Coyote Blog

In response to a Jon Stewart (uninformed) dig about Baltimore schools being crappy because they are poorly funded, we get this:

The National Center for Education Statistics reports the following data on Baltimore City Public Schools and Fairfax County Public Schools, the latter considered among the best school districts in the entire country:

So what about the teachers? Maybe the schools waste a lot of this money and skimp on teachers' salaries?  Yes on the first part, but no on the second.

To my eye, Baltimore teachers are quite well paid, starting at over $47,000 base salary (plus substantial benefits, likely better than what you have) and ramping up to over $80,000 a year for "professional" teachers which I presume means they have a post-graduate degree of some sort.  I am not sure if these salaries are for 9, 10, or 12 months of work, but if I read page 25 of their union contact correctly, teachers can work no more than 190 days a year vs. about 250 for the typical professional job.  This would make their starting salary equivalent to $61,842 for a full-year job.  Add to that tens of thousands in pension and health benefits, 21 different types of allowed leave time, and a virtual inability to be fired, and that's pretty damn good pay.

Postscript:  I will add that I was fortunate enough to be able to send my kids to top private schools in Phoenix K-12.  We obviously paid less in elementary school and more in high school, but the average private tuition we paid in those 13 years of school, even adjusted for inflation, is well below the $17,196 per pupil spent in Baltimore public schools.  I am simply exhausted with people saying this is about money.  It is about a senescent government monopoly with no accountability and no incentive to improve because it faces no competition.

I think folks are rightly concerned that "disparate impact" logic run amok is leading to a lot of questionable practices, like this one in Minnesota:

The good: Minneapolis Public Schools want to decrease total suspensions for non-violent infractions of school rules.

The bad: The district has pledged to do this by implementing a special review system for cases where a black or Latino student is disciplined. Only minority students will enjoy this special privilege.

That seems purposefully unconstitutional—and is likely illegal, according to certain legal minds.

The new policy is the result of negotiations between MPS and the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights. Minority students are disciplined at much higher rates than white students, and for two years the federal government has investigated whether that statistic was the result of institutional racism.

I understand the concern here, and I don't think it is unreasonable to demand that a public institution make this review process applicable to all suspensions, not just to those of black and Hispanic kids.

But good God, if I found out, say, that Hispanics were getting laid off at ten times the rate as Anglo workers in my company, I would definitely do something different in the process.  I would not immediately assume it was due to discrimination but I would sure as hell insert myself into the process to make sure things were fair.  I could easily see myself at least temporarily demanding in such a case that all terminations of people of color be reviewed with me first.  Hell, I wouldn't have waited for two years to do it either.   Even if the terminations turned out to be righteous, I would  hopefully learn something along the way about why the disparity exists and what I could do about it in the future.

By the way, in today's legal environment, any private employer who says they don't put extra scrutiny on terminations of folks in protected classes, or don't increase the warnings and documentation required internally before firing someone in a protected class, is probably a liar.

The single post from way back that I still get the most Google hits from (and the most nasty email, I might add) was my post on the myth that public schools teachers are underpaid.  This was a follow-on post to my lengthy post fisking the NEA's school improvement plans and here too.  The premise in all these posts was that 1) Public schools actually spent more per pupil than private schools that do a better job and 2) Teachers, when you adjust their total hours to match other workers who don't get summers off, make a salary very competitive to other professionals, even before their hefty government benefits package.

The Goldwater Institute has just completed a study of Arizona private schools, and has come to many of the same conclusions.  The study's author, Andrew Coulson, summarizes the findings:

In a study released yesterday
by the Goldwater Institute, I analyze the results of their most recent
private school survey. Among the other fascinating findings is that
public schools spend one-and-a-half times as much per pupil as do
private schools. Or, looked at the other way, private schools spend a
third less than public schools.

Some other fascinating tidbits:

Teachers make up 72 percent of on-site staff in Arizona's independent education sector, but less than half
of on-site staff in the public sector. In order to match the
independent sector's emphasis on teachers over non-teaching staff,
Arizona public schools would have to hire roughly 25,000 more teachers
and dismiss 21,210 non-teaching employees.

When teachers' 9-month salaries are annualized to make them
comparable to the 12-month salaries of most other fields, Arizona
independent school teachers earned the equivalent of $36,456 in 2004 "”
about $2,000 less than reporters and correspondents. The
12-month-equivalent salary of the state's public school teachers was
around $60,000, which is more than nuclear technicians,
epidemiologists, detectives, and broadcast news analysts. It's also
about 50 percent more than reporters or private school teachers earn.

My kids go to an absolutely fabulous private school here in Phoenix.  It is secular and (gasp) actually runs for-profit, so it has no endowments or sources of grants or charitable funds.  In exchange for a great education that far outstrips the quality of even the best local schools, it charges a tuition substantially less than the Phoenix-area per-pupil public school spending (and it offers a 20% discount for each child over one).  If you are considering a move to the area, email me and I will give you more detail.

More here on the virtues of school choice.  This is a sort of related post on the barriers to starting a private school.

I have been spammed several times with messages breathlessly telling me I have to watch this video about why the free flow of people from poorer nations into the US looking for opportunity is so disastrous.  I had nothing else to do in my hotel room, so I watched a bit.

The video clearly relies on the fact that American students have had crappy education into US history.  He uses the period of 1925-1965 as his base period, to show how much higher immigration rates are today than in these years.  To try to make current immigration seem out of line, he gives us the first real whopper of the video - he actually calls 1925-1965 the "golden age of American immigration", implying it was an era of free and open immigration and representative of a high rate of immigration.  Anyone with any sort of history education should be able to smell a rat - after all, wasn't the late 19th and early 20th century the real period of immigration into this country? 

In fact, 1925-1965 was, on the metric of immigration as a percentage of US population (the correct way to index the number) the LOWEST and most restrictionist period of immigration in our entire history.  In fact, 1925-1965 was the golden age of xenophobic restriction laws (aimed mainly at that time at southern and eastern Europeans).

So, after the lecturer began his talk by saying that white is black, I was obviously not really interested in the rest  (not to mention the fact that he for some reason reminded me of across between Rutger Hauer and Crispin Glover playing a creepy takeover-the-world villain).  He tries to take an environmental approach, I guess to try to lure the Left into the nativist camp.  I will say his upward sloping population charts are pretty funny, given that they have absolutely no relationship to any credible forecast.  He seems to take the global warming modeler's approach to shifting assumptions to get that big hockey stick.  His argument is ridiculous, though.  If you believe that a unit of population brings with it a measure of environmental harm, then immigration doesn't really change the net harm to the globe, it only moves its effects around.  And I would argue that the US with its wealth and attention to environmental matters is in a far better position to mitigate these effects than say Mexico.  I addressed this conservative retread of Paul Ehrlich population bomb panic here.

I am trying to picture the discussion in the Colorado legislature.  Our public schools are struggling, what should we do?

A Jefferson County geography teacher was placed on paid administrative
on the second day of school for hanging several flags from other
countries in his classroom.

Eric Hamlin said the flags were part
of a world geography lesson plan at Carmody Middle School and refused
to take them down. The school's principal escorted Hamlin out of class
Wednesday morning after he refused to remove the flags of China and
Mexico.

The school district placed him on administrative leave
for insubordination, citing a Colorado law that makes it illegal to
display foreign flags permanently in schools.

"Under state law, foreign flags can only be in the classroom because
it's tied to the curriculum. And the principal looked at the
curriculum, talked to the teacher, and found that there was really no
curriculum coming up in the next few weeks that supported those flags
being in the classroom," said Jeffco Public Schools spokeswoman Lynn
Setzer.

It all reminds me of this guy.  Colorado has elected a number of strong nativists to their public offices, and they have taken the lead in many anti-immigrant efforts (that's the nativists whose ancestors immigrated from Europe over the last couple of centuries, not the nativists who were actually, you know, here first).  I think its helpful to see where following these idiots will take us.  Anyone still want to argue that strong immigration opponents aren't xenophobes?

Hat tip: Reasons Hit and Run

I am a bit late on this one, but a California judge has determined that giving kids tests that have consequences is unconstitutional:

A judge in Oakland struck down California's
controversial high school exit exam Monday, issuing a tentative ruling
suggesting the test is unfair to some students who are shortchanged by
substandard schools.

If finalized, the unexpected ruling
would block the state from carrying out its plan to deny diplomas for
the first time to tens of thousands of seniors who have been unable to
pass the exit exam.

Note that this standard essentially means that no tests with real consequences (e.g. denial of grade advancement or diploma) can ever be given, because with 1129 high schools in California, some schools will always be below par.  So his argument will always apply -- there will always be kids who can claim their school is on the low end of the normal distribution.  And even if every school were exactly the same, kids within these schools could, I presume, similarly argue to this judge that they had sub-par teachers or sub-par parents or a sub-par reading light or a sub-par dog that ate their homework.

By the way, doesn't this also imply that California can no longer name state champions among high schools in various sports?  After all, isn't that unfair to schools with lesser sports programs?  And couldn't I extend this ruling to say that California state run colleges shouldn't be using high school grades or SAT scores or any other test-based metric in selecting entrants since some of these folks came from low-performing schools?

This confusion of equal protection with equal outcomes is so absurd its not really even worth commenting on further.  I won't even bother, then, asking how the judge expects sub-par schools to be made to improve without testing-with-teeth, or even what objective standards the judge used to determine that any schools were "substandard" in the first place.

For those who support this ruling, and agree with the plaintiff attorney's language that sounds like students have a right to a diploma that can't be denied without due process, here is a question:  What is a diploma?  Obviously, you don't want it to mean that a student has demonstrated basic knowledge and abilities against an agreed upon standard.  Are we reduced to a diploma being a certificate of attendance, indicating that a student grimly sat through 4 years of classes and nothing else?

This same week, the Florida Senate was unable to rescue the very successful state voucher program in the face of last year's insane Florida Supreme Court ruling that vouchers were unconstitutional because the Florida Constitution's uniformity clause:

the Florida Supreme Court ruled 5-2 that the voucher program violated
the "uniformity clause" of the state constitution guaranteeing a
high-quality system of public schools. Because the performance of the
voucher kids was superior to those in public schools, the court ruled that education was not uniform -- or in this case not uniformly miserable.

The program in question that was struck down by the court awarded vouchers to students of schools that failed to pass state standards. 

The program at issue is Governor Jeb Bush's
seven-year-old "Florida A+ School Accountability and Choice Program."
For the first time, schools have been graded on the reading, writing
and math progress made by the children they are supposed to be
teaching. (Imagine that.) Any school that received an F in two of four
years is deemed a failure, and the kids then get a voucher to attend
another school, public or private.

One immediate impact -- according to researchers at
Harvard, Florida State, and the James Madison Institute -- has been
that the mere threat of competition caused many inner-city school
districts to improve. The percentage of African Americans who are now
performing at or above grade level surged to 66% last year, from 23% in
1999.

What is amazing about the court's decision is that every kid who got a voucher, 90% of whom are minorities, came from a school demonstrated by objective standards to be far below average.  But, according to the court, it is constitutional for these kids to be in schools that are far below average, but becomes unconstitutional when kids are moved to above average schools?  Does this make any sense?  I'ts sort of a reverse Lake Wobegone effect -- the system is constitutional as long as all the schools are below average but once any are above average then its unconstitutional.  LOL.

Here is the reason that the court's logic doesn't make sense:  The real thing they are concerned about with the uniformity clause is not uniform quality, but whether the schools are uniformly controlled by the government and uniformly populated with union rather than non-union teachers.

Note that both these decisions use the existence of flaws within the two states' educational systems (e.g. low-performing schools) combined with a "uniformity" or "equal protection" standard to strike down reforms aimed at fixing these very flaws.  Both are saying that you can't reform the schools until all the schools are equally good,  but of course the schools will never improve without reform. 

Update:  But good news in Newark.  It's depressing but not surprising to see my alma mater's own Cornell West out there fighting against school choice for African-Americans.

Update #2:  Walter Olson comments:

It would appear that from now on a high school diploma is meant to
signify not a student's actual mastery of a certain body of material,
but rather the mastery he or she would have attained had the breaks of
life been fairer. Employers, and all others who rely on California high
school diplomas in evaluating talent, would be well advised to adjust
their expectations accordingly.

Here is a scoop for a few folks out there:  6-year-olds do not have the reasoning ability or a sophisticated enough view of the world to be polical activits.  However, they are, given their lack of sophistication, perfect subjects for political indoctrination and great pawns for media-savvy advocacy groups looking for a little airtime.

I saw this story on Fox News today about a group of 2nd graders manipulated by their activist public school teacher and the Rainforest Action Network to protext at Chase Manhattan in New York against logging and oil drilling.  Apparently unable to get anyone with a high school education or a adult reasoning level to support their cause, the RAN turned to first and second graders:

"I celebrate the world, I celebrate the rainforest, and I care [about] the reality of what is happening with my students, which is only fair, and I let them make their own choices," said teacher Paula Healey.

Right.  Six-year-olds are in the perfect position to formulate their own opinion on sophisticated issues.  Even if the kids did have adult decision-making faculties, I would bet a gazillion dollars that Ms. Healey never brought any contrary opinions into the classroom, exposure to which is necesary for most of us to "make their own choices".

This is entirely inappropriate at this age in the Public Schools.  In my mind, this is just another reason for school choice - if there are parents who disagree with me and consider it a good use of a first grader's time to carry a picket sign about issues s/he can't possibly comprehend at a NY bank, then they should be able to send their kids to a school that so specializes, but the rest of our kids can be left alone to learn trivial stuff like math and reading.