By Request: Personnel Quality
I liked NS’s other question too:
Why is “finding better teachers” such a preoccupation among self-described education reformers? Of course, we’d have a better education system if our teachers were better. We’d also have a better military if our soldiers were better and a better health care system if our doctors and nurses were better. Why is education the only policy area where “find better people” is treated as a workable solution?
With regard to soldiers, I would reject the premise. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War there was a very low level of interest in joining the United States military and consequently in order to maintain the required overall force size it was necessary to make recruiting standards quite low and to be pretty lax about who you would keep on. The rebuilding of the quality of the personnel employed by the military over the course of the 1980s and 1990s is one of the great prides of the officers who were involved. And when the Iraq War was leading to a personnel crunch and moves toward diluting recruiting standards there was, rightly, a great deal of hand-wringing over it. Concern about personnel quality is also one of, if not the, main reason why the military brass is generally very hostile to the idea of conscription and this is also why we’ve encouraged our NATO allies to abolish conscript and build smaller, higher-quality, more professionalized forces.
Quality of personnel should always be a concern across public services. Some cities, for example, have trouble offering police officers salaries that are as high as what’s offered in neighboring suburbs. This tends to lead to problems with the quality of the staff available to urban police departments which, in turn, makes it more difficult to keep crime under control.
With regard to teachers, though, it’s worth trying to be more specific since the debate has focused on a couple of particular points. In the United States, we tend to require teachers to do a lot of preemptive qualifying in terms of getting themselves certified. And then after a few years of teaching, they become eligible for tenure status. But we do have some fairly extensive experience with teachers going into the classroom without traditional certification. And the evidence suggests that such teachers are basically just as effective as the teachers who do have the traditional certification. The evidence also suggests that while teachers tend to get a lot more effective after their first couple of years of experience, they don’t get more and more and more effective as further time passes. Thus, the general shape of the teacher quality reform proposals is to (a) relax the preemptive screening so as to make it easier for anyone with a college degree to get into the classroom, (b) make the tenure decision more strictly tied to student achievement, and then (c) take advantage whatever increase in your potential labor force step (a) has given you to make it possible to in step (b) dump the bottom X% of the worst-performing teachers. To all of this I would be strongly inclined to add (d) start paying people more to further increase the size of the labor pool and make step (c) all the more effective.
But the need to have good people doing important public services is by no means unique to teaching and it certainly applies to the military.
117 Responses to “By Request: Personnel Quality”
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December 30th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
To break the teachers unions.
This has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions.
December 30th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
We’d also have a better military if our soldiers were better
No, no, and no. This is why we have a super-professional officer corps and an entire officer-training system. Army is a strictly hierarchical system. Officers are to armies what teachers are to schools. The comparison here is completely fallacious.
Sure we will have a more effective army if we have better soldiers, but quite honestly, the trade-off between a more elite officer corps and better men is not anywhere close to even. It is in fact similar to having “better students.” The British Army always had, compared to the German one, vastly inferior soldiers, but its officers were just as good if not better, the results were not dissimilar. A reverse case could be seen in the French (and more recently, Argentine) armies, where despite having motivated and patriotic enlisted men (France in WWII, Argentina in the Falklands) the lack of an elite officer corps was incredibly detrimental.
December 30th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
To break the teachers union.
December 30th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
> And then after a few years of teaching,
> they become eligible for tenure status.
Can anyone link to the actual percentage of US public school districts that have a tenure concept? I believe it is quite low. These discussions tend to revolve around a belief that 90% or more of public school teachers are part of a tenure program; however I know that in our fairly large metro area virtually no suburban school districts (which make up the vast majority of the teachers and students) have the concept of tenure.
December 30th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Matt wrote:
That is soooooooo true.
Recruitment/retention of people without a high school diploma and with criminal justice or substance abuse issues was greatly curtailed. Bonuses and promotions were often tied to ASVAB scores and education. People with performance issues were often discharged early–especially in basic training.
December 30th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
I’m sorry, that’s just utterly utterly dumb. Stupid. Pathetic.
You want good education, lower your classroom size. That means more teachers, smaller classes. Invest in your students. Invest in resources for the school – music programs, athletic, drama, shop, computers, you name it. Establish a rock solid basic curriculum and then enrich it with lots of electives. Monitor your students performance and then establish streams or programs to encourage and support the brilliant, provide remedial help for those who did a bit of a boost in certain areas, and a low end stream. Identify and remove the disruptive. All of this takes money, patience and a genuine investment. Not something that Americans have a lot of interest in these days.
Much easier to simply go for the crack fix. I mean the quick fix.
Oh, and I certainly do love the ‘break the teachers union’. Yeah, because that’s certainly going to encourage quality teachers.
December 30th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
My own thoughts (purely non-scientific) about the apparent difficulty in getting highly motivated, educated people to become teachers is related to the fact that college educated women have many more options for employment than 25-40 years ago.
When I was a child, practically all of our public school teachers were female, most with Masters, several had PhDs. Many had attended elite institutions, but were essentially barred (”old boys network & legal discrimination) from responsible positions in law, business, government.
December 30th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Isn’t personnel quality an important consideration for most employers? I’ve heard lots of business-y types citing Jim Collins re: “getting the right people on the bus.” In education, citizens feel like the employers, and they have lots of contact with the employees. They live and work with teachers, know their childrens’ teachers, and remember their own teachers.
The public doesn’t hire doctors, and it doesn’t have much regular contact with the army. And I don’t recall hearing any recent calls for post office reform.
December 30th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
In the military, there is accountability. If you are a shitty soldier, senior command will motivate you to improve. But if you are a shitty teacher, what motivation can a principal or superintendent provide? They can’t fire you if you are bad (tenure). They can’t give you a raise if you are good or a cut if you are bad (no merit pay). Perhaps we could develop a system in which bad teachers did push-ups and good ones received weekend passes.
December 30th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
Since Matt seems to be taking topic requests, then I need to know what graphic novels I should be reading next. Keep in mind I’ve already read some Matt suggested works like Y: The Last Man and The Ultimate Avengers 1 & 2. I’ve also done the most famous Batman serials including The Killing Joke and the Frank Miller penned: Year One and The Dark Knight Returns.
December 30th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
We’ve put very little effort into the quality of preservice (or inservice for that matter) teacher education. The consensus is that most of it (which takes place in state schools, not Columbia) is poor. So it is not surprising that motivated souls chosen for selective alternative programs can do just as well as graduates of non-selective, crappy traditional certification programs.
However, if we found that people with MD’s were no more effective than people given a three month crash course in medicine, what would the response be? Get rid of medical school, or improve it?
If solders after basic training were no better soldiers than people pulled off the street, would we scrap basic training or improve it?
December 30th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
I work in IT. We long ago gave up on the notion that we could only hire great people. That works for a short time, but as you scale up the fact is there are a lot of mediocre people out there in this world rears it’s ugly head, and any plan which does not take that into account is going to fail.
December 30th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
All true, but you’re still missing one part of this.
We still pay teachers under the assumption that professional-class women have limited career opportunities. Simply lowering certification standards might not increase the applicant pool by a large enough amount to make a difference. It’s still probably worth trying.
Irregardless: there’s no reason you have to “break the teachers’ union” to do this. You can trade pay increases for a modest increase in flexibility and/or certification. After all, in the Nordic countries with high union density employers have a lot of flexibility … it’s just that there is a better system of unemployment insurance and social spending generally when you do get fired.
December 30th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
> They can’t fire you if you are bad (tenure).
Link to tenure percentage please? I think it is a lot lower (say, in the 10% range) of all public school teachers than is assumed in these discussion.
December 30th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
The biggest problem with Matt’s 3 (or 4) step plan is step (b). “Student achievement” has no good meaning. It might result in the classic “teaching to the test” disaster. Or else it relies on someone’s subjective, and therefore potentially biased, measurement. In the end, “student achievement” is something like pornography: I know it when I see it. Honestly, I think the best way to “fix” the education system is to scrap the traditional methodologies when necessary, and to honestly accept those that work. For example, “whole language” cannot replace “phonics” but should not be ignored either. Instead, we find ourselves in a classic either/or situation, and no one wins. Look around. There are schools in your community that everyone knows “works.” What do those schools do differently? Maybe instead of focusing on teachers, we should focus on methods.
December 30th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
Skeptic–THANK YOU. If we are serious about education reform, we need to look to the STRUCTURE of the classrooms, not just the teachers. Expecting one person to be able to motivate, challenge, and encourage a classroom of 30 unique students with wildly different backgrounds, skill levels, and interests is insane. There is a reason so many teachers are bad, and that’s not because of teacher’s unions or because of tenure or even because the pay for teachers is too low, it’s because teachers are expected to do an IMPOSSIBLE task. In discussions of education reform, why is there so much emphasis placed on the teachers themselves and not on the support system in place for the teachers, or even on the structure of the education system today?
December 30th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
But we do have some fairly extensive experience with teachers going into the classroom without traditional certification. And the evidence suggests that such teachers are basically just as effective as the teachers who do have the traditional certification.
How confident are you that this is an apples to apples comparison? Don’t the career-switcher and Teach for America types constitute a pretty elite group compared to those who pursue traditional certification?
The evidence also suggests that while teachers tend to get a lot more effective after their first couple of years of experience, they don’t get more and more and more effective as further time passes.
Right, but this combined with the fact that half of all teachers quit within 5 years leads me to think that we could greatly improve overall teacher quality by focusing on teacher retention. The massively high attrition rate among teachers mean that inexperienced teachers will continue to be an over-represented fraction of the workforce until this problem is resolved. As a bonus, it is also more likely to appeal to teacher’s unions and is therefore more politically feasible.
Am I on the right track, commenters, or completely off base?
December 30th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
All questions about personnel in education should be subsidiary to the really basic questions, the ones that go unasked: What do we want schools to do? (Hint: just saying “teach students” or similar references to students “learning” are circular.) As long as we’re incoherent on our goals nothing else matters much.
And then, closely tied: How do we do what we’re trying to do? Do we want students to stay bound to classrooms and exact teacher instructions? Do we open up to internships, game-like tracking systems, more open schools? There has been essentially no innovation in the fundamental arrangement of school since the early 1900s. Yet how much has the world changed, and how much will it change?
These are the issues, not personnel.
December 30th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Irregardless
Someone get that man a teacher!
Having been a teacher and being the child of a teacher, I can unequivocally say that every teacher I’ve known hates the education system. But not as much as they hate No Child Left Behind.
I’m not so certain that “breaking” the teacher’s unions as they currently stand is a bad idea. Again, acknowledging that anecdote is not data, I’ve never known a teacher who liked their union.
December 30th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Matt,
In the past, proposals for US school reform have sometimes included lengthening the school year, observing that other countries have a much shorter summer break, and that the US school year was designed to serve an overwhelmingly agricultural population. This history produced the odd result that students have a ton of vacation time, while their parents are not legally guaranteed any at all. You could package a reduction in summer vacation for students with the creation of guaranteed paid vacation for workers, and you could sell it as a Family Togetherness Act.
December 30th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Matt, for a progressive you sure sound, well, pretty damn unliberal.
Of COURSE this is meant to break the backs of the teachers’ unions, one of the few means to protect overworked, underpaid teachers. If teaching was such an easy thing to coast through after tenure, why do so many teachers leave the profession after their first five years (often well after tenure is granted)? It isn’t because they were looking for something more challenging.
Of course, bad teachers need to be weeded out, and of course good teachers need to be recognized. But this “Let’s blame it all on the teachers” environment frustrates and confuses me. Certainly, teachers are part of the equation. But lately all the talk about education reform seems to be that teachers are the ONLY factor when it comes to lack of student achievement. If students succeed, people rarely recognize the teacher, but if they fail, well then let’s gut the teaching staff!
There are so many factors at work: teacher quality, classroom size, factors at home (are students’ basic needs being met? You could be the best teacher in the world but if that child enters that classroom cold or hungry or homeless or abused, then not much that you teach will get through to that child), the sheer amount of things that teachers are expected to teach, the expectations that teachers teach to the test, how wealthy the neighborhood is, unresponsive administrations / principals / school boards, and one factor that none of the so-called education reformers bother to mention: student willingness or ability to learn.
I have worked with many motivated and excellent teachers – and some goofs, too, I admit – but none of those teachers can reach a student that simply chooses not to pay attention, for whatever reason. These students are not in the majority, but they are there. Lots of students also struggle very hard but for whatever reason they just aren’t getting it, for reasons out of the teachers’ hands as well as ones that teachers can certainly help – a barrage of different things that must be crammed in during a school year, which not all students will get, as well as the aforementioned undiagnosed special learning needs. To blame it all on lazy tenured teachers and the teachers’ unions that shield them shows an astoundingly biased, short-sighted lack of understanding of a very complex issue.
December 30th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
Tenured teachers can be fired. The administration has to go through a process, so it’s not like my job where the boss can fire me on the spot for any reason, but it’s a myth that they can’t be fired. Without tenure, the teacher would be at the mercy of every psycho helicopter parent and corrupt administrator; academic freedom isn’t an issue just at universities. I’ll add that the possibility of tenure makes a job more attractive. If you eliminate tenure, you will have more trouble finding people who want to do the job.
December 30th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
My Dad taught mostly in the days before effective teachers’ unions got hold (1920-1970). His view was that people expected teachers to live in “genteel poverty,” which is what we did. For some odd reason, there exists considerable resentment that this is no longer true, which is the bedrock of opposition to teachers’ unions.
Matt says: “make the tenure decision more strictly tied to student achievement.” I say, “Oh give me a fuckin’ break!” With a class of kids like Matt and his buddies at Dalton, I’d be a tenured teacher in a second. In central Brooklyn, not so fast, or so clear. Student achievement depends largely on the students themselves, and the tests supposed to provide some other basis for measuring it are crap.
December 30th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Skeptic–THANK YOU. If we are serious about education reform, we need to look to the STRUCTURE of the classrooms, not just the teachers. Expecting one person to be able to motivate, challenge, and encourage a classroom of 30 unique students with wildly different backgrounds, skill levels, and interests is insane. There is a reason so many teachers are bad, and that’s not because of teacher’s unions or because of tenure or even because the pay for teachers is too low, it’s because teachers are expected to do an IMPOSSIBLE task. In discussions of education reform, why is there so much emphasis placed on the teachers themselves and not on the support system in place for the teachers, or even on the structure of the education system today?
Part of the reason we have large class sizes is that we don’t teach as much stuff as we used to. When you cut PE, arts, music, vocational teaching, etc, those kids have to go somewhere. I’m against adding new teachers to teach the same stuff, since that will may dilute the quality of the teacher rather than improve the quality of the teaching.
If we get back to teaching a more diverse curriculum, and add teachers by adding to the curriculum, we will not only be teaching a more comprehensive education profile, we’ll get more better teaching from the good teachers we have and new teachers to fill in more specialized subjects.
December 30th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
About tenure: I have no numbers. But in North Carolina, which has no teachers’ unions because IT IS ILLEGAL FOR PUBLIC EMPLOYEES TO JOIN UNIONS teachers get tenure after four years in the same system. I have never heard of any system in the state that has a serious policy that subjects any significant number of people to dismissal for performance prior to tenure. If this is how it works in the least unionized state in the country, do you really think that most states don’t either have tenure, or have essentially the same protection via union contract?
But this is beside the point. Tenure is not the issue in most cases of poor performance. In most systems, it is hard enough to find good new people that someone would have to both be in the bottom 10% and be obvious in their ineffectiveness to get fired, even if the rules allowed them to be fired. Since a major part of this discussion is always the shortage of good teachers (or, actually, of potentially good people who want to become teachers) it is ridiculous to talk about the difficulty of getting rid of the bad as the first hurdle that must be cleared.
On “breaking the teachers’ unions”: I’m pretty sure irregardless was being sarcastic in response to the original question MY was answering, not making a proposal. But if not, then it is a good sarcastic response.
On class size: This has come up here before. Yes, reducing class size helps in virtually every single case. Yes, it is by far the easiest reform to verify that it has been implemented properly. But reducing class size means increasing the number of new teachers needed when we are already talking about how hard it is to find enough good ones. It directly competes for funding to increase pay for teachers, or for merit pay for good teachers, when we say we need more money to get good people to enter the profession.
And it also means fewer students get the teachers that are already in the classroom and performing at a top level, when we know that going from a median teacher to one at the 90%-tile in effectiveness can produce the same learning gains as cutting class size by half. The Other Steve is right that you can’t have a plan the requires finding only superstars. But I can tell you from working in high schools, for every kid planning to go into teaching that I would call a real potential star, there are 30 or 50 others who did not consider education as a career. So few top students go into education, there can be MAJOR gains in the number of people with real potential entering the profession if we just make small percentage changes in their choices. Then you are back to improving the attractiveness of teaching, which involves some combination of more money (necessary but not sufficient) and higher perceived status (absolutely essential in drawing top tier young people, who are turned off by a job that is perceived as the bottom of the college graduate totem pole.)
December 30th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
How about better students? That seems to work the best. I’ve been to community colleges and the Ivy League and a few colleges in between. In general, the better the college, the worse the teachers are. The better schools can go through the curriculum much faster because the students are smarter, more motivated, and better prepared. And the better schools can afford to hire teachers who are better at getting grants than teaching. Now you can’t really make students smarter. But perhaps you can make them more motivated and better prepared. That would involve educating the parents first. That’s part of the theory behind Head Start, which has shown some success. But ultimately, our society must actually value education. I’m not sure how to do that.
December 30th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Can I please ask people to go look at the research on this? If you look at all the studies, there isn’t a negative relationship between student achievement and strong collective bargaining provisions. If anything, on balance there’s a positive effect.
December 30th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Without tenure, the teacher would be at the mercy of every psycho helicopter parent and corrupt administrator; academic freedom isn’t an issue just at universities. I’ll add that the possibility of tenure makes a job more attractive.
Mark, the Education Reform Community, characterized by DER and people like Rhee, are putting on the table, alongside their attacks on tenure, SUBSTANTIAL raises in teacher pay. Most teachers would take that bargain. Their unions will not let them. The politicized academic freedom is pure, unadulterated, union propoganda, reminiscent of the insurance industry attacks on “socialized medicine” during the Clinton years.
Nicholas Beaudraut: You are absolutley right. But…
Irregardless: what exactly would be so bad about breaking the teachers unions, especially since all the plans to “break the unions” offer an increase in pay to the underpaid, overworked teachers you purport to support? I can think of only reason: it would undermine a key Democratic constituency (the NEA gave 50 mil to Obama). And that’s not an illegitimate argument! I am enough of a partisan to recognize that it’s good for the country for Democrats to win elections. I’m all for selling out on issues like tort reform, whose deadweight costs probably do more harm for the economy than they do good for people, but trial lawyer money electing democrats end up doing more good for the country than their questionable practices do harm. Not the same for teachers unions. Education is really, really, really important, and not just for the poor kids of DC whose only asset is the education they receive. It’s important for every American, especially so in a globalized economy. It’s an issue whose costs are too high to sell out on.
December 30th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
No one who has worked in a school system, observed a school system closely, watched a school board in action, or talked with a mediocre principal can doubt that the elimination of tenure would result in the best, most provocative and most productive teachers being fired.
December 30th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
What exactly would be so bad about breaking the teachers unions, especially since all the plans to “break the unions” offer an increase in pay to the underpaid, overworked teachers you purport to support?
You think teachers should accept a one-time-only burst in pay (if it ever actually materializes) in return for the end of their powers of collective bargaining? You think teacher are nuts, or at least unable to recognize their own long-term interests.
Look, the whole drive to standardize schools towards a test-prep model, along with privatizing through vouchers, is an attempt to make schools more like Kaplan or other test-prep factories. You don’t think some people would prefer that teachers get paid and treated the way the “coaches” at Kaplan are? Neil Bush runs a company that sells “curriculum on wheels,” with the “teacher” pushing a button and telling students to watch quietly. You don’t think that’s an attempt to de-professionalize the profession of teaching?
In some people’s ideal world, teachers are paid, and respected, at the same level as home health care workers or social workers — treated like dirt, paid poverty wages. You seriously believe that breaking the unions isn’t part of that vision?
December 30th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
There was a fantastic article in the New Yorker dealing with just these issues (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell)
Bottom line is: bad teachers are toxic; you can’t “teach” teaching–most either have it or they don’t; and experience is largely irrelevant.
There are probably 5-10 percent of teachers out there right now that need to be fired. Not all of them are unmotivated, and I’m sure many of them love teaching.
That’s largely irrelevant. I love riding my bike, but I’m not talented enough to have someone pay me to do it for a living.
December 30th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
A couple of people earlier up on this thread pointed out some interesting things.
First, the average span of a teacher is five years. What that means is that teachers are voting with their feet. During the period when they should be entering their era of competence and peak performance, they are choosing to get the hell out. Think about what that means.
It means teachers have taken a good look at students, at their pay, at the system they work in, and they’ve said ’screw this, I’m out of here.’
The other significant observation is that most people are average. Well, gee whiz. Everywhere except America where 90% of people consider themselves above average this wouldn’t be remarkable. But it isn’t remarkable, and horribly, it’s true.
What this means is that Matt’s panacea ‘more better teachers’ is bull. Most teachers are going to be average. Can we artificially weight things to improve the general quality of teachers to above average? Sure… start kissing teachers asses. Triple the pay, pile on the benefits, including security, and you’ll see the general run improving as teaching becomes a solid investment with guaranteed returns – something to put money and skills into.
But instead of that, the prescription reads ‘F… U..’ We’ll maybe pay teachers a little bit more, but we’ll reduce the requirements for entry and turn up the screws for working conditions. Yeah, right.
December 30th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
One thing that’s frequently overlooked is the importance of vital schools as a pillar of the community.
Look, here’s the thing. Among the wealthy and well to do, upper middle class, schools don’t need to fulfill a lot of functions. You got your libraries, your various social groups and committees, art houses, galleries, sports teams, etc. There’s an entire roster of independent social functions that are supported by the relative wealth of the community.
Now, drop the income level to working class or poverty class. Suddenly, the income level in the community doesn’t have enough surplus to support a lot of independent actors and groups and social activities. What happens is that the school becomes the focus and the driver of these additional social activities. The school becomes a center of community functions. And this is important, because without a healthy thriving community for the students, the students become dysfunctional and the schools can’t teach effectively.
This is pretty much the big difference between urban poverty and rural or small town poverty. In many rural areas, the schools assume social functions. In urban poor areas, the powers that be assume magic fairies will provide these functions and strip them from the schools… the result, no one provides, nothing happens, and the community dysfunctions, the school becomes a hellhole.
But hey, lets go blame the teachers. I’m sure that it we can just magically enlist an entire corps of Mr. Tibbs it’ll all work out.
December 30th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Abolishing tenure for union-protected principals would seem like a higher priority than abolishing tenure for union-protected teachers. After all, principals are, by any definition, “management,” yet in many cities they have powerful unions keeping them from getting fired for bad performance.
December 30th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Union-busting is part of it, but the main reason for the focus on teacher quality is that it’s free, or at least it looks that way. Lots of people might not particularly care about unions one way or the other, but they sure as hell don’t like their property taxes going up, and an effort to replace bad teachers with good ones wouldn’t cost a thing. No new positions to hire, no funding to cut in other areas, nothing. In theory it could even save money, if the crappy teachers “just happen” to have been around for a long time and the replacements are fresh out of college.
In practice it wouldn’t work that way, of course, because a serious effort to get better teachers would require the steps Matt mentions, but even those steps wouldn’t be as expensive as smaller class sizes or more and better early childhood education or any other meaningful government-level reform.
December 30th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
If the Dutch or the Norwegians, or the Albanians or whoever is doing so much better than we are, then why don’t we just copy whatever it is that they are doing?
December 30th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
By the way, a major (but forgotten) cause of the low quality of military recruits in the late 1970s was the huge “ASVAB Misnorming” scandal in which recruiters would given incorrect tables for converting raw scores on the military’s entrance exam into percentile scores. This let in large numbers of really, really dumb people into the Carter Era military. It wasn’t discovered and fixed until 1980, so some of the improvement in the Reagan Era military just came about from not shooting themselves in the foot by having too low a passing score on the entrance test.
December 30th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
ArmyMatt, if the unions feel that trading tenure for money is a bad bargain, why are you so sure you know better? Possibly, you do not understand what a union is for or how it works. The union represents teachers as a group. Unions are not dictatorships. If “most teachers” wanted something, they would vote for it within the union and get it. If the unions are opposing this silliness, it’s because their members oppose it when it matters.
That tenure protects teachers from political interference and censorship in the classroom is perfectly obvious. Anyone, in any job, would benefit from having a system in place that prevented them from losing their job for personal, political, or imaginary reasons. Teaching, being an especially political job, requires this kind of protection.
Why should teachers have to take the kind of bargain that you describe? Why should they trade job security and protection for more money? Why don’t they get more money and keep tenure? That is what they deserve. I don’t see why they should give anything up just to get appropriate pay. I’d say that “most teachers” would probably like higher salaries and tenure. I don’t see any problem with that.
Liberals support teachers, unions, and universal health care. You can support all of those, or none of those, but otherwise you’re not making sense.
December 30th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
By the way, for the next few years, unionized teachers aren’t going to agree to give up job security no matter how tempting the carrots dangled in front of them.
December 30th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
In some people’s ideal world, teachers are paid, and respected, at the same level as home health care workers or social workers — treated like dirt, paid poverty wages. You seriously believe that breaking the unions isn’t part of that vision?
Andy, I think it’s worth noting that the options in the political sphere right now aren’t Army Matt’s Pony Plan, the nefarious Republican plan to destroy the public education system, and union defense. I’m not Tom Friedman offering a super-awesome plan for Iraq as the Bush Administration prepares to fuck up Iraq. Rather, Rhee has put a plan on the table that would double, sometimes triple, the pay of DC teachers, putting them in the six-figure a year range, in exchange for a very meager foregoing of tenure. If this succeeded, not only would it allow for the improving of the abysmal DCPS, but it would provide a model, higher-pay for acceptance of management, that could literally save the future of America by adding standards to the American education system. These are the options, union stasis or a raise in exchange for reform. Everything else is bullshit.
Also, on the “attempt to make schools more like Kaplan or other test-prep factories”, in DC at least even that would be an improvement, as lots of these kids are semi-illiterate and couldn’t pass a standardized test, but who says merit pay is all about standardized testing anyway? It could be principal evaluations. It could be a hybrid of teacher evals and standardized testing. It could be measuring graduation or college acceptance rates. Just because the idiot brothers pushed NCLB doesn’t mean education can’t be managed. That’s like saying just because the Bushes fucked up FEMA the government should be involved with managing responses to emergencys.
December 30th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Why should teachers have to take the kind of bargain that you describe? Why should they trade job security and protection for more money? Why don’t they get more money and keep tenure? That is what they deserve.
You’re begging the question. Some teachers do deserve more money and tenure; others deserve to be given a severance package and sent packing. It’s nothing personal against the sub-par teacher. Teaching’s difficult and not for everyone.
There seems to be a strange sentiment among the pro-tenure folks out there that “I really, really want to teach” is not only necessary but sufficient to ensure life-long employment, regardless of the impact on the kids.
December 30th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
I dunno. Strikes me that the problem with DC’s education system isn’t so much a lack of competent teachers, but s seriously screwed over community.
December 30th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Why does this site give me errors when posting from a Blackberry yet my comments have gone through?
Anyway, I was not being sarcastic. From what I can see, finding better teachers has the end game of breaking the teachers union. From the conservative side the Unions are to blame. We all know if it wasn’t for the teachers union we would be able to hire the best and the brightest while firing the dumb and lazy ones, causing all the kids to read and write faster and better…Oh look a Pony!
This mantra of “Better Teachers” has become so ingrained that Democrats are making it their own. Read this “Post Partisan” opinion by Fred Hiatt to see how the issue is framed and where it is headed. Democrats Who Don’t Believe in Change.
This is really the main reason why you hear of better teachers and not better cops or better soldiers or better doctors. It is to break the teachers union. Another reason is that it diverts attention away from the calls for more funding to the schools and from the calls of universal “pre-school”.
December 30th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
Please note when I say, finding better teachers, I mean it as the phrase you constantly hear that is immediately followed by lamentations that the teachers union will not allow firing the bad ones.
December 30th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
ArmyMatt:
I don’t assume you want to gut the teaching profession. I also think that a lot of people interested in merit pay (our new prez among them) want to strengthen the profession. And a big boost in pay would be nice — but if it’s in return for breaking the unions and forgoing tenure, then what keeps the salaries up? A promise? The good will of the government? You can’t take either to the bank.
I am a teacher, and I’m appalled by bad teachers. But I’m also appalled by bad administrators, most of whom go by the Japanese saying that the nail that sticks out gets banged down. Bad teachers don’t stick out; they’re monotonous. Good teachers stick out, especially when they’re raising hell (as they should) about the bureaucratic idiocy which encroaches everywhere.
My point is that leaving teachers at the mercy of administrators (or school boards or panels of teachers) for their merit pay or their jobs would be a nightmare in many, many situations. In my experience, for every bad teacher sheltered by tenure there’s a passionate teacher who isn’t kept, by fear of reprisal, from storming the bureaucratic barricades.
I believe there are ways of measuring teacher performance, but they involve a well-considered set of principles and a longer, more open dialog than most of the shareholders are willing to have. It’s striking that the baseball community has a huge community of devoted scholars measuring the performances of baseball players, and engaging in extensive disputes over methodology and purpose. The educational community has been pitiful by comparison.
December 30th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
If by breaking the teachers union, you mean not offering tenure to anyone who punches the clock for x number of years, then yes, I’m for breaking the teacher’s union.
Of course, this is all a moot point, because there’s a critical mass of public support (as demonstrated by the ridiculous near canonization of Rhee) that realizes that the inability to fire bad teachers (and principals, and administrators) actually *is* a large part of the problem.
And with overwhelming public support in the face of union intransigence, the reformers are eventually just going to move unilaterally (c.f. air traffic controllers union). So that’s at least incentive for union members to accept the terms on offer now.
December 30th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
NS (@17), you’re pretty mcuh on the right track about keeping teachers, provided (and here Skeptic way up at the top has the right idea) we get reasonable class sizes and good materials to work with. MY, on the other hand, keeps going on about producing measures of the unmeasureable….hence, he’s part of the portion of our society who insure that by the time students end up in my classroom students are very good at coloring inside the lines (oops, taking multiple guess exams) and not very good at reading books or doing modest research. (I teach in a Community College north of Dallas). May I suggest that we stop this pedagogical Taylorism and approach teaching as a craft.
December 30th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
By the way, if you want better teachers in the classroom, you should look at how many of the best, especially among math and science teachers, are driven out by the usual teacher training, with its relentlessly mindless indoctrination in political correctness. People who are good at math, chemistry, physics, and biology tend to be less willing to put up with the nonstop propagandizing than their softer-headed counterparts.
December 30th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
The reason teachers don’t get more effective is because 1) the educational environment is wrong, i.e., prisons for kids and 2) the methods – mass rote – used are entirely the opposite of the way humans naturally learn.
The entire educational establishment needs to be shot in the heart and eliminated. Don’t just “privatize” it which just means shifting the same wrong methods into private hands. Destroy it.
Then let technology and the free market come up with educational methods that actually work.
December 30th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
> ather, Rhee has put a plan on the table that would
> double, sometimes triple, the pay of DC teachers,
> putting them in the six-figure a year range, in
> exchange for a very meager foregoing of tenure.
Teachers do, sometimes, study history. Including the history of their own labor movement. Promises to “triple the salary” have been made dozens, if not hundreds, of times since 1850. Those promises have been kept for more than one administration (be it school board president, mayor, governor, or what have you) exactly zero times since then. Personally I don’t want my kids taught by anyone foolish enough to fall for that trap.
Cranky
December 30th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
> But we do have some fairly extensive experience
> with teachers going into the classroom without
> traditional certification. And the evidence
> suggests that such teachers are basically just
> as effective as the teachers who do have the
> traditional certification.
“Extensive” experience? Really? Or just some cherry-picked pilot programs and feel-good stories (the best of which get made into heart-warming movies)? The evidence on Americorps, for example, is decidedly mixed, yet that program is the basis of many feel-good blog posts.
Cranky
December 30th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
Also, on the “attempt to make schools more like Kaplan or other test-prep factories”, in DC at least even that would be an improvement, as lots of these kids are semi-illiterate and couldn’t pass a standardized test,
This is an excellent point. All the talk about how awful it is to “teach to the test” seems like a very suburban complaint. In really crappy schools like the ones in D.C., the kids can barely effing read. If teachers could successfully “teach to the test” — if they could teach the kids the material that’s on basic standardized tests in math and English — the schools would be much, much better. “Teaching to the test” is just fine if we’re testing for the right things.
December 30th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
Steve Sailer is right. If only we had more teachers brave enough to realize that the brown and black kids in their classes are just dumber than the white kids. That would fix everything.
December 30th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
I am a teacher in Texas and we don’t have unions here. Strangely, Texas kids are not in the top of the nation academically. (We are generally 48th, thank you Mississippi and Louisiana. That being said,we do have contracts and we can only be fired for cause,and it is pretty easy not to renew contracts. The problem is that there are not enough teachers, so it does not do any good to fire bad teachers if there is not a good teacher to replace them with.Teaching needs to be a more respected and well paying profession. Right now it is not.
December 30th, 2008 at 6:22 pm
> In really crappy schools like the ones in D.C.,
> the kids can barely effing read. If teachers
> could successfully “teach to the test” — if they
> could teach the kids the material that’s on basic
> standardized tests in math and English — the schools
> would be much, much better.
As I have posted here before, our nice middle class suburban district takes a certain percentage of kids from an urban district similar to DC. The kids who are as you describe are assigned to the best teachers – many of whom are darn good by any standard. Additional TAs, counselors, Reading Recovery teachers, and similar resources are focused on them: probably 10x what the urban district could afford (we keep those resources on staff ‘just in case’).
If our district get the urban kids by 1st grade we usually succeed in bringing them up to a 5th-grade test level by 8th-grade graduation. We are talking about 8 year olds who don’t know their letters here. I am sure that all the brilliant conservatives and young bloggers posting on this thread could do much, much better than our staff. In fact, I am sure they could do so even if they just volunteered at a Washington DC public school. Why don’t you pick the lowest-scoring school in the DC district, drive over, and walk in the front door to volunteer?
Let us know how that goes.
Cranky
December 30th, 2008 at 6:28 pm
Yeah, that’s it. It’s all about bad teachers. Get rid of the bad teachers, and the system will magically right itself and we’ll all be rubbing each other off in happy teddy bear land. Good for you, hope that works out for you all.
Yes, political correctness is at fault. People who are good at math and science just get sick of being told that the N*gg*r word is unacceptable and that you can’t sexually harass the prettier girl students.
Now, I don’t know if my educational experience is similar to most Americans. But here goes.
I went to elementary school, grades 1 through 6, a different teacher in year. Six teachers over six years.
Then I went to Junior High, a curriculum of 6 courses per year, with a different teacher specializing in the different subjects – math, history, etc. There was overlap, different teachers taught multiple classes, but I figure I was exposed to a minimum of 6 to 12 teachers, over three years and 18 courses.
High school, three more years, but increasing numbers of elective courses to choose from. Say 12 to 18 teachers.
All in all, I figure twelve years of schooling had me exposed for substantial periods to 24 to 36 teachers.
Were some of them awful? Sure, I remember a math teacher in high school who couldn’t find his ass with a flashlight. I remember a horiffic elementary school teacher who would pull kids pants down and spank them savagely in front of the class. Of the 24 to 36 I’d have said maybe 4 or 5 were truly terrible. Roughly 15% say, give or take.
That seems to be about average for the population. You look at any trade and the bottom fifteen per cent tend to be major league screw ups.
Were there good teachers? Yep. Not all of them. I remember a couple of really brilliant university professor level high school english teachers, a great biology teacher, a really sweet elementary school teacher. Maybe 4 or 5.
And the rest? Solidly unexceptional.
Now, let me make a few points. Were there bad teachers? Sure there were. But they were the exception, the minority, and for the most part, I was exposed to enough different teachers, we all were, that a few screw ups didn’t really affect the quality of our education. We as students could transcend them. It would have been nice to have been rid of them, but on the other hand, if they hadn’t been there, I don’t think it would have made much difference.
Simply put getting rid of all the bad teachers probably isn’t going to make all that big a difference. There likely aren’t all that many of them, no more than 15% to 20% say, and students are exposed to enough different teachers that any handicap they leave can likely be overcome. Purging the system produces at best incremental benefits rather than transformation.
What about getting better teachers? Well, like I said, there were four or five brilliant teachers and they made a real difference in my life. My education would have been so much better if there’d been eight or ten or a dozen brilliant teachers. Sure.
But on the other hand, my brother, with different skills and interests went through the same schooling and many of the same teachers that I did. Some of the ones I found brilliant made no impact on him, or he even disliked them. He found others to be gifted.
So what makes a teacher really really good for students is a highly subjective thing between the teacher and the student. It’s not like there’s some external board of education monitor who ranks the quality of a teacher. It’s the ability to reach out to students, and all teachers and students are different. It’s possible that even some of the horrific ones were able to make a big positive difference to some students.
But assume we could find some objective method to winkle out the diamonds. Sure. How do we find these diamonds and how do we keep them? More importantly, how do we keep them?
Human nature being what it is, people want two things: Money and security. There’s probably other ways to phrase it, but there you go. We like to talk about investments in stocks and bonds and land and crap like that. But skills are investments, time is an investment, a career is an investment.
A person has maybe 20 to 40 years of working life in them, and they’d like a decent standard of living and a decent retirement. The job, the career, is an investment in both the personal present and in the future, in living, in raising kids, in sickness and health, in retirement. People with options, with skill and talent, choose their careers as investments.
They want a good wage, they want to be able to make a nice living. Maybe there are other thing involved, they may not require top dollar. But on the other hand, they don’t want poverty. And they want some assurance of stability. You go to school invest four years in an education degree, you want some reasonable undertaking that you’re going to be able to recoup that investment, some likelihood that the investment over time will enable you to buy a home, raise a family, have vacations, etc. Sometimes people are prepared to trade a bit of one for a bit more of the other. More money less security is a good deal if you’re young and have options. Less money but more security is a better deal if you’re in an unstable environment. One or the other is not a good deal. Some combination is preferable. And the best is reasonably good provisions for both.
So what’s the idiots reform package – Teachers are overpaid. Uh huh. Okay, drop the compensation, or keep it stable, that will attract people like flies. Teachers have too much security, let’s make it easier to be rid of them and let’s abandon all hope of long term security. Yes, let’s make teachers vulnerable to termination from incompetent or arbitrary administrators, school board officials, angry parents, etc. Let’s strip collective bargaining and union protection rights, and have them stand like peons in the system.
Well, listen up. That sort of model isn’t going to attract the best and brightest. The best and brightest, being bestest and brightly usually have other options, or are motivated to seek out other options. And they pretty much will. Remember, the average lifespan of a teacher is five years. Most teachers leave the profession after five years. That’s a pretty high attrition rate, they’re already voting with their feet. Someone with options, they’ll go and look for a better investment.
So who does take that crap deal? The opposite of the best and brightest. The average, the dull, the plodding, the ones with fewer or no other options.
Way to go. Well meaning idiocy once again improves the American school system.
December 30th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
Good stuff, Skeptic. I have taken the liberty of posting a couple of your comments on my blog where I tell MY to STFU about education!
Thanks!
December 30th, 2008 at 8:55 pm
Very good comment skeptic. I request that MY post it as a counterpoint to his post.
Cranky
December 30th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
I don’t get why people are always babbling about US education being lousy. Look, we’re a gigantic empire (even without our formal and informal colonies like Iraq). Most peoples under most empires don’t really need educations, just so long as there’s enough despair amongst the plebes to keep them from revolting, enough arrogance amongst the optimates to help them keep the boots on the necks of the few plebes who revolt and enough trade flowing through so the merchants stay at each others’ throats (or abusing the plebes, their favorite hobby).
You don’t need a lot of education to exist within our empire. For the plebes, it’s bad – it will cause them to doubt their pastors of our Imperial faith (the Southern Baptist Convention). For the optimates, it’s largely irrelevant – they just need to develop the right tone of command (sometimes education helps with this, but I think football works a lot better). For the merchants, they need some accounting classes. Everything else is bullshit.
The only reason we haven’t finally abandoned any pretense of education is we want to pretend to ourselves our optimates are optimates because they’re smart. It’s not the worst thing we could pretend, but Americans correctly don’t need and don’t want education.
December 30th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
What to make of burritoboy’s comment? You have a point, to a point. But the last part, no, we need education; if we want fewer plebes as well as fewer optimates.
You sound crazy, regardless.
December 30th, 2008 at 10:28 pm
“But the last part, no, we need education; if we want fewer plebes as well as fewer optimates.”
The problem with this is: the Empire exists. For whatever reasons, its subjects either like it or are too feeble to oppose it. Now, we don’t know what will happen if the Empire falls – it may be replaced with something far worse. It’s hardly the worst state ever to exist.
Now, why upset this apple cart to have moderately fewer plebes or fewer optimates? And what will that, concretely, get us? More merchants?
I.E. you need true education to do something: to become wise, or to become a ruler or to become a real citizen. Now, just admit to yourself that there is some possibility at least that we’re really in an empire and not a republic. If we ARE in an empire that we can’t overthrow, we don’t need education to become rulers (it’s a vast empire, and it’s very unlikely that any individual would become a ruler). And we don’t need education to become citizens, because we’re subjects not citizens.
And we’re hardly going to have education so we can become wise, will we?
December 30th, 2008 at 10:41 pm
Well, there’s an argument to be made that the American elites have lost their taste for universal education or for the very concept of meritocracy.
Let’s face it, the George and Jeb Bush’s and the Caroline Kennedy’s may be nice people. But for the elite to rule the country, a lot of rivals have to be eliminated. Best to scale down education, after all, the world needs garbagemen, and perhaps they’d be happier if future Obama’s dug ditches rather than made life awkward for future McCain’s.
December 30th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
Mark,
Liberals support effective government programs to improve the lives of American system. The teachers unions, especially in Washington DC, have a history of thwarting the efficacy of the American education system. Possibly, you do not understand what a liberal is and how we work.
December 30th, 2008 at 11:11 pm
Well, I dunno ArmyMatt. If opposing lunatic notions like teaching creationism in schools, embracing fruitcake religious theories, and whatnot is thwarting, then so be it. I’ve never heard of teachers or teachers unions fighting against school funding, for increased classroom size, opposing enriched programming. Of course, if they as front line personnel wind up frustrating the visionary ideologies of armchair quarterbacks, I think that’s a good thing.
December 31st, 2008 at 12:58 am
Skeptic,
“I’ve never heard of teachers or teachers unions fighting against school funding“; in DC right now, the teachers unions are opposing a plan by Michelle Rhee to increase school funding by doubling, sometimes tripling the salaries of teachers who voluntary pledge not to accept tenure. Outside of imposing mild accountability on teachers, the plan would in arguably attract more and better teachers by increasing pay. By definition, increasing pay is increasing school funding. I suggest that everyone interested in the education debate read about what is going on in DC right now. A comfortable place to do it could even be in an armchair!
December 31st, 2008 at 1:02 am
Andy,
you raise some interesting points. I know we’ve been talking about this subject for a while, but I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind expanding on this one.
In my experience, for every bad teacher sheltered by tenure there’s a passionate teacher who isn’t kept, by fear of reprisal, from storming the bureaucratic barricades.
December 31st, 2008 at 2:45 am
You know, I have seen all over this comment page the idea that unions make it impossible to fire ‘bad’ teachers, or that tenure prevents ‘bad’ teachers from being fired. Whoever claims this is either a fool, an idiot, or unaware of how things in schools work. As a union rep, I initially represented a ‘bad’ teacher with tenure in a grievance filed against him; and he deserved to be fired. However, he was afforded a vigorous defense as was his right as a member of the union. Despite the defense, however, guess what? He was fired! Why? Because the school administration made a freaking effort to document problems with this teacher and show why he should not be retained. This idea that you can’t fire bad teachers is just foolish. In any case, below the Mason-Dixon line, unions are a joke. An example, again from my own experience: a few years ago, when we were again low on funds, the district decided that our pay increase would be about 3%, which was less than cost of living increases at the time. The union fought it, asking for I believe about 4.5 to 5%. The district said that if we fought, the raise would be 1%. Members of the union believed that we could negotiate in good faith and at least get cost of living. Guess what? We got 1%. Who has the power?
As to school funding, increasing teacher pay is nice, but a teacher making 6 figures teaching a classroom of 35 students without supplies or resources is still going to struggle. And where is this money for increased pay going to come from? Not every district is DC. My own district, for example, has given us the option of ‘voluntarily’ giving up 3 days of pay, or losing 10 teachers before the end of the school year. Because we have no money due to Florida’s oh so brilliant funding formula. Which also why we are now on a tight leash with copies..because we can’t afford any more paper. Paper!!!!
WHERE DO WE GET THE MONEY??????????
December 31st, 2008 at 4:11 am
After your finland series I think the answer is obvious. Make teaching a BAchelors degree rather then an MAsters degree profession. Have a minor in teaching.
Cheaper teachers, more of them. substantially more.
December 31st, 2008 at 6:58 am
> in DC right now, the teachers unions are opposing
> a plan by Michelle Rhee to increase school funding by
> doubling, sometimes tripling the salaries of teachers who
> voluntary pledge not to accept tenure.
Again you glide right by the counterpoint: that such plans have been proposed dozens of times since 1850 at many school districts across the land, and that the funding for that “doubling or tripling” disappears after a few years but the restrictions and punishments placed on teachers do not.
Cranky
December 31st, 2008 at 8:50 am
Armymatt, I can see plainly that the US education system has failed you utterly, as both your reading and your math are deficient. While I sympathize with your tragedy, I’m not prepared to see our children’s futures in the hands of the likes of you.
December 31st, 2008 at 9:33 am
Armymatt, to put things with a little more civility, you obviously didn’t read or understand my most recent detailed post on the subject, nor the valid comments of others with actual experience.
But refer back to what I said about teaching being an investment. For any investment, you want two things – a return and security.
Supposing that you had a whole pile of stocks or a rental property that paid a steady guaranteed income and was pretty stable. Along comes a con man, he says that he can triple your returns but you have to give up all your security or stability and invest in his derivatives plan. Is that a good deal? Right now, a whole lot of people with money in the stock market have found that was a very bad deal after all.
The proposal to double or triple teachers salaries at the price of job security is pretty much obviously dishonest snake oil. Here’s how it works: Assume that security is surrendered, assume that admin follows through and increases salaries… within three years most of those teachers will be gone, guaranteed, lay money down on the proposition.
Why? Because its going to be cost effective to get rid of them. You’ll be able to hire two or three or four new teachers with the money you safe from getting rid of one of the high paid teachers. And let’s face it, while there’s a difference between a brilliant teacher and an ordinary one, a brilliant teacher doesn’t come with extra hours, can’t be in two or three places at once, etc. Besides which, the law of averages tells us that most teachers are average.
So here’s what happens. The teachers concession gets made, and management changes its mind about the raises. Instead of doubling and tripling salaries, it’s doubling or tripling the raises so you might get 5% or 10% or 15%. Or its nothing. Or assuming that salaries get bumped, it either gets rolled back, or the teachers start getting purged (sometimes en masse) to ‘bring teachers salaries back into line with the marketplace.’
Frankly, its a tired old song, it’s been sung too many times before, and we’ve all memorized the chorus and verse. It’s merely a shell game promoted by either dishonest or foolish men, and it always ends badly.
December 31st, 2008 at 10:09 am
Where did this myth of underpaid teachers come from? In my district, the average teache salary is over 60,000/year with salaries going into the six figures depending on length of service. We have gym teachers making over 100,000 for 9 months work. I wish I could get a deal like this. Maybe the inner cities have salary problems, but the burbs are teacher paradise.
December 31st, 2008 at 10:17 am
As a community college instructor, I see everyday young people who did not fare well in the elementary and secondary school systems of my part of Northern California.
First of all, one must understand when most people think of what it takes to be a good teacher, they suggest sainthood as the main requirement. Societal factors such as an absence of a parent in the home don’t come to mind. Other factors such as the very real circumstance that outside of school, few get any information from books, nor have they for decades now, yet school continues to rely on texts as a major media, which exacerbates the exotic, irrelevant sense of education to young people, continue to be overlooked in educational policies from elementary education through universities. The kind of thinking that leads to success in academic classrooms is not the only kind of brain activity that boosts student success, yet necessary physical education and art programs that used to be required subject matter are no longer part of school curricula.
There have always been a percentage of school teachers who should have been employed doing other things, but there are a number of factors that make that worse in today’s school environments. First, classroom management–once considered the joke of tv sitcoms–has become a full time occupation. Second, teachers have no time to upgrade their teaching, given the amount of hours necessary to just teach, manage, and grade assignments. The reasons they do not improve after a number of years teaching is because they become mired in routines that would be deadening in any profession. Finally, they aren’t paid enough to work the incredible hours it requires to be merely competent. This is the something for nothing society that we live in–no one wants to pay taxes.
Teachers like every block of workers, break down like this–a handful are great and artistic, a slightly larger amount are misplaced and destructive; most are hard working, well meaning people who get chewed up in the relentless grind of the profession, which is also politicized at every school in ways that would scandalize almost any private enterprise system. The convenient thing is to blame teacher unions, but the values of our society go counter to good education; I don’t have any solutions for you, but I do know that the students I see at the community college level are less prepared today than they were 20 years ago, and many have very little good to say about their secondary school experiences.
December 31st, 2008 at 10:20 am
Well Scoot, compare the quality of education in the burbs to inner cities. Value for money. It’s not just teacher salaries, but a lot of dollars spent on program, infrastructure and class size.
Of course, if that’s too much, just chop all those salaries in half, and strip out all that programming money. You’ll get what you paid for.
But hey, no suburbanite’s going to tolerate his kids having a poverty quality education.
December 31st, 2008 at 10:22 am
But we do have some fairly extensive experience
> with teachers going into the classroom without
> traditional certification. And the evidence
> suggests that such teachers are basically just
> as effective as the teachers who do have the
> traditional certification.
“Extensive” experience? Really? Or just some cherry-picked pilot programs and feel-good stories (the best of which get made into heart-warming movies)? The evidence on Americorps, for example, is decidedly mixed, yet that program is the basis of many feel-good blog posts.
Yes, really. Though I’m sure these studies don’t have the weight of your anecdotes and barely-holding-it-together invective, the evidence is definitely shaping that way:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell
December 31st, 2008 at 10:35 am
Won’t increasing the available pool of labor have an inverse effect on current teacher salaries. One of the reasons salaries are at the level they are is difficulty of entry into the field. Current teachers have to go through educational programs and certification programs. If you make anyone with a BA eleigible for the teaching profession, you grow the available labor exponentially. The only effect this can possibly have is to drive salaries down, as you will always find someone who is willing to the work for less. This is why we have an immigration problem and H1B visas. Companies do not import half a million IT workers a year from India and China because there are no Americans who will do the job, they do it because the H1B visa holders will do the work for half of what an American expects. Opening the pool to everyone just creates a race to the bottom.
December 31st, 2008 at 10:40 am
I’m a teacher. I’ve worked in rural, suburban, and urban schools. Teacher quality really is not the issue so much as parent education, socioeconomic status, school finances (access to books, equipment, etc), and class size. In suburban school districts, there is better equipment, smaller class size, and education is valued by students and their parents. Plus students come into the school system better prepared to be educated. Whether or not education is valued by parents and whether parents have a college degree is a better indicator of student success than teacher quality, believe me. Some of the best teachers I have worked with have worked in inner city and rural schools with poor test scores. Some of the worst have been in the suburban school where I worked, and where my children went.
I am so sick of teachers being blamed for social ills they cannot solve.
And believe me, teachers in all three types of school communities are lying about test scores.
And having looked at these tests, so many of them are culturally biased and ask students to do things that they are not developmentally ready to do (according to educational psychology).
e.g. regarding cultural bias: why is a child in an inner city school being asked in third grade to read and intepret a passage by Rudyard Kipling on a state assessment ? (19th century Indian British English). What kind of accurate assessment of reading comprehension in 21st century America is that? Who writes these tests? Middle-aged white bookish spinsters who’ve never seen the inside of an inner city school, much less even had contact with suburban white kids (who would also have difficulty with such a passage)? I wish there were more assessments of the assessments instead of an assumption on the part of people like Yglesias that they’re terrific objective measures.
December 31st, 2008 at 10:48 am
ps- CitizenE — I’m with you completely. Thank you for your defense of school teachers.
December 31st, 2008 at 10:56 am
and scoot, the amount of hours a teacher works is unbelievable. I worked in the private sector for ten years before I became a teacher. Believe me, I never worked this hard for my salary before. I deserve more. Not to mention all the personal money I put out for books, supplies, etc. Please don’t go there with your criticisms of teacher salaries until you’ve done the job of a teacher. And 60,000 ain’t that much anymore, in case you haven’t noticed. Especially when you have 20,000 in school loans from the master’s you were required to get.
December 31st, 2008 at 11:01 am
What a terrible essay. Gladwell’s more interested in showing off his writing prowess with some virtuoso parallelism of teaching and football which hardly holds together. The essay doesn’t amount to much, merely the suggestion that there are some studies which give certain directions. Hardly what I’d call an effective survey of the state of the art.
Take for instance the remark that we could improve the education system by a full increment (arbitrarily measured) by replacing the bottom 6 to 10% of teachers with average teachers. Okay, sounds sensible until you start getting into practical realities. Such as the reality that a student will process through anywhere from 12 to 30 teachers in their career. It also makes the mistake of assuming that all teachers are generic creatures teaching generic students – thus Ichabod Crane and Richard Roundtree are equally adept teaching classes of gangstas and bostonians. Unfortunately, ‘back of the envelope’ calculations don’t really do the job in terms of real analysis. It’s at best intriguing.
As for whether formal education in teaching makes a difference or not, my view is that in the long term not so much. Front end, a lot. The truth is that most learning is done on the job in the crucible. You get some guy in the business, any business, for 20 years, it doesn’t matter whether he finished first or last in his class, whether he finished school or even started school. He’s got 20 years in the job, and that genuine training and experience, that street smarts, overwhelms all else. On the other hand adequate training is vital to any entry position. Would you put your life in the hands of an untrained new doctor or new lawyer, would you put your kids in the hands of an untrained new teacher?
I’m sorry, but not every study is valid, not every expert is the bible’s own word, and the reality is that we advance our understanding not by cherry picking the results we want to hear, but by multiple studies of multiple angles of the problem until we have a larger sense of it. It’s easy to peddle snake oil, but snake oil, no matter how its sold, often doesn’t amount to much of a cure.
December 31st, 2008 at 11:07 am
In response to skeptic: totally agree with you about teacher quality. And the teacher who had the biggest practical impact on me (as in the one who taught me the most lasting lessons)? A teacher I despised, and who’s class I hated but who taught me critical thinking and to love words without me even realizing it until years later when I used his lessons in my own classroom.
December 31st, 2008 at 11:25 am
Aaron said:
WHAT?!? How do you get that from the Finland series? Just to make sure I haven’t completely lost it, I looked back at those, and MY quite specifically says you need a bachelor’s to teach at the Finnish equivalent of pre-school, but a master’s for anything higher.
How are we supposed to get cheaper teachers while still hiring college graduates? With the exception of highly privileged districts, the majority of teachers in the US do not have master’s degrees. A hugely disproportionate number of teachers come from the bottom third of the college graduate pool. The only way to really go cheaper per person, to allow this great increase in the number of “teachers,” is to hire non-graduates. I can see a paradigm where we greatly increase class sizes, and put every degreed teacher with one or more non-degreed teacher assistants, but that is a radically different system and not something I’ve even seen alluded to in any discussion here, so I assume that is not what you were proposing.
There are certainly a few places (mostly high cost of living areas) where average salaries are >$60k and some teachers might reach six figures. This is never for nine months – teaching is a ten month job, so it is fair to add 20% to these totals to compare to many private sector jobs. But this is the reality: North Carolina is where I work, and falls slightly above the national median (ranks 22nd-24th) and slightly below the national average in teacher salaries. The numbers here are what a teacher makes in the US.
This is what the state pays for a bachelor’s or master’s degree with a given amount of experience:
Bach Mast
0 yrs 30,430 33,470
10 yrs 39,180 43,100
20 yrs 44,610 49,070
30 yrs 51,530 56,680
National Board certification adds a flat 12% to this, and 15% of the state’s teachers have that credential. Systems in the largest/richest areas give local supplements in the 10-16% range, but most smaller areas pay more like 1-5%. The absolute highest teacher pay in the state (by far) is for teachers in Chapel Hill with more than 20 years service, who get a 25% local bonus. For a teacher with a masters degree, national board certification, 31+ years experience and more than 10 of it in Chapel Hill, that comes to around $90,000 a year. That’s not bad. But it is at least 50% more than a typical late-career teacher in this state. It is more than double the average teacher in this state. Unless you factor in major summer and/or extra duties, no teacher anywhere in this state makes six figures. For every place in the country you can point to where teachers are doing substantially better, there are an equal number of teachers somewhere else doing substantially worse.
December 31st, 2008 at 11:44 am
> As for whether formal education in teaching makes a
> difference or not, my view is that in the long term not so
> much. Front end, a lot. The truth is that most learning is
> done on the job in the crucible.
Funny story: when the FAA revised the Certified Flight Instructor’s training curriculum in the late 1980s – that is, the curriculum for teaching CFIs to be instructors and verifying that they know how to teach – they went to the despised Schools of Education for help with incorporating the despised Theory of Eduction and Theory of Learning into the CFI training process.
See, it turned out that even if a guy/gal was a good pilot, even if was experienced, even if he had had a great experience with his own CFI during his primary flight training: **that didn’t mean he knew how to teach**. And in fact the NTSB and FAA traced many deaths during and shortly after primary flight training to flight instructors not knowing how to “read”, evaluate, and communiate with their students.
Now I am not the biggest fan of Schools of Eduction myself, but I have seen many many failures in the corporate world due to a lack of basic understanding of how human beings actually learn. So I have a hard time with “Joe Scientist can just walk into a 4th grade classroom” theory.
By the way, there are very few school districts that require a Masters for entry level. For promotion, or within 5 years, yes. But entry level no.
And I suspected that link would lead to anecdotal feel-good stories – thanks for checking it out skeptic.
December 31st, 2008 at 11:55 am
Matt:
With all due respect to the women and men of the US military, give me a break. What premise are you rejecting? The straw man that soldier quality is a problem (not mentioned in the motivating statement for this post)? Or the idea that improving personnel quality in any field (education, military, medicine, etc.) would improve the overall performance in that field?
If anything, the gut reaction you have to defend soldiers is both understandable and similar to the one you might have to defend teachers. But that doesn’t undermine the idea that improved personnel quality would improve performance of any field of labor, all other things being equal. What is different is that we know it’s silly, impractical, and disrespectful to blame soldiers for institutional failures in the military, but there is a happy national consensus that it’s fine to pin institutional problems in education on classroom educators. Your questioner is right, and your response is both correct on its own merits and irrelevant to the question.
Don’t even get me started on #2 criticizing the operating metaphor by arguing that officers are like teachers and soldiers are like schoolchildren, which is just patently offensive. Those soldiers are adult professionals with a well-defined place in a labor hierarchy. Comparing them to schoolchildren is an embarrassment.
December 31st, 2008 at 12:11 pm
After some deep breaths: Matt’s first paragraph is a knee-jerk response to a straw-man critique of soldiers that clearly irritated me. Apologies for impugning the post overall, though I blame some blood-boiling comments for my lack of prudence. Tragic irony, there.
December 31st, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Looks as if I accidently enrolled myself in the Matthew Yglesias Thoery of Speling class.
December 31st, 2008 at 12:32 pm
“Would you put your kids in the hands of an untrained new teacher?”
It depends. Teaching is more like software development than engineering. I’d rather have someone with no experience and a natural affinity for it than someone with years of experience and missing the fundamental disposition. This is *especially* true in K-8.
There are just some people who are unsuited for the profession. That doesn’t mean they’re lazy, or don’t care about the kids, or don’t have a passion for teaching. We can dicker about whether that’s 5% or 15% of all teachers, but they need to be transitioned to another line of work.
Obviously there are a lot of pieces that need to be fixed, but if you’ve got a jankety old hoopty that’s got bald tires, broken lights, a cracked windshield, a leaky radiator, and a worn-out clutch, you don’t attack the mechanic who proposes putting new tires on it because they’re “blaming the tires.”
December 31st, 2008 at 12:36 pm
And I suspected that link would lead to anecdotal feel-good stories – thanks for checking it out skeptic.
Yep, no reason to take the 20 minutes to read a 3000 word essay on the topic at hand from one of the more respected left-of-center magazines. Much better to trust the word of an anonymous blog commenter. Especially if it dovetails with your intransigent preconceptions.
Please tell me you’re not an educator.
December 31st, 2008 at 1:19 pm
Skeptic,
If opposing lunatic notions like teaching creationism in schools, embracing fruitcake religious theories, and whatnot is thwarting, then so be it.
I don’t think I need a lecture on education from the author of a sentence so syntactically problematic.
However, do you respond to the idea raised by you and Cranky that raising salaries is a sort of one time ploy to trick teachers into giving up union protections, I think one must draw a distinction between Republican misgovernment and reform minded democrats. Yes, Texas lacks public-sector unions and has a poor public education system because Republican governors don’t spend anything on education. DC, on the other hand, has one of the highest rates of per pupil spending in the country, also has poor educational outcomes, because onerous union rules make it impossible to manage the money.
But back to Cranky’s and others’ assertion that the high salaries won’t last. Lets posit that, in DC, teachers accepted the pay raise that knee-capped the unions, accepted merit-pay, but were all fired every 4-years to save money. The firings would cause student test scores to drop (in Cranky’s distopian world, we’d have a way to measure student progress) citizens would get upset, and political pressure would force this practice to be stopped. Ultimately, we must have a modicum of faith in a free society, or what is the point of even arguing about politics in the first place?
December 31st, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Ultimately, we must have a modicum of faith in a free society, or what is the point of even arguing about politics in the first place?
Why do you hate teachers, children, and butterflies?
December 31st, 2008 at 2:20 pm
It never fails, show some pisshead a modicum of respect, and then he gets up on his hind legs and gets all ‘grammar nazi’ on you. Should I respond to Armymatt’s argument?
In brief Armymatt contends that the the DC education system can be a paradise on earth but that the evil teachers union is obstructing any improvement. Armymatt suggests that the only way to improve things is for teachers to surrender their union and surrender their protections of collective bargaining and grievance from the arbitrary whims of management. In return for such surrender, they will be extraordinarily well compensated and that the surrendered rights will not be abused at all at all at all, trust us.
It’s more or less tantamount to saying: “Trust me, we’ll just put the tip in, and we won’t come in your mouth.”
Oh, and listen to this: “Ultimately, we must have a modicum of faith in a free society,” That free society apparently being based on one sided bargaining.
What tripe.
And speaking of tripe, I went and read Gladwell’s essay for the second time, ibc, and it was an even bigger pile of shite than I thought. I do not appreciate it.
December 31st, 2008 at 2:39 pm
This thread is probably past the point of being productive, but I’m going to close out with a final thought. The supporters of teachers unions and opposers of Rhee and co. are a lot like the diehard Hillary Clinton supporters in the Dem primary. They are clearly and obviously on the wrong side of the debate, but this seems to just make them more belligerent. The lonely middle-aged white women didn’t really care that Hillary Clinton’s health care plan was more universal, but they argued vociferously because there was something that rubbed them the wrong way about Barack (uppity black man?). Likewise, there is something strange about arguing the conformist implications of standardized testing in the face of the massive failure of inner city education failure. I don’t know what drives people crazy about Rhee and the education reformers, but it is insane. The importance of the job of teaching will do more to benefit teachers than their professional guilds have ever done. Whatever the impulse to screw over children to prove THAT UNIONS ARE ALWAYS RIGHT NO MATTER WHAT I CAN’T HEAR YOU LALALALA is the sort of odd politics of resentment that the right practices. Grow up.
December 31st, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Oh geez, now Armymatt plays the self pity card. No one understands him, no one likes him, poor little matt. Jesus H. Christ, it just gets worse and worse.
Let’s recap, Matt’s progress has been as follows:
1) Make a bunch of unsubstantiated bullshit comments.
2) Ignore discussion.
3) Make the same bunch of unsubstantiated bullshit comments all over again.
4) Whine and add more unsubstantiated bullshit comments when called on the old ones.
5) Self pity.
6) Profit!
December 31st, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Whatever the impulse to screw over children to prove THAT UNIONS ARE ALWAYS RIGHT NO MATTER WHAT I CAN’T HEAR YOU LALALALA is the sort of odd politics of resentment that the right practices. Grow up.
You forgot the oblivious and unintentionally hilarious projection.
“Unsubstantiated comments”, “self pity”.
Good stuff. Remember the public school system is first and foremost a job-creation program; anyone who claims otherwise is an America-hater.
December 31st, 2008 at 4:01 pm
My substantive posts are up on the board for all to see and evaluate.
ArmyMatt’s and ibc’s tripe is also up to be seen and judged.
Whine all you want, suckers, but its your bed, you made it, you lie in it.
December 31st, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Wow, Jason Fortuny, you know a lot about education policy!
December 31st, 2008 at 4:36 pm
ibc,
It’s not even a jobs program, because there is no enforcement mechanism to evaluate whether teachers are doing there jobs. It’s a welfare program.
December 31st, 2008 at 5:53 pm
ArmyMatt claims to be a proponent of traditional education, yet I note that a spanking was not sufficient to improve his attitude and manners. Perhaps Skeptic needs to use the principal’s paddle next time.
Cranky
December 31st, 2008 at 5:59 pm
This, Cranky Observer, is why I am not a liberal.
A ‘Liberal’ would suffer and tolerate the bad behaviour of fools. Faced with an ArmyMatt a liberal would try to reason with him and get a faceful of spit for his good will.
Me? Here’s the back of my hand, bitches.
December 31st, 2008 at 6:13 pm
Me? Here’s the back of my hand, bitches.
Oh, almost forgot–also the overwrought language, and the final pathetic reduction to threats of violence.
Classic stuff here…
December 31st, 2008 at 6:37 pm
It’s a metaphor, bitch.
ROTFL
December 31st, 2008 at 7:01 pm
But seriously, ibc, why should I take you seriously at all. It’s not like you had anything useful to offer at any point.
Your principal contribution to this discussion seems to consist of referencing a New Yorker article which you clearly didn’t read carefully and didn’t actually understand, because you seem to have mangled its salient points.
You’ve certainly shown no ability to discuss or present the articles points in a coherent fashion, nor to present any sort of nuanced view of its thesis. I suspect its a case of reading into the article what you wanted to. Sad really.
Apart from that you’ve compared teaching to software development rather than engineering (WTF?) and expressed the opinion that you’d rather have your child taught by an untrained but gifted teacher rather than an experienced but incompetent teacher (WTF?). Well, that’s certainly a window into half baked thought process, but it falls dramatically short of even the ghost of an argument.
So is this your style: Citing articles you don’t understand, to underline prejudices you barely articulate, weighing in with arbitrary and disconnected notions, inchoate thoughts haphazardly welded together without recourse to linear logic. Good lord, on the basis of your writing I’m astonished that you have the faculty to take your pants down when going to the bathroom.
Pathetic, but not really amusing. You’ve apparently learned to read, but not to reflect. Talk, but you don’t think. In the end, you have nothing to offer but your own inflated sense of yourself. Thus, your view of ‘projection’, bringing nothing to the table but your own self absorption you assume that’s all anyone has to offer.
I feel no inclination to respect your views, because these views are worthless. I’m sorry but I can’t respect your opinion because it is based on nothing. To offer you the courtesy of respect would be a waste of both our times.
If I could, I would abjure you to go forward and cease being a boob. But you are what you are. In the end, life will pass you by. Life is passing you by, in ways that you don’t understand, leaving you troubled with an accumulating sense of wrongness.
Please understand, I bear you no ill will. But the kindest thing I can offer you is my contempt.
December 31st, 2008 at 7:16 pm
I understand. I’d be Cranky if I were a virgin.
December 31st, 2008 at 7:59 pm
Whereas ArmyMatt always has things in hand.
ROTFL
December 31st, 2008 at 10:16 pm
Note ArmyMatt’s “final thought” posted at 2:39 PM – followed by 3 more posts. Just have to get that last snark in, eh?
Cranky
January 1st, 2009 at 3:41 pm
But seriously, ibc, why should &tc…
And finally, the logorrhoeic tantrum…
Unfortunately, things are pretty busy on my end, what with the New Year and everything. So I stopped reading after the first sentence or two. I certainly hope you won’t think I didn’t appreciate all the effort it took to craft such a lengthy response.
Man, you must’ve sat up all night going over drafts of this stuff…
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