So Much for American Exceptionalism
Jul 2nd, 2011 | 16 responses
Yesterday, National Public Radio (NPR) reported that around 60,000 teachers got a pink slip this week in the United States. We can debate the reasons for the layoffs but, in the final analysis, in the race to balance federal, state and local budgets these teachers were expendable. As my readers probably already know, I am an engineer in a sea of teachers in my family. I know some of the personal costs involved in a number like 60,000. Let’s for a moment however, forget things like good teachers seeing layoffs like this one and deciding to work for Wal-Mart or laid off kindergarten teachers selling a lifetime of personal teaching items to pay the mortgage. Let’s talk about the impact of losing that many teachers.
Conservatives would tell us school districts bring it on themselves. They say, given the opportunity, districts could just fire dead-beat teachers instead of the good ones. If they are part of the 60,000, then good riddance they would say. For a minute I would like you to consider the impact on a school no matter the quality of the teacher let go. If you take the example of your average school system and elementary school which laid off five of fifty teachers, what would be the impact (a real district close to me)? Not much?
Let’s say two of the teachers were first grade. So the class size of ten classes was increased by three students per class. At this point we already exceed the maximum allowable students per adult in a day care setting. Yes, a day care environment, where your primary job is to make sure the kids don’t kill each other, is imposed on the learning environment. How much learning can go on do you think? Can the teacher whose primary job now is to herd cats all day be really expected to teach the top and bottom of the intelligence scale?
Let us now consider the top of the intelligence scale. These three to five kids per classroom were destined to be nuclear physicists and help solve things like cold fusion and make America the king of the technology road, again. Now, with the cumulative effect of being behind, they settle. The become hedge fund traders or worse, if there is worse. See, these formative years are crucial. Being a half year behind your world peers in the first grade accumulates making it impossible to solve the most difficult problems in this world.
As we consider the risks at the bottom of the intelligence scale, we enter territory where the tax payer actually loses money. These two or three children get so far behind the cumulative result is being a high school drop out. The deck is already stacked against these kids. They will probably become a ward of the state in some form or fashion. It is pretty likely; they will actually multiply our losses because they will help enable drug abuse or worse. Their learning deficit will become a cancer spread throughout our society. These leaches on society can often be turned around in their formative years but, when we lay off 60,000 teachers, we doom ourselves to support them and pay for the damage they will do for the rest of their lives.
Granted, this is a fictional allegory but, how many times will this happen in real life? By making these cuts, I submit, we are dooming the classes of 2021, 2022 and 2023 at a minimum. If we keep it up, we may doom a whole generation. Some argue we already have. Those who believe in American exceptionalism should be appalled. If we believe there are inefficiencies, we should cure those before we give up on the kids. Don’t just pull the rug, or their teachers, out from under them. There are all kinds of deficits we leave our kids. There are monetary, infrastructure, and education deficits just to name a few. I believe going after the monetary deficit before the education deficit dooms our country to be second class world citizens. So much for “American Exceptionalism.”
16 Responses to “So Much for American Exceptionalism”
It is unfortunate when anyone gets laid off but I think you should look at the numbers in historical context.
According to the BLS, there were 5 million state and local education workers in 1970 and there were 48.9 million school aged children, a ratio of about 9.8 to 1.
In 2010, there were 10.5 million state and local education workers and 49.9 million school aged children or a ratio of 4.75 to 1.
Now against that backdrop, why does the firing of 60,000 teachers signal the decline of America? Were the children of 1970 in schools undereducated. Did we somehow fail to achieve as a society with fewer educational workers per student. That’s certainly not my impression.
Oh, I’m sure there can be found people that equate rationalization of the public sector (overdue!) with “decline” [sic].
The unspoken assumption is that more teachers is always good, and indeed is essential to American prosperity.
I think it is more likely that most teachers are good, some are bad, and that the question of how many (and which ones) we can afford at a given time deserves a much more balanced analysis than a simple assertion that teachers should always keep their jobs while everyone else is losing them.
Unfortunately, the author provides no discussion of where the money could come from to keep employing more teachers. This is a very important and indeed unavoidable question, since I assume the author also agrees with the teachers’ union’s demands as to salary and benefits levels for teachers well in excess of those for non-government workers.
By the way, the author should consider the possibility that if it cost a bit less to employ each individual teacher, we could have more of them. Perhaps the teachers’ unions should share in the responsibility for raising the per-teacher cost of employment too far?
Steve,
Thanks as always for your insightful comments. Thanks too for your extraordinary ability to find statistics to back up your claims.
In this case however, being a parent of an 8 year-old, I believe I am privy to antidotal evidence which trumps your data. I think most any parent reading this who has K through four children can confirm the following statement:
I know of no K-4 class in my area (say 4 counties) which has less than a 25:1 student-teacher ratio.
That being said, the reasons for this observed data are endless. The reasons, I submit are not relevant for the purposes of this column. The fact remains, 60,000 teachers were jerked out of a classroom with the effect of raising class size, in many cases. We can argue points of resource allocation like too many custodians, counselors, principals, music teachers… but, the fact remains, 60,000 class room teachers are gone.
The thrust of the article is why we can’t fix the problems of resource allocation before we take teachers out of the class room.
Thoughts?
DR,
You should know by now that facts are my thing and google is wonderful. Responding to things I read is how I learn more facts. Said differently, I knew directionally what I reported above but didn’t know the specifics until I had cause to look them up.
FWIW, I have three children, two school aged and one close and I have relatives who are in the K-12 public school teaching world. So I’m not sure I can agree with your contention above and I know of several schools that are below the 25 number you cite.
I’d also point out that in the 1970s when I went to school, 30 was a not uncommon class size in my public school and somehow many of us survived the process.
As to your question about resource allocation, it rather depends on what part of the resource allocation choice you want to debate. Public vs. private at the highest level, education versus other public in the middle, and within education at the bottom.
As I read your comment, you are focusing on the one at the bottom. The resource allocation decisions within education are heavily constrained by administrators at multiple levels, requirements that constrain choice. One simple example of this is ESL requirements…these didn’t exist when I was in grade school and they consume lots of resources. I’m not arguing good or bad though I could, simply pointing out the constraints.
In addition, based purely on anecdotal evidence from people closer to public education than am I, many of the people making these decisions are idiots. They have no idea how to make tradeoffs. Take the $150 million spent on a high school in LA that nobody will ever use. That $150 million would have employed 1500 teachers but instead it built a school that nobody is ever going to use.
In terms of solutions, I only have 4 to offer.
1. Get rid of all the checkers checking checkers. The Federal and State governments (or the Federal and local governments) should get out of the education business and use the money to focus on classroom instruction.
2. Go back to the 3Rs. Enrichment is nice but it’s expensive on a relative basis. When times are tough, we can’t afford it. In addition, we are producing students who are deficient in basic skills because we are moving time toward electives in the classroom. This reduces costs because the ability to use teacher resources declines as the complexity of the curriculum increases.
3. Pay teachers for performance not tenure. The best teachers are underpaid but the average is probably overpaid. I know performance is hard to measure but it is so in every industry. Again, this doesn’t necessarily reduce cost but I think it a critical components of increasing effectiveness.
4. Make schools report on the percentage of money spent on administration versus teaching. I think most taxpayers would be truly horrified by the numbers if they were able to see them.
Last thought. You claim the article is about fixing resource allocation. Maybe you didn’t pick the title but the clear implication is that this reallocation will lead to the end of American exceptionalism. I don’t think that passes the smell test.
“In this case however, being a parent of an 8 year-old, I believe I am privy to anecdotal evidence which trumps your data. ”
Anecdotal evidence is what people use when they want to ignore facts. True classroom size hasn’t shrunk as much as Steve’s numbers would indicate but that would be because of teachers used in other non-traditional classroom settings. You still ignored the main point that even anecdotal evidence can’t say classroom size has increased over the ’70′s and that the children then were not considered undereducated. Classroom size for normal students has not been shown to be a significant factor.
Sorry it took so long Steve,
As far as the smell test on exceptionalism:
We rank 33rd in reading. We rank 27th in math. We rank 22nd in Science. We are average in (middle of the pack of nations) student to teacher ratio until high school when we begin fighting for the cellar.
http://www.oecd.org/home/0,2987,en_2649_201185_1_1_1_1_1,00.html
The irony is that no one spends more as a share of GDP on education than the US except Israel. This might be the point of your arguments. We absolutely agree on this point. More money for education is not necessarily the answer. Along those lines is also where my point is hidden. Maybe you are correct and class size is not the magic bullet. I think you are wrong about the class size based on my cited statistics and what I believe to be logic. But, if cuts are inevitable, I just believe it would be smarter to start at the top and not the classroom. You could get more bang for your buck if you started at the top. Administration positions pay much better than teaching positions. You could lay off one superintendent and save three class room teachers. Within some sensible guide lines, let the principals run our schools. They can comply with all the regulations without four layers of bureaucracy at a central office.
Thanks again for the conversation.
DR
DR
I completely agree that our schools are doing worse on a relative basis. Where I disagree is that fewer teachers is the cause. Indeed, we’ve had more teachers and class sizes have gone down (not up) since we were higher up in the rankings.
It’s not money and it’s not class size, I can’t say I know what it is, but it isn’t those two things.
I agree on administrators but I would go further. Part of the problem is we now have four levels of administration in some cases: district, local or county, state, federal. How about getting rid of at least two of them entirely as a starting point?
Steve,
We might have the record for the longest TMV conversation.
Big classes worked, now they apparently don’t. The only real difference I can point to is the fact that children have both (when there are two) parents working. In the “good old days”, moms were more engaged because they had not worked all day and children were not being raised in the formative years by after school care.
It sounds like we are in agreement on some form of administration slashing. I would add one thing. Moving federal/state compliance from the central office to the school and having the person answer to the principal would do two things:
1. We would pay compliance personnel less than a principal instead of more.
2. Actually being in the school would allow them to backstop classroom teachers in times of need. The possibilities are really endless once you drag them out of a central office. Some could be a part of the teacher evaluation process (actually living around and observing a teacher on a daily basis-not two times a year-what a concept) or just about any other real student service.
Thanks again
DR
DR, the only way to reduce class sizes without increasing spending would be to get control over the cost of each individual teacher. And because that cost has been inflated by decades of unsustainable demands from the teachers’ unions, isn’t the only way to get control of those costs to reduce the amount of power teachers’ unions?
LP,
If teacher’s unions are responsible for the plight of the teaching profession, contrary to the conservative propaganda, the unions are not doing a very good job. Granted unions have bargained for some pretty crazy work rules in some jurisdictions. These rules are probably in lieu of real money.
Since we compete globally I feel the best gauge is country by country comparisons. We are 11th in that respect behind conservative darling countries like Ireland. Before you say it (they get 3 months off), we are number one in teaching hours. By almost any other comparison teaching is still in the cellar. By occupation, entry level teachers ($ 30 k) fall way behind all other bachelor’s degree professionals like accountants ($45 k), engineers ($47 k), and nurses ($39 k). Over the past decade, adjusted for inflation, teachers got a 0.2 percent raise. Some of those years were pretty good years (2004, 5, 6) for employees in private industry.
About the only thing on average and nationally teachers get which their private sector professional peers don’t is the ability to retire at 25 years of service or 55 years old and tenure. Tenure is not all it is been made out to be either. In most jurisdictions tenure only means a hearing is required to dismiss or discipline a tenured teacher. If the administration can prove the teacher is violating a rule or not cutting the mustard in some other way, they can still get fired (much like private industry). They are somewhat better protected than their private sector cousins in “at will” work states, but that is a column all by itself for another day. Both of these benefits have been eroded in the last state legislative session.
http://www.nea.org/home/14809.htm
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/teacher-pay-around-the-world/
Thank you
DR
Perhaps we could agree not to boil it down to a stark, either/or choice. Perhaps instead of the teachers’ unions being THE cause of problems in education funding, we could agree that they have been PART of the problem. That way, we could avoid strawmen and get down to real, multiple cases.
Another problem is what makes a “professional”. This is one of the topics I dealt with in my dissertation work, so I’m not just spouting talking points on this. A “professional” is distinct from other occupations because of a field-specific set of norms and ethics that members of the field embrace even at some cost to themselves. Thus, lawyers and doctors are “professionals” because they have a set of ethical obligations to clients that they must fulfill even to the point of sometimes fulfilling them without pay.
A union operates in tension with professionalism because it places the workers (teachers) ahead of the clients (students) instead of the other way around. The real problem is that the clients here — the students — have no representation at all in the forums where the unions and government officials argue about policy. Teachers unions often claim to speak for the students, but their behavior clearly indicates that the interests of teachers as workers comes first and the students’ interests is secondary and, indeed, merely instrumental.
The problems of dismissal can still exist in the absence of tenure by virtue of union work rules that delay or even outright prevent termination in all but the most extreme cases. But I am willing to leave that aside to point out that the problem isn’t really “dead weight” teachers who should be terminated, but an overall education bureaucracy (with union leaders leading the way) that chokes individual teacher creativity and reduces the entire field to mediocrity. You see, you aren’t the only one with a family awash in teachers. And I hear frustrations about rigid lesson plan requirements and other work rules that originate from or are at least endorsed by the unions that prohibit teachers from fostering learning and which require them to hold back gifted students in order to make mediocre students feel better. Reading the NEA President talking about recruiting enthusiastic, creative teachers is pretty laughable given how local union leaders have repeatedly drummed out some of the most enthusiastic and creative teachers in their midst as potential threats to union hegemony.
And that has a DIRECT impact on our ability to succeed in those international competitions.
So, yes, I think teachers’ unions have contributed to the problem in multiple ways and that reforming teachers’ unions — including restricting their “rights” to collectively bargain in the absence of any REAL check on their power — is essential to reforming the system.
The brute truth is that the countries we need to compete against have unionized teacher who get paid much more than ours. On the other hand, those teachers do not deal with the diversity that our teachers face everyday. Just one example: if you hold poverty rates constant (individual school Vs country) we beat the socks off of the competition. We do badly because more than 25% of our students live below the poverty line. The next nearest country is Great Britain with about 14%. Given the diversity, our teachers, even the ones that folks call mediocre do an incredible job. It’s tough being judged by folks who last saw teaching through the eyes of a 17-year old. I have taught for 37 years. If you paid me now, adjusting for inflation, what I got paid in 1968, I’d be comfortable, but I have not gotten a raise higher equal to inflation for the last ten years. In my career, I have taught with 4 predators and three bitter, ugly teachers. The rest ranged from “good” to “magic”. Throw around statistics all you want. Schools are complex adaptive systems and Ashby’s Law says statistics can never adequately describe them. Go spend a lot of time in schools and then come back and tell us what you see. America has better teachers than she deserves.
I wish I had taken my time and proofed the previous comment. Well, that’s what happens when folks who support an industrial, one-size-fits-all, model of education start getting under my skin. Sorry.
“adexterc” wrote:
Many people ignore or (for political reasons) suppress or omit the correction when it comes to things like infant morality, or even for violent crime. We even see a version of this with disparity claims (and associated illogical inferences, such as “systematic oppression”) for life span. This is often brought up whenever the overdue raising of the retirement age for Social Security and for Medicare is sought or merely mentioned. What matters isn’t the average lifespan, but instead expected remaining years of life at various selected ages (including current and proposed new retirement ages, and this is also the correct basis for adjusting retirement ages in the future “for longevity). Long, long ago (into the early 20th century) there was substantial childhood mortality, which lowered the average for everyone. Many people in poor areas are at enhanced risk of violent crime or choose to engage in it, and this raises the juvenile and young adult death rate for some, but not for others, but also reduces the average life span for those affected, but not for others. It’s dishonest to know of this yet still insist on making decisions based on “averages.”
It’s almost sad reading these comments, especially since it’s been barely a decade since 9/11. When I was a kid, which was not that long ago, as I’m only 25, I was taught that teaching was one of the most noble profession into which one could enter. After seeing the sacrifices made by firefighters and police officers on 9/11, I became persuaded to harbor the same sentiment toward police and firefighters, and have since aspired to become a firefighter myself. But as soon as the economy tanked it’s like I was living in an American where 9/11 hadn’t happened and there were no longer “good” teachers. It seems at every turn, these noble public employees (simply for being public employees) are demonized and made examples of. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems that yesterdays heroes have become today’s scapegoats.