The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/magazine/23Race-t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=all

by robg • 16 years ago

46 49 16 years ago

roboneal3• 16 years ago

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.

patio113• 16 years ago

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.

telemachos4• 16 years ago

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.)

jbellis• 16 years ago

I would think it would be possible to find spending-per-pupil for catholic schools to compare apples to apples.

Quick google says catholic schools are financially "twice as efficient spending less money per pupil" as public schools: http://www.gothamgazette.com/iotw/catholicschools/

From 2002, so you can probably do better.

archgoon2• 16 years ago

Trust me, teachers in the public schools aren't being paid 800,000 dollars to teach 40 students. Most of the money goes into the bureaucracy that comes when you have much larger class sizes and much more diverse student populations. (not claiming it couldn't be smaller) The proposed accountability changes aren't going to change that.

telemachos4• 16 years ago

Your numbers are misleading in one key respect: In Manhattan, private school tuition is far higher than that average (more like $25,000-35,000). Link: http://privateschool.about.com/od/schoolsny/qt/nyctop.htm

That said, the public schools in NYC are (mostly) a disaster, and it's disgusting to me (as an NYC taxpayer) that their return on investment, so to speak, is so poor. (Even the good schools will commonly have class sizes of 35-40 students. Lots of long writing assignments for high school students? Not likely...)

roboneal3• 16 years ago

Your citation is about the top 10 private schools in Manhattan with 1:4 - 1:10 student teacher ratios is a bit misleading.

First NYC is larger than Manhattan and there are plenty of schools with 20-25:1 teacher ratios that would provide a better comparison.

parfe• 16 years ago

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

Mentally handicapped, ESL, and problem students are easily booted from or denied entry to private schools.

inscitekjeff• 16 years ago

What is your point? They don't belong in public schools either.

tptacek7• 16 years ago

If I read the article correctly, simply to keep most students at grade level, charter schools spend over $18,000 per student.

patio113• 16 years ago

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.

tptacek7• 16 years ago

Why?

jerf5• 16 years ago

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.

jgilliam• 16 years ago

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!

nopinsight• 16 years ago

Good teachers are people who are intelligent, communicate well, competent in the subject matter and understands its connections to other subjects and the real world.

These people would do well in a lot of high-paying professions. It is also not a coincidence that the lack of good teachers is most severe in math and sciences. Even if they may choose to be a teacher out of personal desire to make positive change for a few years, most cannot stand seeing their classmates, who are sometimes less capable, earn twice or even thrice their income for decades.

In the society we live in, it is important to pay people what they are worth. Would you personally choose this noble path if it means a 50 or 60% permanent reduction of your income and an almost zero possibility of hitting it rich?

abstractbill2• 16 years ago

I agree. In fact the society we live in, as a whole, does not value teachers as educators. It values them as day care that keeps children busy while their parents are at work, and pays them accordingly.

archgoon2• 16 years ago

>Good teachers aren't motivated by money, so paying them more just attracts bad teachers

Wow. That's got to be one of the most perverse arguments to continue our tradition of treating teachers like shit.

patio113• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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

RyanMcGreal• 16 years ago

Reminds me of Dan Pink's presentation on what motivates people:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

It seems to me that the only piece missing from the current system is the ability to fire bad teachers.

I'm generally pro-union, but I believe unions do themselves a disservice by propping up bad teachers from legitimate dismissal as well as protecting good teachers from unfair treatment.

snprbob86• 16 years ago

Not to be pithy, but I'd be more interested in the ability to fire bad parents.

Even a weak teacher can guide a class of students through the chapters of a textbook. Sure, the kids would learn a lot more from a good teacher, but they are shaped far more by their peers. Crummy parents produce rotten kids, who slow the class down, cause disruptions and set bad examples. Furthermore, there are many talented teachers who are poor baby sitters.

MaysonL• 16 years ago

The thing is: good teaching is a learnable skillset, and neither side seems to be doing much to teach it to existing or upcoming teachers.

TomOfTTB• 16 years ago

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.

tptacek7• 16 years ago

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.

abstractbill2• 16 years ago

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-rf2• 16 years ago

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.

jerf5• 16 years ago

"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.

haily2• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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.

haily2• 16 years ago

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.

alan-crowe• 16 years ago

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.

hammerdr• 16 years ago

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

http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/phase1-applications...

ImFatYoureFat• 16 years ago

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.

The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand

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