Hire and Fire

"Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs lambasted teacher unions today," reports the Associated Press, "claiming no amount of technology in the classroom would improve public schools until principals could fire bad teachers." Mickey Kaus approves and says he wishes Barack Obama had talked about getting "rid of people" rather than offering a vaguer call for "accountability."

This sounds commonsensical, but my understanding is that the reason politicians rarely push for it is that the actual payoff is very, very low. The issue is that there isn't this vast pool of highly effective potential hires out there. The schools with serious teacher-quality problems tend to have them because the better teachers, by and large, don't want to work there and schools have problems filling all the slots with minimally qualified people. The real action (also disliked by teacher unions, if pissing off unions is your goal) is in the certification process, who counts as a qualified teacher, and what counts as an effective teacher (here's where the accountability comes in). If in the future that created a situation where there were tons of people looking to break into the teaching field then it might make sense to expend political capital on making it easier to fire people.

Comments

This is a touchy issue so I'll tread lightly. On occasion I substitute for a California school district in a city with a population of about 140k (53%white, 14.5% black, 33% Hispanic). The public school student population does not match the overall demographic. I'm guessing public schools are about (50% Hispanic & 47% Black).

All the public schools facilities are fairly clean and modern. Most teachers and administrators seem competent and dedicated.

The problem with the schools are not the teachers or the facilities or the "computers" or lack thereof. The problems stems with the students and, by extension, their parents.

It's as simple as that and I'll leave it to others to fill in the blanks.

Posted by Uncle Bunny | February 18, 2007 4:25 PM

There's also another dynamic at work here. Teachers are underpaid in many cases with regard to ther skill setg, but the difference is made up for in extremely good benefits with regard to most other professions out there. Thus, health insurance, retirement benefits, and job security are better in education than most other jobs. You can try to eliminate these things, but you'll rapidly find a decrease in the number of qualified applicants unless you raise salaries to compensate. This requires raising taxes and all sorts of other free things that people often dislike. Jobs and Kaus are looking for a free lunch, which any school administrator can tell you isn't free in the way one would think.

Posted by jfaberuiuc | February 18, 2007 4:28 PM

Matt,

There is some research supporting the idea that there is a pool of talented young teachers, but existing contracts present big barriers to entry:

http://www.tntp.org/ourresearch/unintendedconsequences.html:
Unintended Consequences: The Case for Reforming the Staffing Rules of Urban Teachers Union Contracts focuses on the impact of “voluntary transfer” and “excessed teacher” staffing rules found in the collective bargaining agreements of urban school districts.

“Voluntary transfers” are incumbent teachers with seniority rights who want to move between schools, while “excessed teachers” are those whose positions are cut from their school, often due to enrollment or budget changes.

Through a study of five major urban districts, the report demonstrates how “voluntary transfer” and “excessed” teacher rules result in systems that hire too late to secure the most talented teacher applicants, bump valuable teachers, and require schools to hire poorly matched or—worse—poorly performing teachers.

Posted by Luke | February 18, 2007 4:30 PM

An Addendum in case anyone gets the wrong idea.

This is not a racial issue - far from it. I suppose the better term would be "cultural". And it's not even the majority of students that contribute to the problems but just enough to degrade the system as a whole.

Posted by Uncle Bunny | February 18, 2007 4:30 PM

Just another in a long line of capitalists who bash unions. Is Apple unionized?

In NY the wealthiest school districts spend about $16,000 per student, the poorest about $8,000. If you look at spending in places in the south you will find numbers under $3000. If people want better schools spend the money. This means not only adequate salaries, but supplies and even support services for families that are on the brink of disaster. How is a school supposed to teach when a kid lives in a stressed home environment? Schools see the kids for 6 hours a day for half the year. Who molds them the other 7/8 of the time?

Let's not expect schools to solve the problems of society.

Posted by rdf | February 18, 2007 4:33 PM

Actually, the REAL action is in finding funding to pay people enough so that highly qualified people would rather teach in the primary/secondary market instead of going into the corporate world or into post-secondary academic institutions, where the pay is marginally better (for those without PhDs), but the working conditions are much, much better (i.e. fewer angry parents to deal with, more time to teach and less time spent "babysitting" the students, almost nonexistent discipline problems to handle, etc.)

If you want to pay teachers as minimally as they get paid now, you're going to have to deal with the teachers you can get for that pay. High quality people have a strong incentive to move to Community College positions at the very least, rather than hang around teaching in most High Schools and Middle Schools.

If you just increase the standards for certification you're going to end up with FEWER people overall in the system looking for jobs. That might push salaries upward IF schools followed traditional economic models. But they don't - they're funded by the goodwill of the taxpayers, not by the individual students who attend. So instead, the schools will make do with the money they have and increase the per student ratio for the teachers still in the building. Giving those teachers an EVEN STRONGER incentive to escape into a different job market - like Community Colleges or corporate training if they want to stick with teaching, or any other job at all if the experience has burned them out to the point where they don't even want to be in a classroom anymore.

This is not an argument against pressing for stronger certification, but know what that leads to - higher taxes and better paid teachers OR a school system that is even more broken that the one that we have now. I'm in favor of both of these things myself, but those who are usually in the camp pushing for "more responsibility" often neglect the responsibility of the taxpayers to fund the system so that it works.

Posted by NonyNony | February 18, 2007 4:35 PM

I suppose I would expect that holding everything else constant, at the margin not being able to fire poor teachers would have a significant impact. And the sort of statements that only if something else changes then should we consider making it easier to fire poor teachers is the sort of bien-pensant liberal-leaning, ignoring-the-influence-at-the-margin, waffle which one doesn't expect from this site. I expect your posts to be more insufferable!

Uncle Benny: instead of leaving it to others to fill in the blanks and saying that we shouldn't get the wrong idea, can you just spell out more precisely what is wrong with the school children.

Posted by otto | February 18, 2007 4:40 PM

Just another in a long line of capitalists who bash unions. Is Apple unionized?

You might try looking up Steve Jobs' campaign contributions over the years. He's donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democrats. He's not exactly a shill for big business.

Posted by Smo | February 18, 2007 4:45 PM

Software engineers have a saying:
under every patch, there is a bullethole.

The unions are important to some teachers because some small percentage of administrators, superintendents, and school boards are high-handed, unfair, venal, are zealots, or have other reasons to abuse the teaching staff. And try to do so. And the union stands up for them.
That's how the schools got unionized in the first place.

It's my impression that in good schools, the union is often an obstruction, but never an insurmountable one. Everyone sighs and deals with it.

Posted by joel hanes | February 18, 2007 4:46 PM

American public education is a failure but Iraq is a success?

What color glasses do you have to wear to see that?

Must be bifocals.

The federal government spends twice as much per year on Iraq as it does on K-12 education...maybe our schools deserve a surge.

Posted by alphie | February 18, 2007 4:51 PM

"Uncle Benny: instead of leaving it to others to fill in the blanks and saying that we shouldn't get the wrong idea, can you just spell out more precisely what is wrong with the school children."

Complete lack of discipline. No appreciation of education. No respect for the teachers. They're at school not to learn but to pass time until the last bell of the day rings.

And this is not just kids being kids - It's far worse and it's actually very sad to experience first hand.

I said its a cultural issue but perhaps "class" would be even more accurate. Kids who show no signs of being serious about their education should immediately be separated from the rest of the population. Teachers spend WAY to much time disciplining instead of teaching.

The last season of The Wire actually touched on some of these issues. Believe me, there was no exaggeration in those classroom scenes.

Posted by Uncle Bunny | February 18, 2007 4:51 PM

otto:Being someone who reads..and is hit over the head with this stuff on a routine basis, it's usually a couple of things depending on the person.

#1. It's the TV/Video Games/Movies/Internet, whatever

#2. It's the poverty

#3. It's a lack of concern from the parents

OR a mix of all of the above.

If you ask me, as someone who is in the said generation (although at the older fringes), it's that our society has turned education from a worthwhile pursuit in and of itself, to the means to an end, the end being of course the amassing of material goods.

Posted by Karmakin | February 18, 2007 4:54 PM

Why anyone, looking over the state of American education would imagine that educational administrators would either be able to distinguish "good" teachers (or "good" teaching) from "bad", or would care to make the distinction, escapes me.

Did no one watch The Wire?

You might as well assert that nothing will improve in education until the teachers are able to fire incompetent principals.

Posted by Bruce Wilder | February 18, 2007 5:01 PM

Clearly the question is: would President Lib Hitler Hillary be the kind of bitch that lets schools fire bad teachers (even if she isn't a bitch for hiking gas taxes because everyone knows we need to hike gas taxes rather than pay off the debt and sell energy independence bonds and obviously because it's like totally sexist to call her a bitch [except when it's not]).

Posted by Linus | February 18, 2007 5:18 PM

Since SES does a massively better job predicting student performance than anything you can say about schools, and since the quality of the schools is usually a direct function of the SES of the neighborhood is serves, the idea that we could make failing American schools better by simply being able to fire teachers and break the union is beyond absurd.

If you don't deal with the underlying poverty and all its concomittants (crime, despair, poor housing, bad healthcare, bad neo-natal treatment, weak daycare and kindegarten, teenagers working 40 hours a week while attending school), then "school choice" and other educational reforms are simply masturbatory fantasies.

Posted by Patrick | February 18, 2007 5:37 PM

Since everybody went to school everybody's got an opinion, including me: In the long run schools are pretty much as good as the parents want them to be. If the parents, whether PhDs or immigrants that hardly speak English, push the kids, the district will attract good teachers, parents will raise hell about bad teachers, and the test scores will go up. Positive feedback loop. And it works in the other direction too. Money helps, but it's not the main thing (look at all the Nobel prize winning scientists from ordinary NYC schools and City College back in the 1930s and 1940s).

And since half the time education issues are really about race, I give you this:

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/2003-05-21/news/rich-black-flunking/1

Posted by chris | February 18, 2007 5:37 PM

I never got all this huge anger at teachers' unions compared to all of the other reasons our schools are failing. It seems like the CW repeated in places like The Economist is that everything is the teachers' unions fault. You never see the critics like Mickey Kaus want to go into teaching. Why? It probably pays more - at least relative to effort and stress levels - to be a blogger with no actual ideas taking up room on the Slate site. Who would really want to go to school, get a master's, get certified, have to babysit kids all day who can't find Ohio on a map and then get paid like shit?

I think I have some idea of what Uncle Bunny is getting at. I spent most of childhood in what was actually considered a decent school system with large majority of white students. However, excluding a small minority of the students (many of them the children of immigrants), most of the kids did not really seem to care or were motivated. A lot of the best K-8 teachers simply gave up and didn't know how to control the kids anymore. I then went to a respected New England prep school with a higher minority population, percentage-wise, and the experience was a lot better. The kids were actually motivated, curious and did work. The teachers could spend their time teaching instead of worrying about the types of trenchcoat mafia kids that had been under psychriatic evaluation in the public system. The school also had tons of resources; meanwhile in my hometown all of the old, retired voters would vote down any attempt to increase funding for the schools. I believe a budget cut just passed that cut away a bunch of AP classes (thus making it harder for students to get into college), along with funding for firefighters, police and roads. Anytime a tax increase is propsed for something good, even conservative, Republican-leaning parents are for it because it raises the property values of their house by improving the local schools, but the old people don't care.

The difference was that in one setting it was ok to be smart, but in another it wasn't. Across our country too many parents care more about the high school football team than about how up-to-date the math and history books are. If anti-intellectualism is taught at home as a positive trait, what are parents supposed to do?

My guess is that it has something to do with the idea of being trapped. Most of the people in my public school system had the same teachers their parents had. Most were townies and knew they would always be townies. They felt trapped. If you're from a poor black or Latino family in East LA, not only do you feel trapped in your own community, but you feel unwanted outside of your community due to the racism that is still with us today. Try being a black guy walking around Orange County. The LAPD is insane while the gangs are cruel. Kids in gang-inflicted areas in the likes of Compton suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder at levels associated with survivors of civil wars. How are kids supposed to learn under such conditions? What teacher would want to work there making crap pay?

Posted by Reality Man | February 18, 2007 5:39 PM

> That's how the schools got unionized
> in the first place.

Most of the US big city school districts became unionized around 1932, when the the teachers worked for 12-18 months without pay, then were paid with School District scrip that the School Districts failed to redeem. That experience is still remembered by quite a few out there.

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | February 18, 2007 5:52 PM

> finding funding to pay people enough so that
> highly qualified people would rather teach
> in the primary/secondary market instead of
> going into the corporate world or into
> post-secondary academic institutions

For "people" read "women". All the way into the early 1980s it was common to find women with, e.g., Masters' and PhDs in math or chemistry or history teaching elementary school because after graduation they couldn't be hired for any corporate job other than secretary. This pool is now exhausted; many of those candidates never wanted to teach anyway and those that might consider it would require renumeration _and respect_ equal to what they can get in the corporate market.

Just another take on the "free lunch" theory.

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | February 18, 2007 5:56 PM

Too much "accountability" without enough support is useless. It's good Obama ties it to better pay. Frankly it seems like the rights obsession with "teacher accountability" is just a desire to see people punished for the problem.

Anyway, you can, obviously, have bad principles too.

Posted by Chad Okere | February 18, 2007 6:08 PM

In our capitalist economy where CEOs get immense separation packages for doing a lousy job, I'm amazed that some think that public education can be improved by eliminating teachers' unions, tenure, benefits and job security. These people don't mention anything that might compensate for making the job of public school teacher even less attractive than it is. They seem to think that some "fairy dust" will make everything better. Perhaps, as I have seen with nurses, they think that teachers should be "above" mere money and should be willing
to work for zip.

This is nuts.

I usually say to these folks - OK, let's just abolish public education entirely, RIGHT NOW. They usually think that I am an extremist looney - as if they aren't extreme.

Last summer I had just such an exchange. I was told that public school teachers aren't "productive" and that they have "too much time off" and "too much job security" and excessive benefits. When I offered my counter-challenge, my (slightly choleric) interlocutor accused me of being "extreme".
During all of this, his wife was sitting nearby and saying nothing.

The next day I found out that she had just retired from a local school district with a large pension. Too bad. If I had only known, I would have asked her husband

"Just how much of her ill-gotten gains should she have to give back?"

His answer might have been enightening.

Posted by DCNataro | February 18, 2007 6:08 PM

> Anyway, you can, obviously, have bad
> principles too.

And IMHO the Radical Right does have bad priciples. But for purposes of this discussion we might want to consider that "The princpal is your pal."

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | February 18, 2007 6:12 PM

Actually, the REAL action is in finding funding to pay people enough so that highly qualified people would rather teach in the primary/secondary market instead of going into the corporate world or into post-secondary academic institutions, where the pay is marginally better (for those without PhDs), but the working conditions are much, much better (i.e. fewer angry parents to deal with, more time to teach and less time spent "babysitting" the students, almost nonexistent discipline problems to handle, etc.)

Amen.

I have to laugh at people who complain about teacher's unions.

Let me tell you something from personal experience. My wife is a teacher right now. She teaches ESL at one of the poorest school districts in the metro Seattle area. She gets up at 5 in the morning to go to school everyday. She comes home anywhere from 3 PM to 8 PM at night. Many teachers actually stay past 5 PM everyday. None of the time after 2 PM is officially compensated, even though many days there are endless after school meetings and the like. Really, your summer vacation is only one and a half months because of similar reasons.

Right now, her school is going through a "reform" (breaking the school into small schools) which is actually working relatively well, as the students performance has generally improved in the last several years and so has discipline. (although this reform has not worked many other places it has been tried, my wife's school has a lot of very good teachers and principals).

This said, there is a chronic shortage of math and science teacchers because no one with college level knowledge in these subjects would want to subject themselves to the kind of conditions I describe above, for pay that is mediocre in many places. You can get English, foreign language, and history degreed students into teaching because the amount of degrees in these areas vs. the amount of jobs available means teaching actually remains a good option - even here, many of the teachers now will have master's degrees. But this said, the best people who get these degrees for the most part will not want to go into teaching or will only stay in it for a short time - like my wife, who will teach only a year or two more, until she gets her PhD - because the job is mentally and physically demanding, pays not very well, and is not respected (often because of sexism, as teaching is, traditionally and still to a large extent, considered "women's work").

Teachers unions can be hackish and short sighted, this I can tell you as well. But they do provide teachers benefits and on the whole are a plus, although its a mixed bag.

But teaching unions have nothing to do with the problems in hirign and retaining good teachers. Nothing. So in this sense, all the (male) critics of teaching who have more comfortable, better paid, and more prestigious jobs should try teaching at a bad school for a year or two before they continue to make ignorant statements such as the ones MY cites here.

Posted by Ben P | February 18, 2007 6:13 PM

In Republican-land, people only need incentives once they're making $500,000+ and then they don't even have to respond to the incentives.

Posted by Reality Man | February 18, 2007 6:13 PM

If I could wave a magic wand, Steve Jobs would be taking my place Tuesday morning when I serve my weekly stint as a volunteer reading tutor in our neighborhood elementary school. It might be an eye-opening experience for him.

Our school is a very well-funded suburban one that consistently gets 'excellent' ratings from our state board of education. The teacher pay is one of the best in our area and getting a job in our school system is very competitive. They very rarely hire anyone who hasn't first taught somewhere else successfully for at least two years.

The "reading buddy" tutoring program is one of many efforts the school makes to help struggling students.

One of my "buddies" is a bright, delightful first-grader who literally can't sit still long enough to finish a page, so it's been hard for him to get as much practice as he needs to become a good reader. I bring in easy books on his favorite subject, science, and spend a fair amount of energy redirecting his attention to to the book at hand.

Another is a sweet, enthusiastic girl who can read aloud pretty fluently. She knows lots of sight words and she's able to sound out the words she doesn't recognize. But she can't read "between the lines" and as a result, her comprehension is weak. For example, once she picked out a book titled "Three Scary Stories." After she read the first line of the first story, "As the sun set, Sally and Sue put on their costumes," I interrupted to ask, "When do you think this story is happening?" She answered, "Wednesday." It took me a while to convince her it was Halloween night.

Comparing schools to business is silly. If I'm making widgets, I have control over what raw materials I use. If I'm running a school, I have to take all comers (as I well should). The challenges my reading buddies face have nothing to do with whether or not there's a computer in their classroom and whether the students know how to use it (there is and they do).

Anyway, I'd like to see how much success Mr. Jobs has as a reading buddy. Teaching is a lot harder than it looks.

Posted by Suburban Mom | February 18, 2007 6:26 PM

Ben P said:
"But teaching unions have nothing to do with the problems in hirign and retaining good teachers. Nothing."

For the sake of discussion, I'd like to repost this abstract from The New Teachers Project. Can we discuss whether existing teacher contracts might be a problem at all? without discounting many of the other problems posters have addressed.

http://www.tntp.org/ourresearch/unintendedconsequences.html:
Unintended Consequences: The Case for Reforming the Staffing Rules of Urban Teachers Union Contracts focuses on the impact of “voluntary transfer” and “excessed teacher” staffing rules found in the collective bargaining agreements of urban school districts.

“Voluntary transfers” are incumbent teachers with seniority rights who want to move between schools, while “excessed teachers” are those whose positions are cut from their school, often due to enrollment or budget changes.

Through a study of five major urban districts, the report demonstrates how “voluntary transfer” and “excessed” teacher rules result in systems that hire too late to secure the most talented teacher applicants, bump valuable teachers, and require schools to hire poorly matched or—worse—poorly performing teachers.

Posted by Luke | February 18, 2007 6:31 PM

> Through a study of five major urban districts,
> the report demonstrates how “voluntary transfer”
> and “excessed” teacher rules result in systems
> that hire too late to secure the most talented
> teacher applicants, bump valuable teachers,
> and require schools to hire poorly matched
> or—worse—poorly performing teachers.

In other words, the same sort of tricks that private businesses in competitive markets (e.g. Silicon Valley) and professionals in high demand specicalties pull every day. And which both competitive private schools and high demand private teachers would use when the Radical nirvana of vouchers and private schools arrives.

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | February 18, 2007 6:57 PM

Suburban Mom has reminded me of an old joke that is a favorite of a friend of mine:

A high school math department at what is considered to be a reasonably good suburban school is interested in "assessing" their activities. A speaker is recommended to them with experience in the business world - his business being ice cream.

The speaker comes and gives a talk to the department that is well-received by the members. In the following Q&A, one of the
faculty asks:

Q: "I see that you purchase ingredients from a number of vendors and that you assess the quality of what you buy.
What do you do when a vendor consistently sends you inferior ingredients, like poor strawberries?"

A: "Well, in order to control the quality of our strawberries, we change vendors."

Q: "How do we control the quality of our strawberries?"

It's a real knee slapper, isn't it?

Posted by DCNataro | February 18, 2007 6:57 PM

I think a much more important policy change would be to switch from seniority-based pay to merit-based pay. This of course involved accountability and standards as well, but it also would probably be something many teachers' unions would oppose.

Posted by Mr. Noah | February 18, 2007 7:07 PM

> I think a much more important policy
> change would be to switch from
> seniority-based pay to merit-based pay.

Taking into account the above 29 posts, exactly how do you propose to define "merit"?

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | February 18, 2007 8:00 PM

I drifted between public and private schools before ultimately realizing that they let you skip school more at the latter, and sticking around there.

But when I was at public school I had this really cool teacher who would bring me in on the weekends to play with the robots. He was teacher of the year for the state and all that jazz. He brought in tons of free computers and good publicity for the school.

And eventually he went to work for Apple.

(If you're reading this Mr. Ro I'm no longer an adorable blond child but if you read these threads you'll note that I'm still mindlessly resisting peer pressure and generally have nothing useful to say.)

Posted by Linus | February 18, 2007 8:24 PM

The folks blaming the teachers unions for the failures in the public schools sound much like the folks who blame the UAW for the failures of GM, Ford, and Chrysler.

Posted by SLC | February 18, 2007 8:35 PM

Uncle Bunny writes: They're at school not to learn but to pass time until the last bell of the day rings.

Sounds like excellent preparation for the working world. Keep up the good work.

Posted by Mike in KC | February 18, 2007 9:12 PM

the term "teacher's unions" really doesn't do justice to significant differences in positions towards issues of accountability, etc., between the NEA and the AFT, the two main unions.

for the curious, the AFT has been much more supportive of NCLB-type accountability systems and have looked to "get it right," rather than the NEA, which has reflexively resisted NCLB's provisions.

Posted by looj | February 18, 2007 9:17 PM

Based on my own extensive experience with public school policy issues, I don't see the teachers' unions as a particularly negative factor. Some of the things they do/support are good, some are bad, and most are marginal in that regard.

On the other hand, I think a very positive reform step would be the abolition of all the Schools of Education, which have propagated a huge number of very disastrous educational policies and have almost no positive or redeeming features whatsovever.

Most conservatives obviously share this view. Interestingly enough, most of the senior teachers' unions leaders I've met have the exact same perspective.

Posted by RKU | February 18, 2007 9:43 PM

Taking into account the above 29 posts, exactly how do you propose to define "merit"?

I'm not sure, since I'm not an educator.

But it should be something a lot better than "I've been here longer."

Posted by Mr. Noah | February 18, 2007 9:58 PM

I have no problem with a merit based scale, but the baseline has to be pretty good.

The job is harder than many other professions that are also: 1) better paid, and 2) enjoy higher esteem.

This is the fundamental problem. Particularly when it comes to math and science, you just aren't going to get enough good people unless you pay people a lot of money.

I think some kind of "chicken hawk" argument should apply here. Since most of the peoople criticizing teachers - which is how teachers union criticism comes off to teachers - aren't teachers, why aren't they asking themselves why they aren't if they think the status quo is unacceptable? Shouldn't they be going in to the schools in an effort to "save" the kids since the teachers are corrupt and incomptent?

Posted by Ben P | February 18, 2007 10:03 PM

I have no problem with a merit based scale, but the baseline has to be pretty good.

The job is harder than many other professions that are also: 1) better paid, and 2) enjoy higher esteem.

This is the fundamental problem. Particularly when it comes to math and science, you just aren't going to get enough good people unless you pay people a lot of money.

I think some kind of "chicken hawk" argument should apply here. Since most of the peoople criticizing teachers - which is how teachers union criticism comes off to teachers - aren't teachers, why aren't they asking themselves why they aren't if they think the status quo is unacceptable? Shouldn't they be going in to the schools in an effort to "save" the kids since the teachers are corrupt and incomptent?

Posted by Ben P | February 18, 2007 10:05 PM

I'm a 47 year old teacher to be in Wisconsin. I am now student teaching 3rd graders full time after a year of training. What I can tell you is that my post baccalaureate program provided pretty good training. I can also tell you that teaching is hard than hell. I worked as a graphic artist at places like Boeing and Starbucks and it was way easier. I would honestly compare successful teaching with being a general practitioner or a lawyer. You have to be very, very organized, prepare at least twenty lessons a week, contribute to all kinds of meetings, work more than 40 hours a week, and teach 15 to 25 kids of vastly different backgrounds, abilities, needs and get them all to learn the same stuff at the same time. You really have to know what you are teaching and how to teach. It is a real art form. My current kids are remarkably well behaved and motivated but I have worked with the kids uncle bunny was talking about, and he is right. There are a lot of kids out there, black, white, red, green--it's seems like mostly an economic thing--who are good kids, but have been trained not to do well in school. I think that this is the real problem with US schools. Suburban and good urban schools are doing fine, but we are not successfully educating poor kids. If we address that problem, then most of the problems with US schools would disappear. We would be on a par with anyone in the world, if that is really the goal.

Let me see what else have I observed:
-All the teachers I've worked with have been intelligent, dedicated, and talented. Really. That's in a good urban school district, though. I have heard bad stories about Milwaukee.
-The education schools in the area I am familiar with teach what research has proven to work.
-The things that teachers are mandated to do with special ed kids are impossible given the funding they get.
-Many people, especially politicians, have opinions about education but no knowledge about it at all. It's one of those subjects that everyone feel qualified to spout out about.
-Schools are driven by politics. They are political footballs for people who care nothing about education.
-The overriding issue in all schools is funding: how much is it going to be cut, where does it come from, how is it apportioned.
-A new teacher in Madison gets about $27,000 a year. It's way, way less in other places. The south, in rural and poor urban districts. $27 works out to about $13 an hour. Of course you do get good benefits.

Posted by cw | February 18, 2007 10:40 PM

Well, Ben, consider this.

Under the current system of seniority-based pay, there is no opportunity for rapid salary advancement. Thus, a young, bright person who is considering becoming a teacher must commit to being a teacher for life if he/she intends to ever make a good salary teaching. That's a big barrier to getting good, talented teachers.

For example: suppose I'm a physics major at a good school, but I'd rather not be a prof. I could go into engineering or finance, where, if I do well, I could make $100k or more in a couple years. But suppose I'd rather work with kids, so I wouldn't mind a $60,000 teacher salary. But if I become a teacher, I won't make $60,000 until I've been teaching for 10 years or more. No matter how good a teacher I am, I'll get a low salary throughout my 20s. And by the time I'm making that $60k, I'll have pretty much killed my other career options, so if I find I don't like teaching, I'll be stuck. That's a big risk to take. I might as well suck it up and be an engineer or work on Wall Street.

See what I mean?

Posted by Mr. Noah | February 18, 2007 10:47 PM

"But if I become a teacher, I won't make $60,000 until I've been teaching for 10 years or more"

More like 25 years in most districts.

Posted by cw | February 18, 2007 11:10 PM

I know a sociologist doing research on education in Kentucky and he also finds that student test scores track closely with the SES of a county. What that means for our rural school system is that there is inconsistency at all levels of the system. For my youngest daughter, the teachers in 4th grade range from very good to superb, but my 7th grade daughter has only two good teachers and the high school has a reputation as a disaster. The same patchiness can be seen with the principals and the last two school superintendants. The school board is dominated by useless good old boys.

Teacher training is another thicket in this area. There are some good things going on at the education college at my University, but they are also determined not to raise standards for teacher training. My own Department has been trying to raise standards for social studies teachers for years but we just had to terminate a social studies coordinator who completely rejected our values. It's always one step forward, two steps back. If there are a lot of highly qualified teachers ready to work in impoverished areas like Eastern Kentucky, they're not coming out of our education program.

Teacher's unions are the least of the problems of education in a poor area like Eastern Kentucky.

Posted by Ric Caric | February 18, 2007 11:14 PM

The reason politicans rarely push for the ability to fire bad teachers is that they are afraid of the teacher's unions. What other explanation is there for making it difficult to fire teachers caught in gross misconduct such as criminal activity? Perhaps education pundits would argue that such cases are actually rare and adequately dealt with by assigning such teachers to rubber rooms where there are paid to do nothing but since when have politicians have cared about such considerations? If they are not willing to go against the teachers unions on what would appear to be the politically popular cause of firing felons it is because they are terrified of the teacher's unions not because they think firing felons won't make much difference.

Posted by James B. Shearer | February 18, 2007 11:26 PM

They're public schools.

If the public wanted them to be better than they are, they would be, and if they don't want them at all -- and when the students in them are too poor, too dark, too different -- they'll provide the minimum consistent with the clause in most state constitutions that mandate them.

The most important statistics in public education: 70% of voters don't have kids in the local schools, and 50% plus 1 is a majority.

The mediocrity of public education is a feature, not a bug.

Posted by Davis X. Machina | February 18, 2007 11:29 PM

MY's claim that firing bad teachers doesn't have enough payoff to be worth fighting for also brings to mind the aphorism about perfect being the enemy of good. Liberals like MY unrealistically want schools to eliminate the gap in academic performance between smart rich kids and dumb poor kids. So they dismiss worthwhile incremental improvements like making it easier to fire bad teachers as not being enough.

Note the fact that the pool of people willing to work in bad schools is inferior to the pool of people willing to work in good schools means it is more important for bad schools to be able to fire bad hires because they are more likely to make bad hires in the first place since they have no choice but to hire more risky candidates to fill their slots.

Posted by James B. Shearer | February 18, 2007 11:46 PM

I spent 30 years in private industry as a computer programmer and systems analyst. Every company had a different method of evaluating employees and every company changed that method after two or three years. My evaluations were all over the place depending on the particular manager or client I had at the time - usually excellent sometimes middle of the pack, sometimes in-between, and one time - problematic). The reviews were really very subjective, often politically based, and ultimately useless. Considerations for bonuses were even worse. I have no confidence that any system for reviewing teachers could be implemented in a way that 90% of the reviews would be truly objective. It is possible to weed out the worst employees, but separating good, better, and best gets real subjective. School systems need to be able to weed out the worst teachers, but they also need to offer better salaries and working conditions to attract a better pool of applicants to begin with.

Posted by MarvyT | February 18, 2007 11:53 PM

My parents were lifelong public school teachers (and moderate Democrats), and let me tell you, their terrible local was a common topic of dinner conversation. Basically the union spent most of its time and money -- their dues -- defending terrible teachers from getting fired. This included a guy who at least three times beat kids in class, once enough to send the kid to the hospital, and another guy who slept with students. More than anything the union was for the status quo. In a good district that might not be too disruptive.

Posted by Chris | February 19, 2007 12:03 AM

Yup. It's society's fault!

http://thefrustratedteacher.blogspot.com/index.html

Posted by rishy | February 19, 2007 12:25 AM

James B. Shearer claims that the inferior pool of people willing to work in bad schools means it is more important for bad schools to be able to fire people. This brings to mind a certain aphorism about libertarian economists. When their model fails to match reality, they change their descriptions of reality to match the model.

Failing school districts don't merely have trouble hiring quality people to teach, James. They also, not coincidentally, have trouble attracting and retaining quality administrators. Therefore, making it easier to fire teachers will not magically result in better teachers, because bad administrators tend to reward people who suck up and fire people who try to shake things up. It will result in more abuses of power by bad administrators, and more opportunities for decent teachers to be scapegoated for low test scores achieved by students who come into their classrooms unprepared and receive no educational support at home.

Conservatives find it politically convenient to blame everything on the unions and the (mostly female) teachers, rather than confronting the realities of systemic poverty, or the embarrassingly low pay and dismal conditions that drive good people out of the education profession. So, naturally, the political discourse of education reform is all about punishing teachers. But here's a little economics lesson for conservatives... If you want to attract and retain a talented motivated labor pool, you have to pay well and treat people well, and not burden them with the inordinate amount of paperwork and unpaid labor that results from most "accountability" measures.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | February 19, 2007 12:31 AM

And replace them with who, exactly?

Posted by Reality Man | February 19, 2007 12:36 AM

RKU had it right. Define "merit" in merit pay. OR "poor" in "poor teachers." Turns out to be harder than you think. If you use student test scores as a measure of teacher ability, I can select a group of students that would make you look like a genius. Or a different group could make you look like a failure. There are some systems of teacher evaluation out there that are showing some promise, but they aren't simple and no one knows how reliable they are. Describing a "good" teacher is a your basic can of worms.

Posted by Toby Tobiason | February 19, 2007 1:22 AM

Stipulating that neither I nor my wife are teachers, nor were any of our parents, neither do we belong to unions...

This is as commonsensical as "unions were needed once, but not anymore."

I love Steve Jobs, but the test of a CEO is hardly his ability to treat his employees as widgets.

Unions are a force for good. Workers have as much of a right to bargain collectively as capitalists do to pool their funds and form corporations. Indeed, unions can be seen as corporations whose product is the labor of their membership.

Nobody holds a gun to the employers head to sign union contracts, unless you consider bargaining an unfair tool, which sort of knocks capitalism out of the game, doesn't it? And once signed, those contracts should be as enforcable as any other, if not more so.

I wonder if his suppliers know how Steve feels about contracts?

Posted by Lettuce | February 19, 2007 2:07 AM

Just another in a long line of capitalists who bash unions. Is Apple unionized?

You might try looking up Steve Jobs' campaign contributions over the years. He's donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democrats. He's not exactly a shill for big business.

The answer is: No, Apple is not unionized.

Following up; Steve Jobs has a long record of bashing unions. He is, nonetheless, a Democrat.

Posted by Lettuce | February 19, 2007 2:09 AM

On the other hand, I think a very positive reform step would be the abolition of all the Schools of Education, which have propagated a huge number of very disastrous educational policies and have almost no positive or redeeming features whatsovever.

This is just about the only "reform" worthy of the name in the education sector. Sadly, it's practically never mentioned.

Otherwise.... The dirty little secret of public schooling in America, the land where people supposedly "love" education, is that the great majority of people view it as a necessary path to a better job, and that's it. There's nothing wrong with that, but we should quit pretending that most Americans want their kids to be inquisitive and eager to learn. In light of that, I'd like to hear Jobs explain what exactly a teacher is supposed to do, when at the end of the day his students are likely to return to a home without a single book on the shelf?

And by the way, where are all these great advances that computers have introduced into classrooms? The Web is a terrific thing, but it's free. Most of the "educational software" that I've seen was crap pimped by hucksters (many of them from education colleges -- see opening paragraph).

Posted by sglover | February 19, 2007 3:02 AM

LaFollette Progressive, actually I mostly blame the kids not the teachers or their union. In many cases they are being scapegoated. On the other hand education advocates set teachers up for scapegoating by arguing that more pay would help by attracting better teachers which implies the current teachers are lousy.

Posted by James B. Shearer | February 19, 2007 3:37 AM

Steve easily could say technology in the classroom will help and try to sell a few more computers. He is speaking against his companies interest becuase he feels what he is saying is the truth.

I commend him for that.

Posted by Daveg | February 19, 2007 5:11 AM

I think instead of making the focus on giving principals more power over teachers, we should focus on getting better principals. Good administration is key to running a good school. I find it hard to imagine that there are really that many otherwise excellent principals who would have a great school if only they could fire their bad teachers. Making teachers scapegoats is an easy fix.

Posted by William | February 19, 2007 7:06 AM

Pretty funny, really. Most of the software giants got there by ruthlessly exploiting fine print and striving for monopolistic positions where they could tax us with the costs of endless 'upgrades'.

We wouldn't be too happy with teachers who suddenly told us "You know all that stuff we taught you last year? We have a better idea now and you'll have to learn a bunch of new stuff instead. Go ahead and just use those old textbooks for firewood."

Certainly, if we could afford to do it, education might be improved by building all-new schools every three years and spending as much time on every student as the average blog reader spends reading blogs, say, two or three hours of one-to-one personalized instruction every day.

Care to guess how much that would cost? And for that amount of money we might get something that only works as well as Adobe Acrobat, which apparently needs a 20-gigabit processor to run properly.

Well, thanks, but no thanks. Local control through local schoolboards, a peculiarly American form of education, is still preferable to the dictatorship of Steve jobs.

Posted by serial catowner | February 19, 2007 8:50 AM

Notice that James B. Shearer ignored the question; how do you define or measure "merit" in a system where teachers cannot control their inputs?

I agree with Bunny; there are many children in poor districts (like than district I was raised in) who have absolutely no interest in learning. They are not curious or inquisitive, and they enjoy "scoring points" with their similarly disinterested peers by disrupting class. I can't prescribe any solutions, other than banning irresponsible people from having children. However, I can state that teachers had nothing to do with the problems of the public school system.

Posted by Father Figure | February 19, 2007 10:03 AM

Merit Pay = Ass kissing pay.

(been there, seen it done)

Posted by DCNataro | February 19, 2007 10:34 AM

Its a relief to read all these posts and see people are not buying the Steve Jobs B.S. I especially agree with William's 07:06 post. When it comes right down to it the school's community is responsible for their lot. A community thats lazy and votes for unqualified school boards sets in motion a downward spiral.

Posted by Russ | February 19, 2007 10:36 AM

Obviously you would couple teacher accountability and merit pay with various other reforms. The total package is what counts, right?

Posted by Korha | February 19, 2007 10:41 AM

People with uninformed, sophomoric opinions like Steve Jobs no longer make me furious; they just make me sad. After being a teacher for twenty years, I know that it's almost entirely the reverse of what Jobs is saying. Even somewhat inept teachers can be effective if they have students who are even a little bit willing to learn and administrators who are not idiots. I currently have an administrator who ships students with bad grades off to our continuation high school at the drop of a hat. Guess what? I look like I'm teaching much better than I did ten years ago. For good measure he fired some good non-tenured teachers so it could like like he's taking care of "bad" teachers as well. We're in big trouble in this country and a bunch of ex-football coaches and insufferable academics who never taught a day in their lives aren't going to fix it by firing teachers. You think that pool of qualified teachers is small now. It's going to get smaller. It was already an incredibly difficult, but rewarding job before. I've told my daughter I wouldn't pay for her college if she decided to be a teacher, and I wasn't kidding.

Posted by Caroline Schoneweis | February 19, 2007 11:40 AM

Caroline Schoneweis, given your propensity to blame the victim ("if they have students who are even a little bit willing to learn") perhaps you should have cut to the chase sooner and refused to pay your daughter's tuition if she decided to become a student?

Students, in general, don't arrive at school unwilling to learn. But the system takes care of that pretty fast.

Posted by Lettuce | February 19, 2007 12:02 PM

Students, in general, don't arrive at school unwilling to learn

Elementary, yes. Middle and high school, very much no.

If you stake out a school or two, you'll notice, at the former they run off the bus to get into the building at 9:05, at the latter they run out of the building to get onto the bus at 2:05.

Posted by Davis X. Machina | February 19, 2007 12:27 PM

Davis:Lettuce's point, which is a good one, is that in elementary, you see what you mentioned. The kids are excited to go to school, all that. Something happens between then and middle/high school that quite frankly, turns most kids off the whole mess.

Posted by Karmakin | February 19, 2007 12:41 PM

Karmakin, something does happen, but the teacher is probably low on the why list. For starters kids are tested repeatedly and when not testing, they are beaten down again with preparing to take the next test.

Posted by Russ | February 19, 2007 1:17 PM

If you think it's difficult to fire teachers, you ought to consider SecDefs.

Posted by Hedley Lamarr | February 19, 2007 1:19 PM

This thread seems to be filled with exchanges like this:

A: The problem with schools is that the teachers unions make it too hard to fire bad teachers.
B: No, that's stupid. The problem with schools is that we don't pay teachers enough.
C: That's ridiculous. The problem with schools is that parents don't care enough.
D: Actually, the real problem with schools is that administrators are awful.

Can't it be a dessert topping AND a floor wax?

I think that the reason why this has been such an intractable problem in America is that there are myriad structural failures in schools, and the complex of problems means that a single "cure" gets sidelined by the problems it doesn't address.

So you give more money to a school, and an incompetent administrator fritters it away, or the unions sideline it to senior teachers who just don't care anymore, or it gets to the teachers, and they still don't want to teach the horrifying children whose parents don't give a rats ass about their education.

You do a big parent involvement initiative, and the benefits are minimal because the underpaid teachers aren't really qualified to handle the students, or the administration forces some idiotic education iniative which boils down to "teach the test."

You get a great new principal, and he's blocked and hemmed in by budgetary problems and teachers unions hostile to changes to the status quo.

Etcetera. If this was basically as simple as most of you guys are making it sound, we'd have seen the answer a long time ago. If you could just pour money into schools and make them better, or just fire some teachers and make them better, or just do any one single, simple policy prescription, we'd have figured it out by now.

Posted by Michael B Sullivan | February 19, 2007 1:47 PM

Father Figure asked:

"Notice that James B. Shearer ignored the question; how do you define or measure "merit" in a system where teachers cannot control their inputs?"

I don't know why this is being asked of me since I didn't advocate merit pay. I am advocating making it easier to fire teachers who get arrested for dealing drugs and the like.

However defining merit is easy enough you just adjust for the quality of inputs. Measuring it is harder since the easiest way to improve test scores is to cheat. I have repeatedly read admiring stores about how a bad school or group of schools has been "turned around" and then read exposes a few years later about how the "turn around" was an illusion based on gaming the measurements somehow.

Note if you really don't think you can measure merit then you gain little by paying teachers more.

Posted by James B. Shearer | February 19, 2007 3:56 PM

A teacher dealing "drugs and the like," would be gone the next day.

"Note if you really don't think you can measure merit then you gain little by paying teachers more."

Why pay them at all? We could just hook up computers to every classroom and hire ex-carnies to do the paper work.

Posted by Russ | February 19, 2007 5:35 PM

I know of no union contracts anywhere that prohibit firing individuals for serious felony infractions. It is possible that the alleged cases in this area are the result of certain administrators being unable to properly handle the necessary documentation. In any case, I would like to see actual evidence. So far, one right-winger posted an unverified anecdote, and the entire thread was sidetracked as a result.

For decades, the teaching profession was subsidized by traditional gender roles - to put it bluntly, sexism. Skilled and talented women who today would enter law, medicine, or any number of other well-paid professions were then restricted to teaching and nursing. As a result, Americans tend to grossly underestimate the human capital requirements in these fields. Those days aren't coming back, nor should they. We need to face this fact and realize that we can't maintain any reasonable level of quality in these fields while trying to pay people as if it were still the 1950s.

Merit pay sounds nice on the surface, but it is extremely difficult to quantify. Most of the time, it's simply an excuse; instead of increasing pay across the board, conservatives want to pit teachers against each other for the same small, pitiful pool of funds. How do you compare a teacher in an upper-middle class district to one in the inner city? You obviously can't just compare test scores without taking other factors into account. And you can't just let the principals decide because then you're not rewarding good teaching, but sycophancy.

In some areas, there is indeed fat to be trimmed. Administrative hierarchies are often overly bloated, so far too little of the money spent on schools actually reaches the classroom. Contracts for food and bus service are sometimes crooked, especially in large cities. And we send a lot of kids to "special ed" who really shouldn't be there. But this isn't going to change the fact that we will need to spend more on schools if we want better quality. There is no inexpensive quick fix.

It's also amazing how many of the Econ 101 worshippers seem to forget all the tenets of their religion when it comes to education. Normally, if you have a shortage of applicants for a needed job, you would increase pay or benefits. Here, we have a shortage and the conservatives instead advocate slashing pay and benefits and making working conditions worse. This is just another brick in the edifice of dishonesty built by the right wing.

Posted by Josh G. | February 19, 2007 6:00 PM

Everything I have seen says that main predictor of school performance is the parents income level. By the time my kid was 3 or 4, he had his own computer full of edutainment software. Edutainment software taught him how to read. By the time he got to kindergarten, he could read and do addition and multiplication. He was way, way ahead of any kid that didn't have such "wealthy" parents.

The answer to "level the field" is more time in school. More school days in the calendar, longer school days, universal pre-school. That would take lots more teachers and lots more money. Politicians want to find something that "fixes" public education but doesn't cause a lot of dough. That was really the whole point behind NCLB - for Bush to say that he was doing something about improve education without actually spending much money on improving education.

Posted by Dennis_D | February 19, 2007 6:03 PM

Teaching suffers a whole genre, fiction and non, of literature along the lines of "Coach Carter." There's just that one fantastic teacher / coach / prinicpal who really cares, and will do anything for the children (sniff!)including breaking a few rules if necessary. It's like an action movie with no action, which bears a similar relationship with reality.

Once you buy into this nonsense, it's not a stretch to think the teacher's union is somehow quashing this vast army of Coach Carters. But if you expect teachers to work 60 hours a week instead of 50 for the same pay, just because they care, you could book the number of applicants on Oprah. Hell, Oprah might even book a real teacher and Denzel Washington on the same show, perpetuating the myth even further.

Posted by Jalmari | February 19, 2007 7:39 PM

Actually, James B. Shearer, I don't think that the quality of teachers is too low. Teachers should be paid more because they are the front line that feels the externalities caused by massive resource inequalities. There really aren't any educational policies that can rectify the damage done by poverty; some lucky kids can overcome it, but most can't. If we eliminate inequality (or at least drastically reduce it), test scores would compress. People who blame that inequality on teachers are either very naive about wealth effects, or they are being dishonest.

Posted by Father Figure | February 19, 2007 8:39 PM

Its strange that police officers don't catch the same flak for allowing socio-economic factors to result in different crime rates in different areas.

Posted by Father Figure | February 19, 2007 8:58 PM

Russ, not in New York. Here is an example of how hard it is to fire teachers in New York. I believe they finally succeeded in this case but it took 6 years.

Posted by James B. Shearer | February 20, 2007 3:01 AM

Father Figure, so you think teachers should be paid more for symbolic reasons, to show we care, even though paying them more won't actually help their students in any way.

Posted by James B. Shearer | February 20, 2007 3:05 AM