Randi Weingarten Can’t Get No Respect

January 5, 2009

In what the AFT web site described as “her first major speech since being elected AFT president in July,” Randi Weingarten “decried the widespread scapegoating of teachers and teachers unions for public education’s shortcomings.”  Her comments have generated numerous reactions, including from NYT columnist Bob Herbert, Andy Rotherham, Joanne Jacobs, and our own Greg Forster.  They all raised interesting points, but none addressed one of the most curious aspects of Weingarten’s speech:  Why do teachers, perhaps more than other professionals, seek praise for their work (or are particularly sensitive to blame)? 

I don’t think other occupations have produced bumper-stickers that are the equivalent of “If you can read this thank a teacher.”  I can’t imagine plumbers distributing bumper-stickers that said: “If you flushed your toilet thank a plumber.”  Nor can I imagine: “If you still have your teeth thank a dentist.” 

Teachers particularly demand respect — and of course they deserve respect.  But why do they give speeches, print bumper-stickers, write letters, hold rallies, etc… decrying their social status when I am hard pressed to think of other occupations that do the same?

Of course, one important factor is that almost all teachers are public employees.  The demand for respect can be understood as part of the demand for resources.  My plumber doesn’t have to demand my respect to get my resources.  He just has to do a good job to get me to continue paying him for his services. 

But the resources devoted to education are largely unrelated to how well teachers serve their students.  Political popularity largely determines the level of resources available for teachers, so not surprisingly, teachers actively lobby the public to enhance their image.

The problem is that it is hard to sustain political popularity and community respect as results continue to disappoint despite huge increases in resources.  Teachers interpret this disappointment as a lack of respect, when it is really just frustration at being forced to pay for services that are chronically inadequate.  If people could hire teachers like they hire plumbers or dentists, teachers wouldn’t need to demand respect to get resources.  They would earn respect and resources by serving their voluntary customers well.

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

AFT and UAW – More Alike Than You’d Think

December 30, 2008

aft uaw1

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Lots of people are picking up on the temper tantrum about alleged “demonizing of teachers” begun by a Randi Weingarten speech and continued in Bob Herbert’s column on the speech.

Even that notorious right-winger Eduwonk points out that Weingarten and Herbert are hitting a straw man. I think the real problem is not that school reformers demonize teachers but that defenders of the government school monopoly angelize them. When we reformers insist that teachers should be treated as, you know, human beings, who respond to incentives and all that, rather than as some sort of perfect angelic beings who would never ever allow things like absolute job protection to affect their performance, it drives people like Weingarten and Herbert nuts.

guardian-angel

A typical teacher, as seen by Randi Weingarten

But what I’d like to pick up on is the question of whether the troubles of the government school system are comparable to the troubles of the auto industry.

Of the alleged demonizing of teachers, Herbert had written:

It reminded me of the way autoworkers have been vilified and blamed by so many for the problems plaguing the Big Three automakers.

Eduwonk points out Herbert’s hypocrisy (though he delicately avoids using that word) on this point, because elsewhere in the column, Herbert praises Weingarten for expressing a willingness to make concessions on issues like tenure and pay scales. Union recalcitrance on these types of reform, Eduwonk points out, is precisely why the auto industry is in so much trouble, and Weingarten has been driven to make noises in favor of reform because a similar dynamic has been at work in the government school system.

On the other hand, Joanne Jacobs thinks the comparison between the AFT and the UAW is inapt:

 I don’t think skilled teachers and unskilled auto workers have much in common.  Auto unions pushed up costs, especially for retirees, making U.S. cars uncompetitive.  In education, the problem isn’t excessive pay, it’s the fact that salaries aren’t linked to teacher effectiveness, the difficulty of their jobs or the market demand for their skills.

But teachers’ unions have pushed up costs – dramatically. In the past 40 years, the cost of the government school system per student has much more than doubled (even after inflation) while outcomes are flat across the board. And this has mainly been caused by a dramatic increase in the number of teachers hired per student – a policy that benefits only the unions.

It’s true that high salaries aren’t the main issue in schools, although teacher salaries are in fact surprisingly high. The disconnect between teacher pay and teacher performance is much more important. But the UAW has the same problem! Their pay scales don’t reward performance, either.

The source of Jacobs’ confusion is her mistaken view that auto workers are “unskilled.” Farm workers are unskilled, but not auto workers. The distinction she’s reaching for is the one between white-collar or “professional” work and blue-collar work. But some blue-collar work is skilled and some is unskilled, and auto workers are in the former category. This matters because with skilled blue-collar workers, as with white-collar workers, there’s a dramatic increase in the importance of incentives as compared with unskilled labor.

In fact, a lot of smart people have been arguing (scroll down to the Dec. 26 post) that exorbitant salaries and benefits aren’t nearly as much of a problem in the auto industry as union work rules – including poor performance due to absolute job protection, pay scales that don’t reward performance, and rigid job descriptions that make process modernization impossible.

Sound familiar?

(Edited)

4 Comments | economics, teacher pay, teacher quality, teacher union | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

AFT suggests LBO for Public Schools

December 11, 2008

end-wall-st-bull-collapsed-slide

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Leo over at EdWize (the AFT blog) has posed the question: “When you have spent that last decade telling everyone who would listen that public schools should be for sale, on what grounds do you complain about someone who would sell a Senate seat to the highest bidder?”

Leo has a different recollection of my past decade than I do, as I don’t remember ever telling anyone that public schools ought to be for sale, much less doing it constantly. Never mind that however, I think that Leo is on to something here. The prime targets for leveraged buyouts are companies whose stock valuation falls below the value of their assets. This of course only occurs through gross mismanagement, where companies become worth less than the stuff they have lying around. The management of such companies should be seen at best as incompetent, and at worst as rent-seeking leeches drawing paychecks while destroying value.

Many American school districts likely fall squarely into just such a state of mismanagement- taking $10,000 per year per student, but failing to teach 36% of 4th graders how to read, and failing to get half of African American and Hispanic student to graduate from high school. These are simply averages, and obviously many districts contribute far more than others.

Leo, you are a genius. We can put together a LLC to do the LBOs once the credit crunch ends. Who could be better at defeating the poison pill strategies of the leeches than a former AFT guy?

Leo, you do not yet realize your importance: with our combined power, we can destroy the leeches- they have foreseen this. Join me, and we can put an end to this destructive conflict, and bring learning, order and profit to the nation’s schools.

It is your destiny.

6 Comments | teacher union, vouchers | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

PJM on Candidates’ Education Flip-Flops

November 3, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Over the weekend Pajamas Media carried my column on how Obama and Palin have flip-flopped on education:

Suppose I told you Candidate A has supported rigorous academic standards, has stood up to the teachers’ unions — even been booed by them at their convention — and proclaimed the free-market principles that schools should compete for students and better teachers should get higher salaries. On the other hand, Candidate B says that competition hurts schools, that kids should be taught a radical left-wing civics curriculum, that we should throw more money at teachers’ unions — excuse me, at schools — and that rigorous academic standards should be replaced with the unions’ old lower-the-bar favorite, “portfolio assessment.”

Candidate A is Barack Obama. So is Candidate B.

Meanwhile, Candidate C has made an alliance with the teachers’ unions, opposed school choice, thrown money at the unions — excuse me, at schools — and even helped undermine a badly needed reform of bloated union pensions. On the other hand, Candidate D has broken with the teachers’ unions, demanded that schools should have to compete for students, and endorsed the most radical federal education reform agenda ever proposed by a national candidate, including a national school choice program for all disabled students.

Candidate C is Sarah Palin. So is Candidate D.

Important disclaimer:

None of this implies anything about the overall merits of any of these candidates. One can love a candidate overall while hating his or her stand on education, and vice versa.

1 Comment | competitive effects, money myth, politics, school accountability, social promotion, special ed, teacher pay, teacher quality, teacher union, vouchers | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

It’s a Sign, All Right!

September 23, 2008

HT digitalius

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

When former Pinellas County teacher-union head and “national NEA activist” Doug Tuthill became president of the Florida School Choice Fund, Jay announced that dogs and cats were living together. (By coincidence, in the same week The Onion ran this, one of their best ever.)

Not so fast, says America’s Last Education Labor Reporter. “Tuthill has always been something of a union maverick,” notes ALELR in his latest communique. “He was a new unionist well before NEA President Bob Chase took up the call and made it official policy. Tuthill’s essay in the February 1997 NEA Today, headlined ‘Time to Face the Hard Truth,’ could have been written today – which might explain why Tuthill has gone over to the Dark Side.”

ALELR quotes from Tuthill’s article: “The traditional role of education unions has been to protect members from the negative effects of dysfunctional school systems. That’s not enough anymore.” As recently as 2004, Tuthill was calling for new unionism to “rise from the ashes” and was pushing for NEA involvement in charter school management, membership services for private schools, and “supporting” home schoolers.

Well, I read “Time to Face the Hard Truth,” and frankly, other than that one line about how unions should do more than protect teachers from being fired, it all looks like standard NEA boilerplate. “Today’s education unions must take on the task of transforming these systems. Our primary goal must be to create learning systems in which all adults and children achieve at high levels.” Etc. Etc. Etc. These days the NEA just has computers write this stuff for them, switching the words around so we don’t notice (e.g. “Today’s education unions must take on the goal of transforming these learning systems for all adults and children. Our primary task must be to create systems in which all achieve at high levels”). That frees up more time for them to hang out in their member-funded stadium skyboxes and go on those all-important conference trips.

So ALELR is right that the essay “could have been written today,” but not by a reformer. This kind of fluff only passes as deep thought among the “wow, man, kids need so much” crowd.

In the article, Tuthill talks about a teacher who was being fired for incompetence: ” ‘I know I haven’t done a good job,’ she said crying, ‘but I’m doing the best I can. These kids have so many problems, I just don’t know where to begin. What am I going to do?’ “

What happens? The union saves her job, and Tuthill is glad that this incompetent teacher is returned to the classroom. He sees her as a “victim” of “dysfunctional systems.” His only regret is that more effort (read: money) isn’t being spent on teacher training to help ensure that future teachers won’t be incompetent:

I was pleased that our union had helped her, but the episode bothered me. This teacher had been the victim of a series of dysfunctional systems. She was poorly trained, improperly placed, and not adequately supported. Consistent with our traditional advocacy role, we helped her, but we did nothing to change the systems that caused her problems.

Even that line about unions doing more than just protecting teachers from being fired gets it wrong. What does he say the union is protecting teachers from? “The negative effects of dysfunctional school systems.” I guess any school system that wants to fire a teacher is by definition dysfunctional.

Tuthill gets a little maverick cred simply for mentioning the fact that unions do help prevent teachers from being fired, but is that all it takes to render Tuthill’s move to the school choice movement a yawner?

With all due respect to ALELR, if Tuthill has signed on to lead the charge for school choice, it’s clear that he’s made a lot of progress since 1997. Dogs and cats are indeed living together. Now it’s just a question of how many more politicians realize that they can save the educational lives of millions of registered voters.

1 Comment | tax-credit scholarships, teacher union | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

The Wolf that Cried Ad Hominem

September 15, 2008

The NY Sun columnist, Andrew Wolf, has posted a long and angry comment, taking exception to Matt Ladner’s post, Little Ramona’s Gone Hillbilly Nuts.  In that post Matt challenged Diane Ravitch’s assertion that Joel Klein, Cory Booker, Michelle Rhee, and Adrian Fenty were seeking to “dismantle public education, piece by piece” by supporting merit pay, reductions in teacher tenure, and charter schools.  Matt observed that these were extra-ordinary charges to make “without presenting a scintilla of supporting evidence.”

But Wolf responds: “I am astounded by the puerile ad hominem attack on Dr. Diane Ravitch that appeared in Jay Greene’s blog. Like all of us, Dr. Ravitch has a right for her opinion to be respected and discussed without opponents resorting to such a childish (and inaccurate) attack. Apparently, Prof. Greene and his band of acolytes can’t muster the intellectual arguments to counter those of Dr. Ravitch, so must resort to this denigration of her scholarship and beliefs.”

I see.  And accusing Klein, Booker, Rhee, and Fenty of seeking to dismantle public education without any supporting evidence is not ad hominem?   

It is not ad hominem to say, as I did in my post on this, that “it is shocking to see these new claims made without any evidence that merit pay, weaker tenure, and charter schools harm public education, let alone destroy it.  Other than the fact that Bloomberg and Klein support these policies, it is not clear why Diane Ravitch opposes them.”  The fact is that Diane Ravitch did not provide evidence to support her claim and it is perfectly within reasonable discourse to point that out. 

If Andrew Wolf wants a substantive discussion rather than ad hominem, how about if he starts by providing the evidence that merit pay, reduced tenure rights, and charter schools “dismantle public education” that Ravitch neglected to provide?

In his own defense, Matt added, “A long and distinguished career does not entitle one to make such reckless and unsupported claims.”

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

A Few Comments

September 9, 2008

It must be the back to school season because there are a lot of interesting education pieces on the web.  I thought I’d just mention and briefly comment on some:

  • On Matt Ladner’s Little Ramona’s Gone Hillbilly Nuts about Diane Ravtich’s new-found enthusiasm for teacher unions and hostility to charter schools and merit pay — I posted this comment on his piece: “I liked Left Back, Language Police, and much of her historical work. That’s why it’s so disappointing to read what she is writing these days. From her earlier work one would never have guessed that she would accuse people who favor merit pay, reduction in teacher tenure rights, and charter schools of plotting to destroy public education.  And for someone whose past work relied on rigorous scholarship, it is shocking to see these new claims made without any evidence that merit pay, weaker tenure, and charter schools harm public education, let alone destroy it.  Other than the fact that Bloomberg and Klein support these policies, it is not clear why Diane Ravitch opposes them.”
  • Marcus Winters has a great piece on National Review Online about how reforming the teacher compensation system is the key to improving teacher quality and, in turn, student achievement.
  • Thomas Hibbs has a not-so-great piece on National review Online about how “the true teacher cannot simply be an instrument of the wishes of the student’s family.”  He’s right that parents can sometimes try to shield their children from burdens by lowering academic expectations and that teachers need to strive for excellence regardless.  But it’s unrealistic to expect that we can build an educational system based on “the teacher’s love.”  Parents, whatever their shortcomings, are more likely to be effective advocates for a child’s progress than even well-intentioned and well-trained teachers because the parents have a love for children that we cannot realistically expect from teachers. 
  • I don’t have time to comment on them, but you should also check out the rest of the National Review Online pieces, including those by Checker Finn, Neal McCluskey, Mike Petrilli and Amber Winkler, and Susan Konig.

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

PJM on Merit Pay in D.C.

September 8, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Today, Pajamas Media carries my column on Michelle Rhee’s push for a limited, voluntary merit pay system in Washington D.C.:

To see how much has changed, just consider the amazing fact that about one out of every three public-school students in D.C. attends a charter school — government-owned but non-unionized, privately operated, and (most important of all) chosen by parents — instead of a regular public school. “We lost 6,000 students last year,” says Parker, referring to the number of students who moved from regular schools to charters. Six thousand students is over 13% of the city’s remaining enrollment in regular public schools — in one year.

Rhee isn’t the force behind charter schools or vouchers in D.C. She’s in charge of the regular public system. But the same widespread mandate for reform that made charters and vouchers successful have allowed Rhee to succeed with reforms like closing schools that were only there to create patronage jobs, introducing curriculum innovation, and taking on the unbelievable amount of bureaucratic waste in the system. And as vouchers and charters have sent a message that the system can’t take students for granted any more, the pressure for reform has only increased — strengthening Rhee’s hand.

By coincidence, the Washington Post‘s Marc Fisher has a column today emphasizing how the explosion of charter schools in D.C. was decisive in bringing the unions to the bargaining table, even on the issue of reforming the structure of teacher pay. Just as competition from globalization forced the private sector unions to start the long, slow process of giving up the ridiculous extravegances that they won from management in the 1960s and 1970s, thus rescuing the American economy from disaster, now competition in schooling is forcing the teachers’ unions to start the same process of giving up their own ridiculous extravegances – the biggest of all being a system of hiring, firing and pay that bears no serious relationship to job performance.

Leave a Comment » | charter schools, competitive effects, politics, teacher pay, teacher quality, teacher union, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Little Ramona’s Gone Hillbilly Nuts

September 7, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

The Nashville y’alternative band BR549 wrote a great song about a woman who used to be a punk rocker, but changes into a hardcore country and western enthusiast. The lyrics describe the conversion:

She done traded in her Doc’s for kicker boots
Safety-pinned tee shirts for Manuel Suits
Her hair’s grown out and it’s piled up high
She only shows her tattoos one at a time
She ain’t ashamed of the way she was
She hears old Hank, she can’t get enough
Her punk rock records are gathering dust
‘Cos little Ramona’s gone hillbilly nuts

This song involuntarily comes to mind every time I read a blog post by Diane Ravitch like this one. It could just be me, but Ravitch’s dislike for NYC Chancellor Joel Klein seems to have gone beyond the pale.

Let’s assume that Klein has spent gobs more money without getting much in the way of results. That is a matter of dispute, and I don’t have a dog in that fight. But even if it were true, Klein would have plenty of company: spending more money with flat academic achievement is about par for the course of American education over the last thirty plus years. For instance, the NAEP long term reading scale score for 17 year olds was precisely the same in 1971 and 2004.

Nationally, real spending per pupil doubled during that same period. As sorry as that record is, you could be rightly dismissed as nuts if you tried to argue that the nation’s public school leaders were out to destroy public education. Klein doesn’t support vouchers-so there’s no story there, even for inhabitants of the anti-voucher fever swamps. He does support charter schools, but charter schools are public schools and support for charters is well within the mainstream of the Democratic Party. And yet Ms. Ravitch writes:

So this is the strange new era we are embarked upon, in which the mantle of “reformer” has passed to those who would dismantle public education, piece by piece.

What seems strange to me is making such a charge against Klein, Booker, Rhee and Fenty without presenting a scintilla of supporting evidence. Stranger still to see someone accused of spending too much money on public schools and of seeking to dismantle public education in a single post.

25 Comments | politics, teacher union | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Modest Programs Produce Modest Results . . . Duh.

September 3, 2008

HT perfect stranger @ FR

By Greg Forster & Jay Greene

Edwize is touting a new “meta-analysis” by Cecilia Rouse and Lisa Barrow claiming that existing voucher programs produce only modest gains in student learning.

Edwize quotes the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education (NCSPE), which sponsored the paper and is handling its media push, describing the paper as a “comprehensive review of all the evaluations done on education voucher schemes in the United States.”

But the paper itself says something different: “we present a summary of selected findings…” (emphasis added). Given EdWize’s recent accusations about cherry-picking research, which are repeated in his post on the Rouse/Barrow paper, we thought he’d be more sensitive to the difference between a comprehensive review of the reserach and a review that merely presents selected findings. (By contrast, the reviews we listed here are comprehensive.)

Even more important, the Rouse/Barrow paper provides no information on the criteria they used to decide which voucher experiments, and which analyses of those experiments, to include among the “selected findings” they present, and which to exclude from their review. The paper includes participant effect studies from Milwaukee, Cleveland, DC, and New York City, but does not include very similar studies conducted on programs in Dayton or Charlotte. In New York it includes analyses by Mayer, Howell and Peterson, as well as Krueger and Zhu, but not by Barnard, et al. The paper includes systemic effect analyses from Milwaukee and Florida, but excludes analyses by Howell and Peterson as well as by Greene and Winters.

Clearly this paper is not intended to be, and indeed it does not even profess to be, a comprehensive review.

But even with its odd and unexplained selection of studies to include and exclude, Rouse and Barrow’s paper nevertheless finds generally positive results. They identified 7 statistically significant positive participant effects and 4 significant negative participant effects (all of which come from one study: Belfield’s analysis of Cleveland, which is non-experimental and therefore lower in scientific quality than the studies finding positive results for vouchers). In total, 16 of the 26 point estimates they report for participant effects are positive.

On systemic effects, they report 15 significant positive effects and no significant negative effects. Of the 20 point estimates, 16 are positive.

And yet they conclude that the evidence “is at best mixed.” If this were research on therapies for curing cancer, the mostly positive and often significant findings they identified would never be described as “at best mixed.” We would say they were encouraging at the very least.

Moreover, the paper is not, and doesn’t claim to be, a “meta-analysis.” That term doesn’t even appear anywhere in the paper. It’s really just a research review, as the first sentence of the abstract clearly states (“In this article, we review the empirical evidence on…”). It looks like the term “meta-analysis,” like the phrase “comprehensive review,” was introduced by the NCSPE’s publicity materials.

What’s the difference? A meta-analysis performs an original analysis drawing together the data and/or findings of multiple previous studies, identified by a comprehensive review of the literature. The “conclusions” of a research review are just somebody’s opinion. Meta-analyses vary from simple (counting up the number of studies that find X and the number that find Y) to complex (using statistical methods to aggregate data or compare findings across studies). But what they all have in common is that they present new factual knowledge. A research review produces no new factual knowledge; it just states opinions.

There’s nothing wrong with researchers having opinions, as we have argued many times. It’s essential. But it’s even more essential to maintain a clear distinction between what is a fact and what is somebody’s opinion. Voucher opponents, as the saying goes, are entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts. (Judging by the way they conduct themselves, this may be news to some of them – for example, see Greg Anrig’s claims in the comment thread here.)

By falsely puffing this highly selective research review into a meta-analysis, NCSPE will decieve some people – especially journalists, who these days are often familiar with terms like “meta-analysis” and know what they mean, even if NCSPE doesn’t – into thinking that an original analysis has been performed and new factual knowledge is being contributed, when in fact this is just a repetition of the same statement of opinion that voucher opponents have been offering for years.

(We don’t blame Edwize for repeating NCSPE’s falsehood; there’s no shame in a layman not knowing the proper meaning of the technical terms used by scholars.)

And what about the merits of the opinion itself? The paper’s major claim, that the benefits of existing voucher programs are modest, is exactly what we have been saying for years. For example, in this study one of us wrote that “the benefits of school choice identified by these studies are sometimes moderate in size—not surprising, given that existing school choice programs are restricted to small numbers of students and limited to disadvantaged populations, hindering their ability to create a true marketplace that would produce dramatic innovation.”

And there’s the real rub. Existing programs are modest in size and scope. They are also modest in impact. Thank you, Captain Obvious.

The research review argues that because existing programs have a modest impact, we should be pessimistic about the potential of vouchers to improve education dramatically either for the students who use them or in public schools (although the review does acknowledge the extraordinary consensus in the empirical research showing that vouchers do improve public schools).

But why should we be pessimistic that a dramatic program would have a dramatic impact on grounds that modest programs have a modest impact?

One of us recently offered a “modest proposal” that we try some major pilot programs for the unions’ big-spending B.B. approach and for universal vouchers (as opposed to the modest voucher programs we have now), and see which one works. He wrote: “Better designed and better funded voucher programs could give us a much better look at vouchers’ full effects. Existing programs have vouchers that are worth significantly less than per pupil spending in public schools, have caps on enrollments, and at least partially immunize public schools from the financial effects of competition. If we see positive results from such limited voucher programs, what might happen if we could try broader, bolder ones and carefully studied the results?”

Has Edwize managed to respond to that proposal yet? If he has, we haven’t seen it. Come on – if you’re really as confident as you profess to be that your policies are backed up by the empirical research and ours are not, what are so you afraid of?

And while we’re calling him out, here’s another challenge: in the random-assignment research on vouchers, the point gains identified for vouchers over periods of four years or less are generally either the same size as or larger than the point gains identified over four years for reduced class sizes in the Tennessee STAR experiment. Will Edwize say what he thinks of the relative size of the benefits identified from existing voucher programs and class size reduction in the empirical research?

Leave a Comment » | research reports, teacher union, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

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