Education: February 2007 Archives

My respect for Apple's CEO shoots up a notch as Steve Jobs blasts American teachers unions and echoes many of my own positions.

Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs lambasted teacher unions Friday, claiming no amount of technology in the classroom would improve public schools until principals could fire bad teachers.

Jobs compared schools to businesses with principals serving as CEOs.

"What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in they couldn't get rid of people that they thought weren't any good?" he asked to loud applause during an education reform conference.

"Not really great ones because if you're really smart you go, 'I can't win.'" ...

"I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way," Jobs said.

"This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy."

At various pauses, the audience applauded enthusiastically.

Jobs is right: labor unions can be valuable institutions, but their power needs to be balanced by the private property rights of employers. The employers of public employee union members often have little power to reward or punish bad employees, and the result is widespread mediocrity.

Wired's Leander Kahney doesn't get it, and the examples he comes up with to counter Jobs' positions actually do just the opposite.

Jobs argues that vouchers will allow parents, the "customers," to decide where to send their kids to school, and the free market will sort it out. Competition will spur innovation, improve quality and drive bad schools (and bad teachers) out of business. The best schools will thrive.

It sounds great -- for the successful schools. But what about the failing ones?

Jobs thinks even the low end of the market will be hotly contested, like the market for inexpensive cars. Not everyone can drive a Mercedes, but there's lots of competition for cheap Toyotas, Kias and Saturns.

But Jobs is using the wrong analogy. It'd be more like the market for the low-end food dollar -- rich kids would have lots of choice, but for poor kids it'd be Burger King or McDonald's.

Or Jack-in-the-Box, or Subway, or KFC, or Quizno's, or Baja Fresh, or Taco Bell, or.... Many of which offer quite good and healthy menu items, in addition to being cheap. The fact of the matter is that free markets work in almost any industry other than so-called "natural monopolies", which the education industry certainly is not.

(HT: The Pirate.)

New Orleans is a hellhole, and the solution is obvious!

The homicide total for a still-young 2007 climbed to 27 on Saturday with the dead of a man shot at a nightclub on Friday. ...

"If they don't get crime under control, if they can't convince people it's safe to be here, it doesn't matter how much money they get from the federal government, nobody's going to stay," Tulane University criminal justice instructor Ronnie Jones said.

Before Katrina struck on August 29, 2005, there was little public pressure to do something about the number of murders, which peaked in 1994 with 425 killings. ...

The basic complaint was that too many criminals are arrested and then returned to the streets due to poor police work and lax prosecutors and judges.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune found that 3,000 arrested suspects were released in 2006 because prosecutors failed to indict them within the required 60 days. In January 2007, 580 were released for the same reason, the newspaper said. ...

Even before Katrina, a local study found that in 2003-2004 only 12 percent of those arrested for murder went to prison. ...

A recent murder encapsulated the difficulties. After a 17-year-old was beaten up, his mother gave him a gun and told him to get revenge, and he killed the boy he fought with.

When police went to his home to investigate, they found the mother with cocaine and a family photo on display of the son with a gun in one hand and a fistful of cash in the other.

Anyone familiar with politically correct American blinders knows how the article ends:

"For us to correct this, we have to look at the root of the problem. The root of the problem is our education system," Police Superintendent Warren Riley said in an interview.

The first time education is mentioned in the article is in the last line, and in a quote from the police superintendent. Hmmm... all the stats earlier in the piece suggest that bad law enforcement bears a lot of the blame, but no, the police superintendent passes the buck and says the problem is education! How much education does it take to know not to give your son a gun and encourage a revenge killing?

Some of the least educated people I've known have also been the most moral, and some of the most immoral people I know are the best educated. Blaming evil on a lack of education is the politically correct stance because it avoids any mention of morality, personal responsibility, and objective goodness.

Despite the continuing decline of America's primary and secondary education system, teachers' pay keeps going up and up... the average public school teacher made $36.06 per hour in 2005.

Who, on average, is better paid--public school teachers or architects? How about teachers or economists? You might be surprised to learn that public school teachers are better paid than these and many other professionals. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, public school teachers earned $34.06 per hour in 2005, 36% more than the hourly wage of the average white-collar worker and 11% more than the average professional specialty or technical worker.

In the popular imagination, however, public school teachers are underpaid. "Salaries are too low. We all know that," noted First Lady Laura Bush, expressing the consensus view. "We need to figure out a way to pay teachers more." Indeed, our efforts to hire more teachers and raise their salaries account for the bulk of public school spending increases over the last four decades. During that time per-pupil spending, adjusted for inflation, has more than doubled; overall we now annually spend more than $500 billion on public education.

And what do we get for all that money? Less and less every year.

It would also be beneficial if the debate touched on the correlation between teacher pay and actual results. To wit, higher teacher pay seems to have no effect on raising student achievement. Metropolitan areas with higher teacher pay do not graduate a higher percentage of their students than areas with lower teacher pay.

In fact, the urban areas with the highest teacher pay are famous for their abysmal outcomes. Metro Detroit leads the nation, paying its public school teachers, on average, $47.28 per hour. That's 61% more than the average white-collar worker in the Detroit area and 36% more than the average professional worker. In metro New York, public school teachers make $45.79 per hour, 20% more than the average professional worker in that area. And in Los Angeles teachers earn $44.03 per hour, 23% higher than other professionals in the area.

As the piece notes, the problem isn't that teachers are paid too little, it's that their pay is based on seniority rather than merit. Even a tiny amount of money tied to actual student improvement can go a long way.

Karen Carter, the school's principal, felt that her teachers' efforts were producing progress at Meadowcliff, especially with a new reading program she'd instituted. But she needed a more precise test to measure individual student progress; she also wanted a way to reward her teachers for their effort. She went to the Public Education Foundation of Little Rock. The Foundation had no money for her, and the Little Rock system's budget was a nonstarter. So the foundation produced a private, anonymous donor, which made union approval unnecessary.

Together this small group worked out the program's details. The Stanford test results would be the basis for the bonuses. For each student in a teacher's charge whose Stanford score rose up to 4% over the year, the teacher got $100; 5% to 9%--$200; 10% to 14%--$300; and more than 15%--$400. This straight-line pay-for-performance formula awarded teachers objectively in a way that squares with popular notions of fairness and skirts fears of subjective judgment. In most merit-based lines of work, say baseball, it's called getting paid for "putting numbers on the board."

Still, it required a leap of faith. "I will tell you the truth," said Karen Carter. "We thought one student would improve more than 15%." The tests and financial incentives, however, turned out to be a powerful combination. The August test gave the teachers a detailed analysis of individual student strengths and weaknesses. From this, they tailored instruction for each student. It paid off on every level.

Twelve teachers received performance bonuses ranging from $1,800 to $8,600. The rest of the school's staff also shared in the bonus pool. That included the cafeteria ladies, who started eating with the students rather than in a nearby lounge, and the custodian, whom the students saw taking books out of Carter's Corner, the "library" outside the principal's office. Total cost: $134,800. The tests cost about $10,000.

Far cheaper -- and far more effective -- than straight pay increases based on teacher seniority. And, of course, the teachers' unions hate the idea. Teachers' unions push the dogma of class size reduction because smaller classes leads to more classes which leads to more teachers which leads to more power for the unions -- despite the fact that evidence shows small class sizes do little to improve education.