Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance.
Samuel Johnson
Matt Miller: An Inconvenient Response
On Romney v Teacher Unions: Thumbs DOWN!
I had read Miller's op-ed about 2 or 3 days ago; I wanted to rant in the blog immediately but decided to take a 2-day cooling off period. I have cited the original article and you can read and make up your own mind, but most liberal opinions are fairly predictable. If you've ever heard or read an Obama speech, you know how progressives or liberals frame an issue: it presupposes their point of view.
There's a huge difference between my commentaries and most others; I explained in a commentary a few weeks back that as the lead altar boy back at a south Texas AFB, I had served daily mass early in the morning. As I graduated, the priest surprised me with one of the most thrilling gifts of my lifetime, his multi-volume hardbound set of Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica. Aquinas had a characteristic way of approaching and resolving issues: he would list and forcefully present, in a fair manner, the best arguments for and against an issue. You could anticipate how Aquinas would come down on an issue, but for any bright young scholar, half the fun in reading Aquinas was trying to anticipate how he would respond to a well-stated objection.
Matt Miller, Barack Obama and almost any progressive I've ever read basically have no basic concept of or appreciation of the free market system. Social liberals/progressives caricature classical liberals and create straw man arguments (cf. Bastiat quote below). One common point is that the free market is intrinsically untrustworthy: we cannot trust for the market to do the right thing (hence must bribe or punish companies and individuals), and we cannot trust consumers to make the right decisions (hence we must limit their choices (e.g., Bloomberg's restrictions on sugary drink size) or make decisions for them because they're not responsible enough to make their own decisions, so we must arrange for mandatory retirement contributions and entitlements, etc.) They will often posture themselves as the compromiser, of having a balanced approach, etc.
So let me do a quick synopsis of Miller's points. He sees Mitt Romney as participating in a currently dysfunctional "war" between administrators and unions in education. He pays lip service to dysfunctional aspects of current teacher unions and their current ranks--but he's really doing that for political cover because he then goes on to argue "the fact" that "the top performing school systems in the world have strong teachers unions at the heart of their education establishment." He then looks at what he argues have the "best school systems internationally" (i.e., Finland, Singapore and South Korea) and claims that teacher unions are behind the success. In particular, he credits the government for micromanaging teacher recruitment and setting up specialized education universities for preparation.
He seems to attribute the poor status quo as a reflection of bright women whom in the past had no real professional opportunities to the teaching profession. But, he insists, the only way you are going to get quality bright people back into teaching is to pay them a lot more. As soon as we get the deadwood poor performers out of teaching by their retirement, we eventually replace them with positions paying $65-150K.
My abridged response:
- I absolutely reject Miller's concept of centralizing/federalizing public education. Statist "solutions" are suboptimal and there are opportunity costs (e.g., for high quality private schools) Do I really need to remind the reader of what happens when the government "competes"? E.g., mortgages, school systems, mail services, and roads and highways? Rampant Medicare/Medicaid fraud, dysfunctional pricing, etc. Government is systematically incompetent and inefficient, unlike free market capitalism where transactions are voluntary and competition exists, companies have a natural incentive to wring out excessive costs and innovate products and services.
- There are other factors in play in comparing schools between countries. Miller is confounding correlation with causation, and there may be some methodological differences. In terms of methodology, recall the phony arguments about higher mortality rates among babies in the US? It turned out that the US included certain infant deaths that were filtered out by, say, French statisticians: i.e., an apples and oranges comparison. I'm not saying all of these variables are relevant in this context, but notably Miller didn't even discuss them in his eagerness to push for a statist approach: take, for instance, the US has a shorter school year than most of our competitors. A second point? Cultural factors. I have mentioned this in some of the posts I've written about my college teaching experience. While I was at UH (which has had a very good organizational behavior program), one of the professors took a visiting position in Germany, and he notably mentioned when he got back that he was "treated like a king" there. I had far too many mediocre students with unrealistic expectations, lousy work habits, disrespectful attitudes, and a sense of entitlement. On the other hand the foreign students I had (except one recidivist plagiarist at UWM) were among my biggest fans. I'm not arguing that the two factors I suggest are exhaustive, but he's merely speculating over anecdotal, surface-level comparisons. (Yes, I realize that he tries to provide himself cover--like Obama does all the time--by paying lip service to his "hypothesis", but the evidence he presents for his point of view is fairly thin.)
- Miller completely ignores the failure of the education training system and profession to police itself. For example, medical and law schools often have stiff admissions processes, and you then have medical boards and bar exams. You have professional review boards which can suspend or revoke licenses to practice. CPA's have a rigorous exam and continuing education requirements. Education programs could require say, top 15% entrance exam scores; they could require a nationally-credentialed exam program and raise GPA requirements or increase course requirements in reference disciplines (e.g., math and science). They could allow a dual degree program or an education minor for high qualified reference discipline majors.
- Miller's account of the adversarial relationship between administration and teacher unions is exaggerated and disingenuous. Miller doesn't even bring up Obama at all until almost as an afterthought at the end of his commentary. There is NO DISCUSSION of the corrupt relationship between teacher unions and the Democratic Party. The "adversarial relationship" with enabling Democratic local or county executives or governors? What is Miller talking about? Even FDR recognized that the aims of government and public sector unions were incompatible. By any objective standard, union contracts provide administrators with little, if any, managerial control over tenured ineffective teachers or assignments. Attrition, even during recessions, has been minimal and biased against new teachers. Only recently (e.g., Florida, Wisconsin and Louisiana) have we seen even modest reform. I saw videos of self-interested Wisconsin and New Jersey "teachers" thinking that they are entitled to taxpayer blank checks whom made me want to throw up. Let me point out my personal perspective as a former college professor. I probably did somewhere near a dozen campus visits (an expense-paid job interview where you also give a presentation on your research). I do not recall a single moment of money being discussed prior to getting an offer letter. (The one exception was Providence College. They told me the maximum they would pay was $35K (well below the market rate for MIS professors at the time), and I had to agree to that before they would commit to a campus visit.) I was in a position where my former students would outearn me in 2 or 3 years, while in a "publish-or-perish" track for tenure (typically, if granted, is in the seventh year of employment). I was routinely putting in 70 hour weeks--more than any K-12 teacher I knew and teaching in a rapidly changing discipline. Not only don't I have a pension from any former university employer, but I never got a penny of matching 403B employer contributions. I wouldn't say that compensation doesn't matter, but if the right college offered me a teaching contract even at 40% less than my market rate as a DBA, I would probably take it, because I loved college teaching. I never did it for the money. Which leads to my next point:
- I absolutely reject huge compensation packages for teachers at the expense of the taxpayer. We already know that high quality Catholic school education operates at a fraction of the cost (including teacher compensation) of the public schools: where do they continue to get competent teachers if what Matt Miller is suggesting about compensation is true? I am so fed up with phony comparisons to the private sector. And I'm one of the few people in America whom refuses to pay lip service to "underpaid teachers": expletive deleted! They never compare public school teachers with (typically lower) private school teachers: they try to compare apples and oranges with the private sector. They totally ignore 3-month vacations, greater job security, and much larger benefits packages than most workers. This is so perverse economics that I have to say that that the emperor is wearing no clothes. In the world of the REAL economy, wage increases are typically tied to productivity increases. So, just as an example, what would we mean by a productivity increase? Teaching more students for a given level of instructional quality. Augmenting instructional efforts with computer-based lower-level training and/or simulation exercises focusing on higher-order thinking and/or decentralizing a certain amount of responsibility, say, to teacher aides. But Democrats and others live in an Alice in Wonderland world by flipping classical economics on its head: they want to LOWER performance standards (e.g., reduce class size). Even reformers like Michelle Rhee, whom I otherwise admire, also have suggested $100K-plus teacher salaries [I do think that her position was different by requiring applicants to waive tenure] (off, of course, the government teat, funded by higher taxes for businesses and individuals). STOP THE MADNESS. As I explained in an earlier post, I initially intended to be a math and science teacher (I changed my mind and decided I wanted one day to be a college professor.) Now my middle brother targeted becoming a chemical engineer because he read somewhere they make a lot of money. To this day, my brother doesn't understand why I didn't become an engineer; he and his wife routinely travel to nice places every year, and he's owned the nicest houses in the family. But that's not how I define success. I don't believe in throwing money at problems in the public sector. I suppose with my scholastic record I could have easily gone to Wall Street, med school or law school. But I was willing to live my life as an obscure professor living a comfortable but not lucrative life. I have never met another accomplished scholar whom went out and said, "Hey, you know, I would have been a teacher if only they were paid like a bond trader on Wall Street." Another point: Matt Miller either incompetently or deliberately failed to acknowledge compensation over the past few decades of politicians throwing more and more money at teacher compensation; he intentionally or lazily fails to discuss compensation, letting the reader to assume as a given that teachers are "underpaid": does he seriously believe a $79K New Jersey English or history teacher is underpaid?
- I unconditionally reject Miller's absurd speculation that the teaching profession has deteriorated because of feminist advances elsewhere in the economy. There are gender differences among occupations, and the fact remains that most K-12 teachers have been, and continue to be, women. The idea that women had only one profession available to them before the 60's and 70's is patently absurd and a state of denial; Miller also fails to note that working with children requires patience and certain skills not all bright men or women share. What we conservatives have argued in our critique of public education is that despite however much money the government has thrown at education (e.g., Detroit), achievement test scores have FLATLINED, not deteriorated. Democrats, in exchange for teacher union support, have taken the lead in systematically and visibly increasing teacher salaries and rigging the market for teachers by shortening class sizes; this artificial "teacher bubble" may have resulted in less able people joining the teaching profession, just like less qualified homeowners helped prop up the housing bubble. (In other words, I've just put Miller's argument on its head, and I think my take is far more persuasive.)
- With Romney and libertarian/conservatives, the principal issue is COMPETITION. Miller's pathetically shallow analysis materially misleads the reader. Teacher unions resist any competitive threat from the private sector. (I had an earlier commentary this week debunking the progressive urban legend that the interstate highway system would never have been developed by the private sector. There were thousands of private-sector toll roads before the automobile era. Progressives basically prohibited private sector participation.) Vouchers are seen by the teacher unions as a threat to their captive student base. Lower-income parents are locked into an often failing school system for their children, and popular voucher programs are seen as their children's way to a better future. We pro-liberty conservatives believe that any product or service must improve in a competitive market, and education is just like any good or service. Private schools are a challenge to the public school system. Public schools must learn to compete by shedding costs and improving the quality of their educational services.
Let me close this discussion with two points. First, and this will make public school teachers go apeshit, I believe in privatizing the public school system and replacing it with means-tested subsidies for lower-income households. I believe the fundamental answer is a robust free market in education, not trying to imitate a "better" (but still inferior) government-controlled scheme.
Second, I don't like Romney's discussion of an emergency on education. I need to review Romney's issues papers more closely. One of the key problems we conservatives have been pushing is getting the federal government out of the education business.
Obama's Attack on Romney/Bain
Continues to Be Contradicted by Dems
The reason I'm publishing this segment is not for political purposes. I am pleased that leading Democrats including former President Clinton are coming forward to push back against the Obama campaign's attempt to demonize private equity:
President Bill Clinton veered sharply off message Thursday, telling CNN that Mitt Romney's business record at Bain Capital was "sterling." "I don't think that we ought to get into the position where we say 'This is bad work. This is good work,'" Clinton said. "The man who has been governor and had a sterling business career crosses the qualification threshold." Clinton also went on to say that Romney's time at Bain Capital represented a "good business career."Illinois GOP Rep Mike Bost:
"Mad As Hell and I Can't Take It Anymore"
Reacts to Illinois Pension Reform Pelosi Special:
"We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it"
I think the reason that what happened here and during 2010's ObamaCare debate is the fact that the Dems ran on a platform of transparency and these incidents require having to vote on complex laws without suitable elapsed time.
Why I Love Frédéric Bastiat Part II (Part 1)
This is another quote from Bastiat's "The Law". I have grown annoyed at Obama's attempts to distort the GOP's position on the environment, financial reform, health care reform, etc. Obama offers a false choice between economic fascism and anarchy:
Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs,
confuses the distinction between government and society.
As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government,
the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.
We disapprove of state education.
Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education.
We object to a state religion.
Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all.
We object to a state-enforced equality.
Then they say that we are against equality.
And so on, and so on. It is as if
the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat
because we do not want the state to raise grain.”
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
The Kinks, "All Day and All of the Night"
