Speaking at an education reform conference in Texas, Apple CEO Steve Jobs blamed teachers’ unions for making it impossible for principals to fire bad teachers. The Houston Chronicle reports:
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.’”
Jobs and Dell CEO Michael Dell were there to speak about how technology can help education, but Jobs said technology can’t do a thing if unions are blocking change.
“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.”
Based on his contributions, Jobs is a Democrat, notes Mickey Kaus.
Teachers can be made accountable for performance if principals can be held accountable for performance. That will only happen if parents can take their education dollars to the school of their choice.
What Jobs doesn’t understand is that unions and work rules exist to protect teachers from arbitrary actions on the part of incompetent and unaccountable administrators.
Another thing that Jobs doesn’t understand is that new technologies have not demonstrated their effectiveness in instruction. They may certainly make teachers more efficient in administrative tasks and in planning instruction.
Jobs is pissing off everybody this month. He advocates junking some of the protection schemes on music. Come March he will probably announce for the republican presidency.
I threaten my grandson with a program that will make him work out homework problems, then reward him with gameplaying time.
I say this as a teacher, so take it for what it’s worth.
What exactly do we mean by a “bad teacher”? Is it someone who doesn’t know the material? Someone who can’t convey the information they *do* know? Someone who can’t run a classroom, who can’t create an environment for learning? Is it someone who tries to make do with a poor (fuzzy) curriculum they themselves didn’t choose?
Is it someone who’s given in to the soft bigotry of low expectations?
Except for the first couple of examples I gave above, teachers can’t be held fully, or even mostly, responsible for poor performance–in the latter examples, there’s plenty of responsibility to spread around.
If Steve Jobs means the first couple of examples, then yes, let’s can them. If he’s referring to the latter ones, though, the solution isn’t as easy, and it will require much more work than just that of teachers.
So, who’s in? I didn’t think so.
I wan to control the grades in my class. Period. But, I don’t. If I fail half a class due to lack of class work and home work performed bythe students it is I who catch hell-NOT the students!
I have have time and again shown full proof that students are not doing the work required and all parental notification have been made. No matter. “Raise the grade!” is the refrain from the admin. “If you do this again we’re going to have do do an action plan on you!” they will hiss.
Some my comment to Jobs & Co., “give me the power to control my grade, and I will give you the results you want.” Otherwise: “GET OUT OF MY FACE!”
Public schools are not centrally about learning. The main goal is to keep them entertained while their parents work.
Also, Miller is (again) right on the nose about failing students.
Miller Smith…the way to suppress this kind of pressure for grade inflation is to require regular tests, the content for which is not controlled by the school administration and the results of which are well-publicized. That way, if the administration pressures teachers to give “A”s to students who are doing “C” work, it will become obvious at test time and they (the administrators) will have only cut their own throats.
Accountability must exist at every level, administrators as well as students.
> Some my comment to Jobs & Co., “give me the power
> to control my grade, and I will give you the results you want.”
So you increase the flunkout rate with lower grades than you are giving now, how does this increase the quality of the education so that the graduation rate is higher than now (typically 50-70 percent)?
What Jobs doesn’t understand is that unions and work rules exist to protect teachers from arbitrary actions on the part of incompetent and unaccountable administrators.
Charles, why do teachers, unlike other professionals, need a union? Do you really believe that of all the professions, teaching is the only one that needs to be protected from bad bosses?
Daavid, the admin does not control the content-the state does. We have cirriculum guides with dates we are to on specific content. We also have state tests in science that show we ARE giving grades higher than true accomplishment, but no matter. The admin still demands high grades than accomplishment. The entire county demands it.
Wayne, we have a high graduation rate of students who know nothing. What was the point of graduating them? No one outside the school system believes the grades mean anything. Every single A student with a 4.00 GPA has to take both zero level English and Math in college.
How about this idea? We never send kids from one grade to another who do not meet the minimum standards of accomplishment at eahc grade level. For kids who fail…oh say…1st grade, we have heavy intervention. We get the kids competent all the way until they are 16 and are allowed to leave the school system (or raise that to 18 or until they graduate period) and if bet you…anyone here, I bet you…you won’t have a high flunk out rate in high school.
Or we can just keep on doing what we are doing. Yep. That’s a real winner.
Teachers don’t have as much control over working conditions as other professions.
Name three other professions that work almost exclusively for the government that don’t have unions?
oh, and in the everybody uses the same test, who do you imagine the administrators would blame for the students performance on the test despite a teachers documentation of the students failure to even attempt to learn the material.
Haven’t you heard that it’s the teachers fault if kids aren’t engaged enough to do the work and earn passing grades?
One more thing, and this is actually on point, who does Jobs blame in Right to Work states where unions couldn’t possibly have the influence he is attributing to them?
Couldn’t we once and for all point out that if a district is willing to document the incompetence, bad teachers CAN be fired. Maybe not as easily as they could without due process protection, but almost as easily as they can be fired at any big corporation with a gun shy human resourced department. If the administrators did their jobs well and monitored instruction as they should, they could fire anyone who needed it.
‘the state controls the content’ I bet “education professionals” have input on what they teach. Kinda like the new new new new math, I think it called Cluster math, instead of following the KISS principle they make it so complicated the student get frustrated trying to do it, when the simple old method works better than anything else they have come up with. Teacher doctoral candidates have to have something to try.
> Or we can just keep on doing what we are doing. Yep. That’s
> a real winner.
Hmmm .. let’s review the bidding ..
Steve Jobs claims that American education is suffering because Teachers’ Unions have become so powerful that Principals can not fire bad, unionized, teachers. Michael Dell (of Dell Technology) Dell responded that unions were created because “the employer was treating his employees unfairly and that was not good. “So now you have these enterprises where they take good care of their people. The employees won, they do really well and succeed.”
Who succeeds? Certain the US Maritime Industry didn’t succeed with Union labor, nor the Steel Industry, nor the Rail Industry, and the US Auto Industry is disappearing before our eyes. This past year also, Unionized big-city newspapers started circling the drain too.
So the Teachers’ Unions won.. but what about the kids? If the teachers claim that they aren’t in this job for the money, why aren’t they using their union clout to see that the kids are getting the best education possible by documenting these problems, and getting as much response to their demands about grade inflation as they get for their salary and benefit demands?
Teachers don’t have as much control over working conditions as other professions.
Name three other professions that work almost exclusively for the government that don’t have unions?
Actually professionals control their working conditions, not by forming unions, but by not working for companies that treat they poorly. The difference between professionals and teachers is that professionals get rewarded for performance. Thus companies make sure that their better performing professionals are treated properly so that they don’t leave.
Jobs is assuming that the hierarchical corporate/military model makes sense in education. I would beg to differ. The principal’s role ought to be that of lead support-provider for her teachers. The very idea of teachers as subordinates is entirely misguided.
Still, there are some really bad teachers and we ought to be able to do more to protect children from them.
I don’t mean teachers who are a little shakey.
I don’t mean teachers who aren’t as expert in their subject area as they migh tbe.
Or teachers who have problems with classroom management some of the time.
I mean teachers who essentially do nothing instructional with their students and don’t care and are abusive and arbitrary. They are out there and perhaps it ought to be easier to get rid of them. They make teaching more difficult for the rest of us (ever had kids come into your class after an hour in a dysfunctional classroom?) and are an insult to our profession.
Teachng is NOT a profession. Never was .
Teachers used to black list bad districts.I might believe more in the benefits of union membership if the unions, themselves did. Eliminate mandatory union membership and the punishment of those who do not join. Let the unions have to serve members instead of their political cronies and the classroom might come back under control.
That is an interesting claim, Miller Smith, that teaching isn’t and never has been a profession. But I’m not sure I understand. Can you explain?
American Heritage Dictionary:
pro·fes·sion (pr…-fµsh“…n) n. 1. An occupation requiring considerable training and specialized study: the professions of law, medicine, and engineering. 2. The body of qualified persons in an occupation or field: members of the teaching profession. 3. An act or instance of professing; a declaration. 4. An avowal of faith or belief. 5. A faith or belief: believers of various professions.
Larry, you say “the very idea of teachers as subordinates is misguided”. So is your view that teachers must only be self-directed? What happens if a school adopts phonics but some teachers decide to stick with whole language - or vice versa?
Frankly I think we would be a lot better off with “hierarchial corporate” organizations for schools - as long as there was parent choice to ensure accountability. I think you would see large chains organized around competing educational philosophies and curricula - Core Knowledge, Waldorf, KIPP, Montessori, etc. I also believe you would see more EFFECTIVE use of technology than what we have today.
Larry, here is my rational.
Every profession controls the conditions of their employment. They have clients. They have clients they can refuse to serve and they can fire a client if they wish. Teachers cannot.
Professions set the terms of their payment. They have a billing schedule that potential clients can review before asking to be a client. Teachers do not.
Professions have set procedures that are tried and true. New developments are tested severely before being allowed to be used by the profession. Everyone in the profession knows how to do things. Teachers can’t even agree on how to teach reading…and reading wars have gone on for decades.
Professionals have employees who get paid from the professional’s generated receipts. Lawyers and Doctors have office staff they pay from the fees the professional charges. Teachers do not. Teachers ARE the employees.
And that definition #1 in your post…well…that is enough to show that teachers are not professionals.
These are just a few examples.
There is nothing wrong with being in a vocation. We are, by and large, government workers doing a job pretty much anyone can do without any training whatsoever. All I had to have was a degree in what I was teaching and that is questionable that I needed that. All one has to do now is follow the script the state puts out and you can teach pretty much any class.
By your definition, then, a teacher working after school for the Sylvan Learning Center is a professional (since his labor is generating receipts) though perhaps not since they don’t have the kind of extensive training of a physician or an attorney.
So, then, is a prosecutor not a professional since he doesn’t generate receipts?
A friend of mine spent a decade defending Native Americans in court against the US Government. He had no legal staff nor any receipts. Was he not a professional in that capacity?
You are right that the qualifications to become a teacher are much lower and the preparation requirements much less than for law or medicine. But that does not mean that some of us do not take it upon ourselves to be much more qualified and to undergo much greater preparation than is required. Could it be that we — those of us who become real experts in our subject and innovators in pedagogy — are the professionals and other teachers are the vocationalists?
And I wouldn’t suggest trying to teach where I do — South Central Los Angeles — off of a script written by someone who has probably never been to South Central. When you’ve got Crips and Bloods in your classroom and they are thinking about maybe trading in a life at the margins for what you are offering, you better bring more to the table than a state-sponsored script.
Hunter McDaniel wrote:
Frankly I think we would be a lot better off with “hierarchical corporate” organizations for schools - as long as there was parent choice to ensure accountability.
Depends on what you’re trying to do. If you’re building a million cars a year a flat organization structure isn’t going to work. Too many complex functions that have to be coordinated among large numbers of people and too many interlocked resources that have to be properly scheduled. Managing a task like that requires a hierarchical management structure. But education isn’t that complex so it doesn’t require a complex management structure.
In the case of public education the management structure is unrelated to the complexity of the task. The management structure is an outgrowth of the single point of funding authority - the school board - and is a function of the size of the budget.
The school board hires a superintendent to handle operations and the superintendent operates the organization via the management hierarchy. The more funding you’ve got the more management the school district can afford and, inevitably, gets.
Ideally, those bureaucrats would work for the betterment of the organization but in real life those bureaucrats will be working, to a greater or lesser extent, in their own self-interest. That self-interest shows up, among others ways, as empire-building. Each bureaucrat discovers that their job is well nigh impossible to perform properly without more staff support, an administrative assistant and more office space.
Not unique to public education, the same problem shows up in business. But in business the bureaucracy is periodically trimmed back or it destroys the organization. But in public education the budget, severely strained by not having expanded fast enough to suit the demands of the hierarchy, just wrings some more money out of the public. Destruction of the organization, regardless of malfeasance or incompetence simply isn’t a consideration.
In business the growth of bureaucracy is handled by periodically trimming the hierarchy back. It’s also controlled by defining the ideal size for various functions; how big is big enough for an auto assembly plant and how big is too big? In public education it’s the size of the school district that determines the proper size for the function of educating kids, not the size most appropriate to efficient and competent performance. Schools are not independent organizations but pseudopod of the district administration.
The proper size of organization for educating kids is the individual school and examples that prove the assertion have been around since public education came into existence. They’re called private schools and they don’t need district administrations to convince parents to hand over their kids and their money. Lately though even the assumption about organization size in public education has come into question and the reason is the rise of charter schools which also fore go the doubtful benefits of the district administration.
“Name three other professions that work almost exclusively for the government that don’t have unions?” How about starting by naming three other professions that work mostly for the government? By really, really stretching the definition of “professional”, I came up with one - the military. It’s not unionized, and union organizing would violate the regulations against plotting mutiny.
Yes, empower parents more. Give them choices, make us all accountable to them and their children.
Just don’t forget about all the students who don’t have parents, whose parents are on crack or in jail, kids who will always just end up at the closest school and who have no one — aside from concerned educators and the public as a whole — to advocate for them.
Let’s figure out a way for those kids not to be the victims of neglect from the school system (as well as from their parents)….
The problem with the hierarchical power structure in education is, perhaps, the same as it is in an HMO. Doctors need autonomy in order to make responsible decisions about doing what is best for their patients. They ought not be told what medicine they can and cannot provide. I know what my students and my subject much better than my principal. Should I be able to explain and defend what I teach and how I teach it — to an administrator or parent or anyone else?
Of course.
> I know what my students and my subject much better
> than my principal. Should I be able to explain and defend
> what I teach and how I teach it — to an administrator
> or parent or anyone else?
One would like to believe that the public education system would, more-or-less, provide a uniform educational delivery model to every child, no matter what school he/she might attend. With the sentiment expressed above, it would seem that this is not likely to happen. So, if only from a simple point-of-view of quality control, principals need to be in a hierarchical relationship with the teachers.
> Lately though even the assumption about organization size
> in public education has come into question and the reason
> is the rise of charter schools which also fore go the doubtful
> benefits of the district administration.
Not clear that Charter schools are driving this bandwagon, if in fact there really is any meaningful discussion about District bureaucracies. However, any reasonable review of the organizational structures of school districts leads one to question these folks’ purposes and value to the organization (meaning that reorganizations would doubtless lead to fewer costs and similar output of any reformed organization).
> In business the growth of bureaucracy is handled by
> periodically trimming the hierarchy back
This happens under the control of the business management team, and through the collapse of the business (or industry sector), which we’ve seen here in the US since the end of WWII.
> Destruction of the organization, regardless of malfeasance or
> incompetence simply isn’t a consideration.
Don’t forget outside influences, such as “globalization”. The end result is the same, however.
I have a response for those who demand “accountability” for teachers. My proposal is for teachers to be judged by their estimation of their students’ performance. If A students do A work on some test, then the teacher did well. If D students do D work, again, the teacher did well. The responsibility of the teacher is to tell the students how well they know the presented material. The responsibility to learn the material is entirely on the students. Of course, this may let useless teachers just give failing grades to students the teacher can’t teach, but an administration can step in before things get THAT bad, I hope. And then it’s up to the administrators to decide if the students can move on or not.
Of course, then there’s the problem of the teachers who don’t teach easily-testable subjects. Would an art teacher need to teach for an AP Art History exam or just stick to collages and tempera? Drama and music and PE would also create many issues of unfairness when not judged while their colleagues in the history, math, and English departments are being heavily scrutinized. And I don’t think many school districts are going to leave the football coaches without the ability to get the big bonuses.
And Steve Jobs should know that administrators aren’t really like CEOs. They have executive power, yes. But they have too many strings and regulations and dissonant pressures put upon them to suggest that they have the level of independence for action seen by any CEO of any corporation I can imagine. It’s not just a matter of the teachers’ unions, but a matter of schools being places where there’s a lot more expectations than there are rational plans to implement them.
A truly silly comment was made earlier that firing a teacher was possible, as long as the district was careful about ‘properly’ documenting their issues with the teacher. I have been involved (as a consultant) in two separate affairs of this sort, and I can assure you that barring videotape of the teacher in question abusing a student in front of witnesses, virtually no documentation is considered adequate or proper by union representatives. Process protection amounts to an endless battle of attrition that no cash-strapped district is going to even begin to consider unless keeping the miscreant is a PR debacle. Far easier for any administrator (district or otherwise) to let the students pay the price for the union’s recalcitrance.
Teacher’s unions hide behind their purported concern for the education of our children and their (the teachers) committment to their profession, but when push comes to shove, they are simply guarding their turf at any cost. Teaching used to be a profession, thanks to unions, it is barely a vocation. It is high time we started treating it as such.
“One would like to believe that the public education system would, more-or-less, provide a uniform educational delivery model to every child, no matter what school he/she might attend.”–Wayne Martin
If only every student was the same, I’d agree with you. I was lazy and got good grades. My daughter is lazy and gets poor grades. My wife was industrious and got good grades. And some industrious students get mediocre grades (poor grades are almost impossible for those who try and work hard, at least at the pre-college level). Some come from working all night, some didn’t sleep well by choice. Some didn’t eat that morning (many by choice). Some learn better in groups, others don’t want to be spoken to, and others will do well no matter the educational model the teacher uses. Sometimes the material is relevant to the student, sometimes it isn’t. Many students are there only because they’ll get in trouble if they don’t, and have resentment and anger in the way of their learning. Some are only there for the sports, dating scene, or parties. Some students try sometimes and don’t try at others. Some teachers have rough times, too. Effort all around is important, and so is ability. Imagine having to teach 10th grade math to students who have a sixth-grade math level and agenerously-equivalent fourth-grade English skills.
Teaching involves more than presenting the information in the best way. It involves presenting info to the students in the best way for those students. It’s like the phonics/whole language argument: the different sides require this method or that method, but the real world just cares about the results.
Wayne Martin writes:
One would like to believe that the public education system would, more-or-less, provide a uniform educational delivery model to every child, no matter what school he/she might attend. With the sentiment expressed above, it would seem that this is not likely to happen. So, if only from a simple point-of-view of quality control, principals need to be in a hierarchical relationship with the teachers.
BUT…..
What if a teacher can do more for her students than the uniform model? Should she refrain from doing so because it will threaten this uniformity?
What if she is a truly gifted educator?
Shouldn’t we all deliver the best quality of instruction we can?
My former principal (who was promoted out of the job a year ago) seemed to understand this. She focussed her energies on teachers who were not effective with students (based on test scores, observations, teacher and parent feedback and teacher self-assessment) and pretty much left the rest of us alone because she trusted us, because she knew that we cared deeply about our students and knew how to teach and were more demanding of ourselves than she ever needed to be with us. Our school, by the way, had the largest annual increase in language arts test scores last year in the entire LA Unified School District (about 9%).
> Teaching involves more than presenting the
> information in the best way.
> What if a teacher can do more for her
> students than the uniform model?
Remember, this topic is about Steve Jobs’ complaint that Principals can’t fire “bad” teachers. Each of these points is valid, just not in the context of this topic—unless it can be shown that somehow these behaviors lead to poor performance on the part of a teacher (demonstrated by the poor performance of that teacher’s students).
Teachers seem to get bound up in the bubble of their own class rooms, and ignore all of the other issues of the education system that those of us who are non-teachers focus on. For instance, here in California, we are spending a little over $10,000 per student (which is at/about the national average) and only about 40 percent of the students can read at/above grade. The same is true nationally, per NAEP test results. Yet, few teachers seem aware of these statistics, or even seem fazed. They just respond that the schools are under-funded, year after year. They (through their Unions) just demand more money, offering nothing in return in terms of productivity or better student performance.
The corporate organizational structure works well using people educated (more-or-less) by the same education system to build/create goods/services that people what to buy. Yet, somehow, educators claim that this system won’t work in the classroom—where there is more than a 50% failure rate (for reading, anyway).
Sorry, but the public can not afford to put more money into the public education system only to see no promise of an increase in quality of the product. (And no—process is not a product.)
You’re right, Wayne Martin.
No need to apologize for not wanting the public to “put more money into the public education system….”
Far too much money is spent for the results that we are getting.
I just wonder how much of the money is actually reaching the classrooms.
I have worked in classrooms with leaking roofs, boarded up windows, and holes in the floor. I park my car on mud. I wait years to get a class set of a novel that costs $10-15 per copy.
But, yes — as I think I’ve already stated somewhere during this discussion — there ought to be a way to protect teachers from administrative tyranny without allowing incompetent teachers to go on miseducating our students. And rank and file teachers ought to be willing to make that possible.
There also ought to be a way for dedicated and effective teachers to get rid of a really bad principal.
And Steve Jobs ought to have his engineers figure out a way to make an Ipod that doesn’t malfunction every few months….
The profession of arms is an honorable one and a learned one.
What’s holding the right to work states back?
In around half the states, the unions cannot be the reason that bad teachers don’t get fired because the unions don’t/can’t really have much power. Why are there bad teachers in these states?
What happens in a union district if a union teacher gets fired despite the attempts of the union to protect the teacher? Does it break the contract? Seriously, I don’t know how it works, but I have a hard time imagining the decision to terminate rests solely with the union.
Well, I know we’re debating the definition of professional, but off the top of my head, I’d name firefighters and policemen as positions somewhat similar to teaching. They aren’t “professions” either, but they are publicly employed and require specialized training and credentials. They also tend to have unions.
I agree with you, Larry, about everything you said in your last post.
> I just wonder how much of the money is actually
> reaching the classrooms.
> I have worked in classrooms with leaking roofs,
> boarded up windows, and holes in the floor. I park
> my car on mud. I wait years to get a class set of a
> novel that costs $10-15 per copy.
In California, about 45% of the State’s General Fund is dedicated to education. State law requires that 55% of the District’s General Fund is spent “in the class” room. In most cases, the capital spending is not added into the costs of education by each District, although the the Legislative Analyst and the US DoE does make these determinations at the state level. Amortized over thirty years, most capital spending adds about $1,500 per student to the cost-per-student to educate (although this various from locale to locale). So, the cost of a classroom that seats 30 students is about $1.5M (over 30 years). Most teachers totally ignore this cost when complaining about “dollars in the class room”.
About 45% of the General Fund spending is for non-teaching staff and “Administration”. Benefits for health care come to about 7.5% in my school district, but are somewhat lower statewide (insurance costs are between $2-3B for the Teaching Staff alone.) (Is this money that is “getting into the class room”?)
The School Boards have the ability to spend the money in their budgets as they see fit. They can fix broken windows, they can fix leaky roofs or buy text books. It seems, though, that they spend 85% of the budget for salaries and benefits. The other 15% goes for all other expenses. Special Education consumes between 15 and 25 percent of most school budgets.
Most of the published school budgets don’t do a very good job of breaking all this down for straightforward consumption. If teachers cared to know, one would think that their Labor Unions would devote some financial resources to documenting the finances for their districts.
> And Steve Jobs ought to have his engineers figure
> out a way to make an Ipod that doesn’t malfunction
> every few months….
I don’t own an iPod yet, so I don’t have any direct experiences. However, having worked on small, portable telecommunications devices, I do have a little experience watching one of the devices go through the birthing process. There is a difference between DOA (Dean on Arrival) failures, and FAU (Failures After Use). The following WEB-page provides some interesting data about iPod failutes:
http://www.macintouch.com/reliability/ipodfailures.html
Notice that failure rates after launch which seem quite high, Apple has gotten the failure rates down to about 5% or less. The article also points out the shock-induced failures are the basis of most iPod failures in the field. This could mean anything from dropping the device a few inches to throwing it in anger at the wall. Seems the all-memory iPods have fairly low failure rates, which would seem that Apple is learning by its mistakes. Notice the rapid rate of decline in failure rates over the five years in production.
Thanks, NDC — and I agree with you…. it isn’t just the unions that are responsible for incompetent teachers in the classroom.
I’ve spoken rather exhausively with my former principal about what it takes to get rid of a teacher. If the teacher is new, probationary or an intern, it’s not difficult at all (at least not in L.A.) to get the teacher out of the school (getting him or her out of the district or the profession is another story).
Once the teacher survives that probationary period without being discharged, then it becomes more difficult.
It involves a lot of administrative paperwork.
The administrator most offer assistance and support to the “struggling” teacher, observe and document all the problems…
These administrators have a lot of other duties and responsibilities, a lot of other paperwork to get off their desks. Still, what could be more important than ensuring that the best possible teacher is in every classroom?
This particular principal managed, in four years, to get rid of two incompetent teachers, one probationary, one (really burned out) veteran…
It was a great accomplishment, I felt. And she always let the rest of us know how much she appreciated the hard work and dedication we brought to our classrooms each day.
Now, she is in charge of a large innercity middle school and has about fifty teachers she needs to either “assist” or dump. It’s overwhelming. And with the current shortage of qualified teachers willing to come to South Central Los Angeles, she has no reason to believe she will replace these ineffective teachers with anyone much better.
Yep, but to hear the Jobs type comments, you’d think there are tons of people ready to do a better job if only the unions weren’t obstructing the efforts.
Sometimes I wonder if a unified salary schedule doesn’t actually hold teacher salaries down in some of the worst areas. Imagine what you’d really have to pay someone to work in South Central LA if it were negotiable. Instead, people are willing to start out there with the hope that they can bank experience until something better comes along.
I’m in a non-union state, and most schools who have a lot of “bad” teachers have weak administrators and very few qualified people who want to work there.
Administrators for the most part don’t even bother to try document and get rid of bad teachers, and it’s a pretty clear-cut although time-consuming process. Teachers are entitled to a due process hearing, and the administrators would have to build a case to dismiss or create a professional development plan for improvement, which I’m sure is time consuming and tedious, as well. But I’d say the number of principals who even attempt it is very small, so there’s a lot of complaining and press about a process that very few have even tried to use.
And something else I’ve noticed that people often underestimate: most teachers would leave a school if they were asked to. I know it sounds weird, but really strong principals control their staffing often by simply telling teachers that they’d prefer the teachers transfer. Many do.
Most people don’t want to work for bosses who don’t appreciate their efforts. The number of “bad” folks who would actually fight to retain a position where they aren’t wanted is pretty small, at least in my non-union district.
Your former administrator sounds like a good one. I wish there were more people like her out there.
NDC writes:
Sometimes I wonder if a unified salary schedule doesn’t actually hold teacher salaries down in some of the worst areas. Imagine what you’d really have to pay someone to work in South Central LA if it were negotiable. Instead, people are willing to start out there with the hope that they can bank experience until something better comes along.
–Actually, in some of the really hard to staff schools in the area (mostly the middle schools) the district does pay a few thousand a year extra, combat pay.
Some of us actually enjoy the challenge and love the kids — and that too probably keeps the salaries down….
Good point about principals getting teachers to leave voluntarily, just by asking.
I wonder if anyone has tried to collect data on actual administrative efforts to get rid of ineffective teachers….
“The problem with public education today is that there are a lot of bad teachers that nobody can get rid of.”
That, I believe, is a myth.
From what I’ve seen (in my 30 years), 20 percent are mediocre, and maybe 1 percent are bad.
As for administrators, I’d say that 20 percent are good, 50 percent are mediocre and 30 percent do more harm than good.
“Once a teacher has tenure, it’s virtually impossible to fire him.”
That, too, is a myth.
If Steve Jobs wanted to have a software engineer fired at Apple, he’d have to show “just cause.” There’s a process to go through. Documentation has to be collected. It’s not easier or harder to fire a public school teacher.
If principals could hire and fire at will, you’d have schools with teachers who were simply easy to manage. You’d get rid of all the bad teachers and all the good ones too.
For a start, require all schools to have a teleconferencing room, and prohibit membership in any association that does not allow teleconferencing its meetings.
> What’s holding the right to work states back?
The author of that sentence and comment doesn’t know what constitutes a “right to work state”. It doesn’t mean that unions don’t exist, it means only that folks can’t be forced to belong to a union in order to keep/get a job.
> If Steve Jobs wanted to have a software engineer fired at Apple, he’d have to show “just cause.”
Not in this universe. CA is a (mostly) at-will employment state. There are some reasons that can’t be used for employment decisions (race, gender, age, and a couple of others), but outside of that, anything goes.
Jobs can fire someone for driving a yellow car and promote someone for driving a blue one.
Moreover, there’s another process, namely “the company goes under”. Underperforming companies go down all the time. On the way, they shed employees like crazy.
How often does a failing public school get shut down, or even have significant, let alone massive, layoffs?
Once again, we find that public school advocates don’t know very much about the world outside of public schools.
It’s nice to see the “we don’t control our inputs” complaint again. The combination with “give us more money” is especially nice. (Hint - giving you more money won’t give you any more control over your inputs.)
It’s nice because it demonstrates how clueless public school advocates are. No one controls their inputs. People control only what they do with said inputs.
Outside of public schools, no one thinks that “bad inputs” is an excuse. If you can’t produce adequate outputs, you’re out. If no one can produce adequate outputs, well, the world does without and doesn’t pay for the effort.
In other words, telling us that it’s impossible to succeed is telling us that we should stop trying.
BTW - If there is to be more money for education, it won’t go to current educators. It’s an exceptional public school advocate who understands why.
Andy Freeman, are you suggesting that there are “public school advocates” who believe that they don’t have to make progress with their students because they didn’t choose them?
Or are they saying that, to use your terms, the quality of input affects the quality of output?
If, in one year, I can get a student three years below grade level to be only one year below grade level that is a success. If I fail to adequately challenge a student already reading and writing at college level then I’ve failed that student, right?
But that’s on an individual classroom level.
As for the system as a whole, we are failing on many levels for many reasons — stupidity, arrogance, alienation, dispassion to name a few.
Reducing class size — which does cost money — could help but only if teachers are effective in the first place.
Attracting the best and the brightest to the teaching profession — looting MBA programs and law schools, etc. by paying really attractive salaries to teachers — could, in the long run, make a big difference and, as you say, “won’t go to current educators” — in other words:
dimwits like me will be replaced….
In many of the “right to work” states, collective bargaining is also prohibited. Look state by state, and I think you’ll see that most of what people believe unions do to protect teachers couldn’t possibly be going on in about half of the states because the unions don’t have the power, the percentage membership, any influence in employment decisions.
An open shop alone does most of what is needed to prevent union control.
Using “right to work” as the expression may have been a mistake on my part, but look into it: I think you’ll see the point is valid.
Teachers unions fail to exercise control they are accused of in almost all the “right to work” states in the US.
In most business models for which it’s appropriate to talk about quality of inputs and outputs, it’s assumed that other variables change based on that quality.
If I own a furniture factory, and I want to use less expensive and poorer quality wood, I recognize that I will have to either sell final product for less than a high quality wood product or provide some other desirable feature that compensates for the lack of quality in materials.
In education what seems to be missing from the input and outputs discussion is the recognition that people seem to expect the same final product no matter what the raw material.
That’s just crazy, and we wouldn’t expect it in other areas.
In law, the quality of the case determine the willingness to plea bargain or settle. In policing, we recognize that there are high and low crime areas and we don’t expect arrests to be equal geographically. In health care, we don’t expect the same outcomes from the same illnesses. With the sale of products and business, as consumers we look at quality vs. price. From the sales side, companies know certain sales areas are more desirable than others.
But with education, we pass laws that say everyone will be at grade level by a certain date or schools will face sanctions, and that’s supposed to be reasonable. Often, the schools with the worst “raw material” will often have the least in classroom resources to help compensate.
No doubt there’s mismanagement in public education as there seems to be mismanagnement anytime we allow people to spend money they didn’t earn. But it’s usually a mistake to think the failure mainly occurs at the classroom teacher level.
Something that I think often gets ignored in discussions of public ed. are the competing expectations that communities put on schools. If the public would prioritized their expectations, and administrators could focus on addressing a clear set of goals, then perhaps they could hold teachers more accountable for meeting the goals as well.
Some folks think that school choice would allow the freedom to focus on what expectations a community wanted. Sometimes I wonder that too. But then I also think about the number of people who make terrible decision for their kids, and I’m not interested as a tax payer in subsidizing what they would choose.
“In many of the “right to work” states, collective bargaining is also prohibited.”
Would you provide a list of such states? Together with appropriate links showing that it’s prohibited.
Thanks
But with education, we pass laws that say everyone will be at grade level by a certain date or schools will face sanctions, and that’s supposed to be reasonable. Often, the schools with the worst “raw material” will often have the least in classroom resources to help compensate.
Doesn’t this depend on where we set the expectation?
To use your furniture factory analogy. If I start with bad material, I might not be able to make a Stickley chair, but I may be able to make a chair suitable for IKEA.
I’d argue that most states have set their grade level expectations at the IKEA level, not the Stickley level. So we should be able to make IKEA furniture with whatever material we have.
With respect to the resources argument, have you seen the per pupil expenditures in most major cities recently? Typically, they have some of the largest per pupil expenditures in the state.
Oh, yeah, they’ve got the per pupil expenditure, but very little of it makes it to the classroom.
I understand that it doesn’t make any difference to the tax payers, but the extra money isn’t making it to the kids in a lot of cases.
Seriously, I invite you all to tour schools in your area and contrast the city schools with high per pupil expenditures with the suburban schools with lower expenditures. Almost without fail, I think you’ll leave wondering what the heck the city school are doing with the money because the kids and teachers don’t seem to benefit much from it. The building will be in terrible shape; the kids won’t have books; they’ll be a technology gap with suburban schools.
I’m working on more info about “right to work states”
It’s weirdly hard to even find data about teacher union membership by state. This Bureau of Labor report seem to indicate that union membership in the cluster of field education would fall in is a little over a 1/3 of all employees.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm
I don’t know about the IKEA level. I agree that the bar hasn’t been set high. Again, I know it’s probably irritating for me to keep saying, visit the schools. But what you aren’t accounting for, I think, is the resistance of the raw material into being made into a useful product. I would expect a high level of success in the first three grades or so. But as the kids get older, they won’t even go through the motions of trying to learn.
I clearly should have limited my claim to public employees being prohibited from collective bargaining. I’m still working on a list, but obviously, I’m not going to find a list for private employees.
NDC said:
“Some folks think that school choice would allow the freedom to focus on what expectations a community wanted. Sometimes I wonder that too. But then I also think about the number of people who make terrible decision for their kids, and I’m not interested as a tax payer in subsidizing what they would choose.”
But you’re OK with subsidizing the schools that almost almost uniformly make terrible decisions that affect the kids?
Parents on average are more interested in the welfare of their kids than others. That much seems inarguable - let them choose.
As a teacher in North Carolina, I can assure you that we have no collective bargaining rights. I am not a fan of unions, but if one examines salaries studies that focus on public sector jobs versus the private sector, one finds that North Carolina ranks toward the bottom of all states in terms of comparable public employee salaries.
This website discusses briefly North Carolina’s public employees’ lack of collective bargaining power:
http://southernstudies.org/facingsouth/2005/11/world-is-watching-north-carolina.asp
http://mb2.ecs.org/reports/Report.aspx?id=173
Now, we can debate about whether not having a law that allows is the same as prohibiting, but it gives an overview.
You can look up the states yourself to review; I’ll throw that burden back on you.
So far though, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Georgia, South Caroline, North Carolina are states that jump out at me that ought to doing a lot better if teacher unions are a dominant reason that schools are failing.
> Oh, yeah, they’ve got the per pupil expenditure, but
> very little of it makes it to the classroom.
Public School Advocates keep making these comments, but never provide any meaningful proof. Nationwide, 85% of Public School Budgets are consumed by Staff Salaries and budgets. Last year, the total funding for Public School (from all sources) was almost $1T-typically 7.5% of GDP! Oh, and this number does not include retirement benefits, which can being in 40-80% of another lifetime’s salary for education industry retirees. Is that money that isn’t getting into the classroom?
> very little of it makes it to the classroom.
Used as frequently as this idea is, it is little more than a “sound-byte” intended for consumption by the “true believers” and is meaningless to everyone else.
>visit the schools.
This actually a good idea. Parent/teacher walk-thrus of the sites with maintenance deficiency check-sheets would produce quite a inventory of problems which could be presented to the elected school boards. (Of course, the School Boards should be taking these walk-thrus at least once a year themselves.) If the buildings, grounds and infrastructure is poorly maintained, visual inspection by the parents, and description of the problems by the teachers, will produce a difficult-to-deny list of problems that the School Boards will have to deal with. Parents would be able to ask teachers to produce the work-order requests they have made for problems determined in their class-rooms. If the teachers have not made work-order requests, the parents will be able to ask: “why not?”
Wayne,
Have you been to a school recently? Seriously, GO! Look at several from areas where parent walk-throughs are likely and those where they are practically unheard of. Compare and contrast. Visit central offices: compare and contrast. Request information that should be available but not prepared in advance. You’ll quickly some some differences between schools and districts which will go along way to predict which school are likely to be functional and which aren’t. The amount of money going in divided by number of students isn’t going to be a good predictor of quality at all.
In the “bad” schools, often teacher classrooms are the only safe, functional places in the building because teachers do take responsibility for them. Is it your expectation that they take responsibility for the rest of the building as well? They should scrub the student bathrooms and repair the roof? Or daily take time to turn in paper work about someone’s failure to do so and retain a copy to prove that they requested it, even though requests in the past never yielded any progress? (Not to mention that fact that it IS in fact someone else’s job to manage the custodial and maintenance staff: not that I’m giving a ‘it’s not in my job description” response, but why are you not finding fault with the people whose job it is to do these things? Why are you trying to hold teachers responsible for the physical plant?)
Is it your understanding that individual teachers can request to turn retirement benefits into textbooks or do you expect that they would buy textbooks out of their take home pay? If it is, then say so, but I don’t think that’s what most people think they are getting when they allocate money for teacher salaries.
This particularly refrain is so common because it’s grounded in a pretty visible, hard-to-deny reality from those who spend time in inner city schools. Go in and visit. See what evidence of adequate funding you can find.
I totally agree that public schools are wasting money and that there’s gross mismanagement; but that mismanagement isn’t often happening at the teacher and classroom level. Pouring money in without directing where it goes doesn’t help the students get what they need.
But what you aren’t accounting for, I think, is the resistance of the raw material into being made into a useful product. I would expect a high level of success in the first three grades or so. But as the kids get older, they won’t even go through the motions of trying to learn.
I’d argue that the it is the poor instruction that causes the resistance to future learning, rather than the material.
Academic success breeds academic engagement, whereas academic failure fosters disengagement. It is the unerperforming student that receives a constant stream of negative feedback with respect to his performance. Your typical child cannot tolerate much of this at all. Rather than look foolish in front of their peers, most kids would choose to act up and/or disenageg from school.
Mopst students will go through the motions of learning if they are in fact learning even as the get older. The problem is that most of them are not learning from very early on. And, the reason most are not learning is due mostly to poor instruction.
KDeRosa: I think I have a dimmer view of human nature than you do. I agree that instructional methods should be improved, but I believe that there are other factors that contribute to the problems. We’ve got some problems culturally that really contribute as well.
In places where parents value educational success, you see successful students and successful schools. In places where most parents don’t seem to or don’t seem to understand how to communicate this value day to day, the schools are dysfunctional.
I’d like to see general public school reform. I think common, functional public schools are good for the country. I don’t want to hold kids hostage in bad schools, but I don’t know how much school choice will yield a overall gain for society.
(and that’s what I want from my tax dollars: a gain for society. If there’s no expectation of benefit for all of us, I’m not interested in paying for it. If we can’t make public schools work, then let’s quit having them. People with kids in school can get a big tax credit for tuition costs. Charities can set up scholarships for poor kids. Business and industry can fund their own schools to attract present employee and train the next generation.)
Is there any present endeavor of government where we take this “tax the general public and redistribute to (even high earning) individuals to decide how to spend it” model that school choice seems to represent?
> Have you been to a school recently?
Yes. I have been on an invited walk-thru not too long ago.
> Look at several from areas where parent
> walk-throughs are likely and those where
> they are practically unheard of.
I would guess that parent/teacher walk-thrus are not practiced by most school districts. But that leads to the question—why not? What do the school districts not want parents to know, and why are teachers (and their Unions) not jumping up and down demanding that the school districts schedule these very simple information gathering exercises?
> Compare and contrast.
“Contrast” is implied by “Compare”.
> Request information that should be available
> but not prepared in advance.
In California, we have a Public Records Act. I use it frequently. My school district has responded most of the time, although typically not in the 10-day response period mandated in the law. Unfortunately, there are no teeth in this law, so one must wait until the District gets around to answering the request. On occasion, I have used the local newspapers to let the public know that the District has not been responsive on politically “hot” information requests.
> You’ll quickly some some differences between schools
> and districts which will go along way to predict which
> school are likely to be functional and which aren’t.
> The amount of money going in divided by number of
> students isn’t going to be a good predictor of quality at all.
Interesting. Guess that’s why so many of us are saying: “NO MORE MONEY” for the Public Schools!
> In the “bad” schools, often teacher classrooms are the
> only safe, functional places in the building because
> teachers do take responsibility for them. Is it your expectation
> that they take responsibility for the rest of the building as well?
Yes, I do! This school, its fitness to serve the public’s children, requires the teamwork of all the teaching and non-teaching staff. With the eyes of the teaching staff wide open, making maintenance requests for any/all areas within the school that need improvement, then the information needed by the maintenance team, and the principal, will be more timely and doubtless of better quality than if left to just the maintenance staff alone (which might be an team that sweeps thru the school at night).
> They should scrub the student bathrooms and repair the roof?
No, of course not. But I do think that if they see a leak, they should be required to make a work order as quickly as possible.
> Or daily take time to turn in paper work about someone’s
> failure to do so and retain a copy to prove that they requested it,
> even though requests in the past never yielded any progress?
Yes, of course. That’s how systems utilizing a distributed-responsibility model work. I recognize that not every work order gets done. This is where the Principal gets in the act. The Department heads would periodically ask for copies of work orders which are outstanding, and these would be presented to the Principal who would then take the matter up with the District-wide Maintenance department and the District Superintendent. Over time, these work orders will get filled. If not, then the Teachers’ Union would want to get involved, making this an issue for the school board. For those states where Unions are not present, then PTAs would be the right place to start the “agitation” which would end at the School Board, and the next School Board election.
Oh, in this day and age, there simply is no reason that a WEB-based maintenance request capability be available. There really is no reason for teachers to have to keep copies of anything around when they could print them off the WEB-site if needed.
> Not to mention that fact that it IS in fact someone else’s job
> to manage the custodial and maintenance staff: not that I’m
> giving a ‘it’s not in my job description” response, but why are
> you not finding fault with the people whose job it is to do
> these things? Why are you trying to hold teachers responsible
> for the physical plant?)
Agreed, it is someone else’s job. But if it’s not getting done, then whose job is it to report that fact? There needs to be adequate checks-and-balances in any system. In order for checks-and-balances to work, someone has to step up to the line and say—“the job isn’t getting done”. This is not a terribly difficult thing to do—it just requires a certain amount of courage and motivation to work in a building that doesn’t have a leaky roof.
> Is it your understanding that individual teachers can
> request to turn retirement benefits into textbooks or
> do you expect that they would buy textbooks out of
> their take home pay?
No, but this response totally misses the point. We constantly hear the “whine and wail” that teachers are underpaid, or that schools are under-funded. Teachers are paid “W” dollars over a (roughly) 30 year period for working, and then they get “R” dollars for retirement “benefits” for (roughly) another 30 years. The Total Lifetime Compensation then is the sum of the two: TLC=W+R.
These days, the R-dollars are significantly close to the W-dollars, making the total compensation for teaching about 1.5W These are dollars spent on education that do not directly appear in this month’s pay checks, but will appear in the future—as deferred income. For teachers who think that “dollars in the classroom” is a soundbyte for higher salaries, the need to consider the deferred income as well as their working income. Given their direct and indirect incomes, teaching positions are far more lucrative than most teachers, or their Unions, are willing to admit in public.
> This particularly refrain is so common because it’s grounded in a
> pretty visible, hard-to-deny reality from those who spend time in
> inner city schools. Go in and visit. See what evidence of
> adequate funding you can find.
This is a pretty heady challenge and probably a task that most people have no time to do. On the other hand, we are heavily taxed to pay the salaries of people like yourself who could easily (or thru the Labor Unions which seem to be very absent on this matter) provide the necessary documentation.
> Pouring money in without directing where it goes doesn’t
> help the students get what they need.
And for those students who are not learning to read in US classrooms, what is it that they need that they are not getting?
I read a story once where you start eduators off as administrators and staff, and promote only the best into the classroom as teachers. Kinda like Major league baseball where the heavy hitters make more than the towel boys.
To me compare is looking for similarities and contrast for differences, but thanks for the style tip.
How could I easily provide the necessary documentation? What are you talking about? I don’t currently work in the inner city; I don’t even work in a state with influential unions.
I’m not asking for higher teacher salaries although I do think that the quickest way to improve teacher quality would be to make the jobs so desirable that the supply of applicants could allow schools to be more selective.
(Yes, I know that conventional wisdom is that “unions” that essentially have no power in my state are supposed to somehow keep this from actually happening through their magical powers of destruction.)
I agree that teaching retirement benefits are some of the best around, and I think depending on how much “saving of social security” the Boomers pull off, the fixed benefits and pensions of teaching alone may help provide that supply of teaching applicants.
But none of these things related to teacher salaries and retirement produce books in the classroom or paper or photocopies or technology.
When I was mentioning seeing evidence of adequate funding, or maybe more appropriately lack of evidence, I mean the teachers don’t have enough books to issue one to each student or have such a limited supply of rationed photo-copies that they can’t make the handouts they would logically need (no, I don’t mean endless worksheets; I mean valid instructional supplements.) The kids don’t/won’t show up with pencils and paper.
I think the kids who aren’t learning to read are missing a lot of things. Some of what they are missing are teachers who have been taught the best instructional techniques and districts that supply materials related to those techniques. But let’s imagine that we have a first grade teacher who wants to use DI or a phonics based program. How in whole would such a teacher get additional training and materials that he or she would need to teach at a school where they rotate class sets of whole language crap?
But I’m not sure that the number of students not learning to read is nearly as high as would be believed.
Do you see the level of bureaucracy you are advocating? And do you see the number of things that you feel should be present, like web based maintenance requests, that probably aren’t?
Everybody look at some of the estimates of US adult literacy. Google it, whatever. Where are we getting the idea that the US student are learning to read?
Sure, school could be better. We could teach reading more effectively.
Our math performance compared to other nations is a little scary, sure.
I’m really not saying that everything in public ed is good enough, but we don’t really seem to be in a illiteracy crisis.
That should read, “where are we getting the idea that US students are NOT learning to read?” I can see where you might get the idea that US students aren’t learning to type or proofread.
NDC,
Take a look at something like TIMSS. If those results are OK with you, I doubt we can find a common starting point. I happen to think that they are horrifying on their face. When you factor in the obscene amounts of money that are spent to feed this inefficient, corrupt, monopolistic system, it’s no longer just horrifying; it’s catastrophic.
> But none of these things related to teacher salaries
> and retirement produce books in the classroom or
> paper or photocopies or technology.
Yes the do. Let’s go over the details again. Salary and Benefits of school employees consume 85% of the operating funds of every school district in the US. All of the other expenditures for other items, such as books, come from the remaining 15%. Let’s suppose that there was a salary and wage pull-back, by 1-2%. What would that mean in terms of books for the class rooms? Well, 1% of $100M is $1M. So, for every 1% of salary/benefit expense reduction that can be achieved by school districts, that money can be applied to other pressing needs—such as books. A million dollars will buy a lot of books.
As to retirement costs affecting local school districts, this becomes a state-based issue. Here in California, the school districts are the employer of record, so the costs of retirement must be borne by the employers (ultimately). The CALSTRs program (which manages teacher retirement money matters) from time-to-time runs into troubles which require the Districts to make monetary payments into the fund to cover outlay/income mismatches. During those years, retiree benefits do detract from the dollars available to school districts.
> When I was mentioning seeing evidence of adequate funding,
> or maybe more appropriately lack of evidence, I mean the teachers
> don’t have enough books to issue one to each student or have such
> a limited supply of rationed photo-copies that they can’t make the
> handouts they would logically need (no, I don’t mean endless
> worksheets;
> I mean valid instructional supplements.) The kids don’t/won’t show
> up with pencils and paper.
We hear this from time-to-time, but how frequently this occurs is never offered in evidence. With the coming of e-books, there really ought to soon come a time that every student should have access to instructional materials that are either print-based, or digital (DVD or WEB-based).
By the way, you mention photo-copies (not certain what “rationed” means). I think that if I were a teacher, I’d find some way to get the necessary material photocopied. There is always some way to work around the system if you are motivated enough to see results from your work.
> I think the kids who aren’t learning to read are missing a lot of things.
> Some of what they are missing are teachers who have been taught
> the best instructional techniques and districts that supply materials
> related to those techniques.
I learned to read in Kindergarten. The teacher was a retired school teacher who ran a small kindergarten in her home to supplement her retirement income (and probably because she loved teaching.) I remember her using a easel, with large cards–each having a character of the alphabet and objects which start with that letter. (For instance – A with an apple, airplane, etc.) We used pencils and paper, and maybe a “Dick and Jane” Reader, but I don’t remember for certain. Unfortunately, I don’t remember what materials we used in first and second grade, other than the blackboard and a lot of chalk. So, what has changed since I was a child that makes this approach invalid?
> Do you see the level of bureaucracy you are advocating?
Well, there is some additional attention needed to increase the response to maintenance issues. However, this would best be done by outsourcing to the private sector. For the most part, I ‘m talking about reorganization, with the Principals being expected to “run their schools properly, or dust off their resumes”. In California, the Legislature has frustrated this goal by outlawing outsourcing school maintenance functions—mandating that more expensive, less effective Union labor be used by School Districts.
And do you see the number of things that you feel
should be present, like web based maintenance requests,
that probably aren’t?
Yes .. but again there are really simple solutions here. There is no reason that the State Departments of Education shouldn’t take the lead here, and define a specification for a set of NET-based functions that schools need performed. Once a Spec has been created, then fund a team to design and code these functions, making the materials available to the state’s school districts for free, or minimal charge-backs to the districts to pay for the development of these systems. Yes, this takes a little vision, and leadership. Maybe we won’t find that in the Public Educations System, but it can be found in the Private Sector.
Nope, the TIMSS results are not okay with me, but they aren’t about reading, are they? (I’m being sincere; they don’t contain measures of reading do they?) I was responding mainly to Mr. Martin’s comment about what the kids who weren’t learning to read needed. Science and math ed. may be in crisis; I agree.
Despite your experience, Wayne Martin, I think generally books are needed for school. (Someday, they may be replaced by other instructional technology, but that day hasn’t arrived and might never arrive in the inner city.)
My experience and the experience of others indicates that waste is leading people to not have the teaching materials they need in the inner city schools. For you, teachers salaries are an area of waste; for me, I’d look to mismanagement of other funds. Out of the same tax pool, we could pay for both teachers and books if the money were used well.
At many schools teachers are given a certain number of copies to use of the year. Some places it’s a generous number; some places a reasonable number; others a completely insufficient number. Teachers usually do figure out a way to get the copies made; sometimes paying for them themselves at Staples or whatever. But my point is that a classroom based instructional need isn’t being met by the school district in a lot of inner city schools.
I think I’d cut personnel at the district office and never pay another outside consultant or staff development presenter to visit the district again.
Wayne Martin, what are you excluding when you list expenses other than operational ones?
What expenses are left to by paid by operational funds?
Wayne Martin, if you could figure out a way to get the Los Angeles Unified School District to enable teachers to make direct requests for maintenance and materials with a few clicks of the computer (and whatever authorizations from whoever), then I think you might deserve the nobel peace prize….
It took decades for LAUSD to finally stop requiring athletic directors to fill out a triplicate legal-sized form just to order a SINGLE bus for a single team going to a single game. Now — thanks, by the way, to the efforts of a teacher and AD, we put the bus requests for entire season on one spread sheet and fax it to the IAC office who fax it to the transportation office.
If you want to cut salaries please start with all the teachers who are not teaching, those not even working in a classroom. Some of them perform useful functions — which actually support what happens in the classroom — but many do not and some of them actually have a deleterious effect on classroom instruction. I think that is an excellent place to start in cutting that 85% of which you speak.
In the Atlanta Public Schools, there are 6,536 employees: only 3,465 of them are teachers. Does that seem right to you?
Certainly, teacher salaries might make up a lot of the instructional budget, but I’m guesses there are some positions that could be cut to shift more money to instruction.
Look at the positions available in DC.
http://www.k12.dc.us/dcps/opportunities/vacancy_listing.htm
The regular teaching positions apparently wouldn’t be advertised on this page. The district serves 65,000 + kids.
Doesn’t it look a little administration heavy, especially considering these are just the vacant positions.
My observations about employment are to point out places that things could be cut to find more instructional funding.
> in about half of the states because the unions don’t have the power, the percentage membership, any influence in employment decisions.
Oh really?
Let’s compare the list of teacher union recommended candidates for school boards and state offices in the last election with the list of folks who got elected.
There’s nothing wrong with teachers being politically active, but it’s dishonest to deny that that political activity has given teachers’ unions a large measure of control.
My antipathy towards labor unions stems from a short stint in the steel industry. I was hired to work on a rolling mill automation program in my youth. One of my first tasks was to do some research for the home office to determine the overstaffing of the mill. In the 40s, 50s and 60s, labor unions would engage in long, exhausting strikes that might run as long as four months, and which were very violent. Steel mills are incredibly complicated “beasts” which are very low-tech, but none-the-less are very temperamental. This means that steel mills can not be shut down and started up like a light bulb, but must be kept running–or very expensive rehab work will be required to reopen a mill that has been shut down. This meant that management was able to run the mill for significant periods of time without Union labor. When the employee-per-rolled-ton-of-steel was compared between the two groups of mill operators, it turned out that the size of the Union labor force was about 30% higher than the non-Union force. Over time, the Mill was shut down, and about 20,000 people lost their jobs. This overstaffing is where a lot of the money in Union-infected industries goes.
The point of this story is to reinforce that fact that Unions control the number of workers who eventually are hired, set the labor productivity levels, and eventually the profit levels in the private sector. In the public sector, the lack of competition means that badly-run governments don’t go out of business, they just become more expensive.
Look at the NDC example for Atlanta: 53% of the employees are in the classroom. OK .. this is evidence to back up the grousing about “dollars in the classroom”. (This is close to the 55% here in California, by the way.) Some of these people are doubtless needed to actually run the schools, but clearly there is a lot of money being spent in “Administration” and non-teaching staff. Why? Are there routine audits of the system by outside Auditors who have the acumen in traditional and non-traditional organizational structures to recognize Union over-staffing? If not, why not?
The LAUSD example is a clear example of the need for organizational audits and re-organization that would result in smaller organizations that are more IT-centric in the future. I commiserate with those teachers who are up to their necks in “the stuff”, but I am somewhat amazed that most seem willing to accept their fates rather than do something to correct the situations. (And yes, the LAUSD is too, too large and needs to be reorganized, and probably s