painted and taught in New York and Paris, but eventually settled back in Kansas City.  It is entirely fitting that his work should be on display in a beautiful gallery in the heart of America.

In case you are ever in Kansas City, be sure to visit the Nelson-Atkins Museum, where you’ll find Benton’s wonderful take on the story of Persephone (pictured below).

2 Comments | random pop culture | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Are Public School Teachers Underpaid?

November 7, 2011

(Guest Post by Lindsey M. Burke)

My colleague at Heritage, Jason Richwine, along with co-author Andrew Biggs of AEI, has just published a groundbreaking new paper on teacher compensation. The authors find that public school teachers “make total compensation 52 percent greater than fair market levels, equivalent to more than $120 billion overcharged to taxpayers each year.”

As Bob Costrell noted (Costrell was the discussant at the public event at AEI earlier this week to present the findings) Richwine and Biggs’ research significantly contributes to the existing literature on teacher compensation. In doing so, it shatters three myths that have driven policy in the wrong direction for decades.

Myth No. 1: Teachers are constantly tempted to leave the classroom for high-paying private sector jobs. We’re told that teachers are tempted into higher-paying professions; that it is a teacher’s sense of commitment, not high compensation, which tethers them to the classroom. Teachers, as former AFT president Sandra Feldman once argued “are being lured to other professions with handsome salary offers.” The NEA’s Kim Anderson even responded to the Richwine/Biggs study by stating that “Talented individuals turn away from this rewarding profession because they are forced to choose between making a difference in the lives of students and providing for their families.”

For the average teacher, however, this isn’t the case. Switching from a non-teaching job to a teaching job increases workers wages, on average, by 9 percent; transitioning from teaching to non-teaching, by contrast, results in a wage decrease of 3 percent. As Richwine and Biggs observe, it’s “the opposite of what one would expect if teachers were underpaid.”

Which brings us to myth number two…

Myth No. 2: Teachers are underpaid. Richwine and Biggs’ finding that teachers are paid above market value runs contrary to what we so often hear – that teachers are, to quote Sec. Duncan, “desperately underpaid.”

While it’s true that public school teachers earn less, on average, than similarly credentialed non-teachers, Richwine and Biggs note that traditional skill measures, such as years spent in school or level of degree, do not lend themselves to an accurate salary comparison of teachers to non-teachers. The “wage gap” disappears when teachers and non-teachers are compared using objective measures of cognitive ability, as opposed to years of university education.

Beyond paper qualifications, comparisons of public school teachers to their private school counterparts provides more evidence that public school teachers are compensated above market value. The authors find that “With all observable skills held constant, public-school teachers nationally earn 9.8 percent more in salaries than private school teachers.”

But it’s the benefits that are the biggest factor. Biggs notes in NRO:

“The BLS benefits data, which most pay studies rely on, has three shortcomings: It omits the value of retiree health coverage, which is uncommon for private workers but is worth about an extra 10 percent of pay for teachers; it understates the value of teachers’ defined-benefit pensions, which pay benefits several times higher than the typical private 401(k) plan; and it ignores teachers’ time off outside the normal school year, meaning that long summer vacations aren’t counted as a benefit. When we fix these problems, teacher benefits are worth about double the average private-sector level.

“Finally, public-school teachers have much greater job security, with unemployment rates about half those of private-school teachers or other comparable private occupations. Job security protects against loss of income during unemployment and, even more importantly, protects a position in which benefits are much more generous than private-sector levels.”

When considering the benefits public school teachers enjoy – job security, health benefits, and plush pension packages – the “totality of the evidence” suggests that teachers are not underpaid, and are actually, overpaid.

Myth No. 3: We aren’t attracting enough teachers. Well, myth number three is actually a half-myth. During the AEI discussion, Costrell also pointed out that the median number of qualified applicants per teaching position is 15:1. So while there is actually excess supply, there is wide variation by field. While there are only four applications for every available speech and language pathology position, there are 129 applicants for every elementary (K-6 teacher) position.

Teachers should be paid fair market wages, but the current system prevents teachers from being rewarded based on their performance.

Research shows that teacher quality is one of the most important factors in increasing student achievement. Effective teachers should be handsomely rewarded for the impact they are having on a child’s education. By reforming compensation policies in a way that accounts for the abilities of great teachers to improve student outcomes, we will ensure excellent teachers are richly compensated, and mediocre teachers have a strong incentive to improve.

15 Comments | teacher pay | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

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