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Jens 'n' Frens
Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.
"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures."
-- Daniel Webster
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Thursday, June 09, 2011 :::
Also via Instapundit, John Carney asks why conservatives are supporting for-profit colleges. Professor Reynolds suggests that conservatives see the attack on for-profit colleges as "primarily an effort to defend a traditional Democratic constituency," which is probably part of it. I mostly object to singling out for-profit colleges as for-profit colleges. I don't object to tightening the requirements for a school to get federal student loans, or requiring the schools to essentially co-sign some portion of the loans their students take. This would price some poor people out of college, but a lot of them probably don't belong in college, anyway. Because for-profit schools tend to have poorer credit risks as students, they would probably be hit disproportionately by those rule changes, which is also fine. What I object to is restricting loans for for-profit schools while non-profits and state schools get a free pass.
Similarly, I don't know how this ended up, but there was talk of raising taxes on energy companies a couple months ago, and I saw two main proposals. One would have eliminated some controversial general deductions that energy companies make heavy use of. The other would have left those deductions in place but singled out the five largest domestic oil producers and eliminated some deductions just for them. The former idea struck me as attractive while the latter struck me as inane.
Incidentally, can you single out five of something? Is there a word that is to five as "single" is to one?Labels: education, energy
::: posted by Steven at 12:30 PM
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Thursday, March 03, 2011 :::
Iowahawk is usually more about parody and sarcasm than about numbers, but he has a good take-down of a recent meme implausibly suggesting that collective bargaining for teachers leads to academic success for students. I would like to add that I think self-selection is a bigger problem with comparing SAT scores among states than race -- not everyone takes the test -- but I think the numbers Iowahawk uses account for that as well.
John Hinderaker takes on the notion that Koch Enterprises thrives on "special deals". I think the pipeline using eminent domain could be a special deal, but it isn't necessarily; the other examples pretty much consist of Koch following the same rules that everyone else follows, even when the managing brothers oppose those rules. Cf the third bullet point and the comments here.Labels: education, hypocrisy
::: posted by Steven at 12:08 AM
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Thursday, February 24, 2011 :::
An overwhelming majority of New Yorkers said teacher layoffs should be based on performance not seniority, according to a new poll today.
Eighty-five percent of New Yorkers said they support nixing the “last in, first out” policy that has become a rallying point for New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other big city school districts in New York, a Quinnipiac University poll today found. It's understandable why the teachers' union might want such a policy, and I think it makes sense to have a law prohibiting school districts from accepting that in negotiating for concessions from the teachers' union. But the policy of making firing decisions based solely on seniority is so incontrovertibly contrary to the public good (and, according to this poll, the will of the people) that the New York legislature has made it required by law.
Another noteworthy finding:The poll found that by a 50 percent to 22 percent margin, New York voters have a favorable opinion of public school teachers, but by a 51 percent to 39 percent believe teachers' unions play a negative rather than a positive role in the educational system. Labels: education, New York
::: posted by Steven at 9:30 PM
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Thursday, January 13, 2011 :::
For a number of reasons, workers' best protection against employer abuses is the ability to threaten to leave. Perhaps this is part of the reason large employers and labor unions introduced defined-benefit retirement packages; it provides a large pecuniary barrier to employees' leaving, and thus empowers the unions and the employers at the workers' expense. The pension benefit that accrues to young workers is very, very small; if an employee leaves the employer, even after 15 years, he gets very little value from the retirement plan; on the other hand, the employee deciding between leaving after 24 years and leaving at 25 years may find that his benefits accrue quite rapidly in that extra year, and will want to stick around. Almost the only value to the 15 year employee is that, if he sticks around a few more years, he will be able to earn these large non-wage benefits as well.
Defined-benefit plans don't have to be that way; in practice, though, they almost always are (where "almost" is me being overly cautious, and not an indicator that I have any reason to believe that there is an exception). I just came across a nice graph for the teacher pension in Missouri. In this case, a teacher in his 23rd year (or thereabouts) gets $200,000 in pension value in one year.
As Joel Klein pointed out in an op-ed in the WSJ, this means a lot of money is being spent that is not going to new teachers, making it harder to recruit the best new teachers. This is on top of the teacher mobility issue, and there is evidence of substantial gains made from moving teachers from one place to another; while there appear to be good and bad schools, and good and bad teachers, it also appears that teachers will generally match up better with some schools than others, such that switching a teacher at one school with a teacher at another school can improve both teachers' results.
While much of the recent antagonism toward defined-benefit plans for state employees has been focussed on the uncertainty that this creates for state budgets or the ability it gives to politicians to hide implicit debts, it should also be noted that many problems are caused by the way in which benefits accrue, which, even if they might sometimes serve the narrow interests of the state-as-employer, are detrimental to the state's economy and polity.Labels: big labor, education
::: posted by dWj at 11:28 AM
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Friday, December 03, 2010 :::
The most effective new teachers in Tennessee are being trained by Teach for America, not colleges of education, with the exception of math teachers from Vanderbilt University. Labels: education
::: posted by dWj at 5:28 PM
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Thursday, September 23, 2010 :::
Glenn Reynolds has been going on about a "higher education bubble". In his latest installment, he notesOne point that I haven't blogged, but that is worth mentioning here: The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we'll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren't causes of middle-class status, they're markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn't produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them. Labels: cargo cults, education, signalling
::: posted by Steven at 8:48 AM
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Friday, September 03, 2010 :::
Megan McArdle highlights the problems with an education study claiming that small schools are better by sorting schools in North Carolina by decile and finding the proportion of each group that was ranked in the top 25 schools in the state sometime between 1997 and 2000.
Even without the volatility issues she highlights, I would have to suspect data mining. It seems an odd number to look at. If I were picking an example to emulate, it wouldn't be "occasionally excellent", it would be "generally very good" or "consistently good" or "never at the bottom".Labels: education, statistics
::: posted by Steven at 3:42 PM
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Wednesday, July 07, 2010 :::
On the origins of "tenure" in primary and secondary schools.Labels: education
::: posted by dWj at 6:20 PM
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Friday, April 16, 2010 :::
Common sense takes a step forward in the New York City public schools:The city will end the practice of paying teachers to play Scrabble, read or surf the Internet in reassignment centers nicknamed "rubber rooms" as they await disciplinary hearings, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the teachers union announced Thursday.
The deal will close the centers, where hundreds of educators spend months or years in bureauratic limbo, costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars a year.
"It's an absurd abuse of tenure," Bloomberg said.
Under the agreement with the United Federation of Teachers, most of the teachers will be given administrative or nonclassroom work while their cases are pending. Teachers accused of serious charges including violent felonies will be suspended without pay. The rubber rooms often house poor teachers regardless of actual misconduct; they aren't competent, but they can't be fired, so they get sent to their sinecure safely away from the students. It may be better than leaving them in the classroom, but it's expensive and, of course, offensive to justice.The city has blamed union rules that make it difficult to fire teachers, but some teachers assigned to rubber rooms say they have been singled out because they ran afoul of a principal or they blew the whistle on someone who was fudging test scores.
I wouldn't mind a process in which a teacher stayed with the system until s/he had been fired by three separate principals or something; at some point, though, they should be fired from the system.* If that's not possible, at least having them do something potentially useful for their money an improvement over the status quo.
* Of course it's possible that they got three principals who are somehow unfair or have personality clashes with the teacher, even if the teacher might thrive with a different principal, in much the way it's possible for George Mason to make the final four. At some point I'd take the small risk of an injustice to a teacher than a large risk of a bigger injustice to students and taxpayers.Labels: education
::: posted by dWj at 2:06 PM
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Tuesday, March 30, 2010 :::
Jaime Escalante has died.Labels: education
::: posted by dWj at 10:11 PM
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Thursday, March 18, 2010 :::
From Eduwonk, a Time article on Obama's new education initiative and a response by New Yorkers Bloomberg and Klein.
If you want to like Obama, pay attention to his actions on education. Aside from moving things even more toward the federal government, I think he's frequently on the right track.Labels: education
::: posted by dWj at 2:40 PM
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Digging into studies on charter schools.
I would note that at least part of the theory behind charter schools is "let people try something different", which would largely be expected to have a positive impact if they quit trying it if it doesn't work. To some extent, assuming charter schools come with school choice, enrollment will push this; students will be more inclined to go to the schools that work than those that don't. One of the great virtues of private enterprise generally, vis-a-vis government programs, is that the ones that don't work go out of business. It's important to allow charter schools that do poorly to go out of business, and, assuming this is being done, you're likely to see better results for charters as a whole ten years after you start (or greatly expand) your charter program than 5 years after.Labels: education
::: posted by dWj at 2:22 PM
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Wednesday, February 24, 2010 :::
A good list of improvements to seek in managing the schools:Kill the "last in, first out" rule -- which requires, in the case of layoffs, that the most recently hired teachers, no matter how good, be laid off first. It makes no sense to spend time and resources recruiting new teachers and then require that the newest teachers be fired first, without regard to merit, in tough economic times.
There is a broad consensus that the worst-performing schools should be closed. But when school closings mean the loss of teaching jobs, state law requires that layoffs take place on a "last in, first out" basis systemwide. In other words, teachers at other schools with less seniority must be laid off before teachers in the poorest-performing schools.
This means that teachers in the worst schools would be retained if they have sufficient seniority and added to the "Absent Teacher Reserve." From there they might find other teaching jobs within the system. If not, they'd be paid at taxpayer expense for the rest of their careers. Meanwhile, schools that are working well would have to lose some of their newer teachers.
It's a mind-boggling system -- designed to protect the worst-performing teachers, rather than the students and taxpayers.
Labels: big labor, education
::: posted by dWj at 11:46 AM
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Friday, February 19, 2010 :::
Dozens of public high schools in eight states will introduce a program next year allowing 10th graders who pass a battery of tests to get a diploma two years early and immediately enroll in community college.
Students who pass but aspire to attend a selective college may continue with college preparatory courses in their junior and senior years, organizers of the new effort said. Students who fail the 10th-grade tests, known as board exams, can try again at the end of their 11th and 12th grades. The tests would cover not only English and math but also subjects like science and history. I'm not quite clear on who's being targeted, then; the high school will then cater to the top and the bottom, while the middle leaves?High school students will begin the new coursework in the fall of 2011 in Connecticut, Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont. The education commissioners of those states have pledged to sign up 10 to 20 schools each for the pilot project, and have begun to reach out to district superintendents.
The project’s backers hope it will eventually spread to all schools in those states, and inspire other states to follow suit. Supporters include the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union. I'm a bit more agnostic on that last point until the results are in; the best part of this is that a handful of states are doing something innovative and plausibly in a good way, and that we get to see in a few years what the unforeseen (and foreseen, for that matter) consequences are. Still, on a purely theoretical level, you have to concede this:Kentucky’s commissioner of education, Terry Holliday, said high school graduation requirements there had long been based on having students accumulate enough course credits to graduate.
“This would reform that,” Dr. Holliday said. “We’ve been tied to seat time for 100 years. This would allow an approach based on subject mastery — a system based around move-on-when-ready.” No kidding. I mean, can you imagine a job in which people are paid by years on the job, rather than by actual accomplishments? Oh...Labels: education
::: posted by dWj at 6:47 PM
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Tuesday, November 17, 2009 :::
"Chicago Public Schools have a gang problem. .... The gang is the Chicago Teachers Union."
-- State Sen. James T. Meeks, D-Chicago, chair of the Illinois Senate's Education Committee, Oct. 17, 2009 Labels: education
::: posted by dWj at 5:21 PM
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Monday, October 26, 2009 :::
Seeking scalability in teaching (pdf).Teacher effectiveness has the largest impact of school effects on student learning, and research indicates that top-quintile teachers produce learning gains three times (3X) that of bottom-quintile teachers. .... Instead of just trying to recruit more great teachers, what if schools chose to reach more children with the great teachers they already have? Labels: education
::: posted by dWj at 10:33 AM
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Tuesday, September 08, 2009 :::
I've been a bit torn by the controversy over the President's speech to schoolchildren. On the one hand, it seems a little overblown, but some of the materials the Department of Education originally put out for it seemed a little disconcerting. It was a good idea to release the prepared remarks yesterday before delivering them today; I would assume a lot of the controversy should be resolved by that. As Byron York points out, the speech itself, like President Bush's 18 years ago, is pretty unremarkable; based on the clips I've read, I approve wholeheartedly.Labels: education
::: posted by Steven at 12:40 PM
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Monday, July 27, 2009 :::
I scrounged up some data on spending on health care and education and plotted them logarithmically, normalized to the year 2000 (or 1999-2000 in the case of the education data).
It's gapped out a bit in recent years, no doubt in part for demographic reasons; the ratio of the population of folks over 65 to those 6-18 has gone from 0.66 to 0.73 from 2000 to 2008, according to census estimates. So resources put in per "customer" have grown at a largely similar pace. How has the quality of output changed in the two sectors?
Update: Er, by the way, the circles are health care spending and the line is education spending.Labels: education, Health Care
::: posted by dWj at 7:04 PM
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Friday, July 03, 2009 :::
When the Secretary of Education gets booed by the NEA, he must be doing something right.
Read his speech.Labels: education
::: posted by dWj at 12:49 PM
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Monday, June 01, 2009 :::
A Lumbee Indian who grew up poor in North Carolina and later struck it rich in real estate, Chavis took over American Indian [Public Charter School] in 2000, four years after it was founded with a Native American theme.
He began by firing most of the school's staff and shucking the Native American cultural content ("basket weaving," he scoffed). "You think the Jews and the Chinese are dumb enough to ask the public school to teach them their culture?" he asks -- a typical Chavis question, delivered with eyes wide and voice pitched high in comic outrage. There is no basket weaving at American Indian now -- and little else that won't directly affect standardized test scores. "I don't see it as teaching to the test," said Carey Blakely, a former teacher at the school who is writing a book about it. "I see it as, there are certain skills and knowledge that you're supposed to impart to your students, and the test measures whether your students have acquired those skills and that knowledge." Read more about, according to state tests, the fifth best school in California — with 98% of its students in poverty. (Making it number one among schools with more than a quarter of their students in poverty.) If teaching to the test results in high test scores without a truly solid academic foundation, we'll know in the next couple years; the associated high school has graduated its first class of 18 students, and All 18 students plan to attend college in the fall, 10 at various UC campuses, one at MIT and one at Cornell. Labels: education
::: posted by dWj at 9:18 AM
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