That's the question I answer (in the affirmative) in my latest commentary for the Mackinac Center. But I'm not talking about the union's sanity. To find out why the N-E-A is really an N-U-T, drop by the Center's website.
A revised version of my Mackinac Center op/ed on Detroit public schools was published today in the Detroit Free Press.
You can check it out here.
Note that the editorial page editor deleted a paragraph without consulting me--one that gave some additional figures on Detroit public school enrollment and employment from the state's point of view. I'm sure he meant well, but 'taint proper form, if you ask me.
It doesn't alter the basic message of the piece, but should anyone be interested in the missing numbers, drop me a message at "Andrew" @ this website (thegantelope.com).
So far, the response to the piece has been favorable, but I don't doubt that there are a few folks in the District's administration who weren't happy to see the op/ed page today. To those administrators I would just like to point out that our ultimate goal is the same: to ensure that all kids have access to good schools. Unfortunately, the evidence undeniably points to the fact that we will never achieve that goal within the confines of the existing state education monopoly.
After trying to make the best of a bad system for more than a century, it's time that we actually introduce a better system. Our kids, all kids, deserve that.
[Here's my latest op/ed for the Mackinac Center. They seem to like it over at the National Review.]
Last November, the Detroit Public School District estimated it would suffer a $55 million budget shortfall for the 2003/2004 school year. They bumped the figure up to $78 million in March, and then it hit a whopping $250 million last month.
To balance this suddenly ballooning deficit, as required by law, 3,200 district employees will be laid off this summer.
How did it come to this?
Most of the media have tried to answer that question by looking through a microscope, identifying specific mistakes made by the current crop of public school administrators. They point out that district officials grossly overestimated enrollment, and that fewer kids have meant less revenue. They report that some school principals failed to cut positions in their schools, as they had been told to do, causing higher-than expected personnel expenses.
But let’s put away the microscope for a minute and grab a wide angle lens.
Back in 1996/97, Detroit Public Schools enrolled 183,447 students, and employed 22,077 staff. Enrollment has fallen every year since, averaging 147,808 during the 2003/04 school year. Employment in the District has not fallen. It has risen to 23,800. So the Detroit Public School system is now employing 1,723 more people to teach an estimated 35,000 fewer children.
That can get kind of expensive.
After adjusting for inflation, the District’s total spending is only fractionally higher today than it was back in 1996/97 ($1.63 billion now versus $1.62 billion then, in 2004 dollars), but this represents a startling increase per pupil. The District spent $8,830 on each student in 1996/97, but more than $11,000 in 2003/2004....
[Read the conclusion of this commentary on the Mackinac Center website]
Years ago, in preparation for the writing of Market Education: The Unknown History, I did an informal survey of residents in the greater Seattle area. I asked them how much they thought we were spending on public education in Washington state, and how much they thought we should spend.
Then I'd tell them the actual figure.
For the most part, they were shocked by how much more the public schools spent per pupil than they imagined.
Well, the same is true nationwide according to a recent survey done by the Education Testing Service (the folks who administer the SAT).
Read all about it in my friend Jay Greene's op/ed today in the NY Post.
Under the guise of increased accountability, opponents of market education are calling for more regulation of Pennsylvania's scholarship donation tax credit.
The program, officially called the EITC (Education Improvement Tax Credit) allows businesses to make donations to private scholarship funds that subsidize tuition at independent schools, and receive a tax credit to cover most of the cost of their donation.
Die-hard market education opponents want the program dead. They want every program like it dead. And they will do anything to kill it.
Their current tactic is to try to smother the program with regulations on the grounds that regulation will increase accountability. That argument is simply wrong. The way the program is currently designed, market forces make the program far more accountable to both parents and tax-payers than any body of regulation possibly could. In fact, further regulation would only interfere with the operation of market forces and impede the program's functioning.
I wrote a short memo on the subject of market accountability versus regulatory "accountability" under education tax credit programs a few weeks ago, and you can find it here.
People of Pennsylvania: Don't let the school monopolists kill this path-breaking program!
Blogger and charter school co-founder Joanne Jacobs draws much needed attention to the E-Rate program today.
Not only is the program wracked with corruption, its mode of financing is bizarre. Drop by her site and check it out.
Is it possible for an organization whose employees are sane on an individual level to collectively lose its grip on reality and reason?
It must be. How else can we explain modern public school discipline policies?
Consider the case of Alabama 15-year-old Ysatis Jones. Ms. Jones, apparently suffering menstrual cramps, sought relief by taking an ibuprofen tablet at a school water fountain. Unfortunately for Ms. Jones, she was caught in flagrante de-Motrin by a sharp-eyed teacher. As any normal person would not expect, Ysatis Jones was sentenced by the local school board to a 15 day stint in a correctional education facility. Possession of over-the-counter pain medication is a "major drug offense" in Jefferson County schools, and the district is adamantly defending its decision.
Then there is the act of scholastic treason perpetrated by Thomas Siefert, a junior at Lancaster High School in Ohio. Mr. Siefert had the temerity to satirize Lancaster’s staff on a website created at his own expense and on his own time. For so brazenly exercising his First Amendment right to free speech, Thomas Siefert was expelled through the end of the school year. The district has been threatened with a lawsuit by the ACLU, but as yet shows no sign of backing down.
Here in Michigan, an ACLU lawsuit filed in 2003 was settled out of court last month. The suit was sparked by an incident 13 months ago in which 7 white 8th graders at Bullock Creek Middle School attacked a black 7th grader, kicked him, and whipped him with a belt, all while shouting "KKK," for Ku Klux Klan. The attackers were suspended but, according to press reports, at least one of them was already back at school and taunting the black student with racial slurs the following week.
Norman Donker, the county prosecutor, told reporters that teachers had overheard the victim and his attackers trash talking each other in the language of street thugs on previous occasions, but that "no one put a stop to it" when it first started.
Though he condemned the beating, Bullock Creek Middle School principal Craig Carmoney said "there are two sides to the story." Two sides to a racist seven-on-one gang beating? What does that even mean? What could the attacker’s side of the story possibly look like that would even begin to mitigate such an outrage? Carmoney didn’t elaborate.
To settle the ACLU lawsuit, Bullock Creek School District agreed to offer its staff "diversity training."
So our table of crime and punishment looks like this: ...
[Read the conclusion of this commentary on the
Mackinac Center website.]
In his characteristically psychotic novel, Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog, author Mark Leyner describes a visit to a former professor who’s “serving 15 years for aggravated plagiarism.” Our public school officials are a little more lenient with themselves when they’re caught stealing other people’s work. Just ask Orange County (NC) school-board chairman Keith Cook:
Orange School Board Chairman Admits Using Someone Else's Speech
By Associated Press
Students at Orange County High School can be suspended if they present someone else's words or ideas as their own.
Some departing seniors and school board members were surprised to learn that the graduation speech delivered by county school board Chairman Keith Cook was lifted from a 1998 address given by someone else.
"I wrote that," Cook initially said when a reporter from the Herald-Sun asked him about the speech he gave Friday night.
But later, when a reporter e-mailed him an Internet address containing the speech, he admitted that he found it on a Web site.
The speech, which sought to draw life lessons from the 1997 movie "Titanic," was virtually identical to one given by Donna Shalala when she was U.S. secretary of health and human services in the Clinton administration.
Cook said he found the speech when he did an Internet search on the term "graduation speeches." He said he thought the remarks were a "generic speech," and didn't realize Shalala had originally delivered it.
"I would've never done it, if I knew," Cook said. "It didn't have a name on it."
It sounds as if nothing is going to happen to Cook as a result of his casual disregard for intellectual property rights.
Just for the heck of it, imagine you could easily choose from among several schools for your kids, and a senior manager at one of those choices was found guilty of aggravated plagiarism. Wouldja maybe put that school a little bit lower on your list as a result?
Don’t bother to think too hard about that question. Under our reigning education monopoly you haven't got much choice anyway.
Oh, wait, no. I must have misread that. It turns out that "state school" teachers in the Australian state of New South Wales are striking to demand a 25% pay raise. Here's the story at The Ridge News:
The teachers are striking in response to the State Government's alleged attempts to influence the upcoming decision by the Industrial Relations Commission on whether teachers should receive a 25 per cent pay rise over two years.
Last year teachers took their pay dispute to the IRC, which handed down a 5.5 per cent interim wage increase in December, stating teachers had not been adequately compensated for increased workloads since 1991.
It also urged the Government to recognise the significant contribution teachers make to the community.
The IRC's final decision is expected by June 30.
The teachers are demanding the 25 per cent rise but the Government has said it can only afford six per cent over two years.
Two observations. Despite the frequent protestations of teachers' unions that their highest priority is quality education, you don't often see them hit the picket lines over anything other than salaries, benefits, and working conditions. Not that there's anything evil in that. The whole point of unions is to benefit the member workers. Just keep that in mind, though, when teachers' unions start spouting off against parental choice and competition in education. What's in the interest of the union may not be in your child's interest.
Second, note the difference between a strike by workers in a government monopoly industry versus strikes in the private sector. In the private sector, labor disputes are self-regulating. If workers demand too much, raising their employer's costs too far above those of its competitors, they drive their employer out of business--and themselves out of jobs.
In a government monopoly like public schooling, there are no competitors, and the government employer can never go out of business. It's not self-regulating. That's why public school teachers have been able to raise their pay to 1.5 times the average pay in the private education sector in the United States. Your kids are hostages to the system. You've got no place else to send them but the public schools, unless you want to pay private school tuition on top of the property and other taxes that go to fund the public schools. It's not a healthy system, and it doesn't serve the public interest.
A news story today reports that 75 public school teachers in California have been found guilty over the last several years of cheating on state tests in order to give the impression that students knew more than they actually did.
Incidents include teachers who gave hints by drawing on the blackboard or leaving posters on the wall, told students the right answers and changed the students' responses themselves, the Los Angeles Times reported, referring to documents obtained through a Public Records Act request....
Some educators said temptation to cheat soared under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which can take away funding or reassign teachers in schools with consistently low test scores....
"Some people feel that they need to boost test scores by hook or by crook," said Larry Ward of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, a watchdog group that has criticized many standardized tests. "The more pressure, the more some people take the unethical option."
Union officials said cases of possible cheating soared after the statewide testing began. Since 1999, the California Teachers Association has defended more than 100 teachers accused of cheating, compared to one or two a year before that, chief counsel Beverly Tucker said.
Though state officials say the teachers found guilty of cheating represent a tiny fraction of the total teaching workforce, it isn't clear that their system for detecting cheaters is truly comprehensive or effective. I recall having looked at the test fraud detection policies of several states a few years ago, one of which was California, and none were especially thorough. You can easily see why.
The real problem here is that parents have little choice but to keep sending their children to the same public schools in which this fraud went on. Despite the commonly heard protestation that private school choice programs are "unaccountable," it is the present system of automatically assigning children to government monopoly schools that provides the least redress for dissatisfied parents.
A Judge in Kansas has just ordered all public school spending halted, and hence all public schools shut down, on June 30th. In an earlier ruling, he found that the state's funding formula is unconstitutional, in that it doesn't spend enough on the education of poor children to provide a satisfactory education.
Here's what the Kansas City Star has to say:
TOPEKA, Kan. - (KRT) - A Kansas district judge on Tuesday ordered public schools to close, beginning June 30, until the state's flawed school finance law can be overhauled.
Shawnee County District Judge Terry Bullock, who had declared the school financing law unconstitutional on Dec. 2, ordered the expenditure of school dollars to be halted at the end of next month.
His order, unprecedented in Kansas, applies not only to state education spending but also to additional property tax levies that local school boards authorize and local sales tax money collected for education in certain counties.
"This action by the court will terminate all spending functions under the unconstitutional funding provisions, effectively putting our school system on `pause' until the unconstitutional funding defects are remedied by the legislative and executive branches of our government," Bullock said.
As news of the ruling spread in media reports, concerned parents called schools to see if they would remain open, and worried school employees asked if they would receive paychecks after June 30.
State and school district officials urged people not to panic, predicting that the Kansas Supreme Court would delay implementation of the order.
Attorney General Phill Kline called a news conference to announce that he would ask the Kansas Supreme Court Wednesday to put the District Court order on hold until the high court considers it.
Kline already has appealed Bullock's original order that declared the school finance law unconstitutional. That appeal, authorized by a special law passed by the Legislature this year, is scheduled to be heard in September.
Kline was among those predicting that the Supreme Court would overturn Bullock's orders.
"Everybody needs to take a deep breath," he said. "There is a process, and we are following this process."
Last December, in declaring the school financing law unconstitutional, Bullock said it failed to distribute school aid equitably to students, failed to spend enough to provide students a "suitable" education and did not serve the needs of poor, minority, disabled and non-English speaking children.
"The current funding scheme was found to be irrational; that is, those schools with the children most expensive to educate receive the least," he said.
Bullock was critical of the Legislature for failing to deal with his December ruling.
"In fact, rather than attack the problem, the Legislature chose instead to attack the court."
Bullock had directed the Legislature and the governor to come up with a constitutional school-aid plan by July 1. But lawmakers could not reach agreement on one.
The judge said in his ruling that lawmakers running for re-election were reluctant to raise taxes for schools. However, he also noted that in the past 10 years, the Legislature had cut taxes by nearly $7 billion.
As a result, he said, the school funding method is now unconstitutional, in part because of inadequate funding. In last year's school-finance trial, Bullock heard unchallenged testimony that the cost of providing a suitable education for Kansas children is nearly $1 billion more than is currently provided.
I'll probably be writing more on this story in the coming week, so for now, I'll just leave it at that.
Fifty years after the long-overdue Supreme Court ruling that public schools cannot discriminate by race, African Americans and other minority groups have long had the right to attend public schools along with whites. But do they have reason to celebrate?
Not hardly. The achievement gap between black and white students is still enormous, closely tied to the academic gap between the rich and the poor. As I've written elsewhere,
If you are wealthy in America, you have a one-in-one-hundred chance of being functionally illiterate. If you are in the bottom fifth of wage earners or have no income at all, you have a less than even chance of being able to read a newspaper or write a resume. Wealth and literacy are positively linked in most nations, but nowhere more so than in the United States. Poor Americans academically underperform their fellow citizens by a wider margin than is to be found in any of the 26 other countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Would reintroducing an education market with some sort of financial assistance mechanism help boost student achievment among minorities and low-income families? A new book by the Cato Insitute, Educational Freedom in Urban America: Brown v. Board after Half a Century, argues that it would. I wrote the chapter titled: "How Markets Affect Quality: Testing a Theory of Market Education Against The International Evidence." Which you can check out in .pdf format.An Op-Ed in today's issue of the Daily Times of Pakistan evinces more good sense on education policy than is to be found in most U.S. newspapers. More shocking still, its author, Abbas Rashid, is himself a journalist and editor. Dig some of what this chap has to say:
Given the mess that the government has made of its own school system, it is highly unlikely that expanding its scope of supervision to include private-sector institutions will yield positive outcomes in the absence of institutional reform and a change in approach....
One of the key concerns expressed in relation to private-sector schools is that they charge high fees and offer education of a poor standard. This stands in contrast to the situation in public-sector schools that charge a low fee, or no fee, and offer education of an even poorer standard. There are, of course, exceptions in both cases. There is little doubt that that [sic] the private-sector schools became the synonym for quality in Pakistan when the public sector began to falter. In 1972, the government decided to take over almost all the privately managed educational institutions including 18, 926 schools. Whatever else this may have accomplished, it did not help in the task of imparting education of a minimum standard in the face of growing social demand for education.
Equity certainly should be a priority concern. But, a matter of equal concern is that of maintaining minimum standards. Schools offering free education, for instance, are of not much use when they are virtually ‘education-free.'...
Sadly, we in the "First World" too often have third rate media coverage of education policy.
Oh, and as for Rashid's comment about private schools charging high fees, he might be surprised to learn that families in the city of Lahore who earn a dollar per person per day or less are about as likely to send their children to private as to public schools. A sliding scale of need-based subsides would go a long way to allowing all parents to participate in the educational marketplace. An that is a far easier goal to achieve than the improvement of government monopoly schooling.
Ten Georgia public school teachers bought fake graduate degrees from a sham college in Liberia in order to con taxpayers into raising their salaries.
In virtually every public school district in America, teachers' salaries are almost exclusively a function of two factors: degrees held and time served. Long time teachers get paid more than new teachers (assuming they have the same academic pedigree), and teachers with masters or Ph.D. degrees get paid more than their colleagues who lack them (assuming they've been teaching about the same length of time).
Neither of these factors has any necessary or direct relationship to teaching ability. Human nature being what it is, some public school teachers naturally try to work this system to their advantage. The most common way of scaming the system is for teachers to enroll in masters programs at BSUs (Bull S--t Universities). Sometimes these programs are correspondence courses, sometimes you have to show up in person. What they have in common is that the course work is light, the grading easy, the degree virtually guaranteed, and the usefulness questionable at best.
The Georgia teachers who went ahead and bought their degrees outright, without doing any course work, have not done anything essentially different from their peers who obtain BSU degrees. In neither case is any effort made to ensure or even to ascertain if the degree leads to improved student performance.
This tying of public school teachers' salaries to what are often meaningless or bogus degrees is a travesty that cruelly harms our children's futures. Based on the results of the International Adult Literacy Survey conducted in the mid 1990s, a quarter of all U.S. 16 to 25 year olds are functionally illiterate. After 10 to 12 years of public schooling, at a total cost over $100,000, nearly one student in four is locked out of the modern economy!
Folks, it's time to reintroduce market forces to American education, to allow all families to participate in an open education marketplace in which schools are obliged to compete for the opportunity to serve our children. We need a system where schools have no choice but to pay teachers based on their actual classroom performance instead of basing salaries on some potentially worthless piece of paper, or on the length of time teachers have been employed.
Or we could just stick with the status quo, and sacrifice another generation of children on the altar of our own indifference and fear of change.
The U.S. Supreme Court just upheld the right of Washington State to deny a taxpayer-funded scholarship to a theology student. While the court's ruling emphasized that Washington state could legally have offered the theology student a scholarship if it had chosen to, it nevertheless has major implications not only for the school choice movement but for our entire nation.
The constitutions of all but three states in the nation have either a "Blaine Amendment" (which precludes government funding of devotional religious instruction) or a "compelled support" clause (which prohibits any citizen from being forced to support religious activities, including education). But whether codified in law or not, compelling people to support education that violates their convictions is socially divisive. What's more, our existing system of public schooling is equally so. At present, families seeking religious schooling are at a great financial disadvantage since they have to pay for both the secular public schools and their own children's religious education. The solution? Universal Education Tax Credits (UETCs).
UETCs allow every family to pursue the kind of education they value without forcing anyone to support instruction to which they object. They do so by offering tax credits to anyone who pays for a child's education. That means parents can take a credit against their own children's educational expenses, and other taxpayers can take a credit for donations they make for the education of other people's children. Donation credits, collected by private scholarship granting organizations and then distributed to low- and middle-income families, ensure that all children have access to the educational marketplace.
No state has yet implemented a full UETC program, though donation credits already exist in Pennsylvania, Florida, and Arizona, and personal use education tax credits exist in Illinois. A full UETC program combining both personal use and donation tax credits is soon to be tabled in South Carolina. And therein lies the future not only of the school choice movement but of public education itself.
So sayeth Secretary of Education Rod Paige during a meeting with the nation's governors at the White House today. The NEA, for those not in the know, is the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers' union.
Paige later said the comment was a joke (well, no kidding), and that it wasn't a very good joke (ditto).
This, however, gives us an opportunity to talk about the NEA. Is it an altruistic association selflessly dedicated to improving the education of American children, or is it a conspiracy whose only goal is to thwart all reform of public education? You guessed it: it's neither.
The NEA is a labor union. No more, no less. Its raison d'etre is to improve the compensation and working conditions of its employees, and to protect their job security. If the NEA failed to deliver in any of those areas, its members could, and would, dump it in favor of a different union.
The important thing for American parents and taxpayers to realize is that the interests of the NEA are not necessarily congruent with those of students. A new teaching method that improved outcomes while halving the number of teachers would be a pedagogical and economic windfall for the nation's families and taxpayers, but it would be opposed by the NEA. It would HAVE to be. If the NEA backed such a method, teachers would dump it faster than Howard Dean at an Iowa caucas.
Remember that the next time you read an NEA position statement on the latest education reform proposal.
The richest man in the world wants teenagers to attend small high-schools. He wants this so much that his multi-billion-dollar foundation is paying school districts to split up existing large high-schools into separate sub-schools, and to create new small schools as well.
Hey, I can sympathize. There is evidence that larger public schools and larger public school districts perform worse and are less efficient than smaller schools and districts (see Market Education).
The problem with Mr. Gates' idea is that it does nothing to change the intrinsic incentive structure of public schooling--and there are powerful incentives for bureaucrats to merge public schools into larger and larger agglomerations. That's how we got all our giant multi-thousand student high-schools in the first place.
A century ago, high schools were small, and folks liked it that way. But bureaucrats gain in prestige and income by increasing the scope of their responsibilities and the size of their budgets. How do you do that in the public school system? You do it by merging small schools and districts together so that you can become the uber-lord of a bigger fiefdom. The amount of consolidation this has caused in U.S. public schools over the years is staggering.
If Gates is incredibly succesful, he might rewind the school consolidation clock by one or two generations in a handful of cities around the country. But there is nothing to prevent these newly created small schools from being re-consolidated as soon as he turns his attention (and money) elsewhere.
Bill, buddy, if you want to make lasting changes to a system, you have to change the structure of the system. You can't just parachute in some localized changes and expect them to somehow endure. Unless you embrace a free market education system with need-based financial assistance, you'll end up just like Ozimandias.