Ms. Rhee has not proposed abolishing tenure outright. Under her proposal, each teacher would choose between two compensation plans, one called green and the other red. Pay for teachers in the green plan would rise spectacularly, nearly doubling by 2010. But they would need to give up tenure for a year, after which they would need a principal's recommendation or face dismissal.
Teachers who choose the red plan would also get big pay increases but would lose seniority rights that allow them to bump more-junior teachers if their school closes or undergoes an overhaul. If they were not hired by another school, their only options would be early retirement, a buyout or eventual dismissal.
The problem for the teacher, of course, is that if you join Plan Red, you pretty much automatically signal that a principal should think twice before hiring you. And even under the red plan, principals no longer have to hire you.
I think Rhee is right about tenure: it's great for adults, but it's hard to argue that making it impossible to fire a teacher is good for children. The cases of beleaguered teachers being attacked for their ideas are mediagenic, but most teachers are fired for more prosaic reasons . . . and indeed, the theatrical cases of teachers egregiously abusing their tenure at the expense of their children seem to be much greater in number.
On the other hand, I also think that teacher tenure is a class Public Choice problem of diffuse costs and concentrated benefits, and I'll be surprised if Rhee actually succeeds:
Ms. Rhee and Mr. Klein are hardly the first public officials to inveigh against tenure, but few have succeeded in weakening it. Gov. Roy Barnes, a Democrat, persuaded Georgia lawmakers to repeal the state's teacher tenure law in 2000. But two years later, angry teachers helped elect Georgia's first Republican governor since Reconstruction, who promptly restored job protections for teachers.
If Rhee's plan goes down, it will indicate that a majority of DC's teacher's think that they're incompetent. Which does comport with the data coming out of DC schools . . .
More on Rhee from our very own pages.
"If Rhee's plan goes down, it will indicate that a majority of DC's teacher's think that they're incompetent."
MM's teacher('s) must have been incompetent come apostrophe day.
And if MM's next post is not about marshmallow sculpture, it will prove she is an ivory-tower blowhard.
But shame on me, when haven't market forces solved an important public policy issue?
Has anyone done a correlation between public school test scores and presidential election percentages?
I'd wager such an analysis would be very interesting........
"But shame on me, when haven't market forces solved an important public policy issue?"
The times when they were meddled with by those who distrust market forces.
A discussion of teacher unions and tenure is pretty much the worst place to pop up and mock those who feel free markets work better than bureaucratic big-government solutions.
Primary and secondary education is just about the most-socialized sector of our economy, and also just about the worst-managed.
There's a legit need for tenure at universities (google 'sifting and winnowing') but I don't get it at the elementary school level. I had very good experiences with my teachers as a kid, but it's not like they were modern-day Socrates who needed to be protected from the administration while filling our heads with profound thoughts that challenged the powers that be...
So my brother is a history teacher at a poor and predominantly African-American high school in a red part of a Red State. It's a right-to-work state, very few teachers belong to unions, and there's no such thing as tenure in most school districts (including his). A few years ago, in his first year at the school, he gave what he considered to be fair and even easy tests, awarded lots of extra credit, gave people the benefit of the doubt -- and still flunked about 40% of the class. The principal told him that he couldn't do that, the school might lose funding, and the kids that flunked out didn't really have anywhere to go. My brother handed him his gradebook, a pile of graded tests, and asked the principal to identify those students that he thought should pass after all. The principal just shook his head and said, "You don't understand me. 90% of the students pass or you're fired."
The main reason why non-college teachers need tenure is not because they should be permitted to express a political viewpoint in the classroom. It's because in this day of No Child Left Behind and monthly standardized testing and performance-based funding they are going to be under tremendous stress to play with the numbers for reasons other than their students' best academic interests. There needs to be a safeguard so when they don't want to play that game they have some protection.
Joe above provides an example of a problem caused by overregulation, and a proposed solution consisting of more regulation.
Joe,
Given that the twin goals of teachers unions are retention of tenure and other job protections and elimination of any testing rquirements, I don't think your brothers case is representative. I don't think we're dealing with a bunch of heroic teachers, in DC or elsewhere, who are promoting or not promonting kids based on merit.
Joe,
Your example relies on an experience in the empirical world, and therefore is to be attacked and rejected. The only truth is armchair wonkery.
The millions of teachers who work in a thankless, low pay jobs under unrealistic expectations are the real racists. Teachers unions are preoccupied with keeping their jobs and ending testing: evidence includes the dozens of tests students are subjected to, as well as the fact that schools can't hire new teachers fast enough.
Oh sorry, reality again.
I'll readily admit to ignorance on the subject of teachers' contracts. I don't follow why choosing Plan Red is a signal that a principal shouldn't hire you. Anyone care to educate me?
Snidmeir,
Some reality for you:
A teacher's union is, first and foremost, a union. Like all unions, it exsits largely (if not solely) to preserve and enhance the pay and perquisites of its members. That's reality.
What statewide or district-wide testing requirements have ever been passed with the endorsement of the unions? How many are opposed by unions? I'd bet anything the answers are 0% and 100%, respectively. Reality again.
Joe above provides an example of a problem caused by overregulation, and a proposed solution consisting of more regulation.
I don't (necessarily) disagree with this summary. I was just pointing out that there are some valuable reasons for non-college tenure in today's world. To be sure, if you change today's world so that those reasons no longer exist, then they will no longer exist.
Given that the twin goals of teachers unions are retention of tenure and other job protections and elimination of any testing rquirements, I don't think your brothers case is representative. I don't think we're dealing with a bunch of heroic teachers, in DC or elsewhere, who are promoting or not promonting kids based on merit.
I couldn't care less what the twin goals of the teachers unions are. My only experiences as an adult with teachers have been with non-unionized ones. I was just responding to Megan's implication that there is no realistic reason why a high school (or whatever) teacher needs tenure. That's not the case. In today's educational world, there are plenty of times where what is best for the class or the students is at odds with what the administrators deem to be best for the school or the school district. I think that there is a decent case to be made that tenure protections can be a valuable safeguard in that scenario.
I'll readily admit to ignorance on the subject of teachers' contracts. I don't follow why choosing Plan Red is a signal that a principal shouldn't hire you. Anyone care to educate me?
Because it's a signal that you don't think that you would survive the first year look-see period that's part of the Green Plan. Though given the relatively unlikely circumstances under which you would be looking for a job (school closure or major revamping), I suspect that it's more of a signal that you don't think that your school is going to experience those changes than a self-evaluation of your own abilities. Or, to put it another way: If the pay is equal and the only difference is that you have more job security in case of unlikely events if you agree to a one year look-see period, you're a fool to agree to the look-see period unless you think it is reasonably likely that the unlikely events are going to occur.
Joe,
I went to public schools in a very liberal, pro-teachers-union town. The teachers in middle school and high school had grading quotas as well; it was virtually impossible for students to fail. This was true even in the remedial classes or the ones attended mostly by inner-city kids that were bussed to the (suburban) school. A few teachers complained about this, but they went along with it - so I don't think that tenure guarantees freedom to go around the administration's rules. There are other ways to get teachers to fall in line besides firing them.
That said, I think teachers should have protection against arbitrary or political firings. But full tenure is extreme.
Joe:
I'm confused with your original example, perhaps you can help me understand.
If students have to take standardized tests, and the results of those tests determine school funding, how exactly would passing otherwise incapable students help the situation? They would still fail the state administered tests, and the school would still loose funding.
Perhaps what the principle was trying to get at was a different point that merely encouraging the teacher to pass everyone. Teaching in college, your brothers behavior would have been understandable and expected, as people are there to learn, and if they aren't then they do not need to be there.
High school is a different story, on the other hand. Education there is mandatory, and if the students are not performing, it is the teacher's jobs to inspire them to do so, seeing how they are still minors and all. It is the teachers job to spark interest in 90% of his students, because if they had interest they would pass. Since they are not adults, they cannot be held responsible for their lack of interest.
I'm not sure how much I agree with this logic, but it has little to do with tenure.
I'm confused with your original example, perhaps you can help me understand.
If students have to take standardized tests, and the results of those tests determine school funding, how exactly would passing otherwise incapable students help the situation? They would still fail the state administered tests, and the school would still loose funding.
This is all thirdhand (principal -> brother -> me) but I suspect that the main concern is that flunking massive numbers of students will lead to drop-outs, which will lead to funding cuts. I haven't lived in this particular state since the mid 1990s, so I'm not sure how school funding works now. But if it's like most other schools, there will be a large per capita component.
As for the distinction between college and high school, I'm not sure that I agree with the theory that a high school teacher should be required to pass everybody because if anyoe fails it's his/her own fault. For that matter, I'm not even sure I agree with the view of college -- I'm married to a yet-to-be-tenured tenure-track academic, and it's my experience that the untenured college profs and lecturers flunk far more people than the tenured ones.
Tenure allows teachers to grade as they see fit, protected from parents who interpret a poor grade as malfeasance by the teacher. Tenure allows teachers to apply plagiarism rules. Tenure prevents or at least minimizes "decisions have been made for political reasons, and based on what was going to placate and satisfy adults instead of what was in the best interests of children.”
If tenure is abolished, and there are many good reasons for its abolishment, there are some protections that will need to be replaced. I have not seen that issue discussed anywhere.
"The cases of beleaguered teachers being attacked for their ideas are mediagenic, but most teachers are fired for more prosaic reasons . . . and indeed, the theatrical cases of teachers egregiously abusing their tenure at the expense of their children seem to be much greater in number."
Posters above have pointed out additional reasons why tenure protection might be a good thing. I would add that I think the notion of intellectual freedom that drives sincere defenses of tenure does not assume the same utilitarian calculus you seem to adopt here. It is not the case, in my understanding of those arguments, that if the negative distorting effects of tenure outweigh the positive (and how are the measurable anyhow?) effects of protection to academic freedom, then the latter should be disregarded and tenure should be done away with. Is there a more market-friendly way of protecting academic freedom? If you can't recommend one then you will probably not convince those sincere defenders of tenure to give it up. Instead you end up making a lot of market-oriented points that may be valid as far as they go, but they do not go far enough to overturn a principled defense of tenure.
Also, I'd be interested to see what, empirically, tenure for K-12 teachers means about the ability of administrators to fire them. My (highly fallible) impression was that tenure for teachers is less ironclad than for professors (which, if not absolutely ironclad, is close to being so).
Finally, and beyond the scope of this particular dispute, I have not read your blog for a long time, but have noticed a disturbing propensity in your writing to contrast the messy real world of tough compromises and irreconcilable policy goals with the utopian (dystopian?) models of ECO 101. Having flirted with libertarianism in my misspent youth I think this problem is endemic to your ideology. The point is that the model you without fail gesture at is impossible to reach, and to offer it as the standard by which we are to judge the policy choices that are available gives us no hope in the real world but lets believers cling to the (cold?) embrace of dogma. This reads like an ad hominem but my accusation is not mean-spirited. What it seeks to arrive at is whether you think, in practical policy terms, the option that is friendlier to a "free" market will always be the better one. And, if so, you surely recognize that your positions are always contestable on empirical grounds. Yet your arguments so often have clear moral overtones that I'm not sure that you would want to acknowledge that.
I would actually like to see a middle of the road approach. My main problem with tenure for public school teachers is that it is typically granted after three years. Essentially, that mean at age 25 or so you never have to worry about being fired again.
Why should anyone be allowed to go through their entire working career without thinking that their job is on the line if they don't start pulling their weight? Forty years of absolute job security is a little insane.
So make it renewable on ten-year terms. Eliminate automatic step raises and end the interminable bitching that merit pay is impractical for teachers. There is no way that a P.E. teacher should get the same pay as a physics teacher. There just isn't that much P.E. to teach, quite frankly.
Joe: "...90% of the students pass or you're fired....It's because in this day of No Child Left Behind and monthly standardized testing..."
If anything, that seems like an argument against NON-standardized testing.
If the tests were actually standardized, neither the principal nor teacher would have any say whatsoever on the grade given. It would simply be a matter of following the standardized grading key.
As a student teacher with some experience in these areas I think it is true that Unions can at times stand in the way of student learning by way of protecting teachers who are sub-standard or even downright incompetent. Just like the Fraternal Order of Police defends cops who exercise poor judgment or even kill people without cause. The purpose of teachers unions are expressly to serve the interest of teachers. Just as the Fraternal Order of Police is expressly to serve the interest of police.
The fact that both police and teachers have jobs as public servants does not mean that they should not be entitled to unionize or form associations that serve their own respective interests.
There are without question some obscenely poor run schools and school districts. Pretending like eliminating tenure for teachers and union busting is going to magically solve a complex problem is unbelievably ignorant.
Pretending that teacher's unions are some monolithic, unstoppable juggernaut is unhinged. I have seen unions tangle with administrators who didn't deserve it, but I have also seen administrators stretch teachers to their breaking point and abuse negotiated plan times that make better teachers for students.
The fact that both police and teachers have jobs as public servants does not mean that they should not be entitled to unionize or form associations that serve their own respective interests.
If the Fraternal Order of Police is able to effectively protect cops who kill people that's a little bit past "free association" as I see it.
Free association should mean your employer can fire you if you can't perform your job properly. If unions just insured a fair hearing for accused employees, I could understand. Too often, they go beyond that.
So, I'm probably Megan's worst nightmare, a professor of education. But, I think KevDog is right here. I'm going to turn to empiricism. The problem with tenure now is that it is granted based on observation of the worst years of a teachers' career. There is ample evidence that teachers are still learning a lot in the first three years of teaching and that they plateau around years 5-7. So, you are still basically rolling the dice about their competence during the first three years. Also, given the attrition rate of teachers in their first 5 years, I do not understand a system that awards tenure before most people have really committed to the profession.
Instead of post-tenure review, as KevDog suggests, I'd go with a more medical model of continued certifications. I am a professor of mathematics education and run into teachers all of the time who cannot use the latest technology because they are tenured, have done their masters in administration (for the salary bump and opening potential upward mobility, as there really is none in the teaching profession. Your job on day 1 is your job on the last day.), and have little incentive to update their skills. In medicine, one of the mechanisms that forces them to keep current is maintaining Board certification. To me, that is a better system than relying on often poorly trained and overextended administrators to make judgments about teacher quality and effectiveness. The limitations of standardized tests for this kind of judgment are legion (what do you do with that art or PE professor? Are we only going to judge math and reading on these measures, as they are the only subjects that are tested enough to be able to use in any sort of way to begin to measure teacher effects as opposed to the effects of poverty, prior achievement, parental education, socioeconomic status?).
One of the reasons teachers are so fearful of a non-tenure system is that it relies on good administrators. There is as big a problem with the quality of administrators as there is with teachers. Note, Michelle Rhee also fired 23 of them last year and has already relieved 2 this year. Would you really want your fate resting on evaluations by people you don't think are qualified to do your job, much less their own? Right now because of shortages (particularly because of the crapiness of the job where you have a lot of responsibility relative to your control of the resources to actually effect change), many principals have had three years or less of teaching experience. Would you really let someone who barely knew how to do your job evaluating you? A system that relies on teachers to trust administration to be able to do their jobs well is doomed to failure. There are too many examples like Joe's out there that would suggest there isn't enough oversight of the overseers and they have too many conflicts of interest to serve as both managers and evaluators under these circumstances.
Just a thought from the inside.
Megan,
It's the system. Half of your class doesn't want to be there and is just waiting out the period until they are legally allowed to leave. These students disrupt the entire learning experience and poison the atmosphere for the students on the margin who would be willing to learn. There are serious negative peer effects and there is pretty much nothing a teacher can do about it.
I think that, in addition to the above arguments made against tenure for grade school teachers - which I believe makes zero sense in any situation - people are glossing over the reality that is DC public schools. The pervasive and entrenched incompetence in the DC school system is legendary and cannot be understated. I have listened to Ms. Rhee describe particular instances of said incompetence, and had they not been well-documented I'm not sure I would have believed them. She needs to get rid of not a few stragglers, but a significant portion of this workforce, and tenure should be off the table entirely.
I really like Karen King's idea of certification, but I would like to propose one change.
Most high school classes are pretty basic stuff. Even, advanced material, like AP calculus, rarely requires an inordinate mind to teach. So, instead of testing, or certifying, the teachers knowledge of material, certify their ability to teach it. Have a standardized test that students take in the beginning of the year, and one at the end, then grade the improvement, not the absolute score(this way the test can be designed so that it is almost never mastered, and teachers are rewarded for going above and beyond). You can add a small section of the test with an absolute score for required material.
Josh: While I agree that half the class if simply waiting to leave, I do not agree that there is nothing the teacher can do about it. Kids can be, and need to be, inspired.
James, it is possible that if you were a first grade teacher and you had a heated discussion with a parent as to why his/her child was or wasn't 'gifted', you might hold a different opinion.
If that parent then stormed off to confront a below average administrator or school board member in order to continue the discussion, you might attribute 5% sense to tenure.
If you weren't tenured, you might concede the 'gifted' designation and brace yourself for the discussion two months later as to why the child isn't graded as excellent. Or you might concede ...
Hmmmmm.
@ widmerpool
"A teacher's union is, first and foremost, a union. Like all unions, it exsits largely (if not solely) to preserve and enhance the pay and perquisites of its members. That's reality."
--Wrong--.
The purpose of all social organizations, like biological organisms, is to promote itself. Eat, excrete, grow and reproduce. That unions provide benefits for it's members is a byproduct. Particularly since unions are incapable of existing without a host and are thus parasitical.
So parasitical unions that provide (some) benefits to the host survive best, those that are parasites to hosts strong enough to bear them survive second best and parasitical unions that kill of their hosts (GM, Ford, Chrysler) don't survive at all over the long term.
Hmmmm.
Guaranteed employment (tenure) for people who work 6 months out of the year with a full year's pay?
Uhhh. No.
I have yet to see a good argument for tenure here. Either for K-12 -or- college.
And a person with tenure and a member of a union?
You must be joking.
Hmmmm.
IMO tenure for K-12 is a moot issue. So many municipalities and cities are almost completely insolvent now that bankruptcy looms for most of the country.
And tenure will be one of the first things to go.
As a former teacher myself, I feel the worst thing that ever happened to teachers was unionization.
1. It created the perception that teachers are laborers, rather than professionals.
2. It created the all-too-common phenomena of schools closing due to strikes.
3. It's caused maddening inertia in the face of desperately-needed reforms.
4. It's one of the biggest sources of big-money lobby corruption in Washington politics.
5. It's the reason why qualified math teachers make a tiny fraction of what they could in private sector jobs, while English teachers make far more than they could anywhere else.
These days I work in IT, a field which is thankfully still mostly free of unions. My life is better for it, and I will fight all attempts by unions to encroach on my new profession.
My spouse has worked as a teacher with tenure for the past 10 years and there is only one difference in the conversation Joe posted and one that would take place if his brother had tenure. Instead of the principal saying do this or get fired, he would say do this or I will start the process to get you fired and your professional life will be hell the next two years until the actual firing takes place.
Merit pay is a great idea if implemented correctly, at my spouse's school the worst teacher in the school was also the highest paid.
The only problem with the focus on teacher's unions is it lets principal's unions go under the radar. Bad principals are as big a problem as bad teachers.
"Finally, and beyond the scope of this particular dispute, I have not read your blog for a long time, but have noticed a disturbing propensity in your writing to contrast the messy real world of tough compromises and irreconcilable policy goals with the utopian (dystopian?) models of ECO 101."
Oh crap, fire up the paper shredders and magnetize the hard drives. You're burned.
"James, it is possible that if you were a first grade teacher and you had a heated discussion with a parent as to why his/her child was or wasn't 'gifted', you might hold a different opinion.
If that parent then stormed off to confront a below average administrator or school board member in order to continue the discussion, you might attribute 5% sense to tenure.
If you weren't tenured, you might concede the 'gifted' designation and brace yourself for the discussion two months later as to why the child isn't graded as excellent. Or you might concede ..."
Why on earth would you be having a heated conversation telling a parent that their child was not gifted?
This is the main problem I have with tenure and the public school monopoly. It breeds an I am right and you are wrong take it or leave it attitude. The parents (and children) after all are the customer here. Maybe they are not the idiots you think they are.
Karen King is right about placing your fate in the hands of an incompetent administrator.
I was hired to teach algebra to inner city kids. Many of them were at about the 4th grade level in math skills. My entire evaluation depended on how they did on a standardized test. There were 2 main problems. 1)the boss couldn't pass the test himself so he had no idea what skills were needed. 2)the test only measured 9th grade skills. So even if a student improved from 4th grade level to 6th grade level that improvement was not reflected in their standardized test score.
I had many students tell me that I was the best math teacher they ever had. But the goal was next to impossible. Why a kid who doesn't know how many minutes are in an hour needs to try and learn algebra is a mystery that only G. Bush,Ted Kennedy and my former boss can answer.
These kids were not stupid. What they needed were some pretty basic math skills to get along in the work world. We weren't giving it to them. I told my boss that.
I ended up getting fired because someone's head needed to roll so my boss could pretend he was actually doing something.
I went back to software dev(at 3 times the salary). Not sure what this has to do with tenure except that the entire school system (along with their parents) is failing to provide a large number of students with the skills they need.
Empirical problems with firing a teacher in New York State. First off, it should be noted that firing for insubordination is a lot easier than firing for incompetence. Disciplining tenured teachers comes under 3020-a of the state ecucation laws. If the teacher fights the firing, complying with 3020-a only takes about a year. In the last decade the law was changed so that firing a teacher under 3020-a who was in prison for dealing cocaine would only take one year instead of two. That's right, he was on full salary for the two years he fought the firing process.
Firing for incompetence takes roughly two years, because the first year is spent in documenting and providing training so the teacher can improve. Then the normal one year process for the 3020-a procedure applies. In Virginia, with the continuing contract aspect (no unions for state employees in Virginia), the teacher can be gotten rid of after the one year of trying to help the teacher get better. It's still a time-intensive effort on the part of the principal or assistant principal.
It's a lot quicker to persuade an incompetent teacher to retire a little sooner than planned (for the older teachers) or to persuade a teacher that they have chosen the wrong profession and they would be a lot happier if they left teaching.
Tenure at the administrator level is also a problem. There are certainly principals who ought not to be administrators, but the Superintendent can't really do anything about a mediocre principal. They're not insubordinate or incompetent, but they aren't acting as the instructional leader of their schools.
Now for the good news. In most school districts, at least all those outside the big and medium cities, the vast majority of administrators and teachers are trying to do right by the kids. But there are the 10% who should be fired immediately who drag the rest of the system down.
degg, i'm not getting how this hypothetical interaction has anything to do with tenure.
as the son of a G&T coordinator with her share of parent horror stories, i can assure you i am not unaware of what teachers have to deal with, and i admit that competence and strength in administrators is very important to healthy schools.
although again, this has nothing to do with my anti-tenure position..
Johnv2 is correct in that the students are the products of the system, not the customers. The problem is that the taxpayers, being the customers and voters, overlap with the parents. Separating the roles of the taxpayers at large from the parents at large is impossible. In every district I've lived in, if all the parents turn out to vote in favor of the school budget, the budget passes. The parents also have control over the Board members, voting them into and out of office. Because it's the Board (majority of) who has the final say in the District, in practice the parents have the final say in the District. And the teachers have the ear of the parents.
It is true, however, that the above political process takes some time to play out, usually over several years. We have one district near us which is controlled by the teachers, and the superintendents who are brought in by the Board to make changes stay from 1-2 years. Then the teachers decide they don't want to comply with the changes, so they start talking to the parents who eventually vote for the board members who get the message and lean on the superintendent, who then leaves, because who wants to stay in a district where you have no control to make the changes you were brought in to make?
I just came back looking at a private school for my oldest child. He's currently enrolled in a "good" public school, but even the good schools are geared to the lowest denominator. If your kid is not a behavioral issue and passes the standardized test, they get ignored.
The thing that gets me is that the current system doesn't seem to be serving anyone's interests. The kids aren't learning, the parent's aren't satisfied, I can't imagine the teacher dealing with a class of brats.
Who likes the current arrangement? My only guess is the principal/administration, which (I suppose) is avoiding confrontations with parents of the problematic children?
And if this is what's going on in a relatively wealthy district with involved parents, I can't imagine what it's like in poor urban schools. I don't have a solution, but I can recognize there is a problem.
The kids aren't learning because they are not doing their homework and they're not studying. They're not doing either of those because their parents aren't holding their feet to the fire.
You want to blame someone for poor educational outcomes in this country? The most heinous offenders - by far - are the parents.
I'm sorry, truly I am, but if you want to learn something, it takes more than sitting in class for an hour a day three or five days a week.
SofV nailed it in one. But no one wants to blame the parents, even though studies have shown that once you control for all the other variables, parental influence is the dominate factor in why kids learn. This becomes especially noticeable in the lower socioeconomic classes, but because a lot of the lower socioeconomic classesa are minorities, very few people want to talk about it for fear of being branded racists. Fortunately Bill Cosby speaks out about this all the time.
The problem is, Rex, that 'parental influence' is of two sorts -- biological and cultural -- and the one influences the other. Try all the wonky policy innovations you want. D.C. schools aren't going to improve significantly until the demographics of D.C. change dramatically. I just hope Obama sends his kids to a normal public school in the District.
Mitchell Young alludes to the elephant in the room. Non-Asian minorities have significantly lower average IQ scores than whites and Asians. Expecting NAM schools to perform at the same level as mostly white or Asian schools is unrealistic.
Fred,
That's not quite true. The **average** IQ of blacks is lower than the **average** IQ of whites which is lower than the **average** IQ of Asians. But the distribution of each race is still a bell curve, each of which has plenty of overlap with the others.
The real problem is cultural, as is the main problem with race relations. Most people don't have a problem with race; they do have a problem with different cultures. Race just becomes an easy, if often erroneous, way to identify at a glance someone from a different culture. So what in reality is a cultural difference gets viewed by a lot of people as a racial difference. Bill Cosby is one of the few blacks who get this and talks about it all the time.
Where I live, there is an organization trying to change the culture (to improve black student performance in school) without admitting that "inner-city black culture" is the problem. Very hard to do.
But no one wants to blame the parents, even though studies have shown that once you control for all the other variables, parental influence is the dominate factor in why kids learn.
I largely agree with this, and I think it's the biggest appeal to private schools - all the kids in private school have parents who care.
I've sometimes wondered if, instead of just giving more money to the public schools, we should give bonuses to the parents of kids that do well academically/behaviorally in public school. Give parents a real incentive to make sure their kids are behaving properly and learning. If your kid goofing off is going to cost you (say) $500, would you take the note from the teacher more seriously?
It's more of an idle thought than a plan, but it still makes me wonder...
"If Rhee's plan goes down, it will indicate that a majority of DC's teacher's think that they're incompetent."
That's a pretty malicious comment, Megan. In the middle of a ongoing and probably serious economic downturn that will probably involve budget cuts and belt-tightening, it's understandable that people will be leery of a plan that would eliminate or weaken tenure. Sure, this would be a tough sell at any time, but the timing is terrible.