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A Test for School Reform in Newark

• api 12y ago
  I worked for a while as a government contractor. I'd become disillusioned with libertarianism (no connection to the decision to take the job), and still am, but that experience cured me of any leanings toward the sort of liberalism that sees government as a solution to much of anything. The system was actively anti-meritocratic and the waste was simply incredible. They ran an entire data center at around 1% utilization. The electricity wasted alone must have been tens of thousands worth a month at least. Contractors were the worst. People often complain about too many and overpaid government employees, and there certainly was that, but the contracting waste was where the real hemorrhaging was going on. I routinely saw outside firms hired to do things at many multiples of what it would have cost to have federal employees do it, or even to recruit new federal employees. These contractors would proceed to waste the money much more flagrantly than anyone inside the government did, would deliver barely-working solutions, and would then get contracted again to fix them. It was a routine thing. I started to really suspect that someone was getting kick-backs, but gross incompetence in the handling of outside contracting could explain it too.
  • spiritplumber 12y ago
    The key part of your comment is "would get contracted again to fix them". Contractors optimized for money-over-work. I had a similar situation where I politely mocked a competitor's product for breaking down in 3 months when mine would die after 2 years, and the other guy answered that they make a lot of money on service contracts (it's nautical equipment, so warranties work a little differently).
  • acdha 12y ago
    I've seen that a lot and very similar stories at large companies and private organizations. The main lesson I've drawn is that we spend far too much time talking about isolated small examples and ignore the questions about the incentive structures which lead to it. (The classic example being the pressure to exhaust your budget by the end of the year, which has been joked about for ages but few organizations seem interested in fixing.) Most of the explanation is probably the obvious answer: fixing the broken system requires calling higher-status people on the carpet. Attacking a few teachers, clerks, etc. is much safer politically than asking exactly why the superintendent or CEO doesn't seem to care about efficiency absent a crisis.
  • zzzeek 12y ago
    if you observed that the private contracting waste was where the real hemorrhaging was going on, then your problem was with all the privatized resources being paid with public money - essentially the vast influence of the "free market" on a public resource that is not well suited to traditional free market forces. This article is specifically about the failure of privatized resources, such as charter schools, private donations delivered directly to contractors with no public oversight or review for the purposes of improving the public good. It is about billionaires with no experience or justification for being at the center of a complex public system attempting to inject gigantic, ad-hoc donations into systems they don't understand, and failing.
    • api 12y ago
      Not a bad point. If I, say, donated $100million to Microsoft to improve the Windows UI and did not know precisely where to put that money in the company and what that money should be doing, it probably would not fare much better. Still: the waste I saw was incredible. There is definitely a systemic incentive problem in government, not to mention a problem with private contracting and oversight.
• normloman 12y ago
  A few bad teachers can't explain Newark's low graduation rates. Bad teachers exist outside Newark, but kids outside still graduate in greater rates than Newark students. The difference between Newark and everywhere else is poverty. That's why I never had any hopes for Zuckerberg's donation. You've got to fix poverty to fix education. Unfortunately, the best way to raise someone out of poverty is through education. So you've got a chicken-egg problem. Have we tried doing both? Create new jobs for poor parents while simultaneously improving schools for their children?
  • Jun8 12y ago
    But using the same reasoning you give, we can point out that there are other poor regions in the US with better graduation rates. Surely, cultural and historical reasons also play a big role. The solution is to realize that the causes are many and big. Rather than trying to take these on in a gargantuan effort, which is pretty much doomed, my suggestion would be to ... just ignore the causes! Forget about what causes the problem, just fix the problem for now. When somebody heavily bleeding you don't stop to find out what caused the wound. This would be a transitory approach, of course. But, as you stated, once you make headway into education, you'll be much better equipped to tackle the root causes.
  • crusso 12y ago
    Public schools and the NEA are a monopoly. Monopolies will never fix themselves or act in the best interests of their customers. The only way to fix a bad monopoly is to divest it of power, break it up, and let others take a crack at using the same resources.
    • standeven 12y ago
      Applying corporate logic to education is a mistake. In Finland there are no private schools, and the education system is ranked among the highest in the world. Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/ http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-ame...
• Jun8 12y ago
  What a waste! Government agencies should provide data, supporting services, etc. when needed, they should not be developers of solutions, because, due to their very nature, they cannot do it. Curiously enough, money is not a motivator in this realm for better work, it's like watering the Sahara in the hopes that suddenly vegetation will sprout. What Zuckerberg should have done is to put out $10M-$20M of that money as prizes for small non/for-profit startups to come up with ingenious solutions. Then, after this survival of the fittest mode ends, push money into the promising ones.
  • kjjw 12y ago
    And then we'd be reading about the folly of the scheme's over-reliance on the private sector. They were not aiming at the root of the problem: massive poverty and massive inequality. In fact I'd go further, $100 million is nothing. What is probably needed is billions of dollars worth of investment in public services.
    • Jun8 12y ago
      Call me pragmatic but I see those problems to be not (easily) solvable. Rather than endlessly debate about what the cause is, my proposal would be to involve young, energetic outsiders to come up with solutions and move quickly to implement them. Not all of these will be workable but some will (remember the Go entry from yesterday and how Monte Carlo methods are much better in developing strong AI compared to truing to come up with good computer strategies? Similar approach).
      • Iftheshoefits 12y ago
        "Young, energetic outsiders" in the "startup set" are disproportionately likely to also be in the set of individuals from privileged backgrounds; in America this means they're also more likely to be white and male. They haven't got the empirical foundation necessary to even comprehend the depth or scope of the problems, much less devise "ingenious" solutions to them.
        • 12y ago
• 8ig8 12y ago
  Here's the primary article: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/19/140519fa_fact_russakoff?printable=true&currentPage=all http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/19/140519fa_fact_...
  • nickkthequick 12y ago
    I upvoted you but personally I prefer this link (they worked hard on the article, I believe they deserve the ad revenue): http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/19/140519fa_fact_russakoff http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/19/140519fa_fact_...
    • TheMagicHorsey 12y ago
      I don't know why people are so opposed to newspapers showing advertisements. How are they supposed to operate their organizations without funds? Or do people seriously think government funding of papers is the way to go? I happen to think that state funded news papers would be worse than papers funded by advertisers. At least with advertisers you have many different sources of funding. With the state you have just one boss, and you can't print stories that would piss him off.
      • acdha 12y ago
        I wish more places would adopt Ars Technica's model where you can pay to not see ads. I think ad antipathy is a long-term trend the industry should adjust to but it would break the revenue model at some places – e.g. it costs more to for an online-only New York Times subscription than for online+paper because the business has been dominated by print advertisements for so long.
        • eli 12y ago
          I wish this model would work, but I don't think it does in practice. For one thing, it drives the value of the ads you do show way down to commodity prices. Think about it: no advertiser is going to spend big bucks on ads that are literally only shown to the cheapest and least engaged members of your audience. It also misaligns the incentives. Now the ads function like the "nag screen" on old shareware apps. The site's revenue is tied to the ads being annoying enough that you'll want to get rid of them.
• nugget 12y ago
  I heard Bill Gates speak once at school and I remember him saying that giving away his fortune was harder than earning it in the first place.
  • dethstar 12y ago
    Did he explain why/how? I really don't understand what you're trying to say. Was it because he was too fond of it? Was it because there were many causes he'd like to give to and couldn't make his mind?
    • borski 12y ago
      I imagine it was because making good choices and judgments about who deserves it is difficult. Making sure the money is spent in a manner that matters, as opposed to given away as salaries to a bunch of consulting groups, is very hard.
    • res0nat0r 12y ago
      I'm sure he means that doing it responsibly (having the money actually be spent correctly and not wasted or lining other peoples pockets) actually takes a lot of time and effort.
    • MrFoof 12y ago
      I can guarantee Bill's reason is because he wants the money he provides to be used as efficiently as possible. You want the most benefit to be provided for your dollar. You want to donate to the organization who can use your funds at 70% efficiency, and not one that will use it at 7% efficiency, otherwise you are providing less good for your dollar.
    • icpmacdo 12y ago
      I bet you he was speaking in the context of it being difficult to donate money effectively to see the most positive outcome.
    • eCa 12y ago
      Giving money is easy, but I guess he (and Zuckerberg) wants to give money where it makes a difference. In this case it looks like it didn't make a difference -> failed gift.
• darkstar999 12y ago
  This is basically blogspam of this New Yorker article. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/19/140519fa_fact_russakoff?currentPage=all http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/19/140519fa_fact_...
  • dang 12y ago
    Yes it is. We changed the url (from http://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerberg-gave-jersey-100-130400933.html http://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerberg-gave-jersey-10...). Submitters: please do your due diligence. HN wants original sources, not ripoffs. If the article you're posting is ripped off of something else, post the something else.
• jstalin 12y ago
  I have personal experience with urban education, having been a member of a fairly large city's school board. One thing I realized is that centralization has killed the ability for anyone to think outside the box. There used to be thousands of school districts in my state, but that number has dropped by around 90%. Sure, I get the argument that it's more efficient to pool some resources, such as buses, food service, etc., but I really believe that education is really just about having a good principal who can choose his/her teachers and hold them accountable. Most people aren't aware that many union contracts prohibit the principal from choosing the teachers in the school because of seniority rules, and getting rid of bad teachers is essentially hopeless. And of course all teachers are paid the same, based on years of tenure, rather than actual outcomes or instructional needs. I've seen schools which most would consider being in the worst part of the ghetto doing very well because of a highly motivated principal. The more we centralize, the harder it becomes to do anything of value to help schools perform better. And the trend continues to be more and more in the direction of centralization.
  • bradleyjg 12y ago
    On the other hand, tiny little school districts were created for the purposes of racial segregation and continue to act as mechanisms of racial and economic segregation. Also depending on state law and various other contingent factors, you can end up with regional or even state wide union contracts even with balkanized school districts. Finally, specialized (including aggressively tracked) schools are difficult to impossible with small catchment areas that only support a few schools per level. Although it's far far from perfect, the NYC education department has managed to increase principal autonomy somewhat without throwing out all the advantages to scale.
    • carsongross 12y ago
      And there, my friends, is the totalitarian impulse: "We must coercively centralize in the name of platonic ideals, damn the costs."
      • icebraining 12y ago
• camworld 12y ago
  A large percentage of the Zuckerberg money went towards the NTU teacher contract that rewards teachers with bonuses based on performance. http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/13/10/22/explainer-mark-zuckerberg-s-100-million-gift-to-newark-schools-and-the-foundation-for-newark-s-future/ http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/13/10/22/explainer-mark-z...
• nymph 12y ago
  Precious. Another instance of the principle that money is, in many ways, like violence: you'd like to think that if it hasn't solved your problem already, if you just keep throwing more and more at it it, you'll solve it eventually -- but all to often, it just makes the problem worse. And inasmuch as Zuck would like to believe that being young means you're smarter... whatever your baseline, oftentimes, having too much money -- in Zuck's case, literally more money than he knows what to do with -- just makes us stupider. Between 2010 and 2012, The New Yorker reports that "more than twenty million dollars of Zuckerberg’s gift and matching donations went to consulting firms with various specialties: public relations, human resources, communications, data analysis, [and] teacher evaluation." Many of the consultants were being paid upwards of $1,000 a day. “Everybody’s getting paid but Raheem still can’t read," Vivian Cox Fraser, president of the Urban League of Essex County, was quoted saying.
  • gwern 12y ago
    At the time, people were wondering if it was a PR move to help defuse _The Social Network_. Zuckerberg isn't mentioned as being incensed at the waste of money, so...
  • mikeash 12y ago
    I often compare XML to violence: "if it doesn't solve your problem, you need to use more." Perhaps in Zuckerberg's case, it was PHP rather than XML. In any case, the headline gets a gigantic "well, DUH" from me. Two reasons: 1. It strikes me as unlikely that a lack of funding is Newark's fundamental problem here. 2. Even if lack of money is the fundamental problem, the annual budget for the system is a billion dollars. Why would anyone expect 10% of their annual budget, spent over a period of years, to do anything interesting?
• pmorici 12y ago
  Well that is depressing. They should have watched the documentary "Waiting For Superman" which talks about schools that defy the odds and produce good outcomes for the their students in places where the schools in general are a total failure. It used to be on Netflix streaming but looks like it is only available via DVD now. http://www.hulu.com/watch/185389 http://www.hulu.com/watch/185389 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_%22Superman%22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_%22Superman%22
  • voyou 12y ago
    The proposals mentioned in the article (replacing regular public schools with charter schools, performance-related pay for teachers, a new "transformational" superintendent) are similar to the policies proposed in Waiting For Superman. The success of those policies, however, is pretty questionable, and this case may be another reason to be sceptical (see Diane Ravitch's criticism of Waiting For Superman here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-charter-schools/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-ch... )
    • pmorici 12y ago
      Well I'd say their first problem is that they didn't actually _implement_ any of the ideas they just spent 100 million on over paid consultants (one of the cited problems in the documentary) and didn't change a single thing. Waiting for superman talks specifically about the epidemic corruption in Newark's school system.
• pessimizer 12y ago
  Mark Zuckerberg donated money for school privatization in Newark, not to "fix Newark's schools." There's a difference. http://www.publicschoolreview.com/articles/123 http://www.publicschoolreview.com/articles/123
• wil421 12y ago
  Imagine that, a government organization spending all their money on high paid consultants with nothing to show for it. I wonder how many of these consultant firms had ties to Booker and his cronies.
• EGreg 12y ago
  I know what I would do: http://magarshak.com/blog http://magarshak.com/blog
• cjensen 12y ago
  Statistical studies have long shown that (1) education outcomes strongly correlate with parenting; especially having two parents. (2) education outcomes have near-zero correlation with funding. Given this, one would expect this exact outcome. Santayana and all that. If you want to use money to improve education, I suspect the best use would be to provide parental education as soon as the child is born. It would be nice if someone provided a small amount of money to try that out.
  • ncallaway 12y ago
    I'm currently in the process of investigating the literature on correlations between teacher pay and student outcomes. Would you mind listing some studies showing point (2). I'd really appreciate anything you've got handy.
    • aaronharnly 12y ago
      I don't agree with their proposed remedies, but the book "Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses" by Eric Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth has thorough documentation of the disconnect between spending and outcomes. http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0691130000 http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0691130000
  • jseliger 12y ago
    I don't mean to be that jerk, but I'm going to anyway: citations are needed on this: "Statistical studies have long shown that..." "We"—schools, society, etc.—can't really control parenting. But we can control schools, and per the articles I list here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/susan-engel-doesnt-get-2/ http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/susan-engel-doesnt-... , it is probably possible to get substantially better outcomes than the ones we're getting now, chiefly through better teachers. At the moment, most public school teachers are paid in lockstep based on seniority—CS teachers and PE teachers get the same pay—and can't be fired after their second or third year of teaching, and that creates a lot of perverse incentives.
    • gfodor 12y ago
• mantrax5 12y ago
  This is why Steve Jobs used to say "everyone can throw money at a problem and fail to change anything", but people chose to see it as the excuse of a greedy businessman (who actually did donate to a number of projects privately). Throwing money at a problem and forgetting about it almost never works. It just breeds corruption. Case in point. Well, in a way the money wasn't wasted. Mark really needed the positive PR back then what with The Social Network movie and all the privacy vulnerabilities and abuses of Facebook. He got his PR. Facebook surviving was worth $100 million to him, so good job. Facebook survived. So he stopped donating.
  • x43b 12y ago
    "He got his PR. Facebook surviving was worth $100 million to him, so good job. Facebook survived. So he stopped donating." Is that really true? I thought Zuckerberg gave more in 2013 to charity then any other person in the United States. Link: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/02/10/zuckerberg-biggest-giver/5355871/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/02/10/zuckerb...
  • lmm 12y ago
    Good thing Jobs didn't need to pay for any PR, he has an army of fanboys that will defend any amount of selfishness from him.
• rayiner 12y ago
  Experiments like this expose a really fundamental problem with how Americans approach the issue of poverty. We're convinced that the solution to poverty is education and funding education, because it has to be to validate our political assumptions. For a liberal, it would be tough to swallow the idea that cultural dysfunction (fatherless kids and the gangs that fill that power vacuum) is a root cause. For conservatives, it would be tough to swallow the idea that free market globalization has simply left places like Newark to die. So we pump ever more money into education, and blame teachers for not solving problems that are totally outside the scope of their ability to solve.
  • jpadkins 12y ago
    I was with you until "free market globalization has simply left places like Newark to die." Can you explain that in more detail? Detroit is the counterexample where the firms did not offshore the jobs, but the city still got decimated. I'm not sure how "free market globalization" is the root cause. Maybe you could say as "other countries industrializing has simply left places like Newark to die" but I don't think our economic policies could slow or reverse that trend.
    • rayiner 12y ago
      Detroit was decimated because Americans started buying Japanese and Korean cars. That was possible because of free-market globalization. Now, I'm not saying that on the whole the world isn't better off as a result of free-market globalization. On the net, the gain to consumers in Phoenix from cheaper foreign goods might well outweigh the loss to workers in Newark. But I don't think it's controversial to say that alternative policies could have left Newark better off than it is now, even if they are globally less efficient, or that economic conservatives tend not to highlight the downsides of pro-globalization policies. Nobody comes out and says: "more competition means more efficiency, but it also means there will be winners and losers, and lower-skilled workers in America are likely to be the losers."
      • deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
• Donzo 12y ago
  From the article in The New Yorker, Ras Baraka is paraphrased as saying: "The Booker-Christie-Zuckerberg strategy was doomed, he said, since it included no systemic assault on poverty." Poverty truly is this issue. Giving meal tickets to a bunch of proclaimed "reformers" is not the solution, as this case proves. Until every child has a warm place to sleep, food to eat, and at least one devoted adult to discipline and encourage them, children will be "left behind," to use the phrase of yesterday. I say this as someone who statistically excelled at teaching reading in the West and South sides of Chicago for nine years. I also say this as a member of the human race.
• DanielBMarkham 12y ago
  Wow. $100 million. Put into a trust, you could pull out interest every year, say $2 million, and have your project funded forever. What would the project be? Well, if you set the funding up that way, that's the beauty: you could try different things with that $2 million every year and see what worked the best. That way, instead of trying to "fix" a problem, you could create a system that would continue to help find optimizations. Hell, one year you could give away cash prizes. Another year hire in-home tutors for at-risk kids. Another year you could try some kind of vouchers. You could on and on like this, continuing to experiment and evolve. Or you could just write a check to somebody. Maybe Zuck has learned that you don't write checks to fix systemic problems. Maybe.
• TheMagicHorsey 12y ago
  The problem with schools in a place like Newark is that they serve as a rare source of economic opportunity in an otherwise shithole neighborhood. Schools are a font of money in a place where almost every other economic activity is illegal. That's why reforming a school is a shit show. Its the place where everyone is feeding at the teat. Here is one possible solution for a billionaire to try. It won't work for anything but a tiny minority of students at the moment, but it will shine a light on how our education problems are a problem of the education bureaucracy, and not of the students. Set up a magnate boarding school, outside of the city (perhaps even outside the state). Run it EXACTLY the way you want to run it. Let anyone apply. Give admission based on a lottery ... not on the basis of an examination ... so no one can accuse you of taking only the best kids. Offer free room/board/education. Start only with first graders. Then add a grade, every year, as your first class ages. In 12 years you will graduate your first class of students. Hire the best teachers. Spend a lot on infrastructure. Teach programming/science/technology. Make partnerships with the best universities. Get internships for your students in start ups and companies, using your connections. Maybe your own company can hire some of them. Show the world what kids from an inner city failed neighborhood can do, without the interference of these teachers and their unions. When your kids succeed, however spectacularly, or modestly, that will be a beacon. Encourage your graduates to give back to the school. You will still hemorrhage cash every year, it may never be sustainable without your continued involvement ... but it would be the kind of experiment that would leave an impact for decades ... and if you succeeded in making it sustainable, maybe for centuries.
  • primitivesuave 12y ago
    There is a real discussion over this by education reformists, and for 100 million dollars you could make two or three of these.
  • javajosh 12y ago
    This comment is ignorant beyond belief! Have you ever been to Newark? It's a huge, bustling city - actually, New Jersey's largest city. When you make absurd claims like "[schools] serve as a rare source of economic opportunity in an otherwise shithole town" how can anyone take anything you say seriously?
• nopinsight 12y ago
  From my direct experience working in this field for over ten years, parent's attitude and social environment probably account for most of the variation in education achievement at the elementary level. Kids are curious by nature, but acquiring the three Rs (reading, writing, arithmetic) is not built into human nature. It requires sufficient cultural support from the kid's environment and caretakers. Dedicated teachers and good learning process help, but children spend much more time at home and in their neighborhood than at school. Another factor, not very politically correct to say but real nonetheless, is genetics, although genes likely play a larger role when the subject matter is more complicated, at the high school level and beyond, and when the learning environment is worse. If the teaching system is suitable and children have the motivation to learn, most students can master elementary school materials quite well. At the high school level though, not everyone can master abstract concepts, like equations involving complex numbers and trigonometric functions, with reasonable effort, especially if their basics from elementary education are lacking. (They may be able to get fairly good at them with Herculean efforts, but few would want to dedicate their whole teenage life to academics.) Given the hypothesis from real-world experience above, I suspect that reform successes at the high school level is significantly harder to come by than at the elementary one. If anyone has empirical data to support or refute this hypothesis, it would be helpful. In any case, involving parents and caretakers to support children education is essential for any school reform efforts in poorer neighborhood. This is likely to be more effective at the elementary level when parents have stronger influence over their kids, and other confounding factors (like drugs and love life) are less important than when they become teens. Parental push is definitely behind the academic success of Confucius regions in Asia: Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and Shanghai-China. All of them perform excellently in international academic assessments in reading, math, and science. http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/dec/03/pisa-results-country-best-reading-maths-science http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/dec/03/pisa-re... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trends_in_International_Mathematics_and_Science_Study#Top_10_countries_by_subject_and_year http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trends_in_International_Mathema...
  • hershel 12y ago
    But there has been cases for schools for inner-city children that showed great results ,for example sabis. Not sure how they did it , but maybe not all is lost ?
• gargarplex 12y ago
  Sorry but you're all wrong. It was a political and pr move timed with the release of The Social Network
• robg 12y ago
  Exactly why we can't trust government with resources. Every dollar must be held accountable.
• fleitz 12y ago
  Startup school receives $100 million in funding based on an idea..... and fails? I wonder if it was a mobile social local school like Color? It seems that perhaps what is needed is a YC of education that provides small grants and helps with follow-on investment once those small bets pay dividends. Education is fundamentally pretty simple, you need a room, a teacher, and a few dollars worth of paper. Seems like the ideal thing for a startup. Fundamentally once you teach a person basic literacy and basic numeracy they can spend the rest of their life teaching themselves.
• wavesounds 12y ago
  "It came in the form of philanthropic donations, which, unlike government funding, required no public review of priorities or spending." This is why we should raise taxes on Billionaires. A lot of them are willing to give away a lot of their money but, no matter how well intentioned they are, they are not as good at spending money for the public good as the government is.
• 616c 12y ago
  As a proud NJ-raised kid, I can confirm hat others say about Newark, but with my own personal spin: Newark is a shithole, and no amount of money will fix that problem.
• kelvin0 12y ago
  Sometimes more money without the appropriate structural changes does not yield the intended 'miracle'. This is almost like someone winning the lottery which amplifies their troublesome behaviors ...
• icambron 12y ago
  I would love to see someone try this experiment: let's say we pay teachers $200K/year, gave them huge discretionary budgets, and put a lot of performance pressure on them. What would happen in place like Newark? I'm not saying that's a sustainable, scalable solution, but it certainly sounds like a good use of $100M.
  • danielweber 12y ago
    It's possible to overpay for a position. If you pay significantly over market rates, it is going to be hard to filter through all the applications, and you need a separate auditing mechanism to check for people, say, slipping $20,000 to the HR person to get themselves on the top of the pile. BTW, this is an excellent way of fairly determining if a job is overpaid or underpaid: how hard is it to find applicants? Do people camp out for 3 days beforehand for a chance to apply? In case of performance issues, do people cling to their jobs like a drowning man to a life-preserver? LATE EDIT I agree with the discretionary budgets. Each teacher should have an expense account on a credit card for when things come up and s/he needs to buy something.
    • icambron 12y ago
      > It's possible to overpay for a position. No doubt. And I pulled the number 200K out of my ass; it could be a lot of numbers. But on the question of how hard it is to find applicants, it depends what you hold constant: the qualifications or the compensation. Here we're holding the compensation constant and raising the qualification bar however high we can. I'm sure hoards of people would apply to become CEO of Microsoft if that was a thing you could do, but that doesn't mean the position is overpaid. The experiment here is to see if you could get much better teachers by widening the pool of potential applicants to people who who wouldn't normally want to do that, by a) making the pay competitive with other high-skill industries and b) cutting out a lot of the bullshit involved in applying that skill to teaching children. That pool would surely include plenty of people who are already rockstar teachers, but additionally lots of people who think of themselves as bound for, say, business consulting or finance or software engineering. How would you choose among your applicants? I don't know, but I'm sure there are plenty of answers to "if I could turn anyone into a teacher, who would it be? And I how could I maximize their abilities?" Maybe this is actually lots of different experiments with different selection criteria and different degrees of freedom in applying themselves to the task (e.g., in defining curriculum).
• brudgers 12y ago
  That's the efficiency of the free market. People sought to capture as much of the $100 million as possible while investing a minimum of effort and resources. It's entrepreneurial.
• NorthGuy1 12y ago
  $100M is roughly 10% of Newark's annual budget and was offered as one time funding. Education is a service industry so that 10% is effectively spread thinly across all the schools in the district. This is in stark contrast to Zuck's product development background where 100M can be concentrated into developing a single product that can produce amazing ROI. Perhaps this is why our IT billionaires flounder in education?
• edtechdev 12y ago
  Wow, a lot of experts on education here. There are a lot of myths out there about (U.S. K12) education, such as all these "bad teachers" that we can't ever fire because of tenure, and how awful U.S. education is compared to other countries or compared to the U.S. in the 50s and 60s, and how charter schools or vouchers will solve all education's problems. There is actual data and research out there on all this, buried under all this opinion. Did you know for example that tenured teachers are twice as likely to lose their job as non-tenured teachers? http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/teachers/the-myth-of-teacher-tenure.html http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/teachers/the-m... There is also a history behind all this. Before teacher tenure, teachers were regularly fired on the whim of principals or because of getting pregnant. See for example "Why Teacher Unions Are Good for Teachers—and the Public" http://www.aft.org/newspubs/periodicals/ae/winter0607/ravitch.cfm http://www.aft.org/newspubs/periodicals/ae/winter0607/ravitc... And see the book "50 Myths & Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools" http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/03/18/50-terrible-ideas-for-improving-schools/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/03/... As the authors state: "The mythical failure of public education has been created and perpetuated in large part by political and economic interests that stand to gain from the destruction of the traditional system." Once you get past the myths, I'd recommend doing a little reading on how people actually learn (it's not just dumping information on empty brains). See for example the book How People Learn (free, pdf): http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309070368 http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309070368 Or for the more impatient, watch this beginning of this video Minds of Our Own: http://www.learner.org/resources/series26.html http://www.learner.org/resources/series26.html Or this even shorter video on the counter-intuitive nature of how people learn from videos (criticizing the Khan Academy videos): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVtCO84MDj8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVtCO84MDj8 Teaching is an incredibly difficult job, because learning is incredibly complex. A single phrase or gesture can have an enormous positive or negative influence on learning. If you tried spending even one hour in a typical K12 classroom, most likely you'd be eaten alive. It may not seem like many K12 teachers are getting fired, partly because most teachers quit within 5 years.
• wglb 12y ago
  Whenever I hear talk about school reform, or teacher's pay or how long they work, I am reminded of Dean Kamen's http://www.usfirst.org/ http://www.usfirst.org/. I heard him speak last fall, and he points out that a significant part of the problem is the glory and fame attached to entertainment figures and sports figures, rather than to scientists, engineers, and doctors. His program sponsors local competitions, such as building robots, and other technology-oriented activities. While the issues raised in the article are valid ones, we need to look at the whole picture.