(Guest post by Greg Forster)
NRO’s Jim Geraghty sums up Obama’s new position on D.C. vouchers:
“We know our stance is indefensible; please make this issue go away.”
Geraghty Sums It Up
May 7, 2009
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Posted by Greg Forster
Rock Star Pay for Rock Star Teachers Part Trois
May 7, 2009
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
A few months ago I got an angry email from an Arizona teacher claiming that her school had been terribly underfunded, and that she had 32 students in her classroom. I wrote to her:
If you have 32 children in your classroom, my first question is what is your school district doing with all of that revenue?
The JLBC put the statewide spending per pupil in Arizona at $9,399. A classroom of 32 at the statewide average would mean $300,768 in revenue from the students in your class.
Her response:
1-teacher, 1ELL teacher, 1 Special ED teacher, reading specialist, principal, janitor, secretaries, music, art, PE, computer teacher, Cafeteria workers, Para-educators, paper, textbooks, hands on science materials, Computers (this is the 21st century learning) building up keep, electricity, water, tables, chairs , etc…..
She forgot to mention administrative salaries from central command. There is one tiny little problem with all of this. According to the 2007 NAEP, 44 percent of Arizona 4th Graders scored BELOW BASIC in reading.
In other words, as Dr. Phil likes to say, how’s that hiring your average teacher from the bottom third of university students and supplementing them with crowds of others working out for you?
Shape up people!
The sad reality of American public education is that our schools have become revenue and employment maximizers that all too often are profoundly unfocused on the bottom line: student learning. Public schools ought not to be jobs programs, but focused on their mission of equipping students with the academic skills necessary for success in life.
So, if you’ve got $300,000 in revenue from a classroom (many states have more) call me crazy, but I think you’ve got $100,000 for what research shows to be going away the most important factor for student learning gains: a high quality teacher. When I say a high quality teacher, I mean a verified high quality teacher whose student learning gains are being tracked over time by both administrators and parents on a continuous basis.
The best platforms for ongoing value added assessment are web-based data products that allow teachers to develop common assessment items based on state standards. If there are state standards for a subject, you can do value added analysis on it. When schools really get going on this, they give monthly assessments. This gives ongoing assessment data that greatly drops the amount of error (using only state tests, some of the pioneering value added models require 3 years worth of data).
Overall, it isn’t very hard to imagine a system that would improve upon the status-quo in these practices. We can no longer in good conscience socially organize our efforts to teach children to read along the lines of: let’s hire an army of people who want job security and summers off , do absolutely nothing to reward merit, and hope for the best.
This must change, and it will change.
8 Comments | teacher pay, teacher quality | Tagged: Goldwater Institute, Matthew Ladner, teacher pay, value added assessment | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
Rush Dittos Me
May 7, 2009Rush Limbaugh weighed in on DC vouchers yesterday:
“So all hell was raised over canceling the DC voucher program ’cause it worked. So Obama’s done a flip-flop and he’s gonna let every kid in it, going to keep the program open ’til every kid graduates. Then he’s going to shut it down, to which I have a question. Either vouchers work or they don’t. Either they work or they don’t. Obama doesn’t believe in them. He wants to shut the voucher program down. He’s said so. He doesn’t believe in the voucher program. So why would he continue this program if it’s a bad thing? He believes it’s a bad thing. He says he believes it’s a bad thing. If it’s a bad thing, if it doesn’t serve a purpose, in his view, he ought to cancel it, he should stick with the cancellation because he doesn’t think this is a good program. Period. He’s not concerned with the disruption to the kids here. I’ll tell you what this is about. (interruption) What do you think it’s about? Partially, public relations propaganda. But let’s be specific because everything with Obama is a PR, propaganda.”
The incoherence of letting students continue in a program that you claim is harmful was exactly the point of my post yesterday. That Rush. Always fawning over everything I write and saying “ditto, ditto, ditto.”
But wait, there’s more. Rush then started to channel Kanye West:
“What Barack Obama is worried about is that the black population will discover he really doesn’t care about them. And that was starting to happen…. What Obama has to do here is to make sure that the black population does not figure out that he really doesn’t care about them, that they’re just pawns.”
And Rush topped it off with:
“You have to ask yourself this question. How in the world have we gotten to the point where a program that does not only a great job of educating children, but a better job of educating children, how have we gotten to the point where a program that does a better job of educating black children with less money than public schools is considered controversial? How in the hell have we gotten there? And how in the hell have we gotten to the point where a school that educates poor black kids better and cheaper, that that poses a threat to somebody and the school has to be shut down? How in the world have we gotten to this point? These kids going to these voucher schools have a great chance, at least a greater chance to succeed.”
WaPo Strikes Again
May 7, 2009The Washington Post has another excellent editorial today praising Obama’s willingness to grandfather existing students in the DC voucher program but lamenting his unwillingness to extend the same opportunity to future students.
As they put it:
“It is to President Obama’s credit that he wants to uphold the right of fledgling poet Carlos Battle and 1,715 other voucher recipients not to have their educations disrupted. We can’t help but wish, though, that other needy students would get the same opportunity of choice.”
And in a bit of understatement they added:
“Maybe there was also some thought given to the political optics of booting hundreds of poor, black students from private schools back into troubled public schools.”
Umm…. maybe just a bit.
And they close:
“In an ideal world, we would hope for more than that compromise. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee had already scheduled a hearing next week to evaluate the program. Parents, students and a scientist who have studied the program are among those scheduled to testify… The hearings need to be conducted with an open mind. If indeed this program is shown to work to the benefit of children, it should be continued. And, not — we submit — just for the ones who are lucky enough to be in it now.”
(corrected typo from WaPo)
Leave a Comment » | vouchers | Tagged: D.C. vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
D.C. Voucher Rally Photos
May 6, 2009
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Posted by Jay P. Greene
Killing Me Softly
May 6, 2009Someone suggested that perhaps we should have a contest to pick the song that best captures Obama’s deviousness in trying to kill the DC voucher program without the political embarrassment of dragging the existing 1,700 students out of their private schools.
My original submission was Stop Making Sense. The new entry is Killing Me Softly.
Obama Stops Making Sense
May 6, 2009Maybe Obama didn’t like the negative publicity of today’s voucher rally in DC. Maybe he was tired of being regularly beat up in the pages of the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. Whatever it was, administration officials announced today that they will seek to “grandfather” all 1,700 current voucher students in the program until they graduate high school.
On the one hand, this is a victory for the voucher advocates and shows that their efforts have been effective. On the other hand, this is a clever political move for Obama that allows him to kill the DC voucher program without paying the political price of denying low-income kids access to a program that the official evaluation has deemed beneficial. Just because he’s not ripping this opportunity out of the hands of the existing 1,700 students doesn’t mean that he’s not ripping it out of the hands of every future student who could benefit from it.
Grandfathering in the existing students may be humane and politically savvy, but it is also logically incoherent. If the program helps kids then why not let future students into the program so that they could also be helped? If the program doesn’t help kids, why let these 1,700 continue in it? For an administration that prides itself on its commitment to science and doing whatever works regardless of ideology or predisposition, they sure seem like Clintonian political triangulators completely impervious to evidence or common sense.
Besides, even to get the grandfathering we have to move the congressional democrats, led by rocket scientist Dick Durbin (who attended and whose children attended private schools).
(edited for typos)
1 Comment | vouchers | Tagged: D.C. vouchers; barack obama, Dick Durbin | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
Union Sock Puppetry, California Edition
May 6, 2009
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
That’s right, it’s yet another union sock puppetry scandal.
ALELR draws our attention to a cease-and-desist letter sent last week from the California Faculty Association (CFA) to the California Teachers Association (CTA). The CFA represents the faculty and staff of the California State University system; the CTA is of course the state K-12 teachers’ union.
Both organizations are affiliated with the NEA. Apparently CTA thought that this mutual affiliation gave them the right to do a little vicarious sock puppetry with the CFA – to promote a position that CTA supports but CFA opposes.
CFA is not amused.
You see, in California’s May 19 special election, voters will have the opportunity to vote on Proposition 1A, which will extend some of the state’s recent “temporary” tax hikes and divert a chunk of revenue into its alleged “rainy day fund.” CTA wants Prop 1A to pass because Proposition 1B contains a provision to take up to $9 billion out of the “rainy day fund” and blow it on the educational equivalent of coke and hookers (I’m paraphrasing), but this provision of Prop 1B doesn’t take effect unless Prop 1A also passes.
CTA has been calling CFA members to urge them to support Prop 1A. The CTA callers identify themselves as calling on behalf of “your union.”
That’s bad enough, because if you’re a member of CFA then CTA is not “your union.” But it gets better.
The California State University system isn’t invited to the $9 billion “Rainy Day Coke and Hookers Party” proposed in Prop 1B. So CFA opposes Prop 1A on grounds that it would take money away from their coke-and-hooker fund in the state’s general budget (I again parapharse).
Isn’t this fun?
Come on now, everybody sing along!
Oh, I love cash!
Any dollars or drachmas or dinars,
Any rubles or rand or rupees!
Yes, I love cash!
It’s true that my conscience is tattered and worn,
It’s all full of holes and I do feel quite torn,
But I’d sell my mother on the day I was born!
I love it because it’s cash!
Oh, I love cash!
Any euros or yuan or yen,
Any pesos or pounds or pennies!
Yes, I love cash!
I’m making a phone call, it’s totally cold,
All my talking points are amazingly old,
They won’t know I’m lying because they’re not told!
I love it because it’s cash!
Oh, I love! I love! I . . . love cash!
3 Comments | teacher union | Tagged: California Faculty Association, California Teachers Association, CFA, CTA, Greg Forster, Oscar the Grouch, Proposition 1a | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
Details on DC Voucher Rally
May 5, 2009Here are the details on the DC Voucher rally that was in Bill McGurn’s piece in the WSJ today:
“Tomorrow afternoon at 1 o’clock in Washington, we’ll learn if anything has changed. Two groups — D.C. Children First and D.C. Parents for School Choice — are holding a rally at Freedom Plaza, just across from the offices of the city government. As their flier explains, “D.C. families deserve the same kind of choices that the Mayor, City Council Members, and Federal leaders with children have.”
It ought to make for an interesting event. In addition to Mr. Chavous and former mayor (current D.C. council member) Marion Barry, speakers will include former mayor Anthony Williams — whose leadership played a pivotal role in establishing the Opportunity Scholarships five years ago. Mr. Chavous also says there will be figures from black entertainment, as well as moms and dads and schoolchildren.”
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Posted by Jay P. Greene
The Wall Street Journal Strikes Again
May 5, 2009The Wall Street Journal has another strong editorial today condemning Barack Obama and Arne Duncan’s hypocrisy in seeking to end the D.C. voucher program. Here’s a highlight:
“See if you can follow this political syllogism. President Obama and his Education Secretary have repeatedly promised to support “what works,” regardless of ideology. The teachers unions adamantly oppose school vouchers, whether or not they work. Ergo, Messrs. Obama and Duncan decide to end a D.C. school voucher program that works and force poor kids back into schools where Messrs. Obama and Duncan would never send their own children. What a disgrace.”
There’s a rally of voucher families planned for this week and there will be congressional hearings on reauthorizing the program next week. Stay tuned.
2 Comments | vouchers | Tagged: Arne Duncan, Barack Obama, D.C. vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
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