The EduTransition
The Education Secretary job hasn’t yet gotten much attention, but with the principles for the national security and economic teams in place people are starting to focus on it. And for whatever it’s worth, let me add my vote to Paul Glastris and The Washington Post in hoping that Obama picks a serious reformer who’ll work with George Miller and Ted Kennedy to keep the momentum for education change moving forward rather than a timid incrementalist whose main role is to reward the teacher’s unions for their support during the general elections.
I don’t have any particular candidate I’m pushing, but Chicago schools chief Arne Duncan seems like the obvious pick out of the reform camp for a Chicago-based politician.
But of course it’s worth saying that who gets which cabinet post is of limited relevance when it comes to this sort of thing. Margaret Spellings is currently Secretary of Education and also the most influential voice on education policy. But she was the most influential voice on education policy back when she was Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy as well. Given the intra-party divides on education, and the second-tier nature of the issue, I would be very surprised to see either camp shut out of an Obama administration. The question then becomes who does he listen to and about what.
55 Responses to “The EduTransition”
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December 5th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
There was a rumor going around a few weeks ago that Colin Powell might get this job. Anything since then?
December 5th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Who are the unserious timid incrementalists in the tank to the teacher’s union currently under consideration?
December 5th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Obviously its anyone who doesn’t bring the type of experience of public education you get from a Manhattan prep school followed by Harvard.
December 5th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
Matt,
I’ve nearly completed the process from my current field into education and, while working on my master’s in education, have been observing many teachers at the poorest Florida high school in the poorest county in the state. I assure you every teacher I’ve spoken with wants to reform the system as much as you and I, but it seems to me that the “momentum for change” you’re feeling from outside the school system is imaginary. No Child Left Behind is such a terrible, stupid law, I believe in my weaker moments that its entire intent was to damage public education to the point where people would clamor for vouchers to send their kids to private schools. (Of course, without requiring private schools to accept the vouchers as full payment or requiring those which accept payments to choose students by, say, a lottery system, then schools will pick the kids they want, the rich who already send their kids to private schools will basically get a kickback and the kids who can’t go to private schools will be stuck in a crumbling system, so good luck, parents!) There is no momentum for real change and any momentum you feel right now must be stopped because it’s moving in the wrong direction.
I don’t think Michelle Rhee’s attempts to undercut the the D.C. Public Schools’ tenure system system are beyond the pale and I think a version of DoD’s new pay system (NSPS) would work better in the education system than it will in government (a long discussion). I’m all for reform. I think it’s going to take a lot of serious, meaningful thought, though, and I’m a bit turned off by the anti-teachers’ union vibe I’m picking up in this post. I could be off-base, I’m sure, so let me apologize in advance if that’s the case.
December 5th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Matt, do you know anything about these “reformers” and what “reforms” they’re pushing?
December 5th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
Just so we’re clear: unionized workers are bad for educating kids, but good for making cars and everything else.
Or could it be, possibly, that private-sector unions share the NEA’s focus on securing higher, and more secure, average wages rather than employees’ being paid according to their individual productivity?
December 5th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
I hope that this guy
has some place in the Obama Administration.
December 5th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
Matt, honestly and in good faith, I don’t know where your teacher union antipathy comes from but it’s misplaced. Making the schools better and allowing for a well paid, semi-independent professional union is not an either/or proposition.
December 5th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Oy. Forgive my sloppy earlier post. It should say “I’ve nearly completed the process of moving from my current field into education…”
Should I keep it to myself that I’ll be teaching language arts classes?
December 5th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
Can we see just one post in all these slaps that actually argues for how teachers union actually has made a significant contribution to the lousiness of our public schools? Or is it just something free marketers take for granted, that if the system’s broke, it can’t be problems with funding and has to be unions?
Glad Matt hasn’t tried to offer “help” for the troubled NYC mass transit system, since thankfully he’s distracted with dreams of train travel to from DC to Detroit. Otherwise, we could slash the budget further, call it reining in the unions, and everything would get so much better.
December 5th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
@Nitpicker
Why do you only believe NCLB was created to undermine the public schools in your weaker moments? It’s pretty clear to me that was the intent from the start.
And obviously, those asking what reform means haven’t been paying attention. Reform means dumping on teachers unions. Even here in FL, where the teachers union has 0 power and teachers pay is very low, the problem is that the teachers union has too much power. Either that or we have the best education system in the country–not sure which.
December 5th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
It’s spelled “principals”. You can remember that because they’re your “pals”.
December 5th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Me too.
My kids attend public schools and the teachers are amazing. Most people wouldn’t/couldn’t do that job on a bet. Public school teachers deserve twice what they get and more power to them.
No, I’m not a teacher. I’m a parent.
December 5th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
If Obama is looking for somebody who can look at data about education and test scores and use Occam’s Razor to draw intelligent conclusions, he’s already got one guy on board. Unfortunately, Larry Summers is working in economics, where he did so much to get us in the mess we’re in now with his Wall St. deregulation. But, he’d be a great choice for Education.
December 5th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
Wow. You are kidding, right? Arne Duncan? Wtf?!?
December 5th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
Out of curiousity, Matt, have you ever actually been in a public school? Actually sat in a class? Taught a class? Ever?
Your education policy blogging is easily the least interesting, most bullshit-filled part of your blogging. Please stop.
December 5th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
For what it’s worth, Da Mare has already publicly stated that he doesn’t want Duncan to go, and has pretty much asked Obama not to pick him. The President-Elect probably doesn’t have to listen to Daley, but who knows?
December 5th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
I second PTS.
December 5th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Seriously, Matt, why won’t you ever address the issues your commenters bring up about teachers unions being perhaps valuable? I don’t get it. You keep putting these posts up, and it’s just the same thing every time. As JohnH says, would you please explain your antipathy to teachers unions and try to engage with the arguments over “reform”?
And, as bottomofthe9th says — one minute you’re defending unions, the next your trashing them. What gives?
December 5th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Here in Texas we’ve seen a lot of these reforms for some time now. One, shall we say, unintended consequence of these reforms has been the corruption of the grading process. Richardson ISD (Independent School District) allows a teacher to only give 5 Fs. Dallas ISD mandates that a teacher can give a grade no lower than 50% for work in the first half of a semester, even if the student turns in no gradeable work. I’m sure there are other examples. All of this is being done so that schools districts can pass on their problems and issue reports suggesting their doing better than the standardized test scores suggest, or so I gather. In the community college where I teach we see the results of this sort of thing. Ther are plenty of kids who’ve been bored to death by powerpoint presentations, don’t know how to read a book (that being different from passing their eyes accross a page, want to be told exactly what to study (that’s all they’ve ever been asked to do), think apostrophes turn nouns into plurals instead of possessives and so forth. We also have a co-ordinating board down in Austin with some really particular ideas about science education; the Texas school book market is so big, your schools could end up with books that board down in Austin chooses despite your well thought ought and presumably good intentions. The reformers are in bed with the permenant professional administrators (many of whom do not teach and aren’t really good at it when they try, though they can be preety critical of teaching in disciplines they have no, and I mean no, knowledge of ). We produce all sorts of reports counting things that can be counted because they can be counted; being countable doesn’t make for relevance or pertinence, but it makes reports possible (see also The Nichomacian Ethics on being overly precise as counter to what is good for life). I’ve heard highschool teachers say they get bored telling the same jokes in seven periods a day (but its really hard not to) and first grade teachers say they’ve no choice but to teach to the state tests. None of this has to with unions, MY, none of it; I can’t even belong to one and keep my job. And none of it conduces to serious discussions of what we ought to be teaching to benefit folks who are going to have to think their way through an increasingly globalized world. Teaching is expensive because face to face works better, a lot better, than doing stuff on line–that requires folks to actually be self-discipled (these are kids we’re talking about). Good teaching requires that people actually know what they are talking about (or doing) rather than,as a common alternative holds, being masters of this or that technique. Therefore a modest proposal–get rid of schools of education.
December 5th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
So of the reforms that the reformeers intiated here in Colorado has destroyed public education. In this state many high schoolers, after graduation, are ill prepared for college because they have studied nothing but preparing for the statewide standardize tests. I wish that these provincial “reformers,” would study Europe in which teachers are highly paid and respected instead of coming up with moronic ideas.
December 5th, 2008 at 5:37 pm
Matt,
I have to agree with so many commenters here – you simply don’t know the first thing about education and you are generally talking out of your ass. If you want some respect please cite one empirical study that suggests that the teachers unions have hurt education in any way. Please cite one study that shows that charter schools are superior to system schools. Please cite one study that suggests that merit pay increases teacher quality. If you go for the Teach for America studies you are going to get your tonsils ripped out. Those studies (which I have read carefully) are so flawed and offer such irrelevant information it suggests….
Please, please just write about the god damned trains and parking.
A list blogger – sure you are.
December 5th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
I went to a public school, K-12, and I got a pretty good education. To clarify, my school was in the middle of nowhere, which has now become exurbs, and was relatively well funded for a public school (although my sister’s a senior in high school and they’re still using the same edition government textbook they have since at least 2002, when I was there, and possibly longer.) I had a lot of great teachers, and I have a broad pro-union bias. However, I can’t help but find it interesting that when I complete my masters degree in social sciences this year at one of the top universities in the country, I will be eligible to teach in most private schools, but not in public ones. (I’m not planning on going into teaching,just using myself as an example.) I can’t help but think that I’d be a better history or government teacher in terms of depth and breadth of subject knowledge than many people teaching now, who have bachelors degrees in education and may not have taken a single advanced college history class before trying to teach the subject. I am really conflicted on this issue. Perhaps the problem lies less in teacher unionization and more in the type of education required of them (at least at the high school level.)
December 5th, 2008 at 7:39 pm
Probably the biggest problem with American schools – or at least the schools in many jurisdictions – is the difficulty of firing teachers. That is not to say that teachers are inherently evil or incompetent, or that most teachers are this way. It’s just a fact that if you cannot fire a normal human being, that normal human being will often not perform their task to the best of his or her ability. Even good teachers could be better, in other words.
Take for example this chart, showing the process for sacking an inept teacher in New York City:
http://sitepilot03.firmseek.com/client/cgood/www/burdenquestion-6.html
When it is this difficult to fire someone, bad things happen. Now, the problem with this is that it is hard to evaluate the job teachers do. It is hard to account for the impact they have on final outcomes – the lives of their students. The argument behind vouchers and charter schools is that the best way to evaluate teacher performance is through the aggregated preferences of parents – school choice. There are obvious problems with this, but I have not heard a very convincing explanation of a better idea, or why the status quo should prevail.
Ultimately, though, I think more creative solutions will be necessary. China got out of communism not by ending state production quotas, but by incentivizing production beyond existing quotas. Likewise, maybe the solution to teacher tenure isn’t direct abolition – maybe it’s to do something else, like offer teachers a choice between tenure and higher pay, as Michelle Rhee has been proposing.
None of this is to say that teacher unions do not have a role to play in the process. They do, and their just complaints about certain things, such as pay and working conditions, should be heard. But teacher tenure has gone too far, and calcified education to a dramatic extent. Something ought to be done.
December 5th, 2008 at 8:59 pm
Uhm, the status quo should prevail because it was part of the development of the greatest public education system the world has ever known – taking an incredibly diverse population speaking a hundred different language and turning them in to a dynamic, innovative population. The question isn’t why should the status quo prevail. The question is why have people worked so hard to change it. Since “A Nation At Risk” our education system has gotten far worse, not better. Your argument is purely ideological.
December 5th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Lila –
If it makes you feel any better, there aren’t, probably “many people teaching now, who have bachelors degrees in education and may not have taken a single advanced college history class before trying to teach the subject.” – not at the high school level, anyway.
Certification and teacher education works slightly differently in every state, and I can’t tell you exactly what it’s like in yours, but in my state to get a B.A. in secondary education (and a certificate to teach in high school) one completes the requirements for the major of the subject that one wants to teach, plus some education classes (at least one of these having a clinical hours component) and then student teaching – its really more like having a B.A. in your subject area with a minor in education plus at least a semester of hands-on training. I don’t think you would be a better history teacher than someone with the education described above.
Certification is actually pretty differentiated – the requirements in terms of college credit hours and state exams that must be passed are different for kindergarten teachers and high school teachers, which is as it should be.
December 6th, 2008 at 6:02 am
Give every kid a netbook/tablet and an ebook reader/kindle. Put the entire curriculum online – text,video and interactive. Create a warcraft/second life world where kids can pass ‘levels’. ‘Wrath of the algebra litchking’.
The technology in terms of pc’s, broadband, wifi, graphics card is now there at a feasible price. It just requires political will and funding to make it a reality. Create a non-profit to do this. Ignore Gates – he’s an idiot.
December 6th, 2008 at 10:57 am
Bournes Ghost:
That’s a horrible argument, if only because it’s exactly what 19th century industrialists and modern paleocons use to justify union suppression. “Unrestrained commerce is what created our diversified and advanced economy, taking us from an agricultural society to a dynamic and innovative manufacturing economy! Unions are luddites threatening to turn all this progress back – the question isn’t why we have to preserve the status quo, but why we have to change it!”
Or if you prefer an analogy-free argument, the past is not a reliable predictor of the future. Your argument that what’s worked before will work in the future does not necessarily apply in a changed world. America and the world have changed since the initial development of public education, and there is no indication that the status quo remains effective. Moreover, just because a particular policy has worked before does not mean it is the *most* effective policy. The hyperbolic proponents of school choice who say current policy is not working are not really correct, in my view – rather, it’s that alternatives to the status quo could work even better.
I do not think most reforms that have been adopted so far are effective. A top-down imposition of national testing seems ridiculous and arguably defeats the whole point of having a choice – parents who prefer test-free schooling don’t have a choice under this regime. But school choice in the abstract seems to provide better results – see the recent article in The Atlantic about charter schools in New Orleans after Katrina.
Moreover, choice is not directly linked to markets per se. Urban economists have found indications that we do not even need to privatize education to enjoy choice – decentralized and diverse school districts seem to promote choice since parents can settle in the district which suits them the best. (I would also say that not coincidentally teachers unions have less – but not no – political traction in these districts, since local voters have more control over school boards.) Regions with more decentralized and diverse school districts seem to enjoy lower costs for the same or even better educational outcomes.
I believe that you can make a plausible argument against school choice and for teacher tenure, but I don’t believe that that argument has been made. Empirical studies so far indicate that school choice promotes better policy outcomes, and that teacher tenure (indeed, tenure of almost any sort) does have a negative effect. To say we should deny school choice is almost tantamount to banning people from moving from one municipality to another, or changing jobs; to say we should support teacher tenure is akin to saying we should support tenure in all or most jobs. (What’s to stop a racist foreman from sacking a good worker because he is Hispanic, or a corrupt manager from blocking the advancement of an effective white-collar worker out of personal spite? If we accept the argument that school administrators will fire good teachers for personal/stupid reasons as a justification for teacher tenure, we should likewise support tenure in most if not all occupations.)
I’m open to hearing alternatives and defenses of the present policies, but any such arguments ought to at least address these inconsistencies in the orthodox arguments against school choice and for teacher tenure. Ideally, they would also deal with the empirical studies of school choice and teacher tenure. Arguing against NCLB or other Republican-promoted forms of school reform is kind of a strawman, because it addresses only certain types of school reform, instead of the underlying principles (which Republicans often conveniently ignore in their fundamentalist pursuit of taking every cause to an extreme). Testing may not be an ideal reform, but an argument against testing is just that – it is not an argument against every type of reform.
If my argument is ideological, it’s certainly an ideology that cuts across party lines. Common Good, the coalition which provided the chart I linked to, has both Newt Gingrich and George McGovern on its board of advisors. President-elect Obama, while being supportive of teachers unions (as I am), has observed that they need to be less recalcitrant about tenure and other potential reforms. I am not against public education, let alone publicly-funded education (which even Milton Friedman supported, albeit in the form of vouchers). I am just asking for an explanation of why public education is structured the way it currently is, when alternative structures seem to be more conceptually and empirically sound.
December 6th, 2008 at 11:03 am
Matt you really deserve the beatings you take on Education. While it is obvious that Joel Klein’s friends are ginning up a campaign for him to be Secretary of Ed mainly by attacking Linda Darling Hammond, the whole reformers vs. status quo defenders frame is preposterous. What is the single largest reform initiative by Klein? Launching hundreds of new small schools in New York City (It’s also the major reform in Chicago). Who was one of the founders of the small schools movement in New York and one of its biggest national proponents? Linda Darling Hammond. Charters schools? Darling Hammond founded one of the oldest and most successful in California. Standards based reform? A leader for both student learning standards and teacher qualification standards.
Darling Hammond’s crime apparently is believing that we should invest in improving teacher quality instead of searching for ways to discard qualified teachers and replace them with cheap college grads who do a three stint while they decide what to do with their lives (Teach for America). She also think that the tests we give kids should measure the skills they actually need for college and the work place instead of the lower order skills currently measured by state accountability systems, a position that even testings greatest proponents like Micheal Cohen of Achieve and yes, George Miller have had to grudgingly concede.
As for the whole “bad teachers are the problem” – it’s a crock. I know something about this having been pressed into service as an interim head of human resources for a major urban school district several years ago. Yes, its hard to fire bad teachers but this is nothing in comparison with the nationwide shortage of good teachers. Fire teachers and replace them with what? To staff the neediest schools most major urban districts have no choice but to settle for “warm bodies”. These are often Tech For America kids many of whom perform poorly. And that’s to maintain the status quo.
IF we are really serious about transforming, as opposed to reform – status quo tinkering -, Darling Hammiond should be in charge. She is talking about a serious investment in teacher quality.
There is no real effort right now to prepare teachers for the charge they have been given. The current system is designed to sort kids largely based on their parents’ socio-economic status. That is the factor that is most predictive of current testing outcomes. To really prepare all kids for the challenges of the 21st century, teachers are going to need a much greater array of skills than simply being expert in their subject matter. To fundamentally change the nature of teaching is what is called for and that’s not a status quo defense.
December 6th, 2008 at 11:14 am
Lila,
Given that so few of my students, mostly fresh out of Texas highschools where they must study both Texas and US history, know so little Texas and US history, I’m not sure you’re right about whether that education minor makes folks better teachers or not.
Johnleemk,
We’ve long had a system of parent choice associated with white flight and Christian academies, if not also with the housing market. The first problem with any system of education in this country is first of all its size. Secondly, while there may well be difficulty getting rid of not-so-hot teachers, making folks less secure doesn’t make them better at teaching, rather it makes them more maleable, esaier to push around. Further, not having some form of security for teachers (good ones and passable ones), doe snothing about the difficulties of getting rid of inept administrators. These are the folks who like pushing perfectly fine teachers into doing non-sensical stuff, like counting that which should probably not be counted.
December 6th, 2008 at 11:46 am
djeri,
The problem is that I have not seen a good solution to white flight. Attempts to prevent school choice and keep people immobile by equalizing differences between school districts have not worked very well. There is not much evidence that Serrano v Priest in California, for instance, changed the disparities between high- and low-income districts by mandating the equalization of per pupil spending across the board. If anything, it slightly worsened things because many low-income districts were spending more per pupil (albeit courtesy of property taxes on undesirable manufacturing plants, etc.)
To take up a different analogy, we see similar sorting in academia. Smart academics go to where other smart academics are. Should we prevent the flight of academics from Podunk U to Harvard because Podunk deserves its share of high-IQ profs too? Of course not, because the benefits of aggregating intellectuals are more than the sum of the individual benefits. Likewise, preventing sorting of individuals harms everyone by preventing communities from attending to the specific needs of their residents – instead of catering to one type of resident they must cater to a variety, driving up the costs of public services.
That is not to say white flight is desirable; rather we should be looking at solutions that do not involve dramatically reducing people’s choices and freedom of mobility. A better welfare system which helps poor people and communities pull themselves out of poverty and get back on their feet would go far to alleviate the gulf between rich and poor, colored and white. I do not think the present welfare system works as well as it could, but that is a whole other debate – let’s just say that I think restricting mobility is overall a bad idea.
Re Christian academies, that could be avoided through novel forms of school choice – for instance, more decentralized school districts. Even if a charter school or voucher system were taken up, that does not mean Christian schools will dominate. Even so, I agree with you that this is one of the weaker aspects of school choice, and that proponents of school choice have yet to present a satisfactory argument here. I still think there are ways to get around this while creating more room for choice, however.
You present a compelling argument re administrators, but applying your logic, should we then not also make administrators easier to fire? If tenure makes administrators act less competently than they could, why would it not do the same for teachers? I do not think making people harder to push around is a good idea; the more appropriate question is who should be doing the pushing. I think parents and local communities should be the ones pushing schools around, instead of administrators or bureaucrats.
December 6th, 2008 at 11:56 am
Lcohen,
Good points all around. I would say, however, that you may be missing some of the second-order effects that would arise from reducing teacher tenure. When there are vacancies for teachers, schools must offer to pay teachers more – they must compete with one another for the limited pool of competent teachers, and that drives teacher pay up. Greater pay will in turn attract more intelligent and competent people to become teachers and obtain certification. Over the long run, we would approach an equilibrium where teachers are paid more and perform better. If we start breaking out of this cycle of accepting bad teachers because there’s nobody better, we will eventually find the pool of good teachers growing.
I do agree though that in the short run, there will be problems with finding new teachers. That is why I suggested we need more creative solutions than have already been offered. I think Michelle Rhee’s idea of offering existing teachers a choice between tenure and higher pay is an excellent one. It does not necessarily involve firing any teachers except those who have put themselves on the line, but it does incentivize the entrance of better teachers into the teaching profession. Conceptually, it seems sound to me. Only time will tell if it has the effects Rhee expects, but it is definitely worth a shot, if only because DC schools cannot get much worse than they already are.
Re TFA, I am not sure if it deserves all the criticism it often encounters. To be sure, its teachers are less trained and much more inexperienced than most teachers out there. But I do not know much about empirical studies of the effects TFA has on educational outcomes. It is entirely possible that if these smart volunteers were trained properly and/or allowed to gain more experience, they would outperform the existing pool of teachers.
I also think you and most teacher tenure opponents are closer than it might appear. Teacher tenure opponents focus on the effects the tenure of bad teachers has on the overall pool of good teachers. You focus on the overall pool of good teachers but not on the effects of tenure, dismissing them as unimportant. I think we are attempting to achieve the same end, but disagree on the measures – which is why I think innovations like Rhee’s could be what finally break the deadlock and help us move toward an equilibrium of better teachers overall.
December 6th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Johnleemk says,
Empirical studies so far indicate that school choice promotes better policy outcomes, and that teacher tenure (indeed, tenure of almost any sort) does have a negative effect.
Please, cite the studies. I am certainly not aware of them. I would be most appreciative and it would probably make me rethink my position.
I actually think school choice is the answer!!! Give parents the choice of any public school in a municipality or town or geographical area(and the school provides the transportation). I believe this would actually solve many of our education problems. Hmmmm, what are the chances of the people in the Maryland suburbs who are singing Hossannas to Michelle Rhee agreeing with this? It certainly would make me think twice if they did!
December 6th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
Really? The biggest problem? What is this based on, exactly?
December 6th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
Yglesias,
For a progressive or liberal or educated blogger, I would do a bit more research into the issues of educational jargon and policy before an endorcement. Joe Klein is not a reformer! TFA damages public schools. Teaching to the test is not educational.
December 6th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
Barbar Says: “Really? The biggest problem? What is this based on, exactly?
Exactly. Me thinks Barbar has been in the belly of the classroom beast.
Lets look at another “biggest problem” (of so many big ones) – class size, my dears. Anything over 18 kids is pure insanity in terms of successful teaching. Yet most teachers would faint if they could have 20-24 average class size. What they get across the nation are class sizes of 25-30, even beyond. That’s pure insanity.
As someone asked above, have you ever taught in a secondary school? Don’t even open your mouth about public education until you’ve tried it. Trust me.
December 6th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Johnleemk,
The idea that elimination of tenure might drive up pay is possible but it doesn’t account for the current funding of school systems. Salaries already account for 90% of most school district budgets and districts everywhere are having their budgets cut. So it’s not clear that the “market” could respond. This is really the point. any solution requires a substantial investment, e.g TFAs may make better teachers in the long haul if we invest in them – Darling Hammond’s focus. But Rhee’s scheme, or the various management through terror strategies that go under the name accountability are simply “reform” on the cheap. We have an education system that is largely unchanged from a pedagogical standpoint for nearly 100 years. The world has changed – the skills that all kids need – critical thinking, analytic skills, communication, problem solving, cooperation, the ability to apply knowledge in novel contexts – are new requirements which the system has not evolved to address. Doing so will be expensive but investing in kids, especially black and brown ones is not really a priority to instead we blame teachers for our collective failure.
December 6th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
Bournes Ghost:
If that is the case, I think it is hard to do much better than William A. Fischel’s The Homevoter Hypothesis (2000, published by Harvard University Press). It’s an academic book but written in a casual tone for the layman – it deals with local governments but touches a great deal on schooling too, especially when it comes to financing them. Fischel is a proponent of the Tiebout hypothesis, which is that letting people move between communities allows them to choose for themselves what kind of schools and other social services suit them best, and leads to efficient outcomes.
Barbar:
Thanks for pointing that out – I haven’t had much sleep today, but that doesn’t justify a certainly obvious mistake! I mean to say, “probably one of the biggest problems.” There are a whole lot of other problems to be sure – low pay for teachers, horrid facilities, poor parenting, general apathy if not outright disrespect for teachers, gang violence, so on and so forth. I do think, however, that teacher tenure is an egregious problem in that it is somewhat easier to fix than, say, changing community attitudes to education and the teaching profession. I think also that more there is more potential benefit from somewhat loosening tenure protections than other reforms, if only because the strict tenure system in place seems completely out of whack (correct me if I’m wrong, but one figure I’ve seen cited by school reform proponents is that the state of Illinois fires only two teachers a year). The marginal return of being able to fire another teacher (and also, it must not be forgotten, hire a presumably better one) is probably greater than being able to spend a bit more money on school lunches.
oh that:
While I haven’t had the privilege and burden of teaching in a public school, I have many friends who are teaching, have taught, or plan to teach in public schools, both in America and other parts of the world. I actually grew up overseas, and attended several different public schools in a developing country, so I have a lot of respect for anyone willing to put up with such conditions. I can only imagine what things would be like if the gangs of my high schools actually had real weapons instead of just their fists.
I do think it is important to separate the concept of “blame” as an ethical or moral idea and a policy idea. Policywise, being to blame for something is being the proximate cause of that problem – morally, being to blame implies you must be faulted personally, for being a bad or unethical human being. While most, if not all of my teachers were and are outstanding people, it doesn’t change their ability to teach, or their ability to work within a system of misaligned incentives. Life would be a lot better for a real lot of people if only good intentions counted for more than they currently do. I had teachers who looked on as students tried to rush a football player with a broken skull to hospital, because the red tape and bureaucracy of the school system hemmed them in. I had teachers who couldn’t even be bothered to correctly mark quizzes or read the papers we turned in. And I had teachers who, try as they could, simply could not manage a class of 40 rowdy students and just gave up.
I am well aware that my experience with teachers in another country cannot be directly compared with the American experience (although with the decentralized nature of American education, I wonder if there really is an “American experience” of schooling). However, I do think that incentives matter in how people do their jobs, and I experienced first-hand an education system run on horribly perverted incentives, which – together with a bunch of other problems – strikingly enough sounds very similar to the conditions in some of the most troubled American schools: poor teacher remuneration, long hours, apathetic and ungrateful parents, broken households, miles of red tape, incompetent and corrupt administrators, uncooperative students, etc.
While only some of these problems can be traced back to education policy per se, I think some major problems that the government could potentially address stem from the assumption that as heroic as they are, teachers have become an exception to the general rule that incentives matter. If heroism were all that mattered, we would pay our soldiers no more than the cost of living, and ensure they could never be involuntarily discharged.
I think in many public school systems, teachers face an incredibly difficult problem, working in difficult conditions for low pay and with little autonomy. I can see why teachers are very defensive about the little that they have. But it doesn’t obviate the need for reform. “Blame the teachers for everything” isn’t the right policy, but neither is “Hands off the teachers.” A holistic education policy would look at the contributions of various people – students, parents, teachers, administrators and the state – and recognize that everyone has a role of their own to play. Unfortunately, I don’t find any of the orthodox positions on school reform satisfying in this regard. I have synthesized my own idiosyncratic response to the problem, but I will be the first to admit it is based on my own personal experience of education here in the US and abroad, combined with what little I know of education policies around the world.
I fully agree that there are a lot of other policy remedies which can and should be adopted – I certainly don’t see getting rid of teacher tenure as anything even close to a panacea, not when so many other problems abound. I would not even support it unless it was accompanied by at least a few complementary reforms, such as pay rises for teachers and/or more autonomy for teachers in the classroom.
The reason I entered this debate is because I felt Matt was getting some – but not entirely – unjustified criticism for his position on school reform. In light of how strong restraints on firing (and thus hiring) teachers are, it seems to me completely reasonable to believe we would get a large bang for our buck from simply revisiting the age-old policy of tenure. Likewise, the school choice position I think often unfairly gets a bad rap, albeit because it has been taken up by some very unreasonable people who do not seem to grasp anything beyond the unreasonably absolute maxim that “government is bad.”
Lcohen:
I completely agree, and I do think we need to have another look at how schools are financed – I can’t find any one system anywhere that seems to work really, really well. I am not sure about Rhee’s scheme, though – it seems like we have different ideas of its implications. From what I understand, it provides existing teachers with the choice between tenure and a pay rise, while not offering new teachers tenure and compensating them with higher pay instead. Is that right?
December 7th, 2008 at 10:29 am
Johnleemk,
oh that (at 36) makes a crucial point about class size. This is something which a reform of the system can actually do something about. I would actually want to add that K-12 teachers often teach too many too large classes in any given school day; I know my current load (7 sections, 2 preps) has left me with know time to continue my own study and research. I’m well aware that this sort of approach, as well as things like making sure music has some real place iin the curriculum, would be expensive.
But opposition to expense tells us something about many of the proponents of reform. I’ve heard folks from other community colleges report on very sucessful work with students taking developmental ed courses. All that success came down to lots of dedicated people working very closely together with small groups of students (3 teachers with about 12-15 students for about 1/2 of a school day)…but it worked and worked with students who started with the capacity to read at 5th grade levels. Perhaps its just as well that we seem to be living in the wake of the Proposition 13 era.
I take several of your points concerning the discussion of white flight, though for what its worth your discussion of the movement of academics has little to do with the academic job market as I’ve experienced it and watched go through that. I brought the subject up (and Christian acdemies and, often enough we could add, home schooling) because at least here in Texas a lot of the reform movement is tied closely to ideas about science curriculum (like not teaching evolution) and sex-ed (don’t even mention human sexuality). I appreciate that these are vexing issues, and I appreciate that they do not negate some of the virtues of what you are calling choice. I do wonder, however, about whether depriving schools of resouces isn’t really a perverse incentive towards corrupting the numbers. I do not see how having to do more with less makes the schools which are not so often choosen, or are choosen for reasons like being able to walk to school, any better, leads them to improve and the like.
I also take much of your point about getting rid of bad administrators and bad teachers. But again I see a conundrum rather than a solution. If we can arrange for smaller and fewer classes, then I suspect the real differences between teachers will be much more apparent–though we must keep in mind that a lot of education is about what happens long after the expereince of being in any given classroom. Smaller and fewer classes would help the bulk of teachers do a better job, a more fluid and improvizational job, a more personalized job with a set of students who would have fewer places to hide and therefore likely more incentive to actually do the work rather than, say, text message.
On the flip side, as I see matters at least, the whole impetus on the part of the administrators has been to do more with less; somehow a fair few adminstrators seem to think you can do this sort of stuff without lowering the quality of education. Doing more with less also seems to me at least to contribute greatly to a current confusion of teaching with technique. In many cases, I suspect if my experience is anything to go by, the impetus behind much administrative activity has the consequence–intended or unintended–of militating against the circumstances which give rise to that most sloppy, irratic of human activity–thought, thought by teachers (who often just wantt o be left alone to teach) and by students (who are after all the reason we who teach at whatever level go into classrooms).
Doing more with less may sound like its efficient; I think the evidence of daily practice just shows it to be being cheap.
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