My family attends a local private Christian school. Very small. Very awesome.
We love LOVE it.
This past week my kids brought home an assignment that required them to identify a piece of classical “Americana” to memorize. This could include famous speeches, classical poetry or even religious texts.
Income mobility. Poverty. How to create best results.
Topics that generate a lot of interest in the discussion of politics, government and the role of government.
I have discussed how marriage can impact the GINI coefficient measuring income disparity in populations and more recently had conversations regarding the impact of marriage on social mobility. I feel that the more married we are, the more mobile we are:
I suspect that it [ social mobility] has to do with several things, but I feel that our declining marriage rate and the number of immigrants are leading reasons.
I came across an interesting piece of data from the Brookings Institute:
The Immediate Prerequisites to Success Are:
- Recieve a good education [graduate high school]
- Work full time
- Marry [And do it before having kids]
The results are staggering:
If an individual adheres to zero of those three social norms, he has a 76% chance of being poor. Only a 7% chance of attaining the middle class.
On the other hand, if an individual adheres to all three of those social norms, an almost exact opposite picture is painted. An individual stands a 74% chance of attaining middle class and only a 2% chance of being poor.
Posted in Education, Middle Class, Politics: National
Tagged High School Graduation, Marriage, Poverty
This Sunday’s News And Observer’s Letter To The Editor
This week the featured Letter to the Editor focuses on the Republican’s veto override of a bill that Governor Purdue. If you remember, the Republican controlled House called a special midnight session in order to vote on the override. That veto override was successful and now the bill becomes law. In short, the North Carolin Association of Educators can no longer require that dues be collected straight from the paycheck of teachers.
Our citizen points out, correctly in my opinion, this:
I’m not a public school teacher, and I’m in awe of the job they do with my kids every day. Teaching should be an honored profession.
Very few people I know dispute this fact. However, it’s a common setup for the real point:
House Speaker Thom Tillis and his Republican colleagues are targeting these hard-working public servants. They are punishing the N.C. Association of Educators for standing up against budget cuts to the public schools.
Point of fact, the Republicans are not targeting teachers. Rather, they are working to prevent the state from acting as a private organizations bill collector. Imagine if a church required the state to deduct weekly offerings from the paychecks of public employees. Even if they didn’t belong to the church.
Our citizen continues:
To those of us who want high-quality public schools for our kids, however, this is far from a game. The NCAE stood up against budget cuts to our already underfunded schools, and now they are paying the price. Let’s stick up for the teachers who are sticking up for our schools.
The problem is that teacher’s unions don’t care about educating children. They care about power. They care about taking as much as they can while giving as little as they can. These same unions prevent poor teachers from being fired. They prevent merit pay. They prevent innovation.
We all love excellent, proficient and capable teachers. We do not love poor under performing teachers. And we certainly don’t love organizations that are hell bent on protecting those poor performers.
Posted in Education, Politics: North Carolina
Tagged NCAE, North Carolina, Teacher Unions, Teachers, Unions
I’ve mentioned before that I have some history with the public schools. In addition to attending a small public school in Minnesota, we had one elementary school, one middle school and one high school, my dad taught in that system. I went on to college to become a teacher and then I taught in an even smaller public school system. This district consisted of three small rural towns. One town had the elementary school, another had the middle school and finally, the third town had the high school.
I’m a big proponent of state mandated education for our children. And I’ve been a big proponent of the public schools. However, as my children age into the system, the shine is wearing off and I’ve begun to see massive flaws in the system.
At the end of last year, my wife and I finally decided to pull our kids out of the public schools. Substandard results with substandard management with substandard teachers was going to be the normal fare for the next 13 years; we already had 3 in and the light at the end of the tunnel wasn’t getting any brighter.
When we started shopping for a private school we didn’t really care if the school was religious or not. All we really wanted was stability, a strong emphasis on achievement, a leadership focus and a sense of community. In the end, we choose a school as much for the community as for the achievement of it’s students. Perhaps we’re lucky in that we have a great school so close to our neighborhood. In any event, the school is Christian; non-denominational, but Christian.
As I mentioned, I grew up in rural Minnesota. It may sound strange to say, but while religion is a big part of the culture there in on prairie, it’s a very private kinda thing. It’s not the type of religion people see on TV. There is no gospel choir, there is no fire and brimstone, there’s no speaking in tongues. People don’t go around proselytizing. In fact, churches in Minnesota are able to save money because they don’t have to build the first three rows of pews [the joke is that good Lutherans don’t sit up front].
I’ve been to church all the way from Seattle to Wilmington. I’ve seen a lot of it. And in Minnesota there isn’t the holding of hands during the Lord’s Prayer. We never hugged people while sharing the peace. Like I said, religion is a private kinda thing.
All of which contributed to my surprise when I attended our school’s varsity basketball game last night. It was a blow-out. Our guys beat ’em by 40. The other team was frustrated, tired and beat up. Tempers were beginning to flare. When the buzzer sounded I started to get the kids into their coats and get ready to go. However, after the players shook hands they all made their way to center court where coaches, cheerleaders, officials knelt and bowed their heads in prayer.
It was powerful.
I love our new school.
The last few days have been interesting ones here in Raleigh. The state House has been called for a special session in order to determine if they could override a governor’s veto of the Racial Justice Act.
They could not.
However, in a very unconventional move last night, house republicans called an extra special session in order to consider overriding the governor’s veto of Senate Bill 727. This bill was designed to prevent the NCAE from collecting teacher’s dues automatically from teacher’s paychecks. In this case, the House did override the veto and the bill became law:
In an unprecedented move early Thursday, the North Carolina General Assembly voted to hold a special legislative session after midnight for veto overrides, prompting a sharp rebuke from Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue.
Perdue said the Republican-controlled legislature’s actions were unconstitutional.
The House voted 69-45 to override the governor’s veto of Senate Bill 727, which stops the North Carolina Association of Educators from collecting dues from teachers’ paychecks via payroll deduction.
I certainly agree with the legislation though I have a certain distaste for the methods involved. There is nothing stopping a teacher from going down the bank and authorizing a payday deduction for the dues to the NCAE. Nothing at all. Further, it is not incumbency upon a school district to handle the administration of the collection of dues to an outside body; that is admin overhead that should be absorber by that organization.
However, there are certainly valid calls of shenanigans concerning the method of the vote. If a body has the votes to override the veto, by all means, call the issue to the floor and vote for it. On the other hand, calling a special session at 11:15 at night in order to get that override passed in the dead of night is disingenuous.
Is this where we are with our political posturing? Is it really the case that this type of maneuvering is how business will get done? I hope not.
I grew up the son of a teacher. Then I became a teacher. Though, to be fair, I only lasted a single year. It was a small town, a “negotiation” year and I really didn’t like the whole incentive thing. As a result of the negotiations, which were conducted by a small negotiation team made up of men, the compensation system in the contract changed. Teachers are paid based on a grid. New rookie teachers with no more education than a bachelors degree start in the upper left hand corner of that grid. For every year of experience, they get to “step” down the grid and get a raise. The further down you go, the more you make. Teachers can also move across the grid. They do this by obtaining more education. When they acquire enough, they are said to change “lanes” and move from the left to the right.
The highest paid teachers are in the lower right corner of the grid.
I lost faith when I realized, very quickly, that I would never catch up to the old crummy teachers I worked with. And when that negotiating team reduced the number of lanes from 9 to 3 in exchange for higher coaches salaries [the negotiation team consisted of mostly coaches].
I now have no ties to education save that my kids are in school. Further, I am in an occupation where I am not in a union. My continued employment is dictated by market conditions combined with my ability to produce value for my bosses. Further, my salary is determined by the success of the firm and my contribution to it.
The better I do the more I make and the stronger my job security is. The converse is true.
It is my love of teachers and the role they play in the development of our kids AND the power of market based incentives that makes me love this story of merit based teacher’s salaries:
WASHINGTON — During her first six years of teaching in this city’s struggling schools, Tiffany Johnson got a series of small raises that brought her annual salary to $63,000, from about $50,000. This year, her seventh, Ms. Johnson earns $87,000.
That latest 38 percent jump, unheard of in public education, came after Ms. Johnson was rated “highly effective” two years in a row under Washington’s new teacher evaluation system. Those ratings also netted her back-to-back bonuses totaling $30,000.
In my calculus, the district accomplished two things:
“Lots of teachers leave the profession, but this has kept me invested to stay,” said Ms. Johnson, 29, who is a special-education teacher at the Ron H. Brown Middle School in Northeast Washington. “I know they value me.”
I love this statement: “This has kept me invested to stay.”
EXACTLY!
When an organization values an employee it helps retain that employee. When that value takes the additional value of added pay, that retention is even greater!
On the other hand, there is the opposite phenomena , one that I consider more dangerous to the education of our kids; the incentives provided to the poorest performing teachers:
Under the system, known as Impact Plus, teachers rated “highly effective” earn bonuses ranging from $2,400 to $25,000. Teachers who get that rating two years in a row are eligible for a large permanent pay increase to make their salary equivalent to that of a colleague with five more years of experience and a more advanced degree.
Those rewards come with risk: to receive the bonuses and raises, teachers must sign away some job security provisions outlined in their union contract. About 20 percent of the teachers eligible for the raises this year and 30 percent of those eligible for bonuses turned them down rather than give up those protections.
There are teachers who are SO concerned with losing their jobs that they turned down the money. Turned. Down. The. Money.
Two things:
I look forward to continued market based, merit based teacher compensation.
Posted in Economics, Education
Tagged Free Market, MErit Based Compensation, Teacher Pay, Teacher Unions, Unions, Washington D.C.
So, a little bit of live blogging. Last week in the comments I posited that the highest paying Majors were not the Majors that graduated the most students.
Let’s look.
According to Time, the top 10 paying Majors are:
Thoughts?
7 of the top 7 Majors are engineering. 8 of the top 10.
The other two are very technical majors.
Graduates?
Not one in common. Not one.
My advice to Occupy?
Go to school and study a discipline that pays.
I just thought of this. If you wanna fix public schools, or at least improve them dramatically AND increase the pay of teachers, just follow these simple three rules:
If you object to this, you are more interested in keeping shitty teachers in jobs than you are seriously worried about kids getting a good education.
Education should not be a “Make Work Pay” program.
One more for the file labelled: We Hate Kids, the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers has come out against a policy that would allow the city to fire and hire teachers based on merit, you know–teaching kids–rather than on seniority:
A coalition of City Council members, former school leaders, parents and pastors are calling for Minneapolis public schools to end seniority-based hiring and firing practices in the next teachers union contract.
In its “Contract for Student Achievement” position paper, the group argues that past agreements between the district and the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) “repeatedly put the needs of adults over the academic needs of students.”
“We call on the district and the MFT to negotiate a different kind of contract — one that recognizes the academic crisis in our schools and makes student achievement the top focus,” the coalition says in its letter, which was delivered to the school board this week.
Saying the letter “feels like an attack” on teachers, union president Lynn Nordgren disputed some of its findings and the argument that past contracts have halted reform.
At the heart of all successful organizations is innovation. And innovation requires change; sometimes massive disruptive change. And Unions aren’t in favor of that.
I love teachers. My dad taught, many of my friends teach, some in my family currently teach. Hell, I was a teacher.
I love great teachers. We should fire the horrible ones, not the bad ones, just the horrible ones, but that’s a post for another day.
My beef is the Union. That organization that represents teachers and bargains and negotiates for them. If you ever had any doubt, any doubt what so ever, that Unions not only don’t care about kids, but hate children, here it is. In all its glory, how Unions are power hungry monsters:
To the relief of college-bound seniors, Lakeville high school teachers will once again write letters of recommendation under a deal reached this week between their local union and the school district.
The agreement ends a standoff that began two weeks ago during contract negotiations between the union and district. Hoping to spur a settlement, some teachers began refusing to write recommendation letters, among other measures requested by their union.
The Union requested teachers stop writing letters of recommendation for seniors trying to get into college.
Power. Pure and unapologetic power. Unions do not exist for the benefit of the children. They exploit children. And teachers. And you.
Measure teachers. Fire shitty ones. Reward great ones. And abolish teachers unions.
Posted in Education, Liberty, Lobby/PAC, Politics: National, States Behaving Badly