

The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand - robg
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/magazine/23Race-t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=all

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alan-crowe
I was a studious child and took the examinations that I sat very seriously. As
an adult I follow the debate on education reform and I am frequently informed
that there is something wrong with those examinations. If teachers took them
seriously and modified their teaching with the aim of improving their pupils
scores, this would be "teaching to the test" and educational outcomes would
suffer.

As a child I took them seriously and modified my learning with the aim of
improving my scores. Was I harming my education by taking the examinations
seriously? Why do concerns about the quality of the examinations come out now,
when teachers' pay is on the line? Why not earlier when children's
qualifications were at issue?

The teacher's union party line, that "merit pay leads to teaching to the test
and that would be bad" is a slap in the face to studious children who took
their examinations seriously. It destroys the credibility of the profession.

Is it possible to construct good tests?
<http://www.maths.qmul.ac.uk/~fv/books/em/EssentialMaths.pdf> is an
interesting example of a test aimed at ensuring minimum standards at the start
of a university mathematics course.

The usual technique for gaming an examination is to memorise answers to a core
set of questions that keep coming up. For example one games a calculus
examination by memorising cos 2x => -2 sin 2x and the examiners play along by
providing enough easy questions that you can reach the pass mark with doing
the hard questions that make the examination look tough.

In the article the examiner, Franco Vivaldi, is refusing to play the game.
Instead of designing the test so that it can be broken and students can be
passed even though they haven't learned the essential technique, Vivaldi takes
the opposite tack and tries to design a test with enough variety that students
have to learn the relevant mathematics.

Would teaching to this test do any harm? Drilling the techniques to get faster
and more accurate in pursuit of a higher score would be harmful. Vivaldi needs
his students to be competent because these techniques occur as basic
techniques in the more advanced material that he aims to teach. He needs his
students to be fluent enough that difficulties with the basics do not distract
them in the course of advanced work, but beyond that their time is better
spent on the advanced work, not on acquiring greater fluency with the basics.
Knowing this he sets the test as pass/fail.

The success of merit pay will depend on improving the tests. It will be an
interesting battle to watch.

------
haily
Parents need to take the leadership role in educating their children. Here's a
more radical idea. Get rid of the school system and the teacher's union. Give
the $19,358 back to the student's family. These families can pool the money to
hire their own education facilitator. You get a market driven education
system. The best "teachers" will always be in demand and the families can have
more choices in their children's learning.

~~~
electromagnetic
I fail to see how this will work the way you are presuming. Considering the
median family income in the US is ~$50,000, roughly 3/5 of which is attributed
to the father, what will the point be in a mother working 9-5 to make $20,000
and ship their child to school for $20,000 the government gives them. Rather
than simply stay at home and pocket that $20,000.

Either way the family will be making $50,000, only one way their expenses are
$20,000 more and the other involves the mother being at home 40 hours more a
week, accomplishing more household tasks and essentially returning us to the
1940's.

It wouldn't necessarily be the wife however, as in my household I'm the one
earning the 2/5ths and would have little problem being a stay at home
daddy/teacher. In fact, being an uber-nerd I have a strong feeling I'll be
teaching more math and science skills to my offspring than any educational
facility anyway, and having worked as a writer I know I'm going to be teaching
_far_ better English skills at an early age than any primary school education
will give my kids at a 30:1 child:teacher ratio. So being paid $20,000 to stay
at home and do what I'd be doing in my free time anyway, seems like a win-win.

~~~
haily
I am assuming that it's the public school system we're talking about here. The
$20,000 is from our taxes. You can very well choose to stay at home and
educate your children yourself and pocket the $20k, if that works for you. In
my opinion, we seldom learn everything from 1 or 2 sources. You can provide
your offspring with math & science but what if your offspring is also
interested in music, language, literature, drama etc.? Or any other subject
that is not offered in the school system?

I am just advocating for the child. As parents we're in the best
position(mostly) to judge what our children's needs are.

------
roboneal
Bottom line from the article, it's costing an estimated $19,358 per student
per year to educate, or maybe we should say fail to educate, in the NYC public
school system.

By comparison, average private school tuition is $6600 and Catholic school
tuition is $4254.

Spending is probably not the problem.

~~~
patio11
I agree with the point you are making, but those numbers are not directly
comparable. Catholic schools in NYC are heavily underwritten by their local
parishes and secondarily by the archdiocese, and they also have non-trivial
funding from a variety of government programs for providing social services.

~~~
telemachos
Beyond that, there are fewer and fewer parish Catholic schools in NYC. (The
parish schools have much lower rates. There are also independent Catholic
schools (ones run by boards rather than the archdiocese directly) that charge
tuitions in the 25,000-35,000 range. Those aren't closing down so quickly.)

------
patio11
This is one of my hobbyhorses. I'm cautiously optimistic that this effort will
not end up like the last seven times bold new centrist Democrats tried to take
on the teacher's unions.

~~~
tptacek
Why?

~~~
jerf
The economy is really pressuring the unions. As it becomes clear that public
pensions are right up there with the unfunded Social Security and Medicare
mandates in terms of "things that will destroy our economy in the next couple
of decades", the unions that have obtained their public pensions are having to
spend more and more of their political capital just on maintaining their
economy-destroying gains. The teacher's unions are one such union. (Not the
biggest, but definitely a player.) Teacher's unions have a lot less political
capital left over to defend themselves against reforms that may weaken (or
eliminate) tenure or create the sort of individual accountability they've been
fighting for a while.

I think their ability to resist this is tied to whether the economy gets
substantially better in the next two years; if so the pension problem may fall
out of focus (even though it will actually only be getting worse, but such are
the vicissitudes of democracy), if it doesn't, I suspect the teacher's unions
will end up spending themselves politically bankrupt at which point who knows
what will happen? There's a lot of "reformedness" that's built up over the
years, everyone's going to want to take a crack at it.

There is a potential here that there hasn't been for a while.

FWIW, I mean most of the above as descriptively as possible, without
endorsement of the desirability or lack thereof of anything mentioned.
Personally I would like to see substantial "reform", but only certain ones,
not others. (For instance, I would oppose increasing hours spent in school; I
think they are already far more than are necessary to meet current goals and
to the extent goals are not being met it is not for lack of hours. So simply
slapping an initiative to increase school hours with the label "reform" does
not make me approve of it.) I perceive no guarantee that even if reform
happens, I will like it.

~~~
jacobolus
This is a pretty biased account.

“Things that will destroy our economy” is primarily the financial services
sector taking up 30 or something percent of the entire profit of the economy
for several years, and decreasing tax rates for the last 30 years until by now
they’re lower than they’ve been since the 40s, to the point that the federal
government pays for things by taking loans instead, including sucking money
out of the social security fund and using it as a general revenue source.
Schools are less well funded now than they have been for decades, especially
where I am in California where the public school system has been on a
consistent tragic slide since Reagan was governor, from once being among the
best in the nation.

Blaming _teachers_ (or blaming “scary teacher unions”) for that is a
tremendous distortion; teaching is only a reasonable profession because of a
long history of hard fighting for decent wages. Most of the teachers work
their asses off, for all of our children, and heaping scorn on them is one of
the most reprehensible of the talking points of the right in America over the
last 30 years.

(disclaimer: my mother is a teacher)

~~~
jerf
"“Things that will destroy our economy” is primarily the financial services
sector taking up 30 or something percent of the entire profit of the economy,
..."

That's the past tense, what tanked our economy in the past few months. Looking
forward, what will kill us is unfunded mandates. You know how I know this?
Because even if we completely fixed the financials industry, completely and
utterly tamed it and turned it entirely into a non-profit organization while
still somehow retaining its efficiency, we _still_ choke on our unfunded
mandates in 10 to 20 years, tops. They're growing faster than inflation,
faster than the economy, and faster than any conceivable first-world economy
could possibly grow even if $YOUR_FAVORITE_ECONOMIC_THEORY was perfectly
instituted and it worked exactly as you expected.

 _All_ of the unfunded mandates are gloriously sweet and wonderful things.
Money for teachers. Money for old people. Money for retired firefighters and
police. Money for public servants. Money for sick people and especially money
for sick old people. Our political inability to say no to the sweet and kind
and needy people is what brought them to us in the first place. But it doesn't
matter how gloriously wonderful they are. They are unaffordable. We physically
lack the resources to fulfill the mandates. When I say "physically", I mean,
physically. We lack the energy and materials and manpower they are. When I say
"physically", I mean that one way or another we _will not_ pay those unfunded
mandates, because we are actually, factually incapable of it. The only
question is _how_ we will fail to meet those mandates.

Yeah, the teachers have had a role in that. Not much I can do to prevent that
from being the outcome. I can point out there are hardly alone, though.
There's a lot of people lined up at the trough of unsustainable mandates.
Thanks to Social Security and Medicare, that list is "Pretty much every
citizen of the United States and a fair number of non-citizens". Outrage
changes nothing. Here we are.

("Defined benefit payouts" ought to be striken from our vocabulary. They are
physically implausible. What happens when you build huge chunks of the economy
on a physically-implausible primitive should hardly be a surprise.)

~~~
tptacek
Unlike "sweet, wonderful, sick old people", money for teachers is potentially
an investment, not a straight up social cost.

~~~
jerf
Hmmm, investing with money we don't actually have, has that been in the news
at all lately?

Besides, I seriously question the marginal value we're getting out of the part
of the investment that's killing us, which isn't salary, benefits, facilities,
or management costs. We've been trained by various things that the answer to
"Do schools need more money?" is simply "Yes", regardless of context, but that
produces pathological economic policies. At some point the answer becomes
"No", and personally I think we long passed that point.

See also: "Do we need more money for crime enforcement?" "Do we need more
money to fight drugs?" "Do we need more centralized power to fight terrorism?"

I am totally willing to reconsider that question as circumstances change.
Reform things, start outputting better graduates (according to my rather
strict standards which involve actual training to think and such, not just
better test scores), and demonstrate that under these new circumstances the
bottleneck is money and I'll be happy and overjoyed to reconsider.

------
abstractbill
Making teachers' unions less powerful would be a good thing for sure.
Standardized tests though, tend to be akin to measuring a programmer's ability
through counting lines of code in my experience (my wife used to be a
teacher).

~~~
rm-rf
I used to be a teacher also, but in a college level trade school, in a state
that consistently ranks near the top in high school scores, in a rural, white,
midwestern middle class district that had sufficient funds to produce state
champion football teams, where there were minimal poverty and social issues
and minimal crime.

I _still_ had a steady stream of high school graduates showing up in my
college program that could not read a paragraph, could not write a sentence,
who could not add, subtract, multiply or divide fractions or decimals, yet
they were proud gradates of the local school district.

What's broke? No idea, but I do know that if that district had done even the
most trivial of standardized testing, those students would have been flagged
for remedial work long before they started college. Instead the college, with
about 40 full time faculty, dedicated 3 of those faculty to 4th through 8th
grade remedial math and reading.

~~~
jerf
"No idea, but I do know that if that district had done even the most trivial
of standardized testing, those students would have been flagged for remedial
work long before they started college."

Unless you taught a _long_ time ago or are in a very strange state, odds are
those children _were_ tested with standardized tests, probably multiple times.
I live in Michigan, so I can guarantee that pretty much every child coming out
of Detroit has been tested in a standardized manner by the state at least
three times while in school (conservatively, I remember having more but I'm
not sure what all they were), and they still come out with problems. You can't
even get a real HS diploma without passing these tests. (At least when I
graduated you would get a diploma from the school but it lacked some sort of
state endorsement.)

I don't think total lack of standardized testing is the problem. The problem
is they are either being cheated on or gamed, or nobody really knows how to
solve the problems being identified.

~~~
rm-rf
Having to pass tests prior to getting a diploma is a recent thing, at least to
old dudes like me.

I stopped teaching twenty years ago. There were standardized tests in high
school, but they were not used to determine progress or as graduation
requirement. Social promotion was common - students were not held back under
any circumstances, as it was assumed that the social stigma would be worse
than the failure to actually learn anything.

We tested the students at the time they applied to college. Because were were
publicly funded, open entry, we accepted all high school graduates regardless
of how they scored. If they scored low, we moved them into remedial
programs/courses.

------
TomOfTTB
To me this seems like a nice gesture but largely ineffective.

The fact is it takes effort to make changes that would earn this money and the
school districts who are willing to make that effort are the ones that already
care. So while it’s great to reward teachers and school districts that excel
those people were probably already doing good jobs (or at least competent
ones). So giving them more money is nice but doesn’t really solve the problem.

The problem is the lethargic ones. The ones who are so lazy and incompetent
that they wouldn’t even try for this money. The districts that are so pulled
down by incompetent teachers who can’t be fired that improvement is all but
impossible for them. Fixing education means finding a way to deal with those
people and this push doesn’t seem to address them at all.

~~~
tptacek
The grant money in this article is targeted at states, not at individual
schools. Most of the states in the US applied. Applications involved
legislative-level effort.

Moreover, the program was structured so that simply assembling an application
kickstarted reform efforts.

My read is that the actual money being disbursed is kind of a red herring. The
real benefit of the program is that it forces a bunch of states to start
piloting teacher-tenure and seniority reforms, which, a few years from now,
may serve as models for the rest of the states.

------
ImFatYoureFat
my favorite data point on the issue of education reform is that of Washington
DC a year ago. The new district leader offered a renegotiation of the
teacher's contract in which they would give up their tenure rights in exchange
for raises of the average teachers salary so that the bottom would be 70000
and the top would be 120000. The union was flatly against this renegotiation
plainly stating that they would rather have security to be mediocre than have
the opportunity to earn up to 3 times what they were currently earning.

completely ridicules. to my mind a district that pays their top teachers
120000 solves the entire problem. Imagine the competition for teaching
positions in a district in which you start at 70000 at after 7 year you can be
making up to 120000. What young ambitious twenty something wouldn't want a job
were you could make 120000 a year a have three months guaranteed vacation time
in a field in which you can feel confident that you are making a difference
and there is clear tangible progress from your work.

------
jgilliam
Good teachers aren't motivated by money, so paying them more just attracts bad
teachers. Good teachers want autonomy and to have an impact, and more testing
is just going to drive them away. So both sides of this are advocating for
things that will make the problem worse!

~~~
patio11
Substitute "programmer" for "teacher" and tell me if this sounds that
compelling to you.

Compensation issues are never strictly rational.

What do you think it would do for morale at your favorite tech company if all
salaries conformed _exactly_ to a published table, and advancement on that
table was based solely on years of service and number of Microsoft
certifications earned? Rockstar or plodding clockpuncher, makes no difference:
you get paid what the scale says. The company gradually attracts folks for
whom this makes sense, and the whole culture becomes worshiping that table.
One of the most common topics of discussion is how many years you have to
retirement (highlighted in bold at the top of the table), how much you'll make
in retirement, and what you'll do after retirement.

Somebody in accounting felt up the receptionist three years ago and was placed
on administrative leave, but he's still collecting paychecks exactly as the
table mandates. He comes in at 9, checks into an office specially prepared for
misfits, leaves at 2:57 and 30 seconds, and earns 240% of what you do due to
his seniority.

A friend of mine -- a Democrat whose eyes burned with missionary zeal when he
talked about the responsibility we have to educate the poor -- was very
disappointed with me when I abandoned my career plans as an educator, and took
up with Teach for America at one of the worst schools in NYC. They _broke_
him.

I don't say this lightly: there is a sickness of the soul in public education.

~~~
oz
Wow, I'd love to hear about his experiences. Can you tell us more?

------
hammerdr
The applications and review comments are pretty fascinating. You can see them
at:

[http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/phase1-applications...](http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/phase1-applications/index.html)

