• Who Pays For Education?

    In education debates, especially these days, there is endless talk about spending – how to spend money, what programs to cut, and how to increase the bang-to-buck ratio. This is not surprising: In 2007-08 (the last year for which national U.S. Census data are available), we spent almost $600 billion. That’s quite a figure, and we all have an interest in spending that money wisely.

    What is sometimes surprising is how little we hear about how we get that money. Of course, we all know that our tax dollars fund our public schools, and most of us know that state and local revenue is the primary source of this funding (about 90 percent; on average, about half state and half local). Less commonly-known, however, is who pays these bills – who bears the largest share of the tax burden, relative to their income? At the federal level, taxation is largely progressive, which means that, on the whole, higher-income families pay a larger percentage of their earned income to the federal government than lower-income families. This is, very simply, due to the fact that higher income brackets are taxed at higher rates.

    But when it comes to state and local taxes, the picture is different. The poorest families pay far more of their income than the richest (i.e., taxes are regressive). In other words, the money that funds public education is a burden disproportionately borne by poor and middle-income Americans. And the lower your income, the more of it you pay. Given this situation, combined with a fiscal crisis that threatens to linger for several years, the best solution – raising revenue through a more equitable system – may be the only one not on the table.

  • AMA To Nurses: Teamwork Means 'Just Follow Our Lead'

    Why are some doctors so threatened by nurses?  One recent example of such physician angst can be found in the American Medical Association’s (AMA’s) response to a recent report on the future of nursing by the highly respected Institute of Medicine (IOM). Among the IOM’s recommendations are that “nurses should be full partners, with physicians and other health professionals, in redesigning health care in the United States."

    Being a “full partner”, the IOM report notes, “transcends all levels of the nursing profession and requires leadership skills and competencies that must be applied within the profession and in collaboration with other health professionals. It includes “care environments” (hospitals and medical offices) and the policy area. Nurses must “have a voice in health policy decision-making and be engaged in implementation efforts related to health care reform”, the report argues.  They must be “leaders throughout the system”. 

    What? Full partners?  The AMA was quick on the trigger: “A physician-led team approach to care —with each member of the team playing the role they are educated and trained to play—helps ensure patients get the high quality care and value…”

  • Teacher Value-Added Scores: Publish And Perish

    On the heels of the Los Angeles Times’ August decision to publish a database of teachers’ value-added scores, New York City newspapers are poised to do the same, with the hearing scheduled for late November.

    Here’s a proposition: Those who support the use of value-added models (VAM) for any purpose should be lobbying against the release of teachers’ names and value-added scores.

    The reason? Publishing the names directly compromises the accuracy of an already-compromised measure. Those who blindly advocate for publication – often saying things like “what’s the harm?" – betray their lack of knowledge about the importance of the models’ core assumptions, and the implications they carry for the accuracy of results. Indeed, the widespread publication of these databases may even threaten VAM’s future utility in public education.

  • More On What "Superman" Left Out

    Our guest author today is Diane Ravitch, Research Professor of Education at New York University and an historian of education. In addition, she is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C..  Her latest book is The Death and Life of the Great American School System.

    In my recent article for the New York Review of Books about “Waiting for Superman," I praised the SEED Charter School in Washington, D.C. (one of the schools featured in the movie) for their high graduation and college acceptance rates.  I also pointed out, however, that they spend about $35,000 per student, three times as much as normal schools spend.  This fact was not mentioned in the movie.

    Nor was the school’s incredibly high attrition rate.  Take a quick look at the graph below (hat tip to Leigh Dingerson).  They start out with about 150 students in seventh grade, but their enrollment slowly declines to around 30 in grade twelve.  This level of attrition is alarming, and it makes any simple evaluation of SEED’s results impossible. 

  • Waiting For Methodology Man

    I finally saw the entire “Waiting for Superman” movie last weekend, in a mostly-empty Georgetown theatre. I went with my mother, not just because she’s a great public school teacher, but also because I needed someone to comfort me while I watched.

    We both had strong reactions to dozens of things about the film, and you almost have to admire the chutzpah. It is about education – with a primary focus on teachers – and includes sit-down interviews with superintendents, parents, students, businessmen, economists, and journalists, but not one teacher.

    Given all the attention that has already been lavished on it, I’ll discuss just one other thing that struck me, one which I keep hearing elsewhere.  There is exactly one sentence in the whole film in which director Davis Guggenheim addresses the research on charter school effects beyond the anecdotal evidence that dominates his narrative.  He notes, “Only one in five charters is excellent," with the implication that these charters show that it can be done.

    He is presumably referring to the CREDO study released last year, which is the largest (15 states plus D.C.) and arguably the most overplayed charter analysis in history (for other multi-state studies showing no charter effects, see here, here, here, and here).  The CREDO authors understandably framed their results in a “media-friendly” manner – by reporting the percentage of charters that did better than comparable regular public schools (17 percent), along with the proportion that did worse (37 percent).

    My first point is that 17 percent is equivalent to one in six, not one in five. But beyond that, some charter advocates have taken the remarkable step of turning the finding that twice as many charters do worse than regular publics into “evidence” that the former should be expanded.  The rationale is, as Guggenheim puts it, that these “one in five” charters are “excellent," and if we can increase that proportion, we can fix our public education system. There is only one problem: That’s not what the study says. Guggenheim is either deliberately misleading his viewers or, more likely, just doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

  • Bart Simpson: Worker Rights Activist

    If (like me) you’re not a regular viewer of The Simpsons show, you will have missed a controversial new opening sequence created by British graffiti artist Banksy, which aired this past weekend. The segment, which mocks the show for outsourcing much of its animation work through a South Korean company, began to go viral until yesterday, when Fox asking for the video to be pulled from YouTube and other venues (see here).

    The scene begins much like the regular opening, but with "Banksy" scrawled strategically across the town of Springfield. Bart is seen writing punishment lines on the school blackboard, as usual, but this time "I must not write all over the walls" covers every wall of the classroom. The sequence continues almost as usual until we see the family is seated on their couch.

    Suddenly, we shift to a dark, cavernous space where row upon row of sweatshop workers are seen to be laboring hard to produce this image. A small child ferries the film over to a vat of dangerous chemicals. We glimpse kittens being thrown into a woodchipper to make stuffing for Bart Simpson dolls. A shackled panda hauls a wagon loaded with the finished dolls, while a depleted unicorn is used to punch holes in the center of DVDs. The skeletons of expired workers litter the scene. It ends with a shot of the 20th Century Fox logo surrounded by barbed wire.

  • Privatization's Dark Side

    Privatization advocates argue that private sector workers deliver comparable services more cheaply than their public sector counterparts. The truth is that sometimes they can, but very often they can’t. And, as documented by a recently-released General Accountability Office (GAO) study on federal outsourcing, the savings can sometimes come at a very high price, including employees’ lives.

    The GAO reports that contractors have been awarded billions of dollars in federal contracts, despite having histories of federal safety, health and labor law violations. Some of violations have been extensive and serious. One food supplier was cited more than 100 times for health and safety infractions, including one instance in which a worker was "asphyxiated after falling into a pit containing poultry debris." This same employer was later ordered by a federal court to "properly compensate" more than 3,000 workers.

    Another contractor violated fair labor laws when it "coerced employees" and in another incident refused to rehire a worker due to "prior union involvement." This federal contractor has been ordered to pay $4.4 million in back wages to 2,100 employees since FY 2005. It also agreed to pay nearly $300,000 in back wages to African-American workers after a discrimination suit.

    The list goes on and on. GAO auditors found that half of the 50 largest fines levied by the Labor Department between fiscal 2005 and 2009 were aimed at 20 federal contractors. The DOL’s Wage and Hour Division which oversees federal minimum wage, overtime pay, and child labor requirements, assessed these contractors for more than $80 million in back wages. Despite these problems, in fiscal 2009, the government awarded these 20 worst companies more than $9 billion in contracts. None lost their right to bid for federal contracts, even temporarily.

  • Teacher Contracts: The Phantom Menace

    In a previous post, I presented a simple tabulation of NAEP scores by whether or not states had binding teacher contracts.  The averages indicate that states without such contracts (which are therefore free of many of the “ill effects” of teachers’ unions) are among the lowest performers in the nation on all four NAEP exams. 

    The post was largely a response to the constant comparisons of U.S. test scores with those of other nations (usually in the form of rankings), which make absolutely no reference to critical cross-national differences, most notably in terms of poverty/inequality (nor to the methodological issues surrounding test score comparisons). Using the same standard by which these comparisons show poor U.S. performance versus other nations, I “proved” that teacher contracts have a positive effect on states’ NAEP scores.

    As I indicated at the end of that post, however, the picture is of course far more complicated. Dozens of factors – many of them unmeasurable – influence test scores, and simple averages mask them all. Still, given the fact that NAEP is arguably the best exam in the U.S. – and is the only one administered to a representative sample of all students across all states (without the selection bias of the SAT/ACT/AP) – it is worth revisiting this issue briefly, using tools that are a bit more sophisticated. If teachers’ contracts are to blame for low performance in the U.S., then when we control for core student characteristics, we should find that the contracts’ presence is associated with lower performance.  Let’s take a quick look.

  • Narratives To Nowhere

    Our guest author today is Arch Puddington, director of research at Freedom House.

    I once appeared on a panel on the state of press freedom with a man who had been a reporter with one of America’s prestigious news weeklies. He told of having been on assignment in the Middle East during an especially bloody terrorist atrocity, carried out by Hezbollah, that had killed a number of Americans. When the journalist asked a Hezbollah contact why his group had committed the atrocity, the response was: "You ignored us before we were terrorists; now, after this act, you take us seriously."

    The message that the reporter took from these chilling words was not that the men who made the decisions for Hezbollah were ruthless murderers. Instead, he discovered a measure of wisdom in the terrorist’s rationalization: The Western democracies, and especially the United States, had for too long held sway over how events were interpreted, history was written, and the news was reported. He saw as altogether encouraging the emergence of differing narratives about world events, especially in combustible regions like the Middle East, where the voices and opinions of the victimized had been suppressed for too long.

  • It's A Bird! It's A Plane! No, It's The Superman Movement!

    Yes, it’s the Superman Movement. Most filmmakers must secretly dream of a sequel that is bigger, better, and more important than the original. The makers of Waiting for Superman are apparently no different. "For us, the theatrical release is just the start of social action," says Jim Berk, CEO of the aptly named Participant Media, the studio behind the movie (see here). "When I started the company, it was to motivate the grass roots and really get people to embrace an issue, and the idea was that the politics would follow," confirms Jeff Skoll, Participant’s founder and chairman.

    In 2009, these leaders decided Participant needed its own organizing arm, so they invented TakePart.com, a website tied to an extensive network of social action websites. TakePart, which constructs a special operation for every film, also offers advice to potential activists on their chosen issues – what to do and how to do it.

    Charter school funders gloated and applauded when an early preview clip of Superman was shown at a Grantmakers for Education (GFE) conference in Baltimore last fall. GFE is made up of a wide array of education funders, ranging from powerhouses like Gates, Broad, and Walton, to community and family foundations of every stripe. (Full disclosure: The Albert Shanker Institute is an active member.) Participant was already drawing the foundation world into Superman’s policy and action orbit, hoping its dollars would follow the movie’s message.