education

Teacher Accountability in Public Schools

by Nicole Ciandella on October 14, 2010

in Labor

The second-largest teachers union in the country recently dropped its former president’s speeches from its website. Are they trying to hide the fact that their former president–whom their website calls a “relentless proponent of democracy and freedom”–fought for a competitive, incentive-based public school system?

Al Shanker was president of the American Federation of Teachers from 1974 until his death in 1997. His biography is titled Tough Liberal. But Shanker doesn’t fit the mold of a typical teachers union leader. The Huffington Post‘s Marcus Baram managed to track down some of Shanker’s speeches which are no longer on AFT’s website (nor at the research library AFT links to). In a speech on “Unions and Collective Bargaining,” Shanker said:

As long as there are no consequences if kids or adults don’t perform, as long as the discussion is not about education and student outcomes, then we’re playing a game as to who has the power…

What would happen if we had a system where you had pay for performance in the sense of a series of graded sets of rewards depending upon student outcome? Let’s imagine that this September a system goes into effect where five years from now all the teachers in schools that made the most progress in student achievement could get bonuses of $30,000; in other less successful schools, they could get bonuses of $5,000; and in others they could get cost-of-living increases; in schools that made little or no progress, the teachers’ salaries would be frozen; and the worst schools could be closed down, the faculties dismissed, and the school later reopened on some sort of restructured basis by a faculty from, let’s say, the top schools, like a bankruptcy and hostile takeover.

Shanker also advocated the widespread growth of charter schools and competency tests for teachers.

AFT claims that the removal of Shanker’s speeches from their website wasn’t a political decision; it was simply part of an initiative to redesign the site. But one can’t help but note the difference between Shanker’s (pro-market) rhetoric and that of the current AFT president (and regular HuffPo contributor) Randi Weingarten, who a couple of months ago said, “It’s cathartic to say ‘fire the bad teachers,’ but it doesn’t do much to improve schools.”

I’m not saying that Shanker would necessarily be doing a better job than Weingarten to improve schools today. But if the leaders of today’s teachers unions were willing to consider market-based rehauls of the education system, they might not need to spend so much time in D.C., begging for scraps from the federal budget.

Al Shanker once drily joked, “When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.” Given the trajectory of the American public school system–and the staid policy positions of most teachers unions–that joke isn’t very funny anymore.

PayPal Founder Encourages Students to ‘Stop out of School’

by Lee Doren on October 8, 2010

in Economy

Good reported on Wednesday that Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, is starting a grant program to encourage kids to “stop out of school.”  Thiel is offering up to 20 winners, under the age of 20, $100,000 grants to fund new businesses. He argues that schools are not be the best value for individuals, and he asserts that students don’t learn enough about entrepreneurship. (video interview below)

While I applaud Thiel for investing in the next generation of innovators, it addresses an interesting question: If students and parents are paying thousands of dollars for a college education, and taxpayers are subsidizing tuition increases, are students getting what they pay for?

When some students graduate in debt and without a job, maybe Theil’s idea will be the way of the future where companies sponsor students to develop their own ideas and add value to the economy.  It certainly is preferable to forgiving student loan debt if students work for the government, a program that has no potential to bring us out of the recession.

Regulation of the Day 150: Toy Guns

by Ryan Young on September 17, 2010

in Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Regulation, Regulation of the Day

Samuel Burgos is 8 years old. One day he brought a toy gun to school in his backpack. That got him expelled from his Miami school for two years. Toy guns violate his school district’s zero-tolerance policy for weapons.

The district offered to place Sam in a correctional school; his parents opted to home-school him instead. His father told the local NBC affiliate, “I can’t sit here and allow them to send my kid to a school where students have committed actual crimes,” Burgos said. “He hasn’t committed a crime.”

Sam misses his friends. And he may have to repeat the second grade. All because common sense has gone missing from Broward County’s schools. That’s what makes the school board’s response especially galling:

The school board says it’s common sense to know that this kind of item can’t be allowed on school campus and that responsibility also falls on parents to know what their children have in their backpacks.

The Burgos family has suffered enough. Toy guns are not weapons. They are toys. The school board should exercise a bit of common sense and reinstate Sam immediately.

Mixed Message

by Ryan Young on March 11, 2010

in Politics as Usual, Zeitgeist

Guns and schools don’t mix. State and local jurisdictions have all kinds of gun-free school legislation. There’s even, redundantly, federal legislation.

So why is the Department of Education buying 27 shotguns?

Happy Birthday, Carl Sagan

by Ryan Young on November 23, 2009

in Culture, Odds & Ends, Zeitgeist

I’m a bit late on this, but Carl Sagan would have turned 75 on November 9. The Skeptic Society’s Michael Shermer has set up a nice tribute to him.

The thing I admire most about Carl Sagan isn’t his academic credentials, impressive though they were. It’s that he wasn’t afraid to be a popularizer. In fact, he embraced it. He has been an inspiration for what I hope to accomplish in my own professional life.

Will Durant’s book The Story of Philosophy is credited with introducing more people to its subject than any other book. What Will Durant did for philosophy (and later, with his wife Ariel Durant, history), Carl Sagan did for astronomy.

Some pointy-nosed academics looked down on Sagan for pandering to the masses. But Sagan did more in his too-short life to actually educate people than the lot of them combined. How many of those same disdainful academics were inspired to forge a career in science because of Carl Sagan? For a subject as esoteric as cosmology, this is no small achievement.

People who work in economics or public policy would do well to pay attention not just to what Carl Sagan did, but to how he did it. Intellectuals from all disciplines should follow the sterling example set by Carl Sagan.

“Saving” Jobs Isn’t Always Good

by Michelle Minton on October 28, 2009

in Odds & Ends

The Obama administration is patting itself on the back for saving the jobs of thousands of educators by doling out stimulus funds earlier in the year.
But should we all cheer just because Ms. Frizzle didn’t get the boot? Teachers, like all professionals, have no right to employment. In the private market people who are good at their jobs are in demand and courted with money. People who are bad either work for less money or have to find a different profession. This leads to high-performing workers receiving just compensation and bad employees get sacked. When it comes to your child’s education, does that really seem like such a bad thing-should every teacher good or bad continue to teach or every ineffective administrator continue to clog up the system and waste taxpayer money? That is what the White House and the Dept. of Education assert when they pat themselves on the back for “creating” and saving 250,000 education jobs. Not only are they retaining many school-workers who, perhaps, deserve to be let go, but they are also preventing the emergence of a private market for education. Because of a “free” public option with salaries and pensions paid for with taxes, it is almost impossible for private academies to profitably compete for teachers and pupils.
Far from congratulating the Obama administration, we ought to be condemning such actions as a threat to the health of the American economy, the destruction of any private market for education, and a stab at the rights of individuals to choose which schools and teachers are worth saving with our money.

Student Loan Socialism

by Richard Morrison on September 29, 2009

in Video, Zeitgeist

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJReAunlOw0 285 234]

Regulation of the Day 51: Mandatory Hand Sanitizing

by Ryan Young on September 15, 2009

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Regulation, Regulation of the Day

In Jersey City, New Jersey, the school district is requiring students to “sanitize their hands when they walk into the class in the morning, before and after lunch, and after each restroom visit.” That’s a requirement. As in, not optional. The district will be providing hand sanitizers at a cost of about $100,000.

DC on the School Reform Front Lines, Again

by Ivan Osorio on March 2, 2009

in Economy, Labor, Regulation

Today’s Washington Post features an editorial that strongly criticizes Congressional Democrats’ rush to kill the District of Columbia’s school voucher program, which enjoys bipartisan support in the heavily Democratic nation’s capital, and is considered a success by those whose opinion should most matter in this debate: schoolchildren and their parents.

We would like Mr. Obey and his colleagues to talk about possible “disruption” with Deborah Parker, mother of two children who attend Sidwell Friends School because of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. “The mere thought of returning to public school frightens me,” Ms. Parker told us as she related the opportunities — such as a trip to China for her son — made possible by the program. Tell her, as critics claim, that vouchers don’t work, and she’ll list her children’s improved test scores, feeling of safety and improved motivation.

The school vouchers main opponents are, of course, the teachers unions that contribute heavily to Democratic politicians. But this should not be a partisan issue. Adrian Fenty, D.C.’s Democratic mayor, has already shows great resolve in taking on the District’s troubled public school systems in his appointment of Michelle Rhee as Schools Chancellor, to whom he has granted considerable authority. As a recent profile of Rhee in The Atlantic noted:

Rhee, responsible not to a school board but only to the mayor, went on a spree almost as soon as she arrived. She gained the right to fire central-office employees and then axed 98 of them. She canned 24 principals, 22 assistant principals, and, at the beginning of this summer, 250 teachers and 500 teaching aides. She announced plans to close 23 underused schools and set about restructuring 26 other schools (together, about a third of the system). And she began negotiating a radical performance-based compensation contract with the teachers union that could revolutionize the way teachers get paid.

Mayor Fenty, to his credit, has stood by his Schools Chancellor’s decisions against an onslaught of criticism from teachers unions. This is precisely the kind of boldness he needs to display now to defend the voucher program. If the program is lost, so will be many of the District’s educational improvements.

For more on teachers unions, see here.

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