Sell Outs

June 13, 2011

(Guest Post by Brian Kisida)

It’s truly a sad situation when once respectable organizations become so intertwined with the corrupting influence of party politics and the ulterior motives of other interest groups that they abandon their core principles.  Last week Matt referenced the newly invigorated war against charter schools in New York undertaken by the NAACP.  Also last week in Milwaukee the ACLU filed yet another lawsuit against a school choice program.

On the surface, the NAACP’s ongoing opposition to school choice just seems bizarre.  The overwhelming majority of school choice programs in the U.S., whether it be in the form of urban charter schools or means-tested voucher programs like those found in Milwaukee and D.C., serve distinctly minority and disadvantaged populations by design.  If there’s a rational argument out there that can explain why the NAACP, according to its own principles, should stand in opposition to school choice, I haven’t heard it.  And I’ve done plenty of searching.

But the NAACP supported rally that was held down in Harlem last week does provide the necessary connect-able dots to at least consider their motives.  Who was there?  Well, New York City Council member Robert Jackson spoke out against charter schools, and he invoked the long hard plight of the NAACP’s battle against discrimination in the process:

“NAACP has stood for over 100 years to fight discrimination. And we stand united, right here on 125th Street and Lenox Avenue and Malcolm X Boulevard to say we will fight all people, all people, that want to discriminate against us or our children.”

Of course, he failed to mention that before he became a council member in 2001, he was a Director of Field Services for the New York State Public Employees Federation.  And, while it may be unfair for me to insinuate that his close ties to public employee unions motivate his opposition to school choice, it isn’t unfair to say that his claims are fundamentally false.  Charter schools are open to all students, regardless of residential location.  By definition, freely chosen charter schools are less discriminatory than residentially-assigned schools.  Unless, somehow, you think a randomly chosen lottery ball is capable of discriminating.

Also in attendance was United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew.  He also played the equity card:

“The children from the charter school will get the science labs, and not the children from the public school…the children from the charter school will get the playground, and not the children from the public school.”

Of course, charter schools are public schools, and they are open to all students who apply.  Moreover, if Mulgrew really thinks that charter schools are so superior to “public” schools, then wouldn’t the proper thing to do–if one really cared about giving every child the best education possible–be to make every school a charter school?  Then they’d all get the science labs and new playgrounds, right?

I imagine this is how organizations like the NAACP will inevitably die.  They become so resistant to change and so corrupted by bad influences that eventually they become irrelevant.  The NAACP is squandering what little credibility it has left by opposing policies that are near and dear to the hearts of the people who should be their core constituents.  So it goes.

Up in Milwaukee, the ACLU is also doing its best to betray its own principles by fighting the expansion of Milwaukee’s Parental Choice Program (MPCP).  Like the NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union is no friend of school choice.  Their own director, way back in 1994, agreed that school vouchers, if properly administered, were no more a violation of the First Amendment than were Pell Grants (which means they aren’t a violation at all).  But in the ensuing years, the ACLU has become one of the most vocal opponents of expanding individual liberty through school choice.  And it’s not exactly clear why.  At the very least, it’s worth noting that the word “liberty” doesn’t regularly appear in any of the ACLU’s public statements against school choice.

Last week, the ACLU filed a lawsuit claiming that the MPCP discriminates against children with disabilities and asked the Department of Justice to delay Governor Walker’s planned expansion of the program.  To make their case, they cite flawed statistics generated by the politically minded state Department of Public Instruction (DPI) that claim that nearly 20% of students in Milwaukee’s public schools have a disability, but only 1.6% of the students in the MPCP have the same condition.

Of course, the claim is misguided in multiple ways.  Independent research by Patrick Wolf from the University of Arkansas and John Witte from the University of Wisconsin does confirm an asymmetry with regard to disabled students, but not nearly as high as the one claimed by DPI and the ACLU.  In their analysis, they concluded that:

“Public schools have both strong incentives to classify students as requiring exceptional education, because they receive extra funding to teach such students and well-established protocols for doing so. Private schools have neither. A student with the same educational needs often will be classified as exceptional education in MPS but not so classified in the choice program.”

“Nine percent of choice parents said their child has a learning disability, compared to 18% of the parents of the carefully matched public school students in our sample. The proportion of students with learning disabilities in the choice program is about half that of MPS, but it is certainly not less than 1%, as the state Department of Public Instruction recently reported.”

In addition, the lawsuit brought by the ACLU completely ignores the funding disparity that exists between Milwaukee public schools and the voucher program.  Currently, students in Milwaukee’s public schools receive more than $15,000 in per-pupil funding, while students in the choice program receive $6,442.  If the ACLU were truly concerned about the liberties of disabled students and their families, wouldn’t it make the most sense to argue for an increase in the voucher amount for disabled students?  Wouldn’t that be the most liberty-maximizing course of action?

Like the NAACP, the ACLU has veered far from its own principles as an organization whose stated purpose is to “defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to all people in this country.”  And, like the NAACP, it’s largely because they’ve sold out.  They’ve gone from being an organization founded on certain principles to being simply another political hack-unit heavily influenced by party politics and the agendas of other interest groups.  Unless they can find a way to change, they’ll continue to slide towards complete and total irrelevance.

36 Comments | charter schools, residential school choice, school funding, teacher union, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Brian Kisida

Randi Weingarten Endorses Florida K-12 Jebolution

May 6, 2011

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Keep reading the story past all the complaints about cuts…

While praising Orange educators, Weingarten, a former New York City teachers-union leader, was sharply critical of the Florida Legislature and Gov. Rick Scott, whom she accused of taking “a wrecking ball” to the academic progress Florida has made.

Though not all teachers agreed with all facets of the state’s reform efforts in the past decade — pushed initially by former Gov. Jeb Bush — most embraced the effort to improve public education, she said.

And across the country, Florida gained notice for improved test scores, better national rankings and winning a share of the federal Race to the Top grant last year.

“There was a real sense of Florida schools moving in the right direction,” she said.

Ok- so let me catch my breath here.

The story seems to be Florida used to be making progress, but now that the housing bubble crash is forcing spending cuts and Florida law is no longer going to treat teachers as interchangeable widgets, it is all going to fall to pieces.

Riiiiiiiiight

“Not all teacher agreed with all facets” is a true statement. It would also be true to say that “teacher union leaders opposed almost all facets” of the reforms and that the NAEP has revealed their opposition to have been utterly and totally indefensible.

Sorry Randi- as Jay has noted, teacher union leaders have approximately the same level of credibility on education reform as tobacco executives have on cancer research. If you didn’t dislike the latest reforms, there would be something wrong with them.

Leave a Comment » | school funding, teacher union | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

The Long Knives Come Out

April 25, 2011

“Allen” raised a good point in a recent comment.  As money gets very tight at the state and local level, the interests of different public employee unions should start to diverge.  Firefighters, police officers, and other local government workers will have to bear the brunt of the cuts if education does not share in the pain.  During times of overflowing government coffers, it was easy to maintain harmony by spreading the money around to everyone.  As funds shrink it is nearly impossible to maintain harmony as each tries to shift the bulk of the cuts to the others.

We are beginning to see signs of this fracture among organized government employee groups.  The Fraternal Order of Police has decided to pick a fight with the American Federation of Teachers.  Well, actually the California affiliate of the AFT may have started the fight when they passed a resolution in support of the convicted murderer of a police officer, Mumia Abu-Jamal.  According to Mike Antonucci, America’s last and best investigative reporter on education:

 the resolution claims “the appellate courts have also refused to consider strong evidence of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s innocence,” references his “continued unjust incarceration,” calls on CFT to “demand that the courts consider the evidence of innocence of Mumia Abu-Jamal” and bring the issue to the AFT Convention “should he not have been cleared of charges and released by that time.”

In response Chick Canterbury, the president of the National Fraternal Order of Police, wrote a harsh letter to Randi Weingarten, the head of the AFT, saying:

This resolution, if it remains unchallenged by the AFT, would cast grave doubts on your leadership as well as pose serious questions as to the ability of the FOP to work with your organization at any level. On behalf of the more than 330,000 members of the Fraternal Order of Police, the families of slain law enforcement officers and the honored memories of the officers killed in the line of duty, I urge you to repudiate the resolution supporting this cop-killer.

Weingarten has replied:

We have taken the last few days to search the record, and except for this isolated action in California, we cannot find another incidence in which the AFT or any of our other affiliates have adopted a similar resolution. If such a resolution ever were to be raised at our national convention, I’m confident it would be soundly rejected.

Despite this effort to smooth over the cracks, this split may grow for reasons beyond Mumia Abu-Jamal.  These two unions understand that they will soon be engaged in a high-stakes struggle for resources.  FOP is trying to undermine the political standing of the AFT while also stifling support for a convicted cop-killer.

1 Comment | economics, politics, teacher union | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Special Interest: Teacher Unions and America’s Public Schools

April 14, 2011

 

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Terry Moe has spent years carefully researching this new book on the education unions.  I look forward to seeing Terry’s research, which informed his taking of the teacher unions to the woodshed in a debate a couple of years ago. Terry’s opening statement was very powerful: 

What we are saying is that the unions are and have long been major obstacles to real reform in the system. And we’re hardly alone in saying this. If you read “Newsweek,” “Time Magazine,” the “Washington Post,” lots of other well respected publications, they’re all saying the same thing: that the teachers unions are standing in the way of progress. So look. Let me start with an obvious example. The teachers unions have fought for all sorts of protections in labor contracts and in state laws that make it virtually impossible to get bad teachers out of the classroom. On average, it takes two years, $200,000, and 15% of the principal’s total time to get one bad teacher out of the classroom. As a result, principals don’t even try. They give 99% of teachers — no joke — satisfactory evaluations. The bad teachers just stay in the classroom. Well, if we figure that maybe 5% of the teachers, that’s a conservative estimate, are bad teachers nationwide, that means that 2.5 million kids are stuck in classrooms with teachers who aren’t teaching them anything. This is devastating. And the unions are largely responsible for that.

They’re also responsible for seniority provisions in these labor contracts that among other things often allow senior teachers to stake a claim to desirable jobs, even if they’re not good teachers and even if they’re a bad fit for that school. The seniority rules often require districts to lay off junior people before senior people. It’s happening all around the country now. And some of these junior people are some of the best teachers in the district. And some of the senior people that are being saved are the worst. Okay. So just ask yourself, would anyone in his right mind organize schools in this way, if all they cared about was what’s best for kids? And the answer is no. But this is the way our schools are actually organized. And it’s due largely to the power of the unions.

Now, these organizational issues are really important, but they’re just part of a larger set of problems. Our nation has been trying to reform the schools since the early 1980s. And the whole time the teachers’ unions have used their extraordinary power in the political process to try to block reform and make sure that real reform just never happens. Consider charter schools. There are many kids around this country who are stuck in schools that just aren’t teaching them. They need new options. Well, charter schools can provide them with those options. But charter schools are a threat to teachers’ unions. If you give kids choice and they can leave regular public schools, then they take money and they take jobs with them. And that’s what the teachers’ unions want to stop. So what they’ve done is they’ve used their power in the political process to put a ceiling on the numbers of charter schools. As a result in this country today, we have 4,600 charter schools. There are like well over 90,000 public schools. So this is a drop in the bucket. And mean time charter schools have huge waiting lists of people who are desperate to get in. In Harlem, for example, the charter schools there got 11,000 applications for 2,000 slots recently.

So just to give you an idea of about how the politics of this works out, in Detroit a few years ago, a benefactor came forth and said he was willing to donate $200 million to set up additional charter schools for the kids in Detroit who obviously need it. What did the union do? The union went ballistic. They shut down the schools, went to Lansing, demonstrated in the state capitol and got the politicians to turn down the $200 million for those kids. This is good for kids? I don’t think so. This is about protecting jobs. The same kind of logic applies with accountability. Accountability is just common sense. We obviously need to hold schools and teachers accountability for teaching kids what they’re supposed to know. But the teachers’ unions find this threatening. They say they support accountability but they don’t want teachers held accountable. Any sensible effort to hold teachers accountable, they brand as scapegoating teachers. They don’t even want teachers performance to be measured. Right here in New York City, Joel Klein indicated a while ago that he was going to use student test scores as one factor in evaluating teachers  or tenure. What did the union do? Now, this is something that Obama supports, that Arne Duncan supports. It’s unbelievable. What the union did is they went to Albany and they got their friends in the legislature to pass a law making it illegal to use student test scores in evaluating teachers for tenure anywhere in the state of New York. It’s just outrageous. And makes no sense from the standpoint of what’s best for kids. The “New York Times” called it absurd. This is how the unions approach accountability. Okay, well, I don’t have a whole lot of time left here.

So let me just quickly say our opponents are going to say tonight, and Randi has already said, there is really no conflict between standing up for the jobs of teachers and doing what’s best for kids. But the thing is there is a conflict. And that’s why we can’t get bad teachers out of the classroom, because they protect them. That’s why the schools have totally perverse organizations imposed on them, and that’s why totally sensible reforms are seriously resisted in the political process. Now, what you’re going to hear, I’m sure, throughout the evening is that union leaders and unions around the country, they’re actually reformers too. They want to get bad teachers out of the classroom. They say they’re for charter schools; they’re all in favor of accountability. Well, not really. Talk is cheap. What counts is what they actually do. And what they do is to oppose reform. This is the reality.

In the MSNBC clip with Derrell Bradford a couple of posts below, you will see Derrell taking it to Randi Weingarten, and then an official for the Obama administration go into a litany of “this finger pointing has got to stop.” Derrell did not stop, nor should any of us, as this is exactly wrong. If we want a more effective system that provides the basic academic skills necessary for success in life we must first understand why we have the system we have today. The Dance of the Lemons, LIFO, charter school caps, rubber rooms, fake accountability systems with fuzzy labels and dummied downed tests- none of these things happened on accident. Nor will any of them go away by a “cuddle up to Randi and ask for reform nicely” strategy.

Borders is rushing my copy of the book to me as we speak. I can’t wait to read it.

4 Comments | teacher union | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Derrell Bradford Brings It!

April 12, 2011

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

I’m betting Derrell Bradford is off of Randi Weingarten’s Christmas Card list after this MSNBC exchange.  Weingarten is babbling about wrap-around services while Derrell Bradford is telling the truth about about urban districts spending $30,000 per kid getting 22% graduation rates.

I can’t figure out how to embed the video- so go check it out:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/42520627#42520627

1 Comment | money myth, teacher union | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Florida Legislature Passes Landmark Merit Pay Legislation

March 17, 2011

 

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

About 11 months ago, former Florida Governor Charlie Crist vetoed a major overhaul of teacher pay and tenure as a prelude to running for the Senate as an independent. Yesterday, the Florida Senate passed a revised version of the bill, which the new Florida Governor Rick Scott seems anxious to sign.

Stephen Sawchuck at  the Teacher Beat Blog summarized the bill:

Among other things, S. 736:

• Requires 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation to be based on state standardized tests or other national, local, or industry measures for those subjects not gauged at the state level;

• Requires evaluations to consider four levels of teacher performance;

• As of July 1 of this year, ends the awarding of “continuing” and “professional service” contract status (the Florida equivalent of tenure) and puts all new teachers on annual contracts;

• Permits districts to extend annual contracts only to teachers with good evaluations; those with two “unsatisfactory” ratings in a row, or two “needs improvement” ratings within a three-year period, could not be renewed;

• “Grandfathers” in teachers who now have tenure but allows them to be dismissed for the performance reasons stated above;

• Requires districts to establish performance-based salary schedules by July 1, 2014, for all new hires, and to phase existing teachers onto the new schedules as student-growth measures are developed; and

• Does away with layoffs based on reverse seniority.

Teachers are not interchangeable widgets, and should not be treated as such.  Highly effective teachers deserve greater recognition, and the students of highly ineffective teachers deserve better.  While merit pay is a complex subject, we can do better than simply paying teachers to age.

Florida once again has raised the bar on education reform for the rest of the nation.

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

Douglas County Offers Vouchers to Students

March 16, 2011

The school board in Douglas County, Colorado voted unanimously to offer vouchers worth $4,575 to as many as 500 students who were not previously enrolled in private school.  The measure would save the district between $402,500 and $2.2 million and would greatly expand options for those families, including religious and secular private schools.

The teacher unions and their allies will almost certainly try to tie the program up in court and run their own board candidates in the hopes of rolling back the policy.  But with choice and other ed reforms being pushed all over the country and with the ability of unions to automatically deduct dues from payrolls being eliminated in a number of states, the ability of the unions to fight every battle in every location is limited.

The most effective political strategy for adopting ed reform is to “flood the zone.”  Propose a lot of ideas in a lot of places and the unions find it nearly impossible to block every one.  That’s what Jeb did in Florida and now reformers are adopting that strategy nationwide, enhancing its effectiveness.

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

Do As WEAC Says, Not As It Does

March 15, 2011

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

For weeks, Wisconsin teachers represented by WEAC, the state’s NEA affiliate, called in “sick” so they could join the union protest in the state capitol. Schools closed, and parents were left to take care of their kids on no notice – to say nothing of the loss to the kids’ education.

Priceless development: ALELR points out that WEAC has a contract with the union that represents its own employees – the union’s own union – and in that contract WEAC’s employees are forbidden to engage in union activities during normal work hours.

Pot, this is kettle. Kettle, pot.

In other Wisconsin union news, ALELR reports that the Milwaukee union is dropping its notorious Viagra lawsuit. The teachers who want this medication, he observes, are now left to stand on their own.

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

A Union I Like

March 15, 2011

I just want to make clear, given my post yesterday,  that while I am adamantly opposed to public sector unions, I have no problem with worker’s attempting to negotiate over wages, benefits, and working conditions in the private sector.

In the private sector, if unions ask for too much, at least they experience the natural consequences of destroying their own companies or industries (to wit, the auto industry).  In addition, there are owners on the other side of the bargaining table who have strong incentives not to concede too much or they will lose their wealth.  Collective bargaining in the private sector is a voluntary negotiation over how to split the revenue of a company.  No one should be compelled to work for less than they think reasonable and no one should be compelled to pay others more than they think reasonable.  In the end, owners and workers have to reach a mutually acceptable agreement, whether collectively or individually.

But in the public sector, unions are almost entirely insulated from the consequences of making unreasonable demands since governments rarely go out of business.  Unlike in the private sector, public sector unions can drive total revenue for their industry higher without any improvements in productivity simply by getting public officials to increase taxes.  And the public officials on the other side of the table are at least  partially selected and heavily influenced by the unions themselves.  In the private sector, unions can only select the officials with whom the bargain to the extent that they are shareholders.  In the public sector, one only need be a citizen, and the unions are much better organized and financed citizens than is the average taxpayer.

One private sector union with which I am currently completely sympathetic is the NFL Players Association.  First, the owners are asking that owners be allowed to keep the first $2 billion of professional football’s $9 billion in annual revenue.  That assures them close to a 22% operating profit margin, since football teams have few expenses beyond the player’s salaries and stadium costs (some of which are stupidly subsidized by taxpayers).  What industry can guarantee its owners a 22% operating profit margin?

In addition, the owners have always managed to get players to agree to a cap on team salaries as a further way of ensuring their profits.  Anyone who is for the voluntary exchange of labor for pay should oppose industry-wide salary caps.  All that a cap does is prevent excellent workers from bargaining for a larger share of total revenue.  This discourages excellence and guarantees owner profits at the expense of workers.

And for those of you who say that salary caps are needed to promote equity in the competitiveness of teams…

1) Equity is not the prime goal of sports (or most other endeavors).  Excellence is.  If you want to watch contests that are always perfectly matched, I would suggest that you watch people flipping coins.

2) Rewarding more successful teams and players with the possibility of earning more money provides the proper incentives for them to try harder to win.  If you don’t think that revenue sharing with a cap undermines incentives I have two words for you — Cleveland Browns.

3) If you are afraid that larger market teams will always win, just look at baseball which lacks a cap.  Yes, big market teams are more likely to be in the post-season, but they don’t always win.  If you think big markets and big payrolls can guarantee winning I have three words for you — New York Mets.  Besides, what’s so wrong with larger markets more regularly having teams in the race for a championship?  Only a bizarre system would prefer having small markets, like Green Bay and Indianapolis, regularly in the hunt.

And if you think NFL players are a bunch of rich felons who don’t deserve extra money, I would remind you that the average career is about 3 seasons and many players end up as cripples for life.  The NFL is exploiting these workers like crazy and any decent liberal should be on the side of those who are exploited.

Unfortunately, the NFL players union has been awful in the past and failed to do nearly enough to protect their members from this exploitation.  I hope it is different this time.  And I hope that the unions prevail (as long as it is in the private sector and without government subsidies or coercion).

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

The Public Funding Perpetual Motion Machine

March 14, 2011

Both the NPR and public-sector union controversies make me think of perpetual motion machines.  In both cases organizations receive government funds which they can use to lobby public officials to receive more government funds.

Most people are familiar with this concern when it comes to public sector unions given that it is well-documented that unions use money automatically taken from publicly paid salaries and benefits to donate to campaigns, organize, and lobby for higher salaries and benefits from which they can extract higher dues to push for even higher compensation, etc… Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Mind you, I have no problem with private sector unions since they can only negotiate over how to divide profits with management and shareholders and cannot lobby to increase revenues without also increasing productivity.  But public sector unions can lobby for higher revenues from which they can extract a larger share for themselves without having to do anything to enhance productivity.

But people are much less familiar with how NPR utilizes the same Public Funding Perpetual Motion Machine.  As Congress debates de-funding public broadcasting, NPR is making announcements alerting their listeners to this possibility and urging them to visit a web site to organize a push to maintain and increase taxpayer funding of NPR. So, NPR wants money so that it can tell its listeners to organize to lobby so that they keep getting money.  Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Like all perpetual motion machines, these publicly funded ones are also frauds.  The system is not self-sustaining and requires that resources be extracted from somewhere else — in the case of NPR and public sector unions, it is extracted from the taxpayer.

I should also note that I like a number of programs on NPR.  But it is completely unacceptable for them to take money from me and others by force to pay for their broadcasts.  I’m confident they can generate sufficient funds voluntarily and may well soon have to do exclusively that.

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

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