In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.
Thomas Jefferson
Education, Talking Points and Some Thoughts
This past week I've tried to think of a proper vehicle to flesh out my latest thoughts on education, reform and a right fit federal response: this has been motivated by a number of factors. Barack Obama is currently focused on the topic; the issue arose with respect to whether to abolish the Department of Education at the recent Florida GOP Presidential debate; and there was a roundtable discussion at the end of today's Meet the Press.
Talking Points. First of all, I want to address some pet peeve talking points, including one by one of my favorite fellow conservatives and former Reagan Education Department Secretary William Bennett. (He has over the past several years compiled some excellent anthologies (e.g., The Book of Virtues and The Moral Compass: in fact I have given copies of one or more volumes to my goddaughters.) But the last thing I want to hear committed education reformers (including one of my favorites, Michelle Rhee) talking about is paying public sector teachers more (in some cases, six-figures). I'm tired of trite talking points and anecdotes about teachers paying for school supplies out of their own pockets. That's a management issue: at the core of many of these problems are dysfunctional, corrupt collective bargaining agreements with self-promoting teacher unions which tie the hands of management.
Let me very clear here: I don't think that the government should be competing with the private sector for resources--particularly, apples and oranges comparisons with other professions, which we saw during the Wisconsin protests over long-overdue collective bargaining reforms earlier this year. Public sector and/or teacher unions don't want to compare their compensation packages with private sector school teachers (e.g., Catholic schools). Nobody seriously disputes the comparable quality of Catholic schools and their teachers, but Catholic school teachers make considerably less; I've attended both public and Catholic schools, at the elementary/middle-school and university levels. The teachers I had at the private level were just as good, if not better than any public sector teacher I've ever met. I have an uncle, a retired pastor, whom operated schools in at least some of his parishes; contrary to anti-Catholic propaganda, most Catholic parishes have limited resources; Catholic schools are not profitable; they reflect one of the missions of the Church. I am not aware of students turned down based on limited family resources (e.g., large families). Yet, for example, when NJ Governor Chris Christie sends his kids to Catholic school despite paying an ungodly amount of property taxes, he is spending additional money to do so; certainly he would not be doing so to send his children to an educationally inferior school.
I can honestly say that I never once considered salaries during the time I earned my graduate business degrees. I knew professors made a comfortable living, better than I was making as a teaching fellow (a few hundred dollars a month) for teaching a couple of classes a semester. But, for example, I knew before I went on a campus visit (expense-paid job interview) to a well-known Catholic college in Rhode Island, the position would not pay more than $35K a year, significantly below what I was being offered at any state university--hence, even less than some offers my students were getting. (I knew they had a general preference for local candidates, and they ended up making an offer to one of them.) I am used to the fact that many people with a fraction of my abilities, skills, knowledge and accomplishments make more money. The fact is that I loved being a college professor, and I was a very good one.
The average teacher makes more than $40K, and when you factor in other factors like a much shorter work year, higher job security and modest, if any, contributions for high-cost benefits like retirement and health care insurance: most people think of these as "free" but often they account for up to 40% of total compensation, multiple times more generous than in the private sector. We know, for instance, investing in low-risk fixed instruments (say, money market or CD's) are low-yielding, say, than common stocks with volatile prices but potentially, likely higher returns. It used to be that the relatively lower-paying compensation was one of the trade-offs or sacrifices you made to serve your fellow citizens, whom are also your real employers.
Now what is legitimate for Bill Bennett to raise in terms of teacher compensation is the rigged labor market in public education (particularly K-12), a dysfunctional artifact of publicly-protected labor monopolies, intrinsically against taxpayer interests in frugal management of collected taxes; as we have come to expect, the self-centered unions feel entitled to unsustainable bloated compensation packages and inefficient work rules: they arrogantly, unjustifiably assert that it's NOT that teachers make too much--it's that taxpayers (particularly, higher-income ones) pay too little. Whenever you see companies or schools swamped with resumes (or vitae in the academic market) and/or wait lists for particular positions (I haven't checked, but I'm going to speculate there are robust supplies of elementary education, English and political science/history teachers) versus others (e.g., math and the hard sciences), it's clear that compensation packages are overly generous for the former and insufficient for the latter. Moreover, I would be willing to conjecture that increases in teacher compensation are related more to factors like longevity and advanced education degree, at best weakly correlated with teacher performance. And teachers strenuously argue against each and every OBJECTIVE assessment of their students' performance. In the private sector, these considerations are far less of a factor. It is easier to fire or layoff mediocre performers, regardless of tenure, and to promote or compensate based on merit; e.g., rapidly rising salesmen or high tech managers.
That leads to my second point of discussion--the feeble-minded, trite objection that 'teachers will teach to the test'; we have long known about the Hawthorne effect. Can it happen within a student standardized testing context? Of course; but I see that more of a reflection on standardized test design and validation, and teacher competence and performance evaluation. If we take, for instance, Bloom's taxonomy on educational objectives, teachers need to address higher-order skills and abilities. If a math teacher just teaches how to solve equations, but not to infer the relevant relationship within the context of a word problem, he is failing to adequately address and/or evaluate those higher-order behaviors. (Believe me, when I was a teaching assistant at the University of Texas leading lab sections on calculus word problems, I sensed the frustrations of freshmen at 8AM in dealing with those problems, never mind having to see my face at that hour of the morning. The female graduate assistant in the other section may have had to write out the answers using the solution book, but she was easier on the eyes. I found out when I asked a couple of male students in my section why they weren't showing up.) A competent, confident teacher knows his or her students are properly prepared and know any reliable, valid measure will reflect their performance; you should not be able to game a properly constructed standardized test. The results should parallel those for the teacher's own tests, which should be reviewed, and other measures of student learning.
The problem with those incompetent people raising the objection of testing to the test is that other teachers are subject to the same use of standardized tests, and they provide baselines for assessing student and teacher base and incremental performance. Multiple tests increase the confidence in the assessment of student performance (vs. an outlier performance).
A third pet peeve involves pathetic, predictable, polemical attacks by people like PBS commentator Tavis Smiley, trying to argue that teachers are being scapegoated for problems beyond their control and the impact of adversarial conditions (i.e., the Wisconsin collective bargaining reform). Cry me a river: in the real world, if companies face slumping sales of their widgets for economic or competitive reasons, they have to cut costs, including personnel. Attrition rates among teachers are modest compared to other professions, and seniority rules protect older, more expensive teachers, independent of performance, even when tax revenues are hammered by economic conditions. The idea that teachers are more equal than the parents of schoolchildren is clearly indefensible.
Miscellaneous Observations.
- The teacher unions and/or Big Education establishment will do everything they can maintain or expand funding of education, will argue that standard tests are time-consuming, not realistic and yield garbage data; we need very expensive, questionably reliable qualitative, peer or expert appraisals. Short-answer tests are more efficient, wider scope and more representative, more granular or precise, and reliable in terms of sampling student educational performance.
- There are waiting lists and lotteries to get into charter schools and/or private schools. This is evidence of the lack of competition in a publicly-protected monopoly. Technically the existence of private or charter schools argues against a monopoly, but taxpayers are forced to support the local system so they are a consumer, whether or not they elect to enroll their children.
- There are a number of guidelines (e.g., lower the student-teacher ratio) or novel teaching methods, etc., in an attempt to improve instructional outcomes. Yet does that explain why K-12 student scores in other nations outperform us, without the use of said resources? Many countries' students do better despite relatively fewer teachers. In fact, we know that there are important cultural differences. Asian students, even first-generation immigrant children (including other cultures--Miguel Estrada comes immediately to mind), routinely out-achieve other races/ethnic groups (even Caucasian). I'm convinced it has more to do with a near-obsession of parents with rigorous academic achievement and expectations for their children being the ticket to a comfortable existence (in many countries, the government bureaucracy). I wrote multiple commentaries on the "Tiger Mom" kerfuffle a few months ago. I also want to point out, as I have in other commentaries, the rather obvious point that we are still running off an obsolete agrarian school calendar: the length of the school years is up to 10% longer or more.
The Role of Federal Policy and A Suggestion. Given the fact, as Mitt Romney points out, that education is delivered on a local or state basis, how do you make a case for education as a federal responsibility? Certainly not in micromanaging local and state schools, particularly educational success stories. Perhaps I can see a repository of a national education outcome database, a minimal core curriculum, transferable educational credentials, and related considerations. We need to consider taking action against abusive anti-competitive practices of public sector labor monopolies. But I dislike the federal government exerting (with unpaid mandates) control over local and state responsibilities.
If there was a federal role, it would be to focus resources in taking over "bankrupt" chronically failed urban or rural schools on a shared revenue basis (i.e., firing management, canceling unsustainable labor contracts, and terminating lower-performing teachers, regardless of tenure) and/or extend its efforts with private sector partners (including charter or religious school partners, provided no religious content in core curricula). The schools, once properly back on their feet, would be transitioned back to state or local control (or private sector partners).
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
Fleetwood Mac, "Tusk"
