7 ms·

To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It

47 points by sasvari 15y ago

v0cab 15y ago
Getting rid of unions just sounds like a recipe for abuse. Management simply cannot be trusted to treat employees fairly.
- Shivetya 15y ago
  unions certainly do nothing to protect the students from the teachers, if the NYC area is any example. They exaggerate the costs of educating students and usually exert too much influence over local elections thereby insuring their continued existence and near immunity to control. Unions operate to serve themselves, their political contacts next, then their members; they certainly could care less about the business. There are more than sufficient laws and with our well connected society there is means to protect both teachers and students. We just have to get the bureaucracy out of the system and that includes the unions. public employee unions should never have been allowed. The Department of Education is a good place to start when it comes to fixing the system, it needs to go. Since Carter implemented it the only noticeable increase in regards to education has been cost per student, it certainly has done little if anything to improve their outcome.
  - v0cab 15y ago
    I thought public school teachers in the US were considered to be underpaid? Certainly compared to public school teachers in South Korea, they don't earn that much compared to the national average salary. I don't believe there are sufficient laws in the US to protect teachers. The US's employment laws are poorly-regarded in the rest of the Western world. And what about at-will employment states? Teachers would be fired just because of accusations of wrongdoing. Cheaper to just get rid of the accused teacher and get a new one in.
    - yummyfajitas 15y ago
      Teachers would be fired just because of accusations of wrongdoing. It would be so terrible if a teachers who rub their genitals against students, mock homosexuals and simulate sex acts, or stalk their students were fired. Thank goodness we have unions to protect these teachers and keep them in the classroom. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/nyregion/found-to-have-misbehaved-but-still-teaching-in-new-york-city.html?_r=1&ref=education http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/nyregion/found-to-have-mis... Meanwhile, everyone besides teachers can be fired if they grope their customers. The world hasn't ended for them.
      - v0cab 15y ago
        From the nytimes article: "But to union officials, the right to an impartial hearing is sacrosanct, to protect teachers from losing their livelihoods because a principal or a student might have an ax to grind." An impartial hearing -- sounds good to me. We don't know that all the teachers in that article did those things you said. You're implying that we should fire them and make them leave that career, just because a kid and his friends said they did? Kids can lie, you know. [EDIT: After reading further in that article, I see some of the teachers did misbehave, but they were punished for it.] Without unions, teachers can look forwards to as much protection and fairness in the workplace as your average US restaurant server. Get on the wrong side of your boss or his son? Fired. Too many complaints from customers about you in one week? Fired. No proof required.
        yummyfajitas 15y ago
        While putting teachers in the same boat as waiters, programmers and CEOs does sound awful, I think children will still wind up being educated. Remember, the goal here is not to ensure teachers are never incorrectly fired, it's to educate children. If a few teachers are incorrectly fired, but student performance goes up, that's a win. This is what happens in many industries. For example, if a trader or hedge fund manager gets unlucky and the market moves against him, he can be fired. Unfair individually, maybe, but in aggregate the net result is that the traders who aren't fired tend to perform better.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
yummyfajitas 15y ago
The article unnecessarily conflates two separate pieces of the bureaucracy. The first is management of inputs - work rules, prescribed teaching methods, etc. The second is management of outputs - measurement of student performance and penalties/rewards for teachers who harm/improve this. The first can certainly be scrapped at the global level (though of course experimentation should continue at lower levels). The second, not so much. By analogy to programming, it would be silly to hire a programmer and tell him to use Eclipse and make sure all work is performed between 9AM and 6PM. On the other hand, it would be moronic not to give him a detailed description of what you actually want him to build, and put a clause in the contract tying his pay to his product meeting the specs.
- wisty 15y ago
  Yes, but you wouldn't want to measure lines of code.
  - yummyfajitas 15y ago
    Nor would you want to measure student performance by class attendance. What's your point?
    - wisty 15y ago
      That many of the metrics the school system uses are terrible ones, which lead to pathological behavior.
      - yummyfajitas 15y ago
        Ok, so fix the metrics. Something interesting that I've observed is that most of the people complaining about metrics are really complaining about the goals of the system. I.e., many people want the school to increase mean(student scores), and then complain when the school attempts to increase count(student score > CUTOFF). If you want the school to have different goals, say so. Don't blame the goals of the system on the existence of metrics.
DanielBMarkham 15y ago
After reading yummyfajitas' comment, I wish I could take back my upvote, because he's right: it's one thing to say the structure of the process itself is so byzantine and brittle that schools suck, but it's quite another to say we should remove measurable goals as well. If I didn't know better, I'd call this a disinformation piece: deliberately conflating two concepts into one large rant in order to try to join the two. The subtext goes something like this:we know Joe Sixpack has finally figured out how terrible the education system is, so let's throw together a big pile of things we don't like, stick a label on top (something like "bureaucracy") and that way we can get rid of pesky measurements at the same time we free up execution.) The author isn't good enough to pull that off, though. I think it's much more the case that it's just a populist rant from somebody who already has a big label he wants to stick on things that don't work. That is a non-starter. To continue the programming analogy, as a customer you guys are delivering crap all the time. I pay ten times as much and the crap just gets worse. Now we can sit around and dicker all day long about the process you have for making crap, but one thing we are not going to do is remove the testing at the end that makes it obvious to everybody just how shitty the whole thing is.
- cynicalkane 15y ago
  The thing about measurable goals in teaching is that all of them are awful. Economic psychology teaches us that bad incentives are worse than no incentives. The incentives being promulgated are things like "higher test scores" or "more kids graduating" so the system aligns itself towards teaching the test while simultaneously lowering the bar for everything else. So let's talk about the software analogy. In software, the bar for formal acceptance usually really low. Do test cases pass? Maybe there's an auto-integration test that also must pass, and some requirements checkout QA has to do. You can write terrible code and have it pass the formal process, which is why you see a lot of terrible programmers coasting along at some of the worse companies. Some teams might have more formal requirements but that goes team by team. If you're working anywhere worth working, there'll be a much higher non-formal bar set by your manager, your team, your customers if you're in contact with them. So the incentives are there but they're personal and informal. The 'waterfall' pattern is one example of a misguided attempt to formalize the software dev process and align it with goals. How would software devs feel if some perverse, untouchable bureaucracy measured their code according to ridiculous formal measures from the Central Bureaucracy and arbitrary rules that changed according political whims? That's what teachers are facing. I know some software devs face the same thing, but we always give them the same advice: find a better job. Teachers don't have that option because the bureaucracy is everywhere; but they can go to better (generally richer) schools, where it's a little mitigated, or they can drop out and leave that gaggle of little Kafkas behind forever.
ChristianMarks 15y ago
The Atlantic ought to read this NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/business/college-costs-are-rising-amid-a-prestige-chase.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/business/college-costs-are... Busting unions and destroying bureaucracies isn't going to change the way teaching is done fundamentally. What it will do is make teaching even less attractive as a profession. Most teachers I know value job security in exchange for salary. Take away security and you are left with little economic incentive to stay. And economic incentives are essential: Some of that [tuition] growth has resulted from a phenomenon called Baumol’s disease, after the economist William J. Baumol, who described it in a 1965 article he wrote with William G. Bowen. The basic idea is that while productivity gains have made it possible to assemble cars with only a tiny fraction of the labor that was once required, it still takes four musicians nine minutes to perform Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 4 in C minor, just as it did in the 19th century. College instruction more closely resembles a musical performance than an auto assembly line. Although information technologies have yielded some productivity growth in academia, instruction still takes place largely as it always has. To recruit professors, universities must pay salaries roughly in line with those made possible by productivity growth in other sectors. So while rising salaries needn’t lead to higher prices in many industries, they do in academia and many other service industries. While the Atlantic story seems to comport with the frightening startup idea to "Replace Universities", it is crucial to recognize and deal with Baumol's disease.
- yummyfajitas 15y ago
  What it will do is make teaching even less attractive as a profession. Most teachers I know value job security in exchange for salary. Take away security and you are left with little economic incentive to stay. That's ok, there is already a mismatch between supply and demand in teaching. Apparently there is a surplus of at least 280,000 teachers, according to the Department of Education [1]. This indicates that teachers are currently overcompensated - if comp were reduced, supply would come closer to meeting demand (at least if Keynesians/Monetarists/Austrians are to be believed). Further, if union influence were reduced, then administrators would be able to force out the low performance and keep the high performers, rather than merely keep the teachers with seniority. [1] http://www.ed.gov/blog/2011/10/keeping-teachers-off-the-unemployment-line/ http://www.ed.gov/blog/2011/10/keeping-teachers-off-the-unem...
jeremys1 15y ago
Bobby Jindal is helping fix education by destroying the bureaucracy. Jindal triumphed this past Thursday in his bid to embark on an historic overhaul of public education in Louisiana, receiving final House passage of his centerpiece proposals. In a state where student performance lags the nation, the complex bills will make it harder for teachers to gain tenure while establishing a statewide voucher program for private school tuition and multiplying the ways to create charter schools. The bills also lessen local school board authority in hiring and firing decisions, expand online schools and restructure public financing of education. The measure also creates new paths to start up charter schools, which are publicly funded but run with broad autonomy from state and local education officials. Nonprofit corporations with an "educational mission" will be allowed to authorize charter schools, rather than just the state or local school boards. It also will be easier for the state to take over a failing school. Local school board authority will be lessened, strengthening the hand of superintendents and principals in issues of hiring and firing and giving the state education superintendent more review of local school board contracts with their own district leaders. Current teacher tenure practice will end. Those with tenure now — or who are poised to receive it before the fall school year begins — will maintain the job protection as long as they aren't rated ineffective under a new evaluation system tied partly to student performance on standardized tests. Anyone without tenure or who loses it because of an ineffective rating would need to be rated "highly effective" for five of six consecutive years in order to reach the job protection. Statewide salary schedules for teachers will be scrapped. Teachers won't lose any of their current pay, but raises will be tied to decisions by individual principals and school leaders. Seniority won't be a primary factor in layoff decisions. Source: http://www.nola.com/newsflash/index.ssf/story/final-passage-for-historic-jindal-education-reform/83852fea976348dd811494da06d738cd http://www.nola.com/newsflash/index.ssf/story/final-passage-...
mcmSEA 15y ago
ironic how education systems with "unions and bureaucracies" like Finland seem to do fine, and are best in the world.
MaysonL 15y ago
The way to fix the American educational system is to teach teachers better ways to teach. Teaching is a learnable and teachable art, even though like all arts, some people will be better (sometimes much better) than others. See "Building a Better Teacher": http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html...

47 points by sasvari 15y ago

v0cab 15y ago

Getting rid of unions just sounds like a recipe for abuse. Management simply cannot be trusted to treat employees fairly.

Shivetya 15y ago
unions certainly do nothing to protect the students from the teachers, if the NYC area is any example. They exaggerate the costs of educating students and usually exert too much influence over local elections thereby insuring their continued existence and near immunity to control. Unions operate to serve themselves, their political contacts next, then their members; they certainly could care less about the business. There are more than sufficient laws and with our well connected society there is means to protect both teachers and students. We just have to get the bureaucracy out of the system and that includes the unions. public employee unions should never have been allowed. The Department of Education is a good place to start when it comes to fixing the system, it needs to go. Since Carter implemented it the only noticeable increase in regards to education has been cost per student, it certainly has done little if anything to improve their outcome.
- v0cab 15y ago
  I thought public school teachers in the US were considered to be underpaid? Certainly compared to public school teachers in South Korea, they don't earn that much compared to the national average salary. I don't believe there are sufficient laws in the US to protect teachers. The US's employment laws are poorly-regarded in the rest of the Western world. And what about at-will employment states? Teachers would be fired just because of accusations of wrongdoing. Cheaper to just get rid of the accused teacher and get a new one in.
  - yummyfajitas 15y ago
    Teachers would be fired just because of accusations of wrongdoing. It would be so terrible if a teachers who rub their genitals against students, mock homosexuals and simulate sex acts, or stalk their students were fired. Thank goodness we have unions to protect these teachers and keep them in the classroom. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/nyregion/found-to-have-misbehaved-but-still-teaching-in-new-york-city.html?_r=1&ref=education http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/nyregion/found-to-have-mis... Meanwhile, everyone besides teachers can be fired if they grope their customers. The world hasn't ended for them.
    - v0cab 15y ago
      From the nytimes article: "But to union officials, the right to an impartial hearing is sacrosanct, to protect teachers from losing their livelihoods because a principal or a student might have an ax to grind." An impartial hearing -- sounds good to me. We don't know that all the teachers in that article did those things you said. You're implying that we should fire them and make them leave that career, just because a kid and his friends said they did? Kids can lie, you know. [EDIT: After reading further in that article, I see some of the teachers did misbehave, but they were punished for it.] Without unions, teachers can look forwards to as much protection and fairness in the workplace as your average US restaurant server. Get on the wrong side of your boss or his son? Fired. Too many complaints from customers about you in one week? Fired. No proof required.
      - yummyfajitas 15y ago
        While putting teachers in the same boat as waiters, programmers and CEOs does sound awful, I think children will still wind up being educated. Remember, the goal here is not to ensure teachers are never incorrectly fired, it's to educate children. If a few teachers are incorrectly fired, but student performance goes up, that's a win. This is what happens in many industries. For example, if a trader or hedge fund manager gets unlucky and the market moves against him, he can be fired. Unfair individually, maybe, but in aggregate the net result is that the traders who aren't fired tend to perform better.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]

yummyfajitas 15y ago

The article unnecessarily conflates two separate pieces of the bureaucracy. The first is management of inputs - work rules, prescribed teaching methods, etc. The second is management of outputs - measurement of student performance and penalties/rewards for teachers who harm/improve this. The first can certainly be scrapped at the global level (though of course experimentation should continue at lower levels). The second, not so much. By analogy to programming, it would be silly to hire a programmer and tell him to use Eclipse and make sure all work is performed between 9AM and 6PM. On the other hand, it would be moronic not to give him a detailed description of what you actually want him to build, and put a clause in the contract tying his pay to his product meeting the specs.

wisty 15y ago
Yes, but you wouldn't want to measure lines of code.
- yummyfajitas 15y ago
  Nor would you want to measure student performance by class attendance. What's your point?
  - wisty 15y ago
    That many of the metrics the school system uses are terrible ones, which lead to pathological behavior.
    - yummyfajitas 15y ago
      Ok, so fix the metrics. Something interesting that I've observed is that most of the people complaining about metrics are really complaining about the goals of the system. I.e., many people want the school to increase mean(student scores), and then complain when the school attempts to increase count(student score > CUTOFF). If you want the school to have different goals, say so. Don't blame the goals of the system on the existence of metrics.

DanielBMarkham 15y ago

After reading yummyfajitas' comment, I wish I could take back my upvote, because he's right: it's one thing to say the structure of the process itself is so byzantine and brittle that schools suck, but it's quite another to say we should remove measurable goals as well. If I didn't know better, I'd call this a disinformation piece: deliberately conflating two concepts into one large rant in order to try to join the two. The subtext goes something like this:we know Joe Sixpack has finally figured out how terrible the education system is, so let's throw together a big pile of things we don't like, stick a label on top (something like "bureaucracy") and that way we can get rid of pesky measurements at the same time we free up execution.) The author isn't good enough to pull that off, though. I think it's much more the case that it's just a populist rant from somebody who already has a big label he wants to stick on things that don't work. That is a non-starter. To continue the programming analogy, as a customer you guys are delivering crap all the time. I pay ten times as much and the crap just gets worse. Now we can sit around and dicker all day long about the process you have for making crap, but one thing we are not going to do is remove the testing at the end that makes it obvious to everybody just how shitty the whole thing is.

cynicalkane 15y ago
The thing about measurable goals in teaching is that all of them are awful. Economic psychology teaches us that bad incentives are worse than no incentives. The incentives being promulgated are things like "higher test scores" or "more kids graduating" so the system aligns itself towards teaching the test while simultaneously lowering the bar for everything else. So let's talk about the software analogy. In software, the bar for formal acceptance usually really low. Do test cases pass? Maybe there's an auto-integration test that also must pass, and some requirements checkout QA has to do. You can write terrible code and have it pass the formal process, which is why you see a lot of terrible programmers coasting along at some of the worse companies. Some teams might have more formal requirements but that goes team by team. If you're working anywhere worth working, there'll be a much higher non-formal bar set by your manager, your team, your customers if you're in contact with them. So the incentives are there but they're personal and informal. The 'waterfall' pattern is one example of a misguided attempt to formalize the software dev process and align it with goals. How would software devs feel if some perverse, untouchable bureaucracy measured their code according to ridiculous formal measures from the Central Bureaucracy and arbitrary rules that changed according political whims? That's what teachers are facing. I know some software devs face the same thing, but we always give them the same advice: find a better job. Teachers don't have that option because the bureaucracy is everywhere; but they can go to better (generally richer) schools, where it's a little mitigated, or they can drop out and leave that gaggle of little Kafkas behind forever.

ChristianMarks 15y ago

The Atlantic ought to read this NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/business/college-costs-are-rising-amid-a-prestige-chase.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/business/college-costs-are... Busting unions and destroying bureaucracies isn't going to change the way teaching is done fundamentally. What it will do is make teaching even less attractive as a profession. Most teachers I know value job security in exchange for salary. Take away security and you are left with little economic incentive to stay. And economic incentives are essential: Some of that [tuition] growth has resulted from a phenomenon called Baumol’s disease, after the economist William J. Baumol, who described it in a 1965 article he wrote with William G. Bowen. The basic idea is that while productivity gains have made it possible to assemble cars with only a tiny fraction of the labor that was once required, it still takes four musicians nine minutes to perform Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 4 in C minor, just as it did in the 19th century. College instruction more closely resembles a musical performance than an auto assembly line. Although information technologies have yielded some productivity growth in academia, instruction still takes place largely as it always has. To recruit professors, universities must pay salaries roughly in line with those made possible by productivity growth in other sectors. So while rising salaries needn’t lead to higher prices in many industries, they do in academia and many other service industries. While the Atlantic story seems to comport with the frightening startup idea to "Replace Universities", it is crucial to recognize and deal with Baumol's disease.

yummyfajitas 15y ago
What it will do is make teaching even less attractive as a profession. Most teachers I know value job security in exchange for salary. Take away security and you are left with little economic incentive to stay. That's ok, there is already a mismatch between supply and demand in teaching. Apparently there is a surplus of at least 280,000 teachers, according to the Department of Education [1]. This indicates that teachers are currently overcompensated - if comp were reduced, supply would come closer to meeting demand (at least if Keynesians/Monetarists/Austrians are to be believed). Further, if union influence were reduced, then administrators would be able to force out the low performance and keep the high performers, rather than merely keep the teachers with seniority. [1] http://www.ed.gov/blog/2011/10/keeping-teachers-off-the-unemployment-line/ http://www.ed.gov/blog/2011/10/keeping-teachers-off-the-unem...

jeremys1 15y ago

Bobby Jindal is helping fix education by destroying the bureaucracy. Jindal triumphed this past Thursday in his bid to embark on an historic overhaul of public education in Louisiana, receiving final House passage of his centerpiece proposals. In a state where student performance lags the nation, the complex bills will make it harder for teachers to gain tenure while establishing a statewide voucher program for private school tuition and multiplying the ways to create charter schools. The bills also lessen local school board authority in hiring and firing decisions, expand online schools and restructure public financing of education. The measure also creates new paths to start up charter schools, which are publicly funded but run with broad autonomy from state and local education officials. Nonprofit corporations with an "educational mission" will be allowed to authorize charter schools, rather than just the state or local school boards. It also will be easier for the state to take over a failing school. Local school board authority will be lessened, strengthening the hand of superintendents and principals in issues of hiring and firing and giving the state education superintendent more review of local school board contracts with their own district leaders. Current teacher tenure practice will end. Those with tenure now — or who are poised to receive it before the fall school year begins — will maintain the job protection as long as they aren't rated ineffective under a new evaluation system tied partly to student performance on standardized tests. Anyone without tenure or who loses it because of an ineffective rating would need to be rated "highly effective" for five of six consecutive years in order to reach the job protection. Statewide salary schedules for teachers will be scrapped. Teachers won't lose any of their current pay, but raises will be tied to decisions by individual principals and school leaders. Seniority won't be a primary factor in layoff decisions. Source: http://www.nola.com/newsflash/index.ssf/story/final-passage-for-historic-jindal-education-reform/83852fea976348dd811494da06d738cd http://www.nola.com/newsflash/index.ssf/story/final-passage-...

mcmSEA 15y ago

ironic how education systems with "unions and bureaucracies" like Finland seem to do fine, and are best in the world.

MaysonL 15y ago

The way to fix the American educational system is to teach teachers better ways to teach. Teaching is a learnable and teachable art, even though like all arts, some people will be better (sometimes much better) than others. See "Building a Better Teacher": http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html...