TEACHERS UNIONS & POLITICIANS HAVE DESTROYED US EDUCATION SYSTEM

There are many excellent teachers in the U.S. There also many average or below average teachers. The teachers unions throughout the country don’t care whether their members are good or bad teachers. As long as they pay their dues, the union will do anything they can to keep anyone from making schools better. Teachers unions only care about teachers, not about educating our children. On top of being responsible for the decline in American education, these teachers are bankrupting our states and localities with their ridiculous healthcare and pension benefits. I judge people by the results of their actions. The teachers unions across the country have failed our children miserably. The results speak for themselves.

The Failure of American Schools

Who better to lead an educational revolution than Joel Klein, the prosecutor who took on the software giant Microsoft? But in his eight years as chancellor of New York City’s school system, the nation’s largest, Klein learned a few painful lessons of his own—about feckless politicians, recalcitrant unions, mediocre teachers, and other enduring obstacles to school reform. 

By Joel Klein

Above: Joel Klein in Brooklyn on the first day of school, two months before he resigned as chancellor
Image credit: Ramin Talaie/Corbis
 

Three years ago, in a New York Times article detailing her bid to become head of the American Federation of Teachers union, Randi Weingarten boasted that despite my calls for “radical reform” to New York City’s school system, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and I had achieved only “incremental” change. It seemed like a strange thing to crow about, but she did have something of a point. New York over the past nine years has experienced what Robert Schwartz, the academic dean of Harvard’s education school, has described as “the most dramatic and thoughtful set of large-scale reforms going on anywhere in the country,” resulting in gains such as a nearly 20-point jump in graduation rates. But the city’s school system is still not remotely where it needs to be. 

That story holds more than true for the country at large. Nearly three decades after A Nation at Risk, the groundbreaking report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, warned of “a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people,” the gains we have made in improving our schools are negligible—even though we have doubled our spending (in inflation-adjusted dollars) on K–12 public education. On America’s latest exams (the National Assessment of Educational Progress), one-third or fewer of eighth-grade students were proficient in math, science, or reading. Our high-school graduation rate continues to hover just shy of 70 percent, according to a 2010 report by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, and many of those students who do graduate aren’t prepared for college. ACT, the respected national organization that administers college-admissions tests, recently found that 76 percent of our high-school graduates “were not adequately prepared academically for first-year college courses.” 


Video: Joel Klein explains the twisted politics of New York education in a conversation with Atlantic editor James Bennet 


 

While America’s students are stuck in a ditch, the rest of the world is moving ahead. The World Economic Forum ranks us 48th in math and science education. On international math tests, the United States is near the bottom of industrialized countries (the 34 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), and we’re in the middle in science and reading. Similarly, although we used to have one of the top percentages of high-school and college graduates among the OECD countries, we’re now in the basement for high-school and the middle for college graduates. And these figures don’t take into account the leaps in educational attainment in China, Singapore, and many developing countries. 

During the first three-quarters of the 20th century, America developed an enormously successful middle class, first by making high school universal, and then, after the Second World War, by making college much more available, through the GI Bill and other scholarship programs. As a result, our educational attainment kept pace with our strong technological advancement. But that’s changed markedly since 1980, and now our technological progress is advancing more rapidly than our educational attainment. From 1960 to 1980, our supply of college graduates increased at almost 4 percent a year; since then, the increase has been about half as fast. The net effect is that we’re rapidly moving toward two Americas—a wealthy elite, and an increasingly large underclass that lacks the skills to succeed. 

This division tears at the very fabric of our society. Nevertheless, there’s little national urgency to fix its underlying causes. Unlike a bad economy, poor educational achievement creeps up on us. Right now, if you were running for office, would you be more concerned with unemployment or education? Also, unlike terrorism, an educational crisis has a different impact on the powerful than it does on most of society. Their children, who are in private schools or elite public schools, receive a decent education, so it’s hard to get them fully engaged in the broader national debate. Plus, unlike in health care, for example, where we perceive the quality of care to be good and worry instead about controlling costs and covering the uninsured, in education, despite massive increases in expenditure, we don’t see improved results. That leads too many people to suspect that poverty is destiny, that schools can make only a small difference, and that therefore we’re unable to fix this problem, regardless of its seriousness. So why try? 

If the forces behind reform seem scattered and weak, those defending the status quo—the unions, the politicians, the bureaucrats, and the vendors—are well organized and well financed. Having spent eight years trying to ignite a revolution in New York City’s schools under Bloomberg’s leadership, I am convinced that without a major realignment of political forces, we won’t get the dramatic improvements our children need. 

To comprehend the depth of the problem, consider one episode that still shocks me. Starting in 2006, under federal law, the State of New York was required to test students in grades three through eight annually in math and English. The results of those tests would enable us, for the first time, to analyze year-to-year student progress and tie it to individual teacher performance—a metric known in the field as “teacher value-added.” In essence, you hold constant other factors—where the students start from the prior year, demographics, class size, teacher length of service, and so on—and, based on test results, seek to isolate the individual teacher’s contribution to a student’s progress. Some teachers, for example, move their class forward on average a quarter-year more than expected; others, a quarter-year less. Value-added isn’t a perfect metric, but it’s surely worth considering as part of an overall teacher evaluation. 

After we developed data from this metric, we decided to factor them into the granting of tenure, an award that is made after three years and that provides virtual lifetime job security. Under state law at the time, we were free to use these data. But after the New York City teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers, objected, I proposed that the City use value-added numbers only for the top and bottom 20 percent of teachers: the top 20 percent would get positive credit; the bottom would lose credit. And even then, principals would take value-added data into account only as part of a much larger, comprehensive tenure review. Even with these limitations, the UFT said “No way,” and headed to Albany to set up a legislative roadblock. 

Seemingly overnight, a budget amendment barring the use of test data in tenure decisions materialized in the heavily Democratic State Assembly. Joe Bruno, then the Republican majority leader in the State Senate, assured me that this amendment would not pass: he controlled the majority and would make sure that it remained united in opposition. Fast-forward a few weeks: the next call I got from Senator Bruno was to say, apologetically, that several of his Republican colleagues had caved to the teachers union, which had threatened reprisals in the next election if they didn’t get on board. 

As a result, even when making a lifetime tenure commitment, under New York law you could not consider a teacher’s impact on student learning. That Kafkaesque outcome demonstrates precisely the way the system is run: for the adults. The school system doesn’t want to change, because it serves the needs of the adult stakeholders quite well, both politically and financially. 

Let’s start with the politicians. From their point of view, the school system can be enormously helpful, providing patronage hires, school-placement opportunities for connected constituents, the means to get favored community and business programs adopted and funded, and politically advantageous ties to schools and parents in their communities. 

During my maiden testimony before the State Assembly, I said that we would end patronage hires, which were notorious under the old system of 32 school districts, run by 32 school boards and 32 superintendents (a 2002 state bill granting Bloomberg mayoral control of the city’s schools abolished the 32 boards). At my mention of patronage, the legislators, like Captain Renault in Casablanca, purported to be “shocked.” Nevertheless, after the hearing, when I went to thank committee members, one took me aside and said: “Listen, they’re trying to get rid of a principal in my district who runs a Democratic club for us. If you protect him, you’ll never have a problem with me.” This kind of encounter was not rare. 

Similarly, I faced repeated requests for “constituent services,” meaning good school placements for wired constituents. After we reorganized the system and minimized the power of the 32 local superintendents—the go-to people for politicians under the past regime—a local official called me and asked, “Whom do I call for constituent services after your reorg?” I replied, “What’s that?” Impatiently, he asked, “How do I get a kid into a school when I need to?” I jokingly answered, “Oh, we must have left out that office in the reorg” (actually thinking, silly me, that the school system should use equitable rules for admission). He said, “Go fuck yourself,” and hung up. Despite our constant efforts, or because of them, this kind of political pressure—and payback if we weren’t responsive—happened at every level. Even more important, politicians can reap enormous political support from the unions representing school employees. The two national unions—the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association—together have some 4.7 million members, who pay hundreds of millions of dollars in national, state, and local dues, much of which is funneled to political causes. Teachers unions consistently rank among the top spenders on politics. 

Moreover, millions of union members turn out when summoned, going door-to-door, staffing phone banks, attending rallies, and the like. Teachers are extremely effective messengers to parents, community groups, faith-based groups, and elected officials, and the unions know how to deploy them well. And just as happy unions can give a politician massive clout, unhappy unions—well, just ask Eva Moskowitz, a Democrat who headed the City Council Education Committee when I became chancellor in 2002. Brilliant, savvy, ambitious, often a pain in my neck, and atypically fearless for an elected official, she was widely expected to be elected Manhattan borough president in 2005. Until, that is, she held hearings on the New York City teachers-union contract—an extraordinary document, running on for hundreds of pages, governing who can teach what and when, who can be assigned to hall-monitor or lunchroom duty and who can’t, who has to be given time off to do union work during the school day, and so on. Truth is, the contract defied parody. So when Moskowitz exposed its ridiculousness, the UFT, then headed by Randi Weingarten, made sure that Moskowitz’s run for borough president came up short. After that, other elected officials would say to me, “I agree with you, but I ain’t gonna get Eva’d.” 

In short, politicians—especially Democratic politicians—generally do what the unions want. And the unions, in turn, are very clear about what that is. They want, first, happy members, so that those who run the unions get reelected; and, second, more members, so their power, money, and influence grow. As Albert Shanker, the late, iconic head of the UFT, once pointedly put it, “When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of schoolchildren.” And what do the members want? Employees understandably want lifetime job security (tenure), better pay regardless of performance (seniority pay), less work (short days, long holidays, lots of sick days), and the opportunity to retire early (at, say, 55) with a good lifetime pension and full health benefits; for their part, the retirees want to make sure their benefits keep coming and grow through cost-of-living increases. The result: whether you work hard or don’t, get good results with kids or don’t, teach in a shortage area like math or special education or don’t, or in a hard-to-staff school in a poor community or not, you get paid the same, unless you’ve been around for another year, in which case you get more. Not bad for the adults. 

But it’s just disastrous for the kids in our schools. While out-of-school environment certainly affects student achievement, President Obama was on to something in 2008 when he said: “The single most important factor in determining [student] achievement is not the color of [students’] skin or where they come from. It’s not who their parents are or how much money they have. It’s who their teacher is.” Yet, rather than create a system that attracts and rewards excellent teachers—and that imposes consequences for ineffective or lazy ones—we treat all teachers as if they were identical widgets and their performance didn’t matter. 

In fact, notwithstanding union rhetoric that “tenure is merely due process,” firing a public-school teacher for non-performance is virtually impossible. In New York City, which has some 55,000 tenured teachers, we were able to fire only half a dozen or so for incompetence in a given year, even though we devoted significant resources to this effort. 

The extent of this “no one gets fired” mentality is difficult to overstate—or even adequately describe. Steven Brill wrote an eye-opening piece in The New Yorker about the “rubber rooms” in New York City, where teachers were kept, while doing no work, pending resolution of the charges against them—mostly for malfeasance, like physical abuse or embezzlement, but also for incompetence. The teachers got paid regardless. (To add insult to injury, these cases ultimately were heard by an arbitrator whom the union had to first approve.) Before we stopped this charade—unfortunately by returning many of these teachers to the classroom, as the arbitrators likely would have required—it used to cost the City about $35 million a year. 

In addition, more than 1,000 teachers get full pay while performing substitute-teacher and administrative duties because no principal wants to hire them full-time. This practice costs more than $100 million annually. 

Perhaps the most shocking example of the City’s having to pay for teachers who don’t work involves several teachers accused of sexual misconduct—including at least one who was found guilty—whom the union-approved arbitrators refuse to terminate. Although the City is required to put them back in the classroom, it understandably refuses to do so. And the union has never sued the City to have these teachers reinstated, even though it knows it could readily win. It has also never helped figure out how to get these deadbeats off the payroll, where they may remain for decades at full pay, followed by a lifetime pension. No one—and the union means no one—gets fired. 

Next, consider the consequences of the ubiquitous practice of paying the same for math and physical-education teachers. Given the other job opportunities for talented mathematicians—but not for phys-ed teachers—the same salary will attract many more of the latter than the former. It’s simple supply and demand. But when you’re short of qualified math teachers—as virtually every major urban school district is—poor kids with the greatest needs invariably get cheated, because most teachers prefer to teach highly motivated kids who live in safe communities, and whose parents will contribute private money to the school. The result: too few effective math and science teachers in high-poverty schools. 

Finally, coming on top of these other senseless policies is the remarkable way that benefits and seniority drive overall teacher compensation. It’s possible for a teacher in New York City to retire at 55 and draw down an annual pension of more than $60,000, plus lifetime health benefits for herself and her family. The pension is not subject to New York State or local taxes and goes up with cost-of-living increases. The huge value of this lifetime stream of benefits is rarely mentioned when we talk about teachers’ compensation, but the teachers are well aware of it and act rationally in response to it. What we end up with is both a form of lock-in for employees and an enormous long-term financial exposure for the taxpayers. 

The impact of the lock-in shapes the entire compensation system, because the “big” money comes only after a certain number of years—in New York City, for example, many teachers get their full pension after working 25 years, and a far smaller pension if they work for only 24 years. As a result of backloaded policies like this, after 10 years fewer than 1 percent of teachers leave the system, and after 15 years only about 0.1 percent leave. Many have candidly told me they are burned out, but they can’t afford to leave until their pension fully vests. So they go through the motions until they can retire with the total package. 

Aggravating the perverse incentive of the benefit lock-in is the nature of almost all pay increases in public education, which are either automatic if you stay another year or so, or take 30 college credits; or across-the-board percentage raises—for example, 10 percent over three years, meaning that every veteran teacher making $80,000 gets an $8,000 increase, while every beginning teacher making $40,000 gets a $4,000 increase. 

None of these pay increases makes sense. Why pay someone more for simply working another year or for taking a few courses? Starting last year, Mayor Bloomberg refused to give teachers in New York a raise, because he was facing budget cuts. But the overall pay for teachers still went up nearly 3.5 percent automatically, simply for longevity and college credits. (According to a Department of Education internal analysis, the average NYC teacher works fewer than seven hours a day for 185 days and costs the city $110,000—$71,000 in salary, $23,000 in pensions, and $16,000 in health and other benefits.) And why give all teachers making $80,000, or more, a 10 percent raise? They’re not going to leave, since they’re close to vesting their lifetime pensions. By contrast, increasing starting salaries by $8,000 (rather than $4,000) would help attract and retain better new teachers. But because of seniority, we can’t do it that way. 

Now consider the financial burden that comes with providing lifetime benefits. Given the time between first putting aside the money to fund such a “long-tail exposure” and having to begin paying it, the amount “reserved” by the employer necessarily depends on a host of imprecise assumptions—about the rate of return that the money invested in the pension fund will earn, about how long employees will live, and even about how much overtime employees will work during their last few years, which is normally included in calculations of the amount of the pension. Each dollar set aside this year to cover the ultimate pension exposure must be taken from what would otherwise be current operating dollars. 

Consequently, elected officials have had every incentive to make extraordinarily optimistic assumptions about the pension plan—or to simply underfund it—so they can put as little as possible into the reserve. Unfortunately, but predictably, that’s exactly what has happened: most states “assumed” they would get an average 8 percent return on their pension reserves, when in fact they were getting significantly less. Over the past 10 years, for example, New York City’s pension funds earned an average of just 2.5 percent. Now virtually every pension plan in America that covers teachers has huge unfunded liabilities. A recent study by the Manhattan Institute estimated the total current shortfall at close to $1 trillion. There’s only one way to pay for that: take the money from current and future operating budgets, robbing today’s children to pay tomorrow’s pensions. In NYC, for example, the portion of the overall budget set aside for education pensions went from $455 million in 2002 to $2.6 billion in 2011, most of it for teachers. Not surprisingly, retirees remain politically vigilant, and vote at much higher levels than active teachers in union elections (50 percent versus 24 percent in New York’s last UFT election). 

During my tenure, I fought to break this institutional stranglehold of defenders of the status quo. I did so because I believed that our kids are not getting the education they deserve, that we have clear examples showing dramatically better results, and that we won’t achieve those results if we just keep tinkering. Since 2007, my colleague Michelle Rhee, in Washington, D.C., has been making the same noises. The response, often from friends as well as opponents, was that we were unrealistic: complex systems don’t change easily, impatience is immature, and directly challenging the educational establishment is not a winning strategy. “You need to be more collaborative and less controversial,” we were repeatedly admonished. 

That’s bad advice. Collaboration is the elixir of the status-quo crowd. Consider one of the most cherished mantras in public education today—“We’ll never fix education until we fix poverty.” This lets the school system off the hook: “We can’t do too much with these poor kids, so don’t blame us (but give us more money).” Sure, money, a stable family, and strong values typically make educating a child easier. But we also now know that, keeping those things constant, we can get dramatically different outcomes with the same kid, based on his or her education. Texas and California, for example, have very similar demographics. Nevertheless, even though Texas spends slightly less per pupil than does California, it outperforms California on all four national tests, across demographic groups. The gap is around a year’s worth of learning. That’s big. And the gaps are even bigger when we compare similar demographic groups in large urban districts. Low-income black students in Boston or New York, for example, are several years ahead of those in Detroit or Los Angeles on the national exams. 

At the individual school level, the differences can be breathtaking. One charter school in New York City, Harlem Success Academy 1, has students who are demographically almost identical to those attending nearby community and charter schools, yet it gets entirely different results. Harlem Success has 88 percent of its students proficient in reading and 95 percent in math; six other nearby schools have an average of 31 percent proficient in reading and 39 percent in math. And according to the most-recent scores on New York State fourth-grade science tests, Success had more than 90 percent of its students at the highest (advanced) level, while the city had only 43 percent at advanced, and Success’s black students outperformed white students at more than 700 schools across the state. In fact, Success now performs at the same level as the gifted-and-talented schools in New York City—all of which have demanding admissions requirements, while Success randomly selects its students, mostly poor and minority, by lottery. 

These school-level differences ultimately reflect the effectiveness of a child’s particular teachers. Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, has shown that, while some teachers get a year and a half’s worth of learning into a year, others get in only half a year’s worth of learning with essentially the same students. Imagine the cumulative impact of the best teachers over 13 years of elementary and secondary education. Indeed, even if California raised its performance to Texas’s level, Detroit to Boston’s, the neighborhood schools in Harlem to Harlem Success’s—that is to say, if our least effective teachers performed at the level of our most effective—the impact would be seismic. 

Critics are strangely eager to discredit these differences. Writing last year in The New York Review of Books, the educational historian Diane Ravitch argued that schools like Harlem Success aren’t the answer, because, as a group, charter schools in the U.S. don’t outperform public schools. To make her case, Ravitch relied on a study by Margaret Raymond at Stanford; but curiously, Ravitch failed to mention that Raymond applied precisely the same analysis to New York City (where the school district was atypically supportive of charters), and found that charter schools there were getting significantly better reading and math results with their students than were comparable traditional public schools. And even Ravitch had to acknowledge that some charter schools are getting “amazing results.” If that’s the case, then instead of relying on the kind of group-think that pits charter schools against non-charter schools, shouldn’t we be asking why some schools get much better results, and focus on how we can replicate them? 

Several recent developments offer some hope. In the past year, 42 states, as well as the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands, have agreed to adopt a new set of highly demanding core standards in English and math to replace the current state-by-state standards. The Obama administration has also granted two consortia of states $330 million to design tests aligned with these new standards. As a result, we’ll have a more realistic sense of how our kids are performing, we’ll be able to compare kids in one jurisdiction with those in another, and, most important, we’ll know that kids who graduate from high school will actually be prepared for college. 

But we still won’t get to where we need to go unless we’re prepared to do three difficult, but essential, things: rebuild our entire K–12 system on a platform of accountability; attract more top-flight recruits into teaching; and use technology very differently to improve instruction. 

Surprisingly enough, the best case for greater accountability was made by Albert Shanker, four years before he died, in his capacity as the leader of the American Federation of Teachers. In a truly remarkable speech to the 1993 Pew Forum on Education Reform, which I’ve never seen quoted by any teachers-union official since, Shanker said: 

The key is that unless there is accountability, we will never get the right system. 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.

 

Two points are critical here. First, Shanker makes clear that accountability needs to be measured by “student outcomes,” which he goes on to explain must be based on progress on standardized tests. And second, he calls out the fundamental truth about the system: because it’s not anchored to outcomes, it ends up being about “who has the power,” which can then be used to serve other agendas—such as better pay, political support, or vendor contracts. 

Accountability, in most industries or professions, usually takes two forms. First and foremost, markets impose accountability: if people don’t choose the goods or services you’re offering, you go out of business. Second, high-performing companies develop internal accountability requirements keyed to market-based demands. 

Public education lacks both kinds of accountability. It is essentially a government-run monopoly. Whether a school does well or poorly, it will get the students it needs to stay in business, because most kids have no other choice. And that, in turn, creates no incentive for better performance, greater efficiency, or more innovation—all things as necessary in public education as they are in any other field. 

A full-scale transition from a government-run monopoly to a competitive marketplace won’t happen quickly. But that is no reason not to begin introducing more competition. Many middle-class families have plenty of choice (even beyond private schools): they can move to another neighborhood, or are well-connected enough to navigate the system. Those families who are least powerful, however, usually get one choice: their neighborhood school. That has to change. 

In the lower grades, we should make sure that every student has at least one alternative—and preferably several—to her neighborhood school. We implemented this strategy by opening more than 100 charter schools in high-poverty communities. Tellingly, almost 40,000 families chose these new schools, and another 40,000 are on waiting lists. The traditional schools, as well as their employees and the unions, are screaming bloody murder, something vividly depicted in The Lottery, a recent documentary that shows community agitators brought in by the union to oppose giving public-school space to the Harlem Success network. But this kind of push-back is actually a good sign: it means that the monopolists are beginning to feel the effects of competition. 

At the middle- and high-school levels, where students are more mobile, we can also create community-based choice systems, or even citywide choice systems. In New York City, for example, high-school students now have citywide choice (with some geographic priority), and schools know they have to recruit—and compete for—students. 

To support effective choice, moreover, we need to provide real funding equity: the money must be for the child, not the school. So if Juan goes to PS 11, which gets $20,000 as a result, then that same $20,000 must go to a KIPP charter school if Juan decides to go there. Similarly, capital funds, or space within a school building, must also follow the child—either to PS 11 or to KIPP—on equitable terms. 

Unfortunately, the likelihood of rapidly expanding choices remains small. Witness, for example, those 40,000 families wait-listed for charter schools in New York City. By the time the City opens another 100 schools to meet that demand, at least another 40,000 families will likely be waiting. And now that the union and its allies have seen the smashing impact of the first 100 charter schools, they won’t make it any easier to open the next 100. 

That’s why internal accountability along the lines that Shanker discussed is critical. School districts need a system to fairly evaluate the effect of schools and teachers on kids, which is the best proxy we have for assessing “consumer preference” in a largely monopolistic system. Shanker also had the right idea about how to measure outcomes: by looking at student progress on apples-to-apples metrics, rather than at whether students do well or poorly against an absolute, static index. On a four-point scale, for example, a teacher deserves credit for moving a kid from a 1 to a 2 and should lose credit for letting another kid fall from a 4 to a 3, even though a 3 is better than a 2 in an absolute sense. Some kids come to school way ahead of others, and giving the school or teacher credit for that makes no sense. But if schools or teachers have essentially the same kids, with the same challenges, and the same starting performance levels, it’s pretty easy to measure which are helping the kids make progress and which aren’t. 

Finally, as Shanker emphasized, meaningful teacher accountability means major consequences for student outcomes. Those teachers and principals whose students do well should get substantial merit pay; those who don’t should be fired. Similarly, schools that do poorly should be replaced. Without real consequences tied to performance, the results won’t significantly change. Again, resistance to this kind of accountability is always fierce. In New York, we closed many large, overwhelmingly minority high schools that were posting abysmal graduation rates—some even below 40 percent—and replaced them with new, small high schools. Although research showed that the new schools were getting significantly better results, I wasn’t surprised when the teachers union sued us to block future closures—they want to protect their members. But I was shocked when the NAACP joined the suit. How could it defend schools that were consistently graduating fewer than half their African American children? 

Despite the setbacks, we are seeing progress. In response to President Obama’s $4.3 billion Race to the Top Fund, which requires states to compete for big federal grants, and rewards accountability systems that measure whether teachers add value, several states—including Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, New Mexico, and Ohio—have enacted legislation moving in this direction. Under Michelle Rhee’s leadership, Washington, D.C., adopted the best of these systems with the agreement of its local and national teachers unions, including the union headed by Randi Weingarten. The District was authorized to award substantial merit pay (resulting in salaries of up to $130,000) and to fire teachers who were not performing well. Rhee fired more than 200 of them. 

But although Weingarten’s union had agreed to the contract, it reportedly spent $1 million and mobilized huge numbers of volunteers to defeat Washington’s mayor, Adrian Fenty, when he was up for reelection two months later. That intervention surely sent a message to other reformers throughout the country: we unions talk reform, but firing incompetent teachers will never be a real part of that. 

The second big thing we need to change is the people we attract into teaching. When McKinsey and Company compared educational performance around the world, it came to the seemingly obvious, yet often disputed, conclusion that “the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers”: 

The top-performing school systems [internationally] attract more able people into the teaching profession, leading to better student outcomes … The top-performing systems we studied recruit their teachers from the top third of each cohort [that graduates] from their school system … Conversely, lower-performing school systems rarely attract the right people into teaching. The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce observes that, “We are now recruiting our teachers from the bottom third of high-school students going to college.”

 

By recruiting teachers mostly from the middle and bottom of their college classes, as America has done for decades now, not only did we not get the talent we needed, but we also fostered a culture where excellence and merit don’t matter. 

A rational compensation scheme is critical to fixing this core human-capital weakness: rather than just pay for longevity and lifetime benefits, we must reward excellence and enable the system to meet its needs. If, going forward, we eliminated all the automatic raises and promises of huge lifetime benefits, we’d have an enormous amount of money to devote to merit pay, hardship-assignment incentives, and recruiting in subjects where we have shortages. If we could front-load compensation, new teachers could get as much as $80,000 by year three or four. This would make a huge difference. If you have any doubt, just ask the talented, ambitious young teachers who come through Teach for America or comparable programs. Many leave well before they peak, even though they like the work, because their pay remains quite low in the early years—up to about $55,000—and they are unwilling to commit to staying around for 25 years to cash in on the back-loaded pay structure. 

I once proposed a portion of this—simply eliminating the lifetime, defined-benefit pension, monetizing the savings, and then paying it to teachers in their early years—in a conversation with union officials. I was prepared to give each new teacher a choice between the current pay scale (with the existing pension) and this new pay proposal. Although no teacher would have been compelled to switch, the UFT rejected the idea as “anti-union.” But we have evidence to show that these monetary incentives can work. In Washington, D.C., Michelle Rhee negotiated a merit-based compensation system—where teachers could get paid much more in the early years. As a result, it appears, significant numbers of teachers from D.C.’s charter schools apply to teach in its traditional public schools. Only money can explain that. 

Of course, another way to attract and retain very effective teachers would be to create more schools that work. In my experience, many of the best public-school teachers apply to high-functioning charter schools, even though they usually give up job security, and lifetime health care and pensions, while generally getting a similar or slightly higher salary (although often augmented by modest merit pay). They go because they want to be part of a successful school, where teachers are treated like professionals and not subjected to endless administrative and union micromanagement. 

Last, to shake up the system, we must change how we use technology to deliver instruction. (This is what I’m now seeking to do at News Corporation.) The present resistance to innovation is breathtaking. Consider this story: When we replaced many large, failing high schools with more, much smaller schools, many of the new schools had only a handful of kids who wanted to take rigorous Advanced Placement courses, which can earn students college credit. Several good online programs teach the necessary course content. But in New York state, you cannot get high-school credit unless you’re taught by a live teacher (a requirement referred to as “seat time”), and these small schools didn’t have enough students to bring in an AP teacher. I approached our State Education Department in Albany, which had the authority to waive the seat-time requirement: if a kid could get college credit for passing an online AP course, surely she should be able to get high-school credit as well. 

As soon as the UFT heard that we had requested a waiver from the state, it faxed us a letter saying, “The elimination of seat-time requirements needs to be negotiated,” making clear that if we tried to proceed, this would be war. You see, if we opened the door to online AP courses, maybe we’d end up needing fewer teachers, and that wouldn’t be good for union membership, dues, or power. I got nowhere. 

But one of the best things we could do is hire fewer teachers and pay more to the ones we hire. And, as in any other field, technology can help get us there. If you have 5,000 math teachers, many of whom are underperforming, significantly improving overall quality is nearly impossible. But if you get the best math professors in the world—who are great teachers and who deeply understand math—and match them with great software developers, they can create sophisticated interactive programs that engage kids and empower teachers. Why not start with such a program and then let teachers supplement it differently, depending on the progress of each student? 

That’s a whole lot easier than trying to teach the same math lesson to 30 kids, some of whom are getting it quickly and some of whom aren’t getting it at all. We now have multiple ways to teach the same lessons. As a result, we can tailor both the means and the pacing to each student. We can use digital games where kids progress based on solving increasingly difficult math problems, virtual classes that kids can take online, and tutors whom kids can work with online, as well as, of course, teachers working with large or small groups in person. The possibilities are enormous. We should be trying them all and constantly improving how we do the work. That’s exactly what New York City is doing in a pilot program called the School of One, which was designed to move from the classroom as the locus of instruction to the individual student as the focus of instruction. 

More broadly, we need to foster a fundamental shift from a top-down, one-size-fits-all culture—mandated class-size reduction, after-school programs, and the like—to a culture that supports innovation. In New York City, we set out to change these preexisting dynamics by allowing educators and community groups—rather than the central bureaucracy—to design and run new schools to replace the failing ones. The result was a lot of innovation. For example, New York City is now piloting something called the Generation School, which uses staff time very differently and thus extends the school day and year significantly. Last year, the City also opened something called the New American Academy, where four teachers are collectively responsible for educating 60 kids, and they stay with those children from kindergarten through the fifth grade. The teachers are categorized as Master, Partner, Associate, and Apprentice, and they are paid very differently and get promoted from one level to the next based on performance as well as peer and supervisory review. 

Change is possible. In New York City, it took a mayor willing to assume control over the system and risk significant political capital. It required time—Mayor Bloomberg and I had more than eight years together, while most urban superintendents serve for about three and a half years. It required taking risks, knowing that not every change will work out and that your critics will focus mercilessly on those that don’t. But most of all, it required building community and political support. Toward the end of my tenure, we were engaged in an enormous fight to lift the state-imposed cap on our number of charter schools—an initiative the teachers unions strongly opposed precisely because our expansion of charter schools had been so successful. In fact, six months earlier, a similar effort had gone down to defeat at the unions’ hands. But this time, the families with kids in charter schools and our allies in the community were prepared to help us fight. Philanthropic and business interests raised millions to support the mobilization effort, run ads, and hire lobbyists. We prevailed, and the cap was raised substantially. 

Sadly, that kind of success is still exceptional. In the three decades since A Nation at Risk came out, many have echoed its cries of alarm, but few have heeded its calls for bold change. Indeed, in his 1993 Pew Forum speech, Al Shanker spoke in shockingly candid terms: 

We are at the point that the auto industry was at a few years ago. They could see they were losing market share every year and still not believe that it really had anything to do with the quality of the product I think we will get—and deserve—the end of public education through some sort of privatization scheme if we don’t behave differently. Unfortunately, very few people really believe that yet. They talk about it, and they don’t like it, but they’re not ready to change and stop doing the things that brought us to this point.

 

Time is running out. Without political leadership willing to take risks and build support for “radical reform,” and without a citizenry willing to insist on those reforms, our schools will continue to decline. And just as it was with Detroit, the global marketplace will be very unforgiving to a populace that doesn’t have the skills it demands. McKinsey estimates that the benefits of bringing our educational levels up to those of the highest-performing countries would have raised our gross domestic product by about $2 trillion in 2008. By the same token, every year we fail to close that gap is like living with the equivalent of a permanent national recession. Shocking as that may sound, the costs in human terms, to our nation and to the kind of people we aspire to become, will be even greater. 

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Nonanonymous
Nonanonymous

Of course, that would imply there’s something to destroy, which there isn’t, for the most part.

Just look at NY State Legislature, mired in grid lock. Can our schools be any better than the society they reflect?

All the more reason to decentralize education. Besides that, we’re witnessing the end of the social welfare state. We can either wind down services gracefully, or not. It really doesn’t matter with $6.5T lost in property values, which ultimately pay for schools, all for a few billion in commission $$.

Let’s see the status quo squirm their way out of this one. Good luck!

Reverse Engineer

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RE

Reverse Engineer

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RE

Kill Bill
Kill Bill

The big three pretty much blew themselves up the way wall street did. By becoming lending firms and gambling in derivatives

Besides low wages dont mean a better product look at the stuff coming from China for instance.

Kill Bill
Kill Bill

Lets say that Target got into the education business.

Teachers would become something like those tech support folks you can never understand on the phone from who knows where.

DexterMorgan
DexterMorgan

What an absolutely outstanding post ! Thoroughly, illustrates our education quagmire.

ragman
ragman

RE: is that a Crash Test Dummy talkin’ to Ralph about a Buick?

StuckInNJ
StuckInNJ

Awesomely informative but scary post.

Public School is just a euphenism for Government School. Scary, eh?

Maybe the solution is for the government to get the Feds COMPLETELY out of teaching our children? Keep it private at best … or at worst at the State level.

But you know what’s really scary? It takes only ONE generation to go from Genius to Moron. We may be too late to change anything.

StuckInNJ
StuckInNJ

Do most schools teach young people to be action-oriented — or to be passive? Do most schools teach young people that they can affect their surroundings — or not to bother? Do schools provide examples of democratic institutions — or examples of authoritarian ones?

A long list of school critics from Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, John Holt, and others have pointed out that a school is nothing less than a miniature society: what young people experience in schools is the chief means of creating our future society.

Today, U.S. colleges and universities have increasingly become places where young people are merely acquiring degree credentials — badges of compliance for corporate employers — in exchange for learning to accept bureaucratic domination and enslaving debt.

Schools are routinely places where kids — through fear — learn to comply to authorities for whom they often have no respect, and to regurgitate material they often find meaningless.

These are great ways of breaking someone.

And turning us into compliant morons.

jmarz
jmarz

The public education system is a failure. My wife is currently a teacher in the public system and she is an incredible teacher. She gets frustrated that other teachers just don’t care as much as her about educating their students. She puts in alot of work so there certainly is a correlation between being an above average teacher and the number of hours a teacher efficiently devotes to their profession. Unfortunately, unions and involvement of government have slowly degraded public education. Eliminating the poor teachers is very hard with the existence of unions. If we want to breed better teachers, we need to abort this failed system. We need a privatized system that rewards teachers that go above and beyond. A privatized system would offer options for parents to choose from in determining where they want to send their children to school instead of decisions being forced upon them based on geographical boundaries. A privatized system would eliminate the bureaucracy that suppresses challenging curriculum and innovative teaching methods. In a public system, students that are above average are sacrificed on their education for the sake of meeting the needs of lower tested students. Public education benefits the lower to average students and screws the above average. In a privatized system, there would be schools to fit different needs. Children whom are brighter or more advanced will have to opportunity to continuously be challenged at a school that promotes higher standards, curriculum and harder admission. Children whom progress slowly or just have a lower level of intelligence will find their right fit. WIth a privatized system, competition would be present which will keep schooling rates at market prices. In our current system, taxpayers that have no interest or children are contributing involuntarily to the education of other students. Education is critical but I believe one should have the option to education rather than be forced upon. A privatized system puts the responsiblity on parents to be “parents.” Parents should bear the task of encouraging education. In our current system, some parents use public school as a means of neglecting the raising of their kids. These parents always put blame on the teachers when their kid does poorly in his/her classes or has poor conduct. They don’t ever step back and contemplate if their lack of parenting has anything to do with their child’s poor conduct or grades. I have a strong belief on education since my wife is an elementary teacher. I hear her each day come home exhausted and irritated by the overall system. I am independent thinker so I tend to think about education and general and what a better system woud look like. When I discuss this issue with others, I am automatically looked upon as crazy. I’m usually attacked as being a teacher basher since they assume that I think the public is a system because of the teachers. This is one part of my reasoning but government and unions enables poor teachers. Typically, I’m usually asked, ” Well, what about the students who can’t afford to go to school or what about the parents who are neglectful and wouldn’t put their kids in school? Is that fair for the child?” My typical answer is that a private market encourages competition and competition brings down the price. In a free market for education, their would be a fit for most people. If they can’t afford a particular school, well they can explore financing the school privately. There would be options for financing if necessary. In response to bad parenting and the child or children being affected unfairly, I would say that my option puts much more responsiblility on the parent in raising and contributing to the educational progress of the child. Unfortunately, some children may be neglected due to poor parenting but I do believe there is no such thing as a perfect system so there will never be a system that is perfect for everyone.

Opinionated Bloviator
Opinionated Bloviator

The endless “gorge the beast” spending by both parties has created a system that ultimately rewards failure and punishes success. Replace teachers union with Wall Street lobbyists and you explain the bailouts, printing, looting and general Wabenzi (means” big man” in South Africa) vibe from the so called regulators which has resulted in the sort of financial market you would expect if the governments of Somalia and Zimbabwe were running it.

Fortunately this cannot continue, despite the cheer leading from the McCorporate media, the United States is collapsing, the economy CANNOT function without ZIRP and endless spending and as we spend 43% MORE than we earn SOONER OR LATER the endless “free shit” WILL STOP flowing and the free fall will begin.

This is a GOOD THING. You cannot fix a skyscraper with cracked foundations by building another floor on top of them. Sometimes you must destroy what you create and start again from a blank sheet of paper, hopefully incorporating everything you have learn’t from your previous mistakes.

A true constitutional republic – that’s the change I am willing to fight for.

IraK
IraK

Some of the Dodos who post articles on this site and make comments don’t realize how fabulously successful the U. S. education system is. Its goal is to produce loyal, uncritical subjects of the State and the system meets that goal in spades. Many of the Bozos who post on this site – But not you – are excellent examples of the mostly true believer or mush brained uncritical thinker American education has produced. A secondary goal of the U.S. education system is benefiting the system’s employees. It does that amazingly well, too. What TBP’s Dodos forget is that political systems exist for the benefit of those in the system, not those who they’re supposed to help. Caveat: When I implied that some on TBP have no more than Shit For Brains, I didn’t mean you. I want to make that clear.

Apollo
Apollo

“What an absolutely outstanding post ! Thoroughly, illustrates our education quagmire.”

You bet. The high school system has been turned into a spaghetti machine to serve the short-term financial interests of the adults involved in it. A spaghetti so big it cannot be untangled. It has been producing sub-par graduates for decades – but the system decides it is not its problem. I feel sorry for the good caring teachers in it. I find it almost unbelievable that the teaching system appears not realize that it is dealing with young human beings who invests many years of their young precious lives into the system so that they may have a chance of a good future. Wasting such an investment in mind, energy, time of the young and future generations is immoral.

Reverse Engineer

This is not a complex problem. The entire education system as currently costructed should simply be defunded and scrapped. There is no saving it, by any means.

Besides that, once we DO scrap Public Education, Private Schools like mine will do much better 🙂 Tough to compete with FREE education and child care.

RE

eugend66
eugend66

Admin and others, watch this 1hr clip.

If the vid won`t post then go to: http://inflation.us/videos.html
Great documentary, well worth your time.

Surly1
Surly1

Abolish the US DOE. Just end it. And let’s get back to the property-tax based local school system that God decreed when he handed it down to Moses. And if the poor languish in substandard schools with scant resources, well, fuck ’em, they chose their parents poorly.

We’re a bunch of self-made people here, none of whom has ever accepted a government dollar, sat in a government school, financed an education with a government guaranteed load, used an FHA mortgage . . . self made all. So now it’s time to further retreat from any notion of a common purpose, pull out our money, and let the next generation fend for itself. And as we do, let’s indulge in a big fit of union-bashing. Unions, unions, unions. Bad, bad, bad. Anything that enables a group of individuals to negotiate with an Owner or a Big Bureaucracy is necessarily a bad thing. New law: caught being a union member, lose a hand. Let’s see how Lefty likes teaching then…

***

As someone who has spent fifteen years serving on a local school advisory council, I can tell you that there it is an exercise in frustration. One point made above is abundantly clear: schools are run for the convenience of the adults. Trying to change a bureaucracy is like trying to turn a battleship, but less rewarding. Maybe teachers’ unions have more power in NYC than in Virginia, but I can truly report that they are less the problem here than the fact that the central office is rotten with “educrats.” Just rotten. All well paid, all deeply credentialed, and many redundant.

So the system is really the problem, and the minefield of regulations that attach as strings to the Federal dollars that school systems are in the business of chasing.

Teachers are the least of your problems. As are unions.

Welshman
Welshman

The school system is run for the teachers, as the students are just the grease that lubes the unionized machine. The funding system that buys the grease for this machine is shutting down, and it is going to be interesting to watch.

My son attended H/S for baseball and lunch. The rest was meaningless, never missed a class,
never had homework, and never acted up in school.

Spring of his sophomore year we hanked his sorry ass up and flew to Virginia to interview at Fork Union Military Academy. He spent one summer and two years of high school, graduated 3.0 GPA and a rank of E-5. This little detour in his unremarkable life so far, cost his parents $104,000. for his high school diploma. We refer to FUMA, as a “finishing school” for boys.

If you are a student of American history, Virginia is a wonderful state to visit. We really gained a much more balance view of the Civil War and loved touring all the Virginia presidental homes.

MuckAbout

Yet another path leading to doomcity. I begin to wonder how so many escape the edutrap and turn out to be really great kids..

Of course, I have one grandson who graduated from Annapolis and four more that didn’t. They all range from the superior to the absolutely worthless in a perfect 5-point bell curve.

I don’t know what that proves but native intelligence and parenting seems to have a hell of lot to do with it.

MA

jmarz
jmarz

IraK

Instead of bashing TBPers on this site, why don’t you provide some comments that offer value and wisdom. You mention that many of us don’t realize how successful the US education system is. That is a crock of shit. Our higher level education system is good but to say that our education system as a complete whole is very good is a lie. If it is successful than I assume you are happy with average and below average world rankings in education. Our college education system is good but we are extremely weak in K thru 12th grade. If you don’t think so, check the statistics or try to have an intelligent discussion with a random studen currentlyt in high school.

llpoh
llpoh

Jmarz – I hate to disagree with you, but our higher education system (i.e. college) sucks, with reasonably few exceptions. Studies are showing that MOST college grads come out no better educated/skilled than when they went in. People are getting degrees and not educations. We simply cannot keep pouring money into art history/sociology/etc. and need to force feed people into science/math/engineering/IT. If they want to study art history, make them totally fund it themselves – $50k per year will tend to weed those folks out and into something less costly and more beneficial for society.

jmarz
jmarz

llpoh

You are absolutely correct. What I meant is that we attract the brightest from around the world to study at some of our finest universities. Also, I do think that the US method of teaching at the college level is more productive than methods in Asia in particular. My brother is in a study abroad program in Hong Kong and he said he is learning very little in his business classes. He said the way professors teach the material is very poor and comprehension and engagement in the classroom is very low. I assume their cuture has alot to do with how they teach since respect is very important and professors should never be questioned since this is a sign of disrespect.

I’m a firm believer in education but I don’t think college is the best option for everyone anymore. The ROI continues to drop as the supply of graduates rise during this crisis while demand for college graduate jobs declines. Self education is just as important as college education. Real world experience along with self education and a drive to succeed will take you far in life. Too many students are finding a hard time getting a job after piling on much debt and learning very little impactful knowledge. Some of these same students who are unsuccessful finding a job are deciding to pursue a Masters degree and are getting into even more debt. They think that if they get a Masters in a particular subject, they will get a job. Thousands of individuals who have Masters are unemployed or waiting tables. This current economic crisis is going to suffocate my generation and younger generations who go to college and get a degree and than graduate without getting a job. I think that it may make sense for certain people to put college aside and save and invest the money instead. Instead of pursuing useless degrees, it may make sense to focus on an industry and begin getting real world experience in it. College debt is a big issue these days and unemployment isn’t getting any better for college grads. I’m fortunate to have worked my way through college and gain real world experience along with a college education while avoiding debt. If I was just graduating high school and had to decide what to do with my life, I would probably put college aside for a while and focus on learning a trade or business and saving any money I can.

Reverse Engineer

@jmarz

Bravo. At current prices for a college education versus what you could reasonably expect to earn as a result of such an education, College is simply a LOSING Proposition overall. Beisdes that, what they are teaching currently in College is not likely to be of much help to you in the world tht is to come here.

Even accumulating a Math, Physics or Engineering Ph.D. isn’t likely to be much help to you, there are a GLUT of such brainaics on the market here right now. There is of course fundamental value in learning as much as you can, but your ability to make this economically profitable to the extent you could pay off the loans necessary to get such a Sheepskin is highly questionable at this point. The ONLY way I would go for such a Degree now would be if you can get the whole thing paid for through Grants and Teaching Assistantships. If you can work up such a package, you might have a few more years time to bang a few Freshman Coeds in your Dorm Room. Elsewise, working up a higher degree right now especially by taking on DEBT to do so is a LOSING proposition.

I agree also that the best alternative for someone graduating HS right now would be to learn Basic Trades. Repairing Plumbing, learning Permaculture Farming, basic Metallurgy and Blacksmithing, Commercial Fishing techniques etc are all practical skills which will hold value. Computer Jockeys are a dime a dozen right now, and computers do not look likely to survive too long here in the spin down. Medicine will always provide some income if you know what you are doing, but the kind of education you get in Med Skules probably will no be all that practical to continue with. Learning Herbal Medicines and how to extract stuff like Digitalis from Foxglove and how to use basic techniques of Chiropractic and Accupuncture to relieve pain will be more valuable then depending on Pharmaceutical availability to do the same things.

If you are a big tough guy, Protectors will be needed by everyone everywhere. Just remember though the lifespan of a Protector tends to be quite short. You can only go into so many battles before somebody is bigger and tougher, or gets the drop on you. If you are an attractive young female (or even male), Prostitution will remain a viable way to make a living. It is of course the OLDEST Profession.

Finally, there will be room for Leaders, Arbitrators, Teachers and Holy Men. to set yourself up for any of these positions, you have to be a REALLYgood talker, to convince people to BELIEVE in you and follow your advice and teaching.

There are no other basic professions to Study for here. Food Producer, Toolmaker,Soldier, Medicine Man, Leader, Arbitrator, Prostitute, Holy Man. Prepare yourself to fill as many of those roles as you can. That is how you will SURVIVE, and be a necessary part of any Community.

RE

llpoh
llpoh

Jmarz – very well said indeed. People forget that they go to college to ge educated, and the degree is supposed to signify that that has occured. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case. You could get a baboon a degree if you were prepared to pay the tuition.

I have been to a number of colleges in yhe US and Europe. Some were good. Others had a good reputation but stunk. The ones that stunk would have folowed the Asian model you referred to – a lecturer up front of tens or hundreds of students. You need not have a professor in such circumstances – simply give them a sylaabus and tell them to come for the exams.

We are seeing a disconnect between having a degree and having a skill set – hey, I have a degree so give me my gravy train job just doesn’t cut it. There needs to be a skill set and a work ethic to match. It is rare to find the combination these days.

SSS

IraK

Nice sarcasm.

“Its goal (education) is to produce loyal, uncritical subjects of the State, and the system meets that goal in spades.”

“A secondary goal of the U.S. education system is benefiting the system’s employees. It does that amazingly well, too. What TBP’s Dodos forget is that political systems exist for the benefit of those in the system, not those who they’re supposed to help.”

Sweet.

llpoh
llpoh

SSS – I thought so too, but it was a little murky so he caught a bit of friendly fire. Sublte sarcasm can get lost in translation – I saw the Admin scorch some poor fuck the otherday for what I had read as total sarcasm. We temporarily went down below 7000 as a result.

llpoh
llpoh

RE – don’t forget Doomsday Soothsayer. Always seems to be vacancies for them.

The problem is most folks do not even know what it is to be educated. And they do not understand the intrinsic value of being educated. And so even PHDs in engineering end up being uneducated, as to be educated requires both breadth and depth. In many cases we get degreed individuals who have neither breadth nor depth of education, and so will be unable to truly contribute.

Reverse Engineer

@LLPOH

Doomsday Soothsayers, Seers etc fall under the general rubric of Holy Men. Like Protectors, its also a Dicey Profession. If you get things WRONG, you don’t last too long. Failed Seers tend to get strung up by their Gonads, Successful ones like Joseph do pretty well. Its a Gamble. I take my Chances with this. LOL.

RE

llpoh
llpoh

RE: one more missed prediction and this is your fate:

comment image

The mob wants accuracy, not excuses!

Reverse Engineer

I am quite aware of this LLPOH, which is why I keep my options open on the Timelines. Pinning down precisely when Doomsday will arrive is pretty damn hard, I am Impressed that Joseph was able to hit the 7 years of Famine so accurately. I have made plenty of mistakes here already calling impending Doom, because I have consistently underestimated the control that TPTB and CBs have over the financial markets. This is an error I admit to and will make no more. However, I hold fast to my conviction that at some point they will lose control, and the spin down will proceed as I predict. I just have to hedge my bets well enough until that time comes.

RE

Buckhed
Buckhed

About a year ago I decided to do a little digging into our local school system. I don’t have kids but I wanted to know a little about how our heathens were being educated and even more what are the costs.

I called the largest private school and talked to the head master. She said that I could send my (fictional child) to her school for $4,200.00. The school has about 500 students and the average SAT score is almost 1200,the dropout rate was less than 1% and 90% of the kids go on to higher institutions of learning.

I talked to the local school board and found out they were spending $8,700.00 per pupil and the average SAT was 840. The dropout rate was about 30% and about 50 percent went to institutions of higher learning upon graduation.

So in conclusion it is easy to see that money isn’t the key to smarter, better educated kids. The key in my opinion is…..Parental involvement !

llpoh
llpoh

Buckhed – you are absolutely right. Keep little Johnny away from all the numbnuts, and have parents who think enough of education to shell out hard earned cash, and you will get much better results.

Buckhed
Buckhed

I spoke with a young man recently who just graduated from a major university with a degree in business. He has already been hired by a small bank.When I talked to him about what school economic theory he liked (Keynes,Chicago,Austrian etc) he had no idea what I was talking about. He had never read Keynes,Friendman,Hayek etc. He had no idea what the Federal Reserve was.what fractional banking was…he was clueless. Is this what institutions of higher learning are putting out now ?

I gave him Hazlitt’s book “Economics In One Lesson” as a graduation gift.

Buckhed
Buckhed

LLPOH…when I asked the school board how could a private school produce better results for less money, they responded that, “public schools cost more” !!! LMAO is what I did when they responded.

Reverse Engineer

I am just counting on the complete failure of the Public Schools, because until that occurs, the economics of Private Education are dicey.

I can do a better job with education at about $4K per child than the Public Schools do at around $9K. However the fact of the matter is at the moment, MOST of the $4K I need to charge comes out of after tax income of J6P, whereas the $9K is embedded in the taxes for everyone, regardless of whther they have kids in the system or not. We do just great up thru Kinderarten, but after that the parents mostly elect to mosve the kids to Public Education, because its “free” at that point. We can only retain those kids who have parents with enough surplus income that they will buy the better product. This is not the majority of the population, in fact its an increasingly smaller part of the population.

However, Public Education is in aprogressive failure mode at the moment. Here on the Last Great Frontier, numerous teachers are being laid off and class sizes will increase again to well over 30 in even a 3rd grade classroom. In my classroom, I will not take more than 12. Hopefully enough people who can afford this will take the option. However, at the point the Publi Schools fail competely, there is no contest here. If you want your child educated, you either will have to pay for it directly or do it yourself. I just have to keep the paradigm running long enough for the complete collapse to take shape. I should be able to do this, because I really do not need to make any money at all here with the paradigm. I do have some problems though with my partner in tis venture, we do not see eye to eye on all of this.

RE

Surly1
Surly1

@Buckhed,

What you observed from your classroom visit is likely to happen any time you compare public and private schools.

In the process of identifying high potential students known as “gifted”, they find that the single greatest factor that correlates with “giftedness” is household income. Presumably as it relates to the value of education, to variety of experiences, travel, etc. Private schools in essence “skim the cream” of better students, and represent a self- (or more to the point, parent-) selected group, made up of those parents who didn’t want their children to enjoy the public school “experience.” Thus the private school OUGHT to be putting out a better product, as they are starting with better material.

Never forget that public schools HAVE to take everyone. Now THERE is a recipe for pulling down your average SAT score.

Want to reform public schools? Get the troublemakers out of classrooms and give them something productive to do, like break rocks, and shrink the central Office staff by 2/3.

Opinionated Bloviator
Opinionated Bloviator

llpoh – That will be spinal readjustment therapy 5 years after the collapse.

dizzyfingers
dizzyfingers

Too late to fix the schools, and too much money wasted on nothing.
After the end, lots of things will get “fixed”.

Buckhed
Buckhed

Surly1…I have several friends who barely scrap by who send their kids to the above private school. They know that a good education is important to the future of their kids and thus they make sure that the kids do well so that they get the best ROI. I commend them because they have given up many of the trapping of middle class life ( vacations,new cars every few years etc) in order to advance their children in life.

AWD

Unions are cancer. Union types are political types, and, not surprisingly, democrats. Democrats think everyone is equal, progressively redistribute everything from intelligence to income. The Federal Employee unions run the same shit: huge pensions, retirement at 50 or 55, free everything.

The only problem with unions is they bankrupt whatever they touch. Unions producing mediocre crap resulted in the decline in the U.S. auto industry and it’s eventual bankruptcy. Unions producing mediocre students are bankrupting our future growth. Federal, state, and local employee unions have already bankrupted our Federal, State, and local governments; they just haven’t admitted it yet. The combined debt of Federal, State, and local governments is north of $20 trillion, much more than anyone will ever be able to pay back or tax; most of which is pensions.

The exceptional person doesn’t want to join a union and be “dumbed down” to everyone else, yet they are forced to. Unions, across the board, reward the stupid and penalize the exceptional. It’s a practical form of communism, where everyone become a drone. Our productivity as a nation is based on our education, and ours has been wiped out by the unions and their ilk.

Surly1
Surly1

Bullshit. Vintage Ayn Rand objectivist bullshit.

jmarz
jmarz

Buckhed

Your story about asking a business college grad a question on what economic theory he believes in is right on. A majority of college grads only care about getting the degree. They could care less about the education. I have first hand experience with your college grad story. I graduated in May of 2010 and I had an incredibly hard time trying to find colleagues to engage in discussions outside of the classroom. I was a finance major so I was around business students all the time and most of them could care less about anything. I tried sparking conversation on current or economic events and most were clueless. I had finance students who never followed the markets or even had the curiousity to follow the markets. Most of the students assumed that once they received their degree, they would be paid a good salary and move up the corporate ladder from there. The students who had any input usually just followed the crowd such as CNBC or any other MSM. If I mentioned Austrain economics, I would be looked upon like an idiot. We need more well rounded role models and independent thinkers to influence others. Good job on your part for giving that college grad a great book on Austrian economics. Hopefully he will read it and learn from it. I was hooked when I first began studying Austrian economics. It made so much sense to me and just clicked. I was hooked from then on.

Reverse Engineer

@Patrick

Idiot Doctors are a Cancer, along with their Union the AMA. Doctors are responsible for turning the Medical system in this country into a gigantic Ponzi, lobbying Goobermint through the Pharmaceutical companies to bring home big paychecks. Now because the whole mess you built is coming apart at the seams and destroying our country, you go and blame everybody else. Its YOUR fault asshole.

RE

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