Michelle Rhee's Failing Report Card

Michelle Rhee gained notoriety as the chancellor of DC's public schools under Adrian Fenty's administration from 2007 to 2011. Her conduct in this position was one of the main reasons he was not re-elected. Among other things, she publicly took pleasure in firing large numbers of teachers and administrators. Incredibly, she also claims not to have realized that high stake testing would provide incentives for teachers or administrators to cheat on the scoring of exams.

Since she left the DC school system she started a new organization, StudentsFirst, which was created to push for the sort of changes to the school system she sought to implement as chancellor. The organization received considerable media attention for a report card it issued on the public school systems in the 50 states earlier this week. While most of the items on the report card were part of an educational agenda of questionable merit (see Diana Ravitch's blog for specific critiques), one item had nothing to do with education whatsoever.

Rhee's report card gave schools a failing grade if teachers received a defined benefit pension (worse if it was backloaded). The school system gets an "A" in this category if teachers only had a 401(k) typed defined contribution plan or a cash balance account.

Pensions are now and have historically been an important part of teachers' compensations. Teachers, like most public sector employees, are paid less in wages than workers in the private sector with comparable education and experience. They make up much of this gap with a better benefit package, including better pension benefits, than workers in the private sector receive.

Given this reality, it is difficult to see how students are helped if a school system replaces a defined benefit pension that guarantees teachers a specific level of income after they retire, with a defined contribution plan, where retirement income will depend on the teachers' investment success and the timing of the market. Since state governments don't have to care about the timing of market swings, only overall averages, assuming timing and investment risk is an important benefit that governments can provide their workers at essential zero cost. A defined benefit pension will make a job more attractive to workers than if the state gave teachers the same amount of money in the form of a contribution to a 401(k) account.

In short, Rhee's report card means that states get credit for making their teachers more financially insecure without saving the government a penny. This position might coincide with a business agenda to eliminate defined benefit pensions, but it is very difficult to see how it will improve our children's education.

Via.

Recruiting the best?

Interesting

This goal – recruiting and retaining talented people into teaching – is shared by most everyone, but it is among the most central emphases of the diverse group that might be called market-based reformers. Their idea is to change compensation structures, performance evaluations and other systems in order to create the kind of environment that will be appealing to high-achieving, less risk-averse people, as well as to ensure that those who aren’t cut out for the job are compelled to leave. This will, so the argument goes, create a “dynamic profession” more in line with the high risk, high reward model common among the private sector firms competing for the same pool of young workers.

No matter your feelings on TFA, it’s more than fair to say that their corps members fit this profile perfectly. On paper, they aren’t just “top third,” but top third of the top third. TFA cohorts enter the labor market having been among the highest achievers in the best colleges and universities in the nation. Getting accepted to the program is very, very difficult. Those who make it are not only service-oriented, but also smart, hard-working and ambitious. They are exactly the kind of worker that employers crave, and market-based reformers have made it among their central purposes to attract to the profession.

Yet, at least by the standard of test-based productivity, TFA teachers really don’t do better, on average, than their peers, and when there are demonstrated differences, they are often relatively small and concentrated in math (the latter, by the way, might suggest the role of unobserved differences in content knowledge). Now, again, there is some variation in the findings, and the number and scope of these analyses are limited – we’re nowhere near some kind of research consensus on these comparisons of test-based productivity, to say nothing of other sorts of student outcomes.
[...]
But, to me, one of the big, underdiscussed lessons of TFA is less about the program itself than what the test-based empirical research on its corps members suggests about the larger issue of teacher recruitment. Namely, it indicates that “talent” as typically gauged in the private sector may not make much of a difference in the classroom, at least not by itself. This doesn’t necessarily mean that market-based policies won’t lure great teachers, but it does suggest that, if we’re going to enact massive changes in personnel policy to attract a certain “type” of person to teaching, we might reexamine our assumptions on who we’re trying to attract and what they want.

Via.

Overpaid? Hardly

The National Education Policy Center debunks that ridiculous AEI report on teachers being overpaid by 52%, and finds evidence to the contrary

This report compares the pay, pension costs and retiree health benefits of teachers with those of similarly qualified private-sector workers. The study concludes that teachers receive total compensation 52% greater than fair market levels, which translates into a $120 billion annual “overcharge” to taxpayers. Built on a series of faulty analyses, this study misrepresents total teacher compensation in fundamental ways. First, teachers’ 12% lower pay is dismissed as being appropriate for their lesser intelligence, although there is no foundation for such a claim. Total benefits are calculated as having a monetary value of 100.8% of pay, while the Department of Labor disagrees, giving a figure of 32.8%—a figure almost identical to that of people employed in the private sector. Pension costs are valued at 32%, but the real number is closer to 8.4%. The shorter work year is said to represent 28.8% additional compensation but the real work year is only 12% shorter. Teachers’ job stability is said to be worth 8.6%, although the case for such a claim is not sustained. In sum, this report is based on an aggregation of such spurious claims. The actual salary and benefits for teachers show they are in fact undercompensated by 19%

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Scapegoats

A letter from a teacher, getting to the heart of a lot of the anger about SB5 we hear from other teachers and public employees.

Senate Bill Five is an attempt to scapegoat public workers for an economic crisis that began in the private sector with Governor Kasich’s blessing. Now, members of the Ohio legislature want to strip workers of their pay, benefits, and rights, knowing full well that the state’s economic problems are by no means related to those workers.

As a congressman, Kasich voted and lobbied for the complex laws that allowed financial institutions to destroy the national economy, including the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act. Kasich and Governor Walker in Wisconsin want to scapegoat public sector workers for problems that began, with their approval, in the private sector!

Firefighters and teachers in Dayton did not peddle and trade risky mortgage securities for self-serving banks. Police and EMTs in Cleveland had nothing to do with the government bailing out financial institutions that engaged in the gross mishandling of people’s lives and fortunes. Corrections officers and nurses in Cincinnati did not develop a system of shadow banks that wrote off-balance derivatives, nor did they have anything to do with bait-and-switch predatory lending. Still, the legislature wants to blame public workers.

Rather than creating scapegoats, Kasich should reexamine his role in the financial crisis. In order to protect middle class public-sector workers, voters should vote no on Issue Two.

Sincerely,
Matthew Blair

What Does a Teacher Do?

By Bob Sickles, President and Publisher, Eye On Education

As my staff and I began planning a roundtable webcast on teacher evaluation, a fundamental question emerged: What does a teacher do? Examining this question might shed some light on the teacher accountability debate which had been discussed in a recent issue of Education Week.

As the founder and CEO of a profitable education publishing company, I’m all for the entrepreneurial spirit and the push for accountability. Yet I feel uncomfortable when my MBA friend argues that our educational problems would be resolved if only schools would behave more like for-profit companies in the private sector. He wants to tie teacher evaluation to standardized test scores. His sole focus on high stakes tests is grounded in his desire to equate profit growth with test score increases.

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Repealing SB5 isn't partisan, it's personal

Yesterday, over 600 labor leaders packed the pipefitters union hall on Kinnear Road in Columbus to discuss the next phase of the repeal effort. What is becoming clearer and clearer with each passing moment is the shear scale of the opposition to SB5. It was a mid July day with temperatures soaring over 100 degrees, yet people had come together in their hundreds for a closed to the press event, whose nature might usually attract only 30.

It's not just the numbers that should cause supporters of SB5 to take stock, but the breadth of opposition. The gathering represented over 2 million members, from public and private sector unions. While much focus has been placed on the direct assault on teachers, police and fire, private sector allies have stepped up and into the fray too, to lend their considerable support.

Everyone recognizing SB5 for what it is, a direct and indirect assault on working men and women in Ohio.

As if to punctuate this huge gathering, it happened, by coincidence, on the same the day that Secretary of State John Husted certified that voters would guaranteed the opportunity to repeal SB5 in November on the back of a record breaking signature collection effort

Secretary of State Jon Husted certified a state-record 915,456 valid signatures collected by a coalition seeking to repeal the Republican-backed law that weakens collective bargaining for public employees. Only 231,147 were needed to place a referendum on the ballot.

On June 29, We Are Ohio, the coalition opposed to Senate Bill 5, delivered nearly 1.3 million signatures to Husted's office for validation -- smashing the previous state record. Those signatures were shipped to their respective county boards of election for initial validation, and Husted was responsible for final certification.

In addition to cruising past the threshold for total number of valid signatures, We Are Ohio also collected signatures equal to 3 percent of the total vote cast in last year's gubernatorial election in all 88 counties -- which campaign spokesman Melissa Fazekas said was also a first in Ohio history.

The effort isn't massive because it's partisan, we see that all the time, it's massive because for millions of workers from across the political spectrum, it is personal.