"America’s new aristocracy" and "An hereditary meritocracy"

Parents Forum
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May I suggest that what you have shared does more to support my points than “debunking” them. Of course, there are (large) pockets of suburbia in the US where the school districts are competitive. For instance, one might think of Highland Park in the center of the Dallas, or suburban Shangri La a la Southlake, McKinney, or Allen. And, yes that Allen that could spend 100,000,000 dollars for a football empire and park its busses in style.

There is no doubt that those schools are offering better choices, including the prize sought by many, namely the school within the school that separates students (and teachers) in nice compartments labeled IB or AP programs.

The above is one side of the US in 2015, but how does it compare to the urban decaying areas that have been mostly abandoned by the parents “smart” or rich enough to practice … school choice! Yes, school choice does exist in the US, but it is restricted to people of means, and often great means. But let’s look at highly unionized parts of the country and at the correlation with abysmal school systems. How does most of Chicago, Detroit, and {fill the blanks with many large and older cities] in terms of dropout, in terms of number of substitutes or percentage of absenteeism?

All in all, some of the points I raised were in answer to a statement that school choice cannot work. The posts describing a much better than average education exemplifies that not all schools are equal and that deliberate design can make the difference. There are schools that function well, but plenty that do not and have shown no signs of improvement but plenty of reliance on fighting any attempt to measure the school, let alone make it competitive.

Let’s not be naïve and think that the public school system is going anywhere. Even in countries where school choice is protected, the government schools retain about 1/2 of the organization, as not everyone is interested in a non-secular education.

There are no quick cures nor miracles in education. It is, however, rather unfortunate that most efforts in the US have been directed by the fear of implementing deep changes. Why fear dismantling a monopoly when about everyone will agree that we need plenty more teachers and better academic equipment and tools? Other countries, including the darling Finland, have shown what it takes, namely the courage to realize that being crazy is repeating the same mistakes over and over again in the hope of getting different results.

What we do know is that we can ALWAYS count on the US to end up doing the right thing, but only after having exhausted all the other alternatives. Again, our solutions have been to throw more money at the problems and hope that academic technology might replace the value of well-educated and well-trained teachers. The problem is that the additional money rarely go to where it belongs: the classroom! It usually goes to building more infrastructure that requires an ever growing of administration and babysitting. Reduced to its basis, the dialogue is often about the need to pay the teachers better, and that is true. In exchange, teachers who deserve to be treated as professional should deliver performances that reflect their salaries and benefits. Our education system should no longer be based on an antiquated agrarian system that made time to milk the cows and pick vegetables in the summer. Education should revert to a system when the students are taught within the four walls of the schools, and not send home to shore up a lacking classroom experience,

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Wow, well said, xiggi.

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“And, yes that Allen that could spend 100,000,000 dollars for a football empire and park its busses in style.”

Are you serious that a school district spent $100million on a football stadium?

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Pizzagirl, the stadium was only 60,000,000. The rest was spent on building a Cadillac “barn” for its busses. They needed that to complement the close to 100,000 Steinway grand piano.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Stadium_(Allen,_Texas)

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/allen/headlines/20101215-allen-high-buys-steinway-grand-piano-for-performing-arts-center.ece

PS On a side note … By the 2011-2012 school year, Allen was facing a $4.5 million budget shortfall and was forced to cut 44 teaching positions and 40 support positions through attrition and voluntary buyouts. The district raised the property taxes accordingly.

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@xiggi - I think we’re mostly in agreement. I do not like, however, when teachers and their unions are made the target of general complaints about “everything wrong in America today” - it’s like blaming issues with healthcare on “doctors who are just greedy”. There may be some greedy doctors or some bad teachers who “can’t get fired” but that’s not what is really going on with a lot of so-called reform movements.

Many in “education reform” (just check out who is behind the for-profit groups) are looking to profit by privatizing everything, and have found a niche with specialized charter schools or other ways of picking on the kids who can least handle yet another degradation to their education. Something like this happened, I think, with the automotive industry - a lot of middle-class jobs and protections were removed with the money being funneled to a few wealthy investors.

If a priority is reducing the wealth-gap, and I think it should be (it’s ridiculous what a chunk of the wealth the top fraction of a percent now controls in the USA, totally unlike any time in our economic history, and I consider myself fairly conservative economically) - then we need more protections for middle-class workers (e.g. unions) and not fewer. More middle-class jobs need defined-benefit pensions, as they used to have. Of course middle-class workers are unhappy to see teachers apparently getting something they don’t (though usually this is made up for in lower salaries which are less visible). The solution is more benefits for more workers. This will likely happen in a non-legislative way only as the labor market tightens up with the aging of the Baby Boomers, if at all.

Not to mention the importance of tenure to protect free speech for teachers/professors who might professionally be teaching evolution or sex ed (including acceptance of LBTQ) and other situationally-unpopular subjects. I have seen almost no “bad teachers” at my school, but the couple that I have seen, have been removed. I don’t think it’s a “bad teacher” if someone gets complaints about e.g. not “rounding up an 89%” or actually following through on penalties for cheating, or lessons on Global Warming or other things that entitled parents/students sometimes complain about. Job protections are very important to avoid a sort of lynch-mob mentality in such cases.

Which brings me to the issue of public funding for religious schools - There are situations right now in Europe where religious schools are objecting to teaching, for instance, women’s sexuality, rights for LBTQ people, dinosaurs (!!) and other so-called controversial topics. The British government is claiming a public interest in having those British Values taught to children, and religious fundamentalists are objecting.

If we believe that there is a public good to having a certain core of material/attitudes taught to America’s children, then we had better not let someone else’s religious preferences be affecting that on our collective dime. This is a moral argument on top of the Constitutional one.

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Fretfulmother, there are indeed bad apples on both “sides” of the debate, if we assume there is actually a dialogue! The extreme ideologists do not contribute anything positive to improving the issues and helping us finding a balance.

I do share your feelings about “extreme” religious schools, but we should not be blinded by the egregious behavior of the ones that border on lunacy. There are always dangers looming behind the best intentions. For instance, I mentioned the freedom of school in a country such as Belgium. Most everyone has now become more familiar with the issues brought by extreme Islamists in Western Europe. Yet, the country has to support and fund schools that belong to the official system and have distinct religious overtones.

In the US, the issue of religious schools is often a proxy for Catholic school. Just about twenty years ago, Bryk contributed this book: http://www.amazon.com/Catholic-Schools-Common-Good-Anthony/dp/0674103114 and I happen to think that many of his arguments are well-founded. Just to offer another example, I have to admit to fail to see why schools such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cristo_Rey_Network are destined to stay outside the “system” when so many resources are wasted through mismanagement and corruption.

Again, the system will not change rapidly --or ever, but I think that being close-minded about the possibilities of a more equitable system that permits the co-existence of different schools. I also believe that many are overestimated the percentage of religious instruction in Catholic schools, and underestimating the impact of “religious” classes that are dealing with justice and ethics.

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I recently finished reading Amanda Ripley’s Smartest Kids in the World and How they got that way. http://www.amazon.com/Smartest-Kids-World-They-That/dp/145165443X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1422469833&sr=1-1&keywords=the+smartest+kids+in+the+world

I found her journalistic analysis of international school systems compelling. It dealt with diversity, parental involvement, private schools, and poverty to make an argument for academic rigor for all. Great school systems do not privilege sports, inflate grades, or track early (thereby dooming the masses to boredom). We all know the U.S. public school system (and religious system) are failing to prepare the vast majority of kids for the work of the future.

Why there is much resistance to change?

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Fretful mother- there have been some terrific analyses done which show that the teacher’s unions somewhat cynically jumped on the “lower class size” bandwagon-- even in the absence of proof that class size was a factor in student performance-- because smaller classes means a school needs more teachers for the same number of students which means more union members aka dues.

We’re not talking about a class of 14 kids vs. 40- where I don’t think anyone would argue that class size is meaningful. But the difference between 25 and 28?

Public bashing of the teacher’s unions will stop (or recede) when the unions stop behaving in such blatantly self-serving ways. It takes years in some jurisdictions to get rid of a blatantly incompetent teacher. Not talking about a teacher who teaches something controversial- go google NYC’s “rubber room” where teachers who have been accused of having sex with their students hang out for months and sometimes years on end, getting their full salaries, and getting paid not to work. A fresh controversy right now in Stamford CT where a principal (mandated reporter) chose to protect a teacher who was having sex with a student. The lawsuits are starting to fly-- who is at fault- who knew what when, who should have contacted law enforcement, why aren’t teachers trained in the statutes on sex abuse, etc. But what is being laid bare is that NOBODY cares about the student in question… just a bunch of grownups protecting their jobs, lawyering up, paying consultants to come in and train these adults that they aren’t supposed to have intercourse with their students.

Really? Taxpayers need to pay consultants to teach adults not to have intercourse with their students?

So I am fully sympathetic to the sentiments behind your comments. Teachers get bashed unfairly for all sorts of things beyond their control- kids with poor nutrition who come to school hungry, kids who are homeless and teachers who try to teach despite many terrible factors going on in the kids life. They are heroes.

But when they act in a reprehensible manner, the unions don’t do themselves any favors by their reactions. The public starts to wonder if getting rid of/reducing the power of the unions might not get us a situation where the interests of the teachers and the students aren’t aligned a little better.

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Both of my parents were high school teachers in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. They were very against unionization at first because they felt it denigrated their professional status. Both loved their jobs, worked hard at them, and were proud to be teachers. They saw no need for unionization.

However, collective bargaining provided benefits and policies that were unheard of before, and paved the road to a middle class lifestyle that would have been less possible if the policies from the 50s and 60s had remained in place. Both parents retired at 55 with full pension benefits, for example. My mother often bemoans the fact that if I had gone into teaching like she wanted me to, I’d be retired now. (There’s nothing like maternal “I told you so’s”…even if you are in your 50s yourself.)

But in the past 25 years, some self-serving policies have played a roll in bankrupting the pension fund and have fed into the public opinion of teachers that is less than stellar. For example, increasing teacher pay drastically in the last few years of one’s career so that pension allocations are based on a salary that may have been twice as much as the teacher was getting throughout most the years he/she taught. Or having policies that make working past the age of 55 financially irresponsible, so some, like my mother, may be a “retired” teacher for years longer than they actually taught.

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That makes the profound assumption that you would also incur all of the other accoutrements and affectations of the upper middle class.

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Interesting how there’s an article every month that’s just a repackaged Bell Curve.

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Many posters seem mystified by the idea of admitting solely on the basis of academic scores; however, keep in mind when reading this article that The Economist is a British publication, and as such it has a British bias when looking at other things. In the UK, admissions are based purely on academic merit, but their population is a lot lower and they have a very different conception of the “college experience”. Personally, I think that a big part of our admissions system gets lost in translation over the Atlantic, which leads to articles like this one.

Just my two cents.

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[QUOTE=""]
However, collective bargaining provided benefits and policies that were unheard of before, and paved the road to a middle class lifestyle that would have been less possible if the policies from the 50s and 60s had remained in place. Both parents retired at 55 with full pension benefits...

[/QUOTE]

And the left wonders why there is so much animus against teacher unions? Do you realize how much money does it take to fund somebody pension (inflation adjusted) for 4 decades? If this is such a great and affordable idea, why don’t we all get to retire at 55 and have our pension funded by the government (or perhaps the Chinese).

Do you guys know how much we spent (publicly) on K-12 a year in US? The number is obscene - New York spends an average of 19K per student (the median is 22K). The district that spends least actually spends close to $14K per student. Finland, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, etc spend a fraction of this sum and have a much better outcome. Why is that?

What about the class sizes? I don’t think the union will be happy until there is a 10:1 teacher to student ratio. Then, everyone in the US will be employed as a K-12 school teacher.

Actually, I really like my kids’ teachers. It is just I cannot square my affection for them with the actions of the union that represents them.

Sorry - I will now get off the soap box.

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@furrydog:

According to here(http://www.ncee.org/programs-affiliates/center-on-international-education-benchmarking/top-performing-countries/finland-overview/finland-system-and-school-organization/), Finland spends about the same or more than the US at educating kids.

SKorea spends less than the US at lower levels but about the same for HS (http://www.ncee.org/programs-affiliates/center-on-international-education-benchmarking/top-performing-countries/south-korea-overview/south-korea-system-and-school-organization/).

You can’t really compare raw figures with Taiwan because the cost of living there is quite a bit less than in the US.

Cost of living in Singapore is closer to but still below the US.

Also, keep in mind that cost of living in NYC seemed to be double what it is in an “average” locale in the US when I was there, so it doesn’t surprise me that costs in NYC are roughly double the US average also.

BTW, @xiggi, teacher pay per student in the US is far below what the Belgians spend (http://www.ncee.org/2014/10/statistic-of-the-month-teachers-salaries-class-size-and-teaching-time/). If we doubled teacher salaries, we probably would see an improvement with school choice as well.

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Just a quick note on pensions - in MA, at least, our system is fully self-funded. I.e. we are not participants in SS, and we are forced to have automatic withdrawals that go into our pension account run by the teachers’ retirement plan. The public never pays a dime for our retirements. (Historically it has dipped to something like 98% self-funded with a small amount of other funding but not now.) We put in a much higher %age than SS and get a better plan. I don’t think it’s necessarily the best plan possible to invent, but it beats a lot of others.

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PT, it is all a matter of perspective. Should we also consider the ratio of teachers’ salaries to the cost of the overall education? The devil is in the details! Do foreign schools spend as much in providing the “services” that our K-12 deem to be basic in terms of entertainment and babysitting? Is it possible that countries such as Belgium have understood that students learn from good teachers … even if the buildings are no glorified country clubs with cheerleaders and Steinway pianos?

Fwiw, even if we were to use the sole metric you provided, this would not undermine one of my positions. I believe that our system should be built on better wages for the direct providers of service, and that their qualifications should be correctly compensated. In so many words, we need better teachers and to get them we will have to compensate them better at an early stage. And to be able to afford them, we will need to level the salaries by punting the seniority pay scales. And, yes that means that the difference between starting salaries and career ending salaries should be narrowed down to a minimum.

But, as we know, the salaries paid to teachers are only the most visible part of the education iceberg. It is what we hear about in the news. Yet, the waste, corruption, and lack of accountability at the administration level should be our first targets.

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The elephant in the room is the skyrocketing spending on special ed and “non-classroom” budget items. My district provides what is essentially taxi service (door to door) for kids who are healthy enough to participate in after school sports, but who have a doctor’s note that their asthma prevents them from walking a block to the school bus stop. My district is paying for dozens (probably over a hundred by now, I haven’t checked recently) of kids to attend private schools when savvy parents hire lawyers to sue the city over not being able to accommodate every single learning issue. My district pays for one-on-one instruction; scores of administrators who never even see a school child during their work day but who manage the people and the dollars who provide speech, OT, PT, etc.

The law requires that all children have access to an appropriate education and I have no problem with that. But the percentage of a typical district’s budget going to actual classroom teachers is declining in most cases.

I disagree with Xiggi- I don’t think educators and administrators are corrupt. But I do think that the educational industrial complex (the unions, the teaching certification business, all the for-profit companies that provide goods and services to school systems) see a bottomless pit and just won’t let go.

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Blossom, what I did write is that “we” should try to curb corruption in education. And, alas, I am afraid that it is quite present in the system. Perhaps, it is localized but it is not rare in Texas. A simple google search would reveal dozens of cases of defrocked superintendent with many serving prison time for embezzlement and other larcenies. Here is just one example:

http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2014/04/07/texas-school-district-scandals-continue-to-rattle-the-state/

In West Texas, for a while, it was impossible to find one school district “jefe” who had not or was about to be indicted. And those are the very visible cases that mask the “pettier” problems with kickbacks (think technology companies such as IBM, bond peddlers such as Goldman, and book publishers) and theft of goods and services.

I wish it were different.

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@xiggi - I like some of your ideas, but why do you think “good teachers” would be willing to have end of career salaries not much different than starting salaries? Don’t you like to get raises in your job, even beyond cost-of-living inflation raises?

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^ Raises over time to keep up with COL and inflation are something different from (large) planned differences in scale through seniority adjustments. Nobody expects that a 45,000 salary in 2015 will be the same in 2040. Raises are not absent per se.