To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It
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Re: To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It
#2Getting rid of unions just sounds like a recipe for abuse. Management simply cannot be trusted to treat employees fairly.
Re: To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It
#3The article unnecessarily conflates two separate pieces of the bureaucracy.
The first is management of inputs - work rules, prescribed teaching methods, etc. The second is management of outputs - measurement of student performance and penalties/rewards for teachers who harm/improve this.
The first can certainly be scrapped at the global level (though of course experimentation should continue at lower levels). The second, not so much.
By analogy to programming, it would be silly to hire a programmer and tell him to use Eclipse and make sure all work is performed between 9AM and 6PM. On the other hand, it would be moronic not to give him a detailed description of what you actually want him to build, and put a clause in the contract tying his pay to his product meeting the specs.
Re: To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It
#4Getting rid of unions just sounds like a recipe for abuse. Management simply cannot be trusted to treat employees fairly.
unions certainly do nothing to protect the students from the teachers, if the NYC area is any example. They exaggerate the costs of educating students and usually exert too much influence over local elections thereby insuring their continued existence and near immunity to control. Unions operate to serve themselves, their political contacts next, then their members; they certainly could care less about the business.
There are more than sufficient laws and with our well connected society there is means to protect both teachers and students. We just have to get the bureaucracy out of the system and that includes the unions.
public employee unions should never have been allowed.
The Department of Education is a good place to start when it comes to fixing the system, it needs to go. Since Carter implemented it the only noticeable increase in regards to education has been cost per student, it certainly has done little if anything to improve their outcome.
Re: To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It
#5After reading yummyfajitas' comment, I wish I could take back my upvote, because he's right: it's one thing to say the structure of the process itself is so byzantine and brittle that schools suck, but it's quite another to say we should remove measurable goals as well.
If I didn't know better, I'd call this a disinformation piece: deliberately conflating two concepts into one large rant in order to try to join the two. The subtext goes something like this:we know Joe Sixpack has finally figured out how terrible the education system is, so let's throw together a big pile of things we don't like, stick a label on top (something like "bureaucracy") and that way we can get rid of pesky measurements at the same time we free up execution.)
The author isn't good enough to pull that off, though. I think it's much more the case that it's just a populist rant from somebody who already has a big label he wants to stick on things that don't work. That is a non-starter.
To continue the programming analogy, as a customer you guys are delivering crap all the time. I pay ten times as much and the crap just gets worse. Now we can sit around and dicker all day long about the process you have for making crap, but one thing we are not going to do is remove the testing at the end that makes it obvious to everybody just how shitty the whole thing is.
Re: To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It
#6The Atlantic ought to read this NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/business/college-costs-are...
Busting unions and destroying bureaucracies isn't going to change the way teaching is done fundamentally. What it will do is make teaching even less attractive as a profession. Most teachers I know value job security in exchange for salary. Take away security and you are left with little economic incentive to stay. And economic incentives are essential:
Some of that [tuition] growth has resulted from a phenomenon called Baumol’s disease, after the economist William J. Baumol, who described it in a 1965 article he wrote with William G. Bowen. The basic idea is that while productivity gains have made it possible to assemble cars with only a tiny fraction of the labor that was once required, it still takes four musicians nine minutes to perform Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 4 in C minor, just as it did in the 19th century.
College instruction more closely resembles a musical performance than an auto assembly line. Although information technologies have yielded some productivity growth in academia, instruction still takes place largely as it always has.
To recruit professors, universities must pay salaries roughly in line with those made possible by productivity growth in other sectors. So while rising salaries needn’t lead to higher prices in many industries, they do in academia and many other service industries.
While the Atlantic story seems to comport with the frightening startup idea to "Replace Universities", it is crucial to recognize and deal with Baumol's disease.
Re: To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It
#7The article unnecessarily conflates two separate pieces of the bureaucracy. The first is management of inputs - work rules, prescribed teaching methods, etc. The second is management of outputs - measurement of student performance and penalties/rewards for teachers who harm/improve this. The first can certainly be scrapped at the global level (though of course experimentation should continue at lower levels). The sec…
Yes, but you wouldn't want to measure lines of code.
Re: To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It
#8The article unnecessarily conflates two separate pieces of the bureaucracy. The first is management of inputs - work rules, prescribed teaching methods, etc. The second is management of outputs - measurement of student performance and penalties/rewards for teachers who harm/improve this. The first can certainly be scrapped at the global level (though of course experimentation should continue at lower levels). The sec…
Yes, but you wouldn't want to measure lines of code.
Nor would you want to measure student performance by class attendance. What's your point?
Re: To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It
#9Getting rid of unions just sounds like a recipe for abuse. Management simply cannot be trusted to treat employees fairly.
unions certainly do nothing to protect the students from the teachers, if the NYC area is any example. They exaggerate the costs of educating students and usually exert too much influence over local elections thereby insuring their continued existence and near immunity to control. Unions operate to serve themselves, their political contacts next, then their members; they certainly could care less about the business.…
I thought public school teachers in the US were considered to be underpaid? Certainly compared to public school teachers in South Korea, they don't earn that much compared to the national average salary.
I don't believe there are sufficient laws in the US to protect teachers. The US's employment laws are poorly-regarded in the rest of the Western world. And what about at-will employment states? Teachers would be fired just because of accusations of wrongdoing. Cheaper to just get rid of the accused teacher and get a new one in.
Re: To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It
#10The Atlantic ought to read this NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/business/college-costs-are... Busting unions and destroying bureaucracies isn't going to change the way teaching is done fundamentally. What it will do is make teaching even less attractive as a profession. Most teachers I know value job security in exchange for salary. Take away security and you are left with little economic incentiv…
What it will do is make teaching even less attractive as a profession. Most teachers I know value job security in exchange for salary. Take away security and you are left with little economic incentive to stay.
That's ok, there is already a mismatch between supply and demand in teaching. Apparently there is a surplus of at least 280,000 teachers, according to the Department of Education [1].
This indicates that teachers are currently overcompensated - if comp were reduced, supply would come closer to meeting demand (at least if Keynesians/Monetarists/Austrians are to be believed).
Further, if union influence were reduced, then administrators would be able to force out the low performance and keep the high performers, rather than merely keep the teachers with seniority.
[1] http://www.ed.gov/blog/2011/10/keeping-teachers-off-the-unem...