[earl]

But they essentially have to be.

First, teachers outside of pretty narrow bounds will never be more productive. It takes one teacher to teach 20 students. In 10 years it will take one teacher to teach 20 students. Thus there is no productivity growth while, if you want people to be teachers, you have to eventually pay them more. So assume you don't have a hard time firing teachers; I just found a cute way to save a whole lot of money! Fire everybody with more than 10 years experience, ie all your high salaried employees.

Second, I don't think you'll possibly get good employees without strong unionization. Who would be stupid enough to teach without a union contract? Real people want to do things like own homes, put down roots, start families, and have some job security; that's enormously risky in an area with monopsony employer(s). I'm a software engineer, so there are dozens to thousands of employers in reasonably sized cities, whereas there are typically only one public school district and perhaps a handful of private schools. That's a lot more risk for the employee, since if I have a personality conflict with my boss, there are plenty of other buyers of software engineering. What happens to a teacher if he or she has a conflict with his or her principal? It's not like there are tons of employers around, and if the answer is that employee is just sol, don't expect smart hardworking people with choices to become teachers.

[3pt14159]

Oh please. I went to a (religious, not preppy) private school and the the non-unionized teachers did just fine. My family also paid about between 5 to 9k a year (complicated reasons for the range, basically the school over charges single child families and undercharges multi-child families, but also gives you a break if you have kids in an elementary school and a high school) Canadian dollars (so at the time, it would have been 3k to 6k American) for two children in private school. The average the province of Ontario paid at the time was 11k per child.

The market can handle delivery of education just fine without complicated unions and pay scales. All we need to do is to ensure that every family can afford to send their kids there (vouchers, or whatever).

[yequalsx]

That's great that it worked for the private school you went to. Does this scale for a country with 300 million people?

[yequalsx]

I guess the answer is that it might not scale to a nationwide level when 300 million people are involved.

Saying, "At my school...." is sort of like saying, "I got a web server to work on my home machine and now I'm ready to handle Amazon level traffic." You gotta think about how it's going to scale. You gotta think about unintended consequences and whatnot. Pointing out an example of how one particular school worked and how it worked well is not an argument for nationwide policy changes.

[schmittz]

You're criticizing someone's argument by using a parallel argument. There's also no reason for it to not work, at least that you've demonstrated. The web server analogy falls apart because the server is analogous to a single school, so a series of web servers may work... The point is that, in general, private education spends less per student. That's compelling evidence to at least investigate the effect of single employer, unionized employment systems on education quality. You can argue that vouchers will have some sort of distribution issues between socioeconomic levels and education quality, but as to whether they could allow realized savings on education (with the savings being used to subsidize failing schools), that seems pretty settled.

[yequalsx]

I'm unable to reply to your comment below so I'm replying here.

Edison is a for profit company that run schools in Philadelphia. It used to, I don't know if they do now. Edison has run schools in other districts. Results are mixed as far as I know.

No Child Left Behind has provisions about tutoring and many for profit tutoring companies are making money off of the mandate. Incidentally, one of George Bush's brothers is involved in with a tutoring company. There is a drive to privatize education by going to a for profit model.

For profits (and non profits) don't provide busing. They don't provide school lunches for low income students. The U.S. has dreadful public transportation in most localities and the lack of adequate transportation is a major problem for poor people who get vouchers. For profits don't normally build schools poor neighborhoods. Actually, for profits don't build schools. They get the taxpayers to pay them.

For profits provide workers with sub standard pay and benefits. That's how they become more efficient. For profits provide the corporate leaders with huge salaries though. The realized savings don't occur when one factors in long term damage that will be done.

[schmittz]

I am not advocating for the abolition of public education, but rather true equal "opportunity." You do cite valid concerns about private educational facilities, but that does not mean parents shouldn't have the opportunity to send their child to a school if they so desire. There's never anything wrong with maximizing someone's choice. I'll have to look more into these for-profit companies running schools. That's too bad that public money is being used to fund them. I also don't like the assumption that a for-profit company will do "damage" to education by virtue of the fact that it is for-profit. Although, they may ultimately not be effective in serving students needs.

[yequalsx]

Actually, I didn't criticize the argument. I asked a valid question. Namely, does the idea scale for a nation of 300 million people.

When you include private education do you include private higher education? Do you include for-profits? Their overall expenditures per student aren't less.

[schmittz]

I apologize for misinterpreting your attitude from your subsequent response to your own comment as disbelieving of the original commenter's viewpoint. Consequences of voucher systems are as-of-yet unknown or unexplored, but I greatly dislike fear of consequences as a reason for abandoning the pursuit of change altogether. Why would you include higher education? Higher education is a completely different issue from "the education problem." I'm unaware of any for-profit, private, non-postsecondary schools in the country. Obviously, if we did move to a voucher system, for-profits would not be included as it makes no sense for citizens to obligatorily fund a corporation when alternatives exist.

[natrius]

For some time, I've lamented the negative effects that the government's effective monopoly over primary education has had on our system. Eliminating choice eliminates the natural incentive to improve that results from consumers choosing better alternatives.

I found the monopsony problem you've pointed out on the employment end of the system quite insightful. Entering an industry with a limited number of employers generally isn't a great idea. However, there's a simpler solution to the problem than more unionization, which in practice requires non-voluntary membership to be effective. I think we'd all be better off if the government continued to fund education for those who can't afford it, but stopped actually running the schools themselves. I don't understand why voucher proposals find such limited support.

[_delirium]

> I don't understand why voucher proposals find such limited support.

A traditional stumbling block (though not the only one) is the question of religious schools. Voucher proposals have historically been seen as ways to get the government to fund religion, leading to various backlashes dating back to the 19th century: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaine_Amendment

A solution could be to only allow vouchers to be used for secular schools, but that runs into opposition from religious conservatives, and it's also unclear if it'd be permissible to exclude all schools run by religious organizations from an otherwise generally available program. I suspect conservative support for school vouchers that allowed religious schools would take a huge nosedive as soon as Islamic schools started taking advantage of them though, which is currently what's causing the Netherlands to rethink its voucher program.

[bugsy]

It's kind of bizarre. The government takes the people's money, using its militarized police powers, and then "gives it back" in the form of school funding. If the person then wants to CHOOSE which school they would like their children to attend, which is paid for with the money they had in the first place, then suddenly every lunatic crawls out of their cupboard and starts shouting "But the government is funding religion!"

News flash. The government isn't funding anything. The government produces nothing and their only source of income is theft from productive individuals who do produce things.

[_delirium]

Your theory of taxation and funding is quite far from the theory the founding fathers of the U.S. had, which might explain why you find the setup bizarre. I suggest reading some of Thomas Jefferson's writing for the explanation!

[caterping]

It's not bizarre. The kids who's parents wouldn't give a shit about choosing a school for them are the kids who need the most help.

[yequalsx]

Who is going to build a school in a poor neighborhood then? Who is going to transport the child to the good school? When the slots to the best schools are filled by children of wealthy parents then what?

We would end up with a worse two-tiered system than what we have now.

[anigbrowl]

If there is voucher money available, then the poverty of a neighborhood is a lower factor than it is for, say, retailers.

On the other hand, poor neighborhoods can be more dangerous and involve greater academic and social challenges. The solution is not to measure schools in poor areas against those in good ones and declare them worse because they perform more poorly (due to circumstances beyond teachers' control), but to measure students' baseline ability and then fund and reward relative improvement, rather than on the basis of absolute outcomes.

For example, say you go into a neighborhood on the first day of school and find that only 50% of 10th graders meet expectations for literacy. The best teacher in the world is not going to be be able to bring that up to the 95% level in a wealthy area on the other side of town, but if the proportion of students who are literate rises to 75% by the end of the 12th grade (correcting for dropout %ages), then that's a huge improvement. In economic terms, it's worth adding more funding right up to the point where marginal net gain falls below zero.

There are obviously willing and committed teachers willing to take on these important challenges. Maybe they would do better by setting up nonprofits and applying for funds to establish charter schools instead of abdicating their negotiation power to the national unions.

[yequalsx]

National unions do not negotiate salaries at the national level. Salary negotiations are done at the local level from district to district done by local union reps.

[anigbrowl]

Not all negotiations are about pay and benefits. Presumably there is some benefit in being organized at the state and national levels or unions wouldn't bother to do so.

[yequalsx]

Definitely there are reasons for having a national union. But you made a statement about not abdicating negotiation power to national unions. I assumed that by this you meant salary since that is the subject of the article about which all these discussions come from. Of course, things do get off topic and so I'm sorry if my assumption was incorrect.

[natrius]

The principle at play is the idea that where there is money to be had, there will be entrepreneurs that want to collect it. How effectively that would work is the subject of plenty of research that I'm not familiar with.

There is no system you can devise within the bounds of a capitalist society in which people with greater means don't achieve better educational outcomes.

[yequalsx]

But one can devise a system in which those without means have feasible access to quality education.

[natrius]

Agreed, and I think voucher systems can accomplish that.

[tokenadult]

It takes one teacher to teach 20 students.

Where my wife grew up, it took one teacher to teach 60 pupils. A class size of 50 was an exceptionally small class size. Several of the countries that best the United States in academic achievement

http://timss.bc.edu/PDF/t03_download/T03_M_Chap1.pdf

have much higher class sizes per teacher than the United States has. It is definitely possible to improve teacher productivity over the low level maintained in the United States. There are whole books on the subject.

http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Gap-Schools-Japanese-Educatio...

http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Schools-David-Perkins/dp/0028740...

http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-Class...

http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...

[yequalsx]

Whether or not the magic number is 20 or 50 or 60 the point is there isn't much room for productivity growth. The U.S. may gain a one time increase in productivity growth by doubling the size of classrooms but the inherent problems addressed by the parent will still exist.

[bugsy]

Who knows. With Khan Academy you have one guy teaching 1 billion people. It works pretty well too. Maybe we can get rid of most teachers and school districts. It's not like giving them more money has ever yielded better results before, it's clearly fallacious to claim it will do so now.

[yequalsx]

With Khan Academy you have one guy providing supplemental help to motivated people. You do not have 1 billion people be taught. Do you know of any cases where Khan Academy (with nothing else) has taught a person enough about a subject so that person could pass a final exam for a corresponding course at a university? I really haven't heard of this and would like to know. My question is not a snarky one.

Actually, there are lots of a cases where underfunded schools improve student performance with more money. There is a strong correlation between school funding level and student test scores.

[tokenadult]

There is a strong correlation between school funding level and student test scores.

I'd be happy to look at the examples you can find citations for. In my state, Minnesota, school funding was largely equalized statewide in the 1970s. That political feat was lauded as the "Minnesota miracle," and got our then governor on the cover of Time magazine as a can-do, innovative governor. With special funding adjustments for high-poverty areas and special funding for school districts to promote racial integration, the inner-city school districts of Minneapolis and St. Paul, the two largest school districts in Minnesota, actually get MORE funding per pupil than most other school districts in the state.

But after a generation of this experiment, the results are disappointing. On the whole, schools anywhere in Minnesota are probably better than schools in most places in Mississippi, which is why many observers are guessing at the macro level that funding makes a difference.

But within Minnesota, both the Minneapolis and St. Paul districts are laggards in academic achievement, and most disturbingly to people like me who hope for all school pupils to learn and thrive, the "achievement gap" between "white" pupils and "pupils of color" is wider in Minnesota than almost anywhere else. That last observation is especially disturbing because Minnesota has no history of de jure school segregation or of impairing the civil rights of black people. (The first black graduate of the University of Minnesota graduated before my late grandfather was even born.) Something is seriously awry in the Minneapolis Public Schools, despite adequate funding, and when I read in the local newspaper, as I did a few months ago, that a union-endorsed candidate for the Minneapolis School Board has NEVER lost for as long as the schoolteacher union has been organized as a collective bargaining unit, I think that more than just funding levels are a problem here.

[yequalsx]

The bad schools in Minnesota tend to be much better than the bad schools in Mississippi. There will still be variation amongst school districts because there are lots of factors involved (not least of which are cultural factors). But what adequate funding to is to raise the average (and median) but not eliminate the variation. Well, at the very minimum, eliminating the variation would take more money than society is willing to pay.

[shasta]

If teachers with experience aren't any better then they shouldn't be paid more for experience (not exactly true with a finite teacher supply, but close enough). Shifting money to newer teachers is going to drive newer teachers away from teaching jobs? I don't think you thought this through.

Regarding personality conflicts, having some teachers fired because they can't get along with their boss is a small price to pay to get rid of the worst teachers easily. Principals should be incentivized to keep talented teachers, and thus discouraged from firing them for petty reasons.

[earl]

I thought it through just fine, unless you have a large supply of smart well educated people who'd like to be making the same amount of money, and maybe less in real terms, ten years from now, and 20 years from now, and so on.

No? Well then I guess we're going to have to pay people more as they have more seniority, just like virtually every other industry.

[anigbrowl]

I disagree, although I think many of your observations are valid. It's unfortunate that our politics have become so polarized that both critics and defenders of teachers often wind up talking past each other.

There are obvious downsides to a seniority system. Younger teachers tend to get offered poorer contractual terms during collective bargaining, be handed the worst assignments (when they have the least experience), and are sometimes even bullied by older teachers with much greater authority and job security. I feel this is true of seniority systems in general, but in education the potential consequences have particularly wide-ranging implications for society. While we don't want to lose skilled veteran teachers, we don't want to raise the barriers to entry too high for new entrants to the profession either. Over longer periods, that leads to a succession problem.

I'm less convinced by your argument about monopsony. You mention that there are thousands of employers in cities (plural) for software engineers, but then refer to a single public school district with a handful of private schools, as if teachers were chained to the first city they work in. On the other hand, there are about 6 million teaching jobs in the US, vs. maybe a million software engineering jobs (going by memory from BLS data). And since, as you say, k-12 education necessarily involves a fairly low student-teacher ratio, the demand in that job market is very predictable based on demographics. While instructional methods may be disrupted by technology (and ought to have been disrupted far more than they have been up to now, if you ask me), a good part of junior education is about social skills and learning to find and function as part of a non-familial social group. Even if we could put a holodeck in every classroom tomorrow along with all other pedagogical disiderata, teachers would still be needed to manage kids' behavior and needs in more or less the same proportions as today. I think that number can be a bit higher than 20 (I grew up with class sizes of closer to 30, and it was fine), but there are only so many children that an adult can supervise and assist effectively.

[earl]

re: monopsony -- You didn't read my comment carefully. Teachers obviously aren't chained to a city, but not all of us are 20 years old and eager to hop around the country. Once you do things like buy a house / apartment, or have an SO with a job, or kids in school, or a group of friends, or family, or get divorced and are forbidden by court order from moving your child around, or have an underwater mortgage, or just plain like where you live, you stop wanting to move. Having one dominant and maybe one or two small alternate (and who knows what their labor demand is) local employers would discourage me or I'd think most reasonable people from wanting a career in a given field. Employment at will is a fine theory when there aren't monopoly / monopsony effects and both buyers and sellers have little leverage and are price takers. Remove that and people naturally see protection.

[ecounysis]

Productivity in teaching is not how many students can be taught by one teacher. It is how effective the teacher is at helping students learn.

[alextp]

I think this is the most insightful reply to the original post. Indeed, thinking about "numbers of students teached" is a really crappy metric for the performance of a teacher; it's far better, for example, to use something like (average increase in standardized test scores per student) * (number of students) / (hours taught) or somethng similar (assuming we do believe in standardized tests), the only problem with this metric being how you evaluate which teacher is responsible for which proportion of the increase in test scores, but this can be solved with proper randomization.

The idea behind this is that one should consider that a bad teacher is far more likely to fail his students (as lon as he doesn't control the exams), while a good teacher will send his students to the best univerisities/high schools/jobs availiable.

[earl]

No. Words have well accepted definitions. While obviously effectiveness is important, it's not productivity [1].

[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/productivity