A friend of mine has been involved with Special Education this summer.
Asked by another school district if he were interested in teaching a handful of students for about half the summer, he has found himself, along with several assistants, essentially providing child care from 8-12 for half a dozen special needs children.
The tab for this state-provided daycare is astounding. There's my friend's compensation, several thousand dollars, plus that of his aides.
What's astounding is how little of value, other than warehousing, is going on in this taxpayer-funded half-day summer camp masquerading as school.
Of the children attending, several are autistic, several are heavily-medicated, and another is a foster child whose guardian's objective seems to be to place the child somewhere all day, every day. Since 'school' is free, whereas camps cost money, all of these children are in summer school.
Despite my friend's best efforts, his explanation of what takes place each day makes clear what a waste of society's money calling it 'school' is.
We talked about the larger issue of mainstreaming these children during the conventional school year. As one might expect, our viewpoints differed. He claimed that, if he were involved in Special Ed full time, then, over time, he could get a few of these children to learn something useful. That's the opinion of an affected, involved teacher who pretty much has to believe that his efforts make a difference.
What I see is something much different.
Before mainstreaming and Special Ed, most of these children weren't allowed anywhere near conventional K-8 or high schools. That's because the cost of attempting to educate them was so high, due to labor intensity, and the method of instructions so different from the mainstream, that it made no sense. As it is this summer, the teacher:student ratio approaches 2:3.
But nonsense is what we now have. What is being taught isn't remotely near normal education. None of these children, from my friend's description, are ever likely to be independent, productive adult members of society.
During a far-ranging discussion on the subject, I reminded my friend that by mainstreaming handicapped children into conventional schools, a capital spending burden was added to the ongoing operational expenses of each school.
From a strictly societal, economic view of education, it's almost impossible to justify mainstreaming. Public education, as we have it in the US, for better or for worse, is meant to educate the broad population of children to become economically productive adults. In a globally-competitive world, money spent on this function has to be as productive as other nations which do a good job of it, or our nation's resources are being comparatively wasted.
Thus, as heartless as it may seem, for all taxpayers to be saddled with the effort of making believe that behaviorally, emotionally and/or mentally handicapped children can be mainstreamed with no adverse effects on teachers, other students, the school systems, and costs/pupil, is unfair. Because, unlike most students, who can leave school able to be functioning adults capable of independently making their way in society, those handicapped students cannot do so.
The attempt to mainstream such children reflects our nation's, and my state's apparent disregard for the reality of limited economic resources, including tax dollars.
I'm fine with a state or the nation setting up defined-contribution plans for children with non-physical handicaps which prevent them from benefiting from the conventional school experience. But to subject entire school systems to costs and changes in order to benefit a few who won't actually attain the desired goals of such systems is simply unaffordable.
People like Tom Freston did our society no favor when, as a former Viacom senior executive, he fought New York to force the state to pay for private schooling for his autistic child which he could easily afford.
Every parent or teacher of an autistic or otherwise-handicapped child wants, perhaps needs, to believe that that child, with enough special, individualized attention, can become a functioning, independent adult. But the truth is, the chances are not very good of that being true. Thus, it's unfair to make the rest of society pay for every handicapped child's parents and teachers' hopes.
Liberals like to claim that the worth or measure of a society is how it treats its least-fortunate members. And, in a vacuum of real economics and global competition, that could be true.
But that's not the world in which we live, and if we continue to spend money at the rate I'm seeing through my friend's brush with "teaching" handicapped children this summer, I question whether our American society will be capable of maintaining its competitive edge among other nations for another generation.
At which point everyone's educational performance and our society's ability to afford what we now take for granted will be at risk.
Showing posts with label Education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Education. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Thursday, May 12, 2011
Joel Klein's New York Schools Stories
Joel Klein, former chancellor of New York City public schools from 2002 through 2010, wrote a provocative editorial recently in the Wall Street Journal entitled Scenes From the New York Education Wars.
His observations in the passages below reinforce how obstructive the teachers' union was to his efforts to improve the city's education system.
Teachers are extremely effective messengers to parents, community groups, faith-based groups and elected officials—and their unions know how to deploy them well. Happy unions can give a politician massive clout, and unhappy unions—well, just ask Eva Moskowitz, a Democrat who headed the New York City Council Education Committee when I became schools chancellor in 2002.
Smart, savvy, ambitious, often a pain in my neck and atypically fearless for a politician, Ms. Moskowitz was widely expected to be elected Manhattan borough president in 2005. Until, that is, she held hearings on the city teachers-union contract, an extraordinary document, running for hundreds of pages, governing who can teach what and when, who can be assigned to hall-monitor or lunchroom duty and who can't, who has to be given time off to do union work during the school day, and so on.
The contract defied parody. So when Ms. Moskowitz exposed its ridiculousness, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), then headed by Randi Weingarten, made sure that Ms. Moskowitz's run for borough president came up short. After that, other elected officials would say to me, "I agree with you, but I ain't gonna get Eva'd."
I found that story to be very chilling. As I noted in my recent post concerning Randi Weingarten, union officials attempt to identify themselves with children's education, but they are really just concerned with their own poewr and money. In Weingarten's case, she savagely retaliated against an elected official who merely wanted voters to understand what the teachers' union contract was doing to education in their schools.
Consider Klein's story about Albert Shanker.
Politicians—especially Democratic politicians—generally do what the unions want. The unions, in turn, are very clear about what that is: They want happy members, so that those who run the unions get re-elected, and they want more members, so their power, money and influence grow. The effect of all this? As Albert Shanker, the late, iconic head of the UFT, once pointedly said, "When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of schoolchildren."
When I told my NJ public school teacher friend that story, he flatly refused to believe it. His own union officials have so brainwashed him that he simply can't believe that they don't care about his students. Sometimes denial is hard to accept and acknowledge. To me, Shanker's quote is one of the most telling of any I've heard by a public sector union boss.
Consider the common refrain that "We'll never fix education until we fix poverty." This lets school systems off the hook. Of course money, a stable family and strong values typically make it easier to educate a child. But we now know that, keeping those things constant, certain schools can get dramatically different outcomes with the same kids.
I loved that passage. It's so typical of the liberal mindset to blame society while continuing to pocket taxpayer dollars for poor results. And use an external cause to evade responsibility for their own actions.
At individual schools, differences can be breathtaking. One charter in New York City, Harlem Success Academy 1 (founded by Ms. Moskowitz after she left politics), has students who are demographically almost identical to those in nearby schools, yet it gets entirely different results.
Parents celebrate as they hear that their 4-year-old daughter was awarded a coveted slot at the Harlem Success Academy charter school.
Eighty-eight percent of Harlem Success students are proficient in reading and 95% are proficient in math. Six nearby schools have an average of 31% and 39% proficiency in those subjects, respectively. More than 90% of Harlem Success fourth-graders scored at the highest level on New York State's most recent science tests, while only 43% of fourth-graders citywide did so. Harlem Success's black students outperformed white students at more than 700 schools across the state. Overall, the charter now performs at the same level as the gifted-and-talented schools in New York City, all of which have demanding admissions requirements. Harlem Success, by contrast, selects its students, mostly poor and minority, by random lottery.
Critics try to discredit these differences. Writing last year in the New York Review of Books, the historian Diane Ravitch argued that schools like Harlem Success aren't the answer because, as a group, charter schools don't outperform traditional public schools. Yet even Ms. Ravitch had to acknowledge that some charter schools get "amazing results." If that's the case, shouldn't we be asking why they get much better results—and focusing on how to replicate them?
A full-scale transition from a government-run monopoly to a competitive marketplace won't happen quickly, but that's no reason not to begin introducing more competition. In the lower grades, we should make sure that every student has at least one alternative—and preferably several—to her neighborhood school.
That story and Klein's reasoning about making small steps is a valuable example regarding charter schools. Call them what you will, charter schools are simply affordable private schools. Why wouldn't choice be important? Why wouldn't it make sense to focus on, celebrate and try to replicate even a few charter school successes?
Instead, the union bosses pick on the worst examples of private schools to argue that none should exist. Under that logic, we'd scrap the public school systems and their teachers, too, by focusing on the worst public schools.
As Shanker put it in a surprisingly candid speech in 1993: "We are at the point that the auto industry was at a few years ago. They could see they were losing market share every year and still not believe that it really had anything to do with the quality of the product. . . . I think we will get—and deserve—the end of public education through some sort of privatization scheme if we don't behave differently. Unfortunately, very few people really believe that yet. They talk about it, and they don't like it, but they're not ready to change and stop doing the things that brought us to this point."
I found this, too, to be a chilling quote from Shanker. He must have been quite a capable union boss. He understood reality, but was able to temporarily halt its onset from affecting his union members. Never mind what that did to millions of American children in the process.
My teacher friend expressed at least one reason for the behavior Shanker noted in that passage. My friend notes that he's closer to retirement than he is to commencing his career. So, like the old pilots who favored newer, younger pilots being given a lower starting salary and fewer benefits, he, too, cares little for le deluge after his tenured career is over.
In short, so long as he gets his, he could care less about the fate of his replacements. Trouble is, all of the discussion is in regard to his pension, pay and benefits- not children's education.
Klein's instructive selected quotes from Shanker reveal the simple truth. So long as unions serve their members, unionized teachers won't really care about children's educational success as much as they care about their own economic success.
At least a private school can remedy this flaw by aligning the two for each individual teacher, rather than maximizing average welfare of a group of teachers, regardless of pupil performance
His observations in the passages below reinforce how obstructive the teachers' union was to his efforts to improve the city's education system.
Teachers are extremely effective messengers to parents, community groups, faith-based groups and elected officials—and their unions know how to deploy them well. Happy unions can give a politician massive clout, and unhappy unions—well, just ask Eva Moskowitz, a Democrat who headed the New York City Council Education Committee when I became schools chancellor in 2002.
Smart, savvy, ambitious, often a pain in my neck and atypically fearless for a politician, Ms. Moskowitz was widely expected to be elected Manhattan borough president in 2005. Until, that is, she held hearings on the city teachers-union contract, an extraordinary document, running for hundreds of pages, governing who can teach what and when, who can be assigned to hall-monitor or lunchroom duty and who can't, who has to be given time off to do union work during the school day, and so on.
The contract defied parody. So when Ms. Moskowitz exposed its ridiculousness, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), then headed by Randi Weingarten, made sure that Ms. Moskowitz's run for borough president came up short. After that, other elected officials would say to me, "I agree with you, but I ain't gonna get Eva'd."
I found that story to be very chilling. As I noted in my recent post concerning Randi Weingarten, union officials attempt to identify themselves with children's education, but they are really just concerned with their own poewr and money. In Weingarten's case, she savagely retaliated against an elected official who merely wanted voters to understand what the teachers' union contract was doing to education in their schools.
Consider Klein's story about Albert Shanker.
Politicians—especially Democratic politicians—generally do what the unions want. The unions, in turn, are very clear about what that is: They want happy members, so that those who run the unions get re-elected, and they want more members, so their power, money and influence grow. The effect of all this? As Albert Shanker, the late, iconic head of the UFT, once pointedly said, "When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of schoolchildren."
When I told my NJ public school teacher friend that story, he flatly refused to believe it. His own union officials have so brainwashed him that he simply can't believe that they don't care about his students. Sometimes denial is hard to accept and acknowledge. To me, Shanker's quote is one of the most telling of any I've heard by a public sector union boss.
Consider the common refrain that "We'll never fix education until we fix poverty." This lets school systems off the hook. Of course money, a stable family and strong values typically make it easier to educate a child. But we now know that, keeping those things constant, certain schools can get dramatically different outcomes with the same kids.
I loved that passage. It's so typical of the liberal mindset to blame society while continuing to pocket taxpayer dollars for poor results. And use an external cause to evade responsibility for their own actions.
At individual schools, differences can be breathtaking. One charter in New York City, Harlem Success Academy 1 (founded by Ms. Moskowitz after she left politics), has students who are demographically almost identical to those in nearby schools, yet it gets entirely different results.
Parents celebrate as they hear that their 4-year-old daughter was awarded a coveted slot at the Harlem Success Academy charter school.
Eighty-eight percent of Harlem Success students are proficient in reading and 95% are proficient in math. Six nearby schools have an average of 31% and 39% proficiency in those subjects, respectively. More than 90% of Harlem Success fourth-graders scored at the highest level on New York State's most recent science tests, while only 43% of fourth-graders citywide did so. Harlem Success's black students outperformed white students at more than 700 schools across the state. Overall, the charter now performs at the same level as the gifted-and-talented schools in New York City, all of which have demanding admissions requirements. Harlem Success, by contrast, selects its students, mostly poor and minority, by random lottery.
Critics try to discredit these differences. Writing last year in the New York Review of Books, the historian Diane Ravitch argued that schools like Harlem Success aren't the answer because, as a group, charter schools don't outperform traditional public schools. Yet even Ms. Ravitch had to acknowledge that some charter schools get "amazing results." If that's the case, shouldn't we be asking why they get much better results—and focusing on how to replicate them?
A full-scale transition from a government-run monopoly to a competitive marketplace won't happen quickly, but that's no reason not to begin introducing more competition. In the lower grades, we should make sure that every student has at least one alternative—and preferably several—to her neighborhood school.
That story and Klein's reasoning about making small steps is a valuable example regarding charter schools. Call them what you will, charter schools are simply affordable private schools. Why wouldn't choice be important? Why wouldn't it make sense to focus on, celebrate and try to replicate even a few charter school successes?
Instead, the union bosses pick on the worst examples of private schools to argue that none should exist. Under that logic, we'd scrap the public school systems and their teachers, too, by focusing on the worst public schools.
As Shanker put it in a surprisingly candid speech in 1993: "We are at the point that the auto industry was at a few years ago. They could see they were losing market share every year and still not believe that it really had anything to do with the quality of the product. . . . I think we will get—and deserve—the end of public education through some sort of privatization scheme if we don't behave differently. Unfortunately, very few people really believe that yet. They talk about it, and they don't like it, but they're not ready to change and stop doing the things that brought us to this point."
I found this, too, to be a chilling quote from Shanker. He must have been quite a capable union boss. He understood reality, but was able to temporarily halt its onset from affecting his union members. Never mind what that did to millions of American children in the process.
My teacher friend expressed at least one reason for the behavior Shanker noted in that passage. My friend notes that he's closer to retirement than he is to commencing his career. So, like the old pilots who favored newer, younger pilots being given a lower starting salary and fewer benefits, he, too, cares little for le deluge after his tenured career is over.
In short, so long as he gets his, he could care less about the fate of his replacements. Trouble is, all of the discussion is in regard to his pension, pay and benefits- not children's education.
Klein's instructive selected quotes from Shanker reveal the simple truth. So long as unions serve their members, unionized teachers won't really care about children's educational success as much as they care about their own economic success.
At least a private school can remedy this flaw by aligning the two for each individual teacher, rather than maximizing average welfare of a group of teachers, regardless of pupil performance
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Broken Public School Systems
A Wall Street Journal editorial in yesterday's edition noted some surprising and disappointing statistics regarding school enrollments and teachers.
In New York state, over the period from 2000 to 2009, public school enrollment fell by 121,000 pupils, but the number of teachers increased by 15,000. In New York City, 11,000 education system employees were added while the student population decreased by 63,000.
In other states, similar discontinuities occurred. Virginia's number of teachers increased by 21% in concert with a 5% enrollment increase, while in Florida, the same rates were, respectively, 20% and 6%. For North Carolina, they were 22% more teachers for a 9% rise in enrollment.
In my own state of New Jersey, educational jobs have increased by 14% in the past decade to serve an enrollment of 3% more students.
These are horrifying numbers. Any business that operated like these states' educational systems would be out of business by now. It's negative productivity, at speed.
I had lunch with an old friend and business colleague/partner yesterday. Among the many topics we discussed was my recent understanding of Milton Friedman's concept of the negative income tax. Friedman, as a disciple of Von Hayek, realized, implicitly, the loss of freedom and general inefficiencies created by government programs which provide services, rather than vouchers, credits, and other mechanisms by which services may be bought by consumers.
Imagine, in this vein, if states and local school boards collected tax revenues to be paid to private contractors who provided teachers and schooling services?
Can you possibly imagine any such schools hiring teachers at a faster rate than students increased in their systems?
Of course not.
Maybe it's too late to move to such a model, but with American primary education apparently in such appalling shape, how much worse could we do? One benefit of contracting services out, rather than providing them by the state via unionized employees, is that new vendors can replace current ones whose prices are too high, or quality too low.
Instead, now, we get both low quality and high prices from our state-provided public school systems in too many of these United States of America.
In New York state, over the period from 2000 to 2009, public school enrollment fell by 121,000 pupils, but the number of teachers increased by 15,000. In New York City, 11,000 education system employees were added while the student population decreased by 63,000.
In other states, similar discontinuities occurred. Virginia's number of teachers increased by 21% in concert with a 5% enrollment increase, while in Florida, the same rates were, respectively, 20% and 6%. For North Carolina, they were 22% more teachers for a 9% rise in enrollment.
In my own state of New Jersey, educational jobs have increased by 14% in the past decade to serve an enrollment of 3% more students.
These are horrifying numbers. Any business that operated like these states' educational systems would be out of business by now. It's negative productivity, at speed.
I had lunch with an old friend and business colleague/partner yesterday. Among the many topics we discussed was my recent understanding of Milton Friedman's concept of the negative income tax. Friedman, as a disciple of Von Hayek, realized, implicitly, the loss of freedom and general inefficiencies created by government programs which provide services, rather than vouchers, credits, and other mechanisms by which services may be bought by consumers.
Imagine, in this vein, if states and local school boards collected tax revenues to be paid to private contractors who provided teachers and schooling services?
Can you possibly imagine any such schools hiring teachers at a faster rate than students increased in their systems?
Of course not.
Maybe it's too late to move to such a model, but with American primary education apparently in such appalling shape, how much worse could we do? One benefit of contracting services out, rather than providing them by the state via unionized employees, is that new vendors can replace current ones whose prices are too high, or quality too low.
Instead, now, we get both low quality and high prices from our state-provided public school systems in too many of these United States of America.
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