January 9, 2007
Frozen Assets? Try Re-Warmed Hash, Spiced Up With Voodoo Economics.
Filed under: Education by Leo Casey @ 2:46 pm
Education Sector published yet another report yesterday, Frozen Assets. There is some $77 billion in money spent on parts of K-12 education that could be more profitably used, its thesis goes, but for the onerous restrictions of collective bargaining agreements.
They have the wrong metaphor in their title: a far more appropriate title would be Re-Warmed Hash. There is no new or original research here, just citations of the old thin gruel by the anti-union, anti-public education short order cooks — Ballou, Podgursky, Hess and so on. You won’t swallow too much of this fare if you value your gastrointestinal health. Here’s why…
For starters, the report is not even entirely coherent and logical. Take the first deadly sin it cites, “increases in teacher salaries based on years of experience.” Frozen Assets cites one of the very few pieces of solid educational research in its pages, Jennifer King Rice’s work on teacher quality, to the effect that it takes novice teachers five years to master the fundamentals of teaching and to be fully effective in the classroom. In an extraordinary leap of reasoning, the report infers that beyond year five, salary increments based on experience serve no productive purpose in terms of educational benefits to students.
But if teaching is a profession which requires such an extraordinary up-front investment of time and resources to bring practitioners to full productivity, one does not want to structure salary incentives to simply get teachers to the five year point, but also to retain teachers who have passed that point and are fully effective. And those incentives have to take into account the mid-life financial pressures faced by teachers, as they pay home mortages and send their own children to college. That is the purpose of experience-based differentials.
To the extent that a school and a school district loses large numbers of teachers after year five, but early in the careers, it is functioning with a teaching force that includes a disproportionate number of novices still learning the craft, with students paying the educational price. Moreover, it has to over-invest in the induction process into the teaching profession, in order to bring the disproportionate number of novice teachers up to full teaching effectiveness. Anyone who honestly thinks that this does not have a deleterious effect on the education of students is simply a total stranger to real schools.
Let’s be clear here, because this seems to be a question easily misunderstood. We are not saying that teachers should only be paid for their years of experience, and that there should not be other differentials for what teachers know and do. Teacher unions like the UFT have supported differentials for National Board certification, for working in low-performing, hard to staff schools, and for taking on additional responsibilities, such as becoming a lead teacher. We do not have a problem with differentiated pay, when the opportunity to obtain the differential is available to all teachers, and all they need to do is obtain the special knowledge or do the additional work. Such differentials make perfect sense when they are combined with a salary schedule that recognizes the importance of retaining experienced, accomplished teachers through experience-based differentials. Our objection is to ‘merit pay’ schemes which seek to replace the entire structure of teacher salary schedules with pay differentials decided by subjective supervisory judgments and by poorly crafted standardized tests.
Note that this provision alone accounts for more than half of the purported $77 billion in “frozen assets.” Taken together with another proposed savings from teacher’s salaries [no longer providing differentials for having a master's degree], the total money to be taken out of teacher compensation is estimated at just under two-thirds of the “frozen assets.” Yet Eduwonk’s Andy Rotherham, co-founder and co-director of Education Sector, rushed to reassure his readers yesterday that the recommendations of this report could actually mean “more not less money” for teacher salaries. That’s voodoo economics, applied to teacher salaries.
Frozen Assets is a remarkable piece of writing, however, with its imaginative combination of non-fiction and fiction genres. Take another of its contractual deadly sins, class size. We took a special interest in this section of the report, since it cites the New York City collective bargaining agreement. Well, sort of… it says that “Large school districts with class-size-reduction provisions in their contracts include Boston and New York City…”
The problem here is that the New York City collective bargaining agreement does not have a single “class-size-reduction” provision. It does have class size limits for elementary [32], middle [30, 33] and high schools [34], in Article 7 M, and these limits have been the same since 1969, when they were last reduced. This is not a semantic quibble on our part, but a symptom of an intellectually dishonest argument in the report. Frozen Assets is spinning the issue in a way that creates a saving around class sizes, without being forthright about what its recommendation actually involves for schools such as those in New York City — an increase in class sizes. Its calculations talk about a savings of the per pupil costs of reducing class size by 5%. In the case of the New York City collective bargaining agreement which it cites, that could only mean increasing already large class sizes by something between 1.5 and 2 students per class. And this in a school district where classes are already, according to a much delayed New York City report which was finally published yesterday, in the vicinity of one-third larger than classes in the rest of New York State.
There are some who challenge the idea that lower class size is the most effective education reform, dollar for dollar. Among their number is Joel Klein, Chancellor of the NYC Department of Education, who has been waging a campaign against using the Campaign for Fiscal Equity funds due New York City to reduce our class sizes to those of other state school districts. He has lost that battle in the court of expert educational opinion and in the court of public opinion, and if the Governor and the State Legislature pay attention to both of those courts, he will lose it again in the CFE case resolution. We are only too happy to debate that issue, for the evidence in support of lower class size is as strong as any research evidence in education.
But if this is the issue that Frozen Assets is focused on — and an argument about the costs of “class-size-reduction” would make more sense in this context — there is a little problem in its presentation. Its “frozen assets,” the savings it proposes, are purportedly being held captive by the provisions of collective bargaining agreements. The New York City collective bargaining agreement does not determine how the additional CFE funds will be spent. That is a policy decision that will be made by the appropriate representative bodies, such as the state legislature, and officials, such as the Governor.
We could go on here, but the point is made, so let’s move on to some more inviting repast.
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