What's the point of a PhD?

Reading an old Slate article about why MOOCs (online classes) devalue the importance of a one-on-one relationship between professors and students, I have a few thoughts:

Sure, in the ideal case there is this fantasy that undergraduate classes are tight seminars, one-on-one with a professor who pushes you to learn more, who customizes everything to your needs. In reality, the vast majority of undergraduate education is more like the broadcast of a MOOC, a professor and his staff piping information out to students, who take it all in and produce homework assignments.  The TA (or, sure, in smaller classes, the professor) grades the assignments, and in the best classes the professor himself looks carefully at the student's output and critically evaluates it.

But Is society really better off with a group of "insiders", who learn from each other, and then produce theses and papers that nobody will ever, ever read. What percentage of PhD theses are ever read again, after the degree is granted? I bet the overwhelming majority are are never, ever checked out of the library, completely irrelevant to everyone for all time in the future. At what point is an academic PhD just a glorified blogger?  While it may be useful for them and their tight circle of colleagues, is what they're doing the most efficient way to expand knowledge?  

Compare a traditional academic experience with something like http://www.fsmitha.com/, a blog written by a “amateur” who wrote more than 1M words of history.  I can imagine a future where everything is a seminar.  You read  information jointly with a whole bunch of others who are exploring the same idea, and you need to produce new information, interacting with others who pursue the same goal. That’s what I’d like to see.

 

College degree expiration dates

My daughter is thinking about the essays on the Common Application  the long standardized form that most colleges now require as part of their admissions process. These essays, combined with grades and test scores, are supposed to help the colleges decide who is a good fit. But how do they know who “fit”? I guess they assume that, once you graduate you’ve proven that you’re one of them, and now for the rest of your life, no matter what you do, you still have that degree from that institution. But does that make any sense?

I know a guy who graduated from MIT in 1978 with a degree in electrical engineering. Would you hire him as an engineer today just based on that piece of paper? Of course not; you’d need to know a lot more about what he’s done since then. How about somebody who majored in English literature — would you assume they (still) understand good writing, ten or twenty years after they have the degree? Or history: what if somebody majored in it ten years ago but hasn’t read a single book since then? Do you think they should still be allowed to say “I have a degree in history from <such-and-such-school>?"

Physicians have to renew their licenses every two years. For lawyers, it’s every year. Even priests need to renew every year.

What if colleges required you to renew your diploma every so often — say, five years. What if you had to submit another essay, to prove that you’re still worthy of that degree?

I bet a LOT of people would simply drop their degree. Once you have your job, or are married, or otherwise stable in life, you don’t need that degree anymore. Most people don’t donate to their alma maters, presumably because by now they feel it’s irrelevant.

But then, why did you go to that school? For that matter, what was the point of the whole exercise — including that admissions essay? 

How about you? Would you bother to renew your college degree?

Doug Lemov’s Tips for Teachers

A few notes from Econtalk’s interview with Doug Lemov, founder of Uncommon Schools, who gives several practical tips on how to be a better teacher.Since we all find ourselves “teaching” sometimes, I’d like to see these tips applied more to business presentations too:

• "At bats": Like baseball batters, who practice over and over, make sure your audience applies your instructions over and over, not just until they get it correct once or twice.
• How deeply you know something is more important for getting to the next level than whether you “know it” or not. You must review, practice until something becomes intuitive, not just till you pass a test
• e.g. You learn vocabulary words by understanding the distinctions with synonyms, not just the meanings
• "cold calling": the teacher tells everyone in the classroom to prepare the answer, then asks one student at random
• students know they are on call the entire lecture, so they have to pay attention
• If the person called says "I don't know", you follow up with more questions till they get it.
• "Call and response": Turn your questions into a game a al Rock Paper Scissors. Everyone answers the question at once (e.g. by raising a number of fingers signifying their answer to a multiple choice question)
• Now you know how many in your class really understood -- and you can adjust accordingly
• Technology can help too if everyone answers a quiz on their smart phone.

These and dozens of other practical tips are available in Lemov’s book Teach Like a Champion. Definitely worth checking out.

Sustainable online education

Anant Agarwal, the president of EdX, MIT and Harvard’s massive open online course (MOOC)provider thinks the future of education doesn’t need have to maximize revenue:

“It’s not at all clear to me that there’s a business here that will produce hundreds of millions of dollars ... but I can see enough -- as a MOOC provider -- for us that we can sustain ourselves,” Agarwal said. “Our ambitions are modest in terms of revenue, and that’s adequate.”

With something so basic, so closely resembling a public good, as education, it seems to me that there will be no shortage of philanthropists and others willing to subsidize schools of various kinds. We’re already seeing news outlets going this way (Pierre Omidyar, Jeff Bezos). The arts have long relied on patrons, benevolent backers who sponsor something out of passion rather than profit.  Seems to me that education could go the same way.

Are public schools better than private?

The Atlantic has a short interview with University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign professors Sarah Theule Lubienski, and her husband Christopher A. Lubienski: “a new book argues that public schools are actually academically superior”.

I don’t have the book (The Public School Advantage- Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools to be published in November 2013), but the authors wrote a 2006 paper that seems to conclude the same thing. Essentially they use a large dataset to argue that, while private schools do outperform public schools overall, the advantage disappears when you account for demographics of the students.

This would indeed be interesting if it were true. But a quick look at the paper makes me wonder about some obvious mistakes in methodology behind the  headline-grabbing “conclusion”.

• 150K public students (96%) vs. 6500 private students (4%)
• 2K Catholic, 2K charter, 1K “Christian”
• Of 6,000 schools overall, only 150 are “other private”.

Since almost all of their data from private schools is from religious schools (mostly Catholic), shouldn’t that be the headline? This is NOT comparing your local school with the $20K/year highly-selective boarding school that many people imagine when they think “private school”.  As the study itself points out, there are many reasons parents might shell out extra money to send their kids to a school, but religion is a big one that, if anything, would trump "academics” in a lot of cases.

As always, my conclusion is to wonder how useful it is to know in aggregate whether something as variable as education is better done one way or another. What matters is what’s good for your kid. Trying to make a generalization about education systems based on a database of thousands of schools is like trying to predict the value of your home by looking at trends in US real estate. Who cares?

The future of college

College is such a critical part of modern life that sometimes we forget the difference between “college” and “education”.  Now that my children are closing in on that age, I’ve been thinking about it more.  How is college changing? How can I ensure my kids get the right education?

There are plenty of books (and seminars and consultants) that explain how to get into top colleges, but I don’t really want a how-to manual (maybe it’s my liberal arts education :-). This book, a well-written summary of the bigger and more important trends, was exactly what I needed. The author, Jeffrey Selingo, is a long-time editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education, so his natural audience is people in the academic community, but I found it to be a good overview for interested parents too.

Higher education is in the midst of one of its biggest transformations ever.  Maybe you don’t need to worry just yet If you’re a tenured professor at a reasonably good school, but frankly if you’re just starting to consider a career in academia, you better think carefully because the reset that universities are undergoing will almost certainly make jobs in the Ivory Tower very different just a few years from now. Clay Christenson (The Innovator’s Dilemma) says the disruption is so big that in fifteen years half of universities will be bankrupt.

Technology is the immediate driver of urgency, but as Selingo notes, the problems in higher education are deeper and result from decades of societal attitudes and government policies that focus on the degree itself, as though no dollar amount is too much to justify additional spending on college.

It’s a vicious cycle.  See Bennett’s hypothesis:  “increases in financial aid in recent years have enabled colleges and universities blithely to raise their tuitions, confident that Federal loan subsidies would help cushion the increase”.  Academics will tell you the evidence for this is controversial, but to me it seems self-evident when you look at the rise of “resort colleges” with their expensive – but to immature 18-year-olds, appealing – amenities. When it can easily cost $200K to send a kid to a four-year college, there had better be a lot more value than free ice cream trucks (true story: Hill Point University in North Carolina uses that as one of its many gimmicks incentives  to persuade trick high school seniors into getting their parents to pay the outrageous tuition).

It’s not just tuition prices that are going up, even beyond whatever Baumol’s cost disease predicts. There’s grade inflation of course (did you know that 91% of Harvard students graduate with honors?)  but also an inflation in degrees themselves: with so many low-quality college degrees, it’s getting to the point where you need a master’s degree to stand out, with almost 700K awarded in 2009.  As Selingo writes (p10), "The number of people with a master's degree is now about equal to those with at least a bachelor's degree in 1960...it's probably only a matter of time before the doctorate is the new master's degree".

But the same forces that disrupted the music industry, then journalism, are now coming to universities, and for a similar reason: much easier distribution of information. Some of that, obviously, is the rise of online learning (the book goes into details everything from Khan Academy to Coursera), but better information affects more than just the learning itself. 

For example, it’s much easier to find a good college using several amazing new online resources: Naviance, the excellent detailed database of colleges which most good high schools already subscribe to, and ConnectEDU, which uses a student’s academic record to predict the best fits for colleges and majors. I think resources like this are much more valuable than the newly-fashionable parent-child college tours, which are really more of a family bonding experience than an objective way to learn about colleges.  Who on earth would make a decision based on the impressions of a quick visit – many of which, Selingo notes, are now guided tours put together by the same people who plan experiences at Disneyland.

Information is causing another disruption, thanks to new transparency about the the true ROI for individual colleges and majors. Virginia law requires its colleges to to publish data about the salary earnings of their graduates. In other states, even when colleges don’t want that information published, the company Payscale ranks schools using their extensive data about starting as well as mid-career salaries of their alums. The results are not good news for many schools, and you can see why a shakeout is long overdue.

If you or your kid are one of the few (one out of five, according to psychologist William Damon) who knows what they want to do in life, the coming changes to higher education will seem natural and overdue. For other kids, though (and their parents), the information in this book is indispensible: see his suggestions about overseas study, time off before/during college, preparing better in high school.

My college education, as wonderful as it was for me, will seem quaint and largely irrelevant much faster than we think. This book is a great introduction to how it will change.

Don’t study engineering or science

Thomas Friedman writes today in his column, One Country Two Revolutions

if one result of the downsizing of Wall Street is that more of America’s best and brightest math and physics students decide to go into science and real engineering rather than financial engineering, the country will be a whole lot better off.

The rest of the article is a glowing account of Silicon Valley and some of the inspiring people he wants us to emulate.  Just for fun, I looked up the education histories of the people he cites:

• Alan Cohen, VP at networking company Nicira (MBA, MA Int’l studies)
• Scott Wilson, designer mentioned in Fast Company (B.A. Design)
• Alexis Ringwald, founder of an education startup (B.A. Political Science)
• Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com (B.S.B.A. Entrepreneurship)
• Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn (B.S. Economics from Wharton)
• Jagdish Bhagwati Professor at Columbia is of course is a BA Economics.

(By the way, Mr. Friedman himself has an undergraduate degree in Mediterranean Studies)

Not a single one of the people he praises is an engineer or scientist!

Like I said after watching the education movie 2 Million Minutes:  Science and engineering are important, but by themselves they are technical skills, like welding or car repair, that can be mastered by anyone with some discipline and training.  You need to be much smarter than that. I’m reminded of the common entrepreneurial wisecrack: “If I need an engineering degree, I’ll hire one”.

China and India have plenty of engineers and scientists.  To compete in the future, we need innovators and risk-takers, along with a culture that encourages people to try new things, even things the “experts” and regulators think are too risky or likely to fail.  The future belongs to people with curiosity, open minds, willingness to change, an ability to empathize with people of different backgrounds, work well with others, and a society with enough flexibility and freedom to allow for many ways of getting there.

If science and engineering are your passion, by all means go for it. But if you (or your kids) are studying it just because experts like Thomas Friedman say you should, then you’re missing the whole point.

"If you loved it, you'd be doing it"

Great one-hour video/podcast by Ken Robinson, public education expert.

I liked this part (about 43 minutes in) when he relates a conversation he once had with a musician:

Ken: "I'd love to do what you do."

Musician: "No you wouldn't."

Ken: "What do you mean?  Of course I would."

Musician: "I practice six hours a day and play five times a week. I've been doing this since I was a small boy. I do it because I love it. You like the idea of doing it.

If you loved it, you'd be doing it."

Many more great ideas in there about why today's entire education system is misguided and needs to be transformed, not simply reformed.  It's a video, but no slides or anything, so go ahead and listen to it on your commute like I did.

Note: you have to buy a $5/month subscription to Fora.TV to download from the site, but you can get the MP4 file for free if you subscribe on iTunes.

The only way to improve schools

This week’s New Yorker is required reading of anyone interested in improving education.  An article by Malcolm Gladwell (author of “The Tipping Point”, “Blink” and other books) points out how teacher quality is so much more important than anything else:

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile.

According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close [the performance gap with the world’s top education systems] simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality. After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers.

and

A group of researchers—Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard’s school of education; Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth; and Robert Gordon, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress—have investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master’s degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost every district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in the classroom.

The fundamental importance of teacher quality makes me pessimistic that public schools are likely to improve their mediocre, over-priced performance, no matter how much money you throw at them.

It’s not just me saying this.  Read Jonathan Alter’s Dec 6th column in Newsweek (“Bill Gates Goes to School”) and read the devastating comments of Microsoft’s founder:

It's no surprise that Gates is a believer in merit pay and incentive pay and has little use for teachers colleges as presently constituted because there's no evidence that having a master's degree improves teacher performance. You never hear Gates or his people talk about highly qualified teachers, only highly effective ones.

[btw, Steve Jobs says the same thing, and so does McKinsey]

I wish I understood the counter-argument.  Defenders of the current system tell me that it’s too hard to evaluate teacher performance fairly.  But do you think it’s easy to evaluate employee performance at Microsoft or IBM or GE or Apple?  It’s not easy, but every world-class company does it, and if we want world-class schools we’ll have to do it too.

Maxwell wins

Many of us have been watching the shifting return counts since election night, but now it’s official:  Marcie Maxwell won the election for 41st district state representative over Steve Litzow.  The margin was extremely close:  748 out of 64,394 votes cast, much tighter than the 1591 votes that separated the two of them during the primary election.

I think she won for two reasons:

1. She’s not George Bush.   In a district that Obama carried by 64%,  anybody with a “D” in their name was guaranteed at least 748 voters who wanted their state legislator to end the war in Iraq, end subsidies to Big Oil, end all that corruption in Washington D.C., stop the Born Again Fundamentalists from running the government, help those poor Katrina victims, and make abortion legal again.  If you can fog up a mirror you can vote in this country, and this year the momentum was on the side of Democrats.
   
2. Steve went negative.  Too many people were put off by the petty, irrelevant attack mails that Steve sent, implying that Marcie somehow doesn’t care about student privacy.  Or something – I’m not even sure what he was implying about her.  Anyone who knows Marcie personally (or knows somebody who does – which is half the city of Renton) looked at his ads and rolled their eyes.  Same thing with his comments about Renton school performance; there was a right way to legitimately bring this up as an issue, but Steve came across as somebody who was just picking on the good people of Renton.

The full downloadable results will be ready in early December, and I can’t wait to pour through the numbers so I can update the analysis from the August primary.  Here’s what I’ll be looking for:

• Did Steve carry Bellevue?  I bet he did.  That would be interesting because it challenges the popular explanation that the Eastside is becoming more Democratic.  In other words, it’s possible (even likely) for a Republican to win District 41, even in a terrible year.
• Did education voters make the difference?  Since this is Marcie’s main campaign theme, it will be interesting to see how much the voters agreed.  This didn’t matter much in the primary, so I want to see if anything changed in the larger turnout for the final election.

Meanwhile, Marcie deserves congratulations, and I’m proud to stand behind her as my legislator for the next two years  (Argh, is that all it is?!  After nearly a year of hard work campaigning, the prize is a lot more of those 2-hour drives to Olympia, a diddly state legislator’s salary,  and then you have to do it all over again!

Civics test: 90%

Ouch! I’m disappointed that I got three answers wrong on a new 33-question civics test created by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, giving me a score of 90.1%.

Still, that’s better than 49% mean score of the 2500 people test-takers nationwide. In fact, it’s way better than every single category sampled:

Group	Score
Income > $100K	55
Democrat	45
Republican	55
Age 18-24	47
Age 45-64	52
Doctorate	72
Undergraduate	57

The study's authors somehow convinced 164 elected officials to take the test, and their average score was 44% – five points lower than the general public.

These questions are pretty basic: multiple choice answers to questions about the First Amendment, the purpose of the Federal Reserve Bank, names for the three branches of government. Yes, some of them were a little tricky, but I don't think you can be an informed voter if you don't know this stuff.

Take the 5-minute test yourself and let me know how you did:

http://www.americancivicliteracy.org/resources/quiz.aspx

Litzow vs. Maxwell at the PTA

The Mercer Island Legislative Team of the PTA sponsored a discussion recently between the Washington State 41st district legislative candidates, Democrat Marcie Maxwell and Republican Steve Litzow. It’s getting close to Election Day and maybe with absentee ballots the decision has already been made.  But if like me you’re planning to vote in person on Tuesday,  here’s my bottom line on the differences between the candidates:

Steve cares most about freedom: let schools, teachers, parents, and taxpayers have maximum choice and flexibility.  Marcie cares most about fairness: don’t let the “rich” districts (like Mercer Island) forget that there are less well-off places in need.  Marcie knows more details about education issues, but Steve is less beholden to vested interests and more likely to bring real change – if you think that’s necessary.

The best example of this difference is school funding.  Mercer Islanders would spend even more on our schools if we could, but Washington is one of only two states that put a maximum cap on the amount you can raise in tax levies – even if 100% of the voters in a district beg for it.  How silly is that?

Steve: would eliminate the levy lid if he could, but recognizes it’s politically difficult, so he supports a compromise that involves raising the floor on funds we get from the state.

Marcie: reminds us there are other districts out there that won’t support higher taxes for education the way we do, and it’s important not to let Mercer Island get too far ahead.

In other words, Steve wants people to be free to choose the level of funding they want, but Marcie worries that’ll lead to unfair advantages for the pro-education districts.

One nit: both candidates keep repeating the incorrect statistic that Washington scores 42nd in funding on education. That’s very old data; the actual number is 38th (as of 2006) and probably much higher by now thanks to the $2.46B added to teacher salaries in the past four years .

Both candidates say teacher strikes should be illegal, though neither gives specifics on what to do.  Steve notes that the unions seem to strike each year just before elections, and that we should expect another one two years from now, just before the next election. No suggestions for how to avoid it. Marcie repeats her union supporters’ statements about how “teachers are happiest in the classroom”  and that presumably the best way to ensure happiness is to pay them more.

But how should we pay them?  I saw a big, healthy difference:

Steve:  “I do believe it’s possible to tell the difference between good teachers and bad teachers” and the good ones should be rewarded.

Marcie: “It’s complicated”, so let’s focus on making existing teachers better, through things like National Board Certification or the Math Academy they tried in the Renton district.

Here Steve’s clearly right.  It’s ridiculous that we give the same raises to the worst 10% of teachers that we give to the top 1%.  That study people quote about National Board Certification is flawed because it didn’t distinguish between causation and causality: the certification doesn’t change the teacher. Marcie should read up on what Apple’s Steve Jobs says: today’s schools will never really improve until you fix the awful way we hire and compensate teachers.  Meanwhile, those mediocre teachers who want to keep their jobs should spend every waking minute of their day trying to ensure Marcie gets elected because she’s unlikely to propose anything new here.

Somebody asked Marcie why schools in her home district of Renton fare so poorly, and she replied with the important reminder that demographics are important: Renton is not like Mercer Island.  It’s a much bigger school district (100K students), with 44% of kids on government assisted lunch programs (in one school it’s as high as 73%).  Top-down mandates like No Child Left Behind offer little flexibility, which crushes the options for resource-constrained schools.

There is no question that Marcie is more aware of the day-to-day realities of poor districts, and that her legislative priorities are more focused on the immediate needs of the have-nots.  That’s why the Mercer Island School Board President says Steve Litzow doesn’t get it.  That may very well be true (he definitely doesn’t get it with his lame, idiotic ads implying Marcie doesn’t protect privacy—give me a break), but does it matter who “gets it” or does it matter who’s more effective?    Sure, Marcie cares about the poorest kids (so do we all) but an elected official shouldn’t be given an “A” just for effort.

One more thing: everyone blames the rising cost of education on mandates, so one question to ask is where are those mandates coming from, are they really necessary, and who is more likely to reduce them.  Marcie mentioned that we should reconsider some of those mandates (she specifically blames No Child Left Behind).  Still, it seems to me that most (all?) of the mandates come from the “fairness” people like her, not from the “freedom” people like Steve.   I don’t necessarily disagree with Marcie – I  mean, I like “fairness” too – but everything in life is a tradeoff and we can’t keep pretending that more funding is the only answer.

As for me, I’m following the lead of Surrounded by Water and voting for Steve.  Since I’m also voting for Fred Jarrett, and I know Marcie’s pretty much lockstep with Fred anyway, I think this is the best way to ensure healthy variety and flexibility in state government. 

Confidence in Fred Jarrett

I think there are at least two kinds of politicians: the "populists" and the "wonks". Too many politicians are populists, who treat government like a popularity contest: a grown-up version of the Homecoming King and Queen (come to think of it, a lot of politicians are former homecoming kings).

We need more wonks, which is why I'm voting for Fred Jarrett. Meet him in person like I did this weekend and you'll see why: he is knee-deep in the details about the issues that matter to him (and me): like education  and transportation.

Here are a couple of areas where he changed my mind:

• Vote no on I-985: I'm partial to cars--it's far and away the most important way people get around, and I disagree with the do-goodies who push ultra-expensive mass transit that won't help a bit. I figured there's enough opposition to I-985 that it won't pass anyway, but I want to send a message that cars are important. Not anymore. Fred thinks it's likely to pass, unfortunately. I agree with him that it would be a disaster (micromanage how traffic lights get synchronized? Puh-lease)
• It’s possible to get bad teachers to quit, through policy changes that don’t have to upset their union.  Best example: make pensions portable.  A lot of middle-aged teachers would love to change jobs but the golden handcuffs of their generous pensions are keeping them there.  What if we could make their pensions portable?  through defined contribution (like the 401k that I have) or through something else…  I think that’s the single best way to improve schools.
• Tolling on I-90.  Fred’s opponent, Bob Baker, talks like it’s a simple matter of “just say no”, but in fact Bob Baker’s naive stance would make matters far worse for Mercer Island.  [this deserves its own post, like the one from Surrounded by Water]

I'm not surprised the non-partisan Municipal League gives Fred the highest rating for our district.

Stop by the Education Funding blog he runs with several other legislators for more wonky details.

Seattle Times Endorses Steve Litzow

The Seattle Times endorsed Steve Litzow in the race for 41st State Legislative District. You have to chuckle at their follow-on comment

His opponent, Democrat Marcie Maxwell, a member of the Renton School Board, is passionate about education but doesn't seem to have an original idea about the topic.

Ouch!

Their rejection stings even more when compared to the kinder comments they made when they passed on Fred Jarrett’s competitor, Bob Baker, who they at least encourage to “stay in local politics”.  It’s clear they agree with the Municipal League’s non-partisan assessment that Marcie just isn’t as qualified.

Note how quickly Steve added the Seattle Times endorsement to this brand new campaign video:

Compare it to a similar one released by Marcie’s team a few weeks ago:

I think the Seattle Times assessment is accurate.  I don’t know any Democrats who are enthusiastic about Marcie.  If you are, and you really think she’d be a better legislator, especially on education issues, please let me know in the comments.  Do original ideas matter in this race?

Comparing teacher experience between Mercer Island and Bellevue

Good teachers deserve to be paid a lot more than they are, and if it were up to me there’d be a huge bonus pool, with big fat raises for some of the underpaid but outstanding teachers I know.  It’s no fair that the bottom 10% get to dictate how the top 10% are paid.  In competitive industries (like small business, real estate, restaurants, any international company), your income is based on performance, not years of experience, which is why I I don’t think you should evaluate teachers strictly based on their number of years of experience either. But if you’re curious how school districts compare, this chart should help:

 

I calculated the number of teachers in Bellevue and Mercer Island who have various numbers of years of experience.   In my rush I couldn’t think of a better way to label the graph, but basically each column represents the percentage of teachers whose years of teaching experience are somewhere between the previous column and this one.

For example, 27% of Mercer Island teachers have between 0 and 5 years of experience, while 38% of Bellevue teachers fit that category; 23% of Mercer Island teachers have been on the job between 20 and 30 years while only 11% of Bellevue teachers have.

Generally speaking, Bellevue has fresher teachers than Mercer Island.  Since the union-mandated payscale cares only how long somebody has been on the job, no matter what their competency or fitness for teaching, this explains why Mercer Island salaries are slightly higher.

[9/23: I updated this post a bit to explain better what I think]

Salaries for Bellevue and Mercer Island Teachers

Public employee salary information is public record -- as it should be, since you and I pay for it through our taxes.  Bellevue public school teachers went on strike over their low pay, so I was curious exactly what the pay scale there is, and how it compares to Mercer Island.  Here's the answer:

Bellevue

Gender	# Teachers	Total Salaries Paid	Average	Per Hr	46 week equiv
F	990	$ 53,746,505	$ 54,289	$ 39.56	$72,781
M	302	$ 18,741,895	$ 62,059	$  45.22	$83,198
total	1292	$ 72,488,400	$ 56,106	$  40.88	$75,216

Mercer Island

Gender	# Teachers	Total Salaries Paid	Average	Per Hr	46 week equiv
F	202	$ 11,495,884	$ 56,910	$ 41.46	$76,295
M	75	$ 4,720,192	$ 62,936	$ 45.85	$84,373
Total	277	$ 16,216,076	$ 58,542	$ 42.65	$78,482

 

Since annual salaries for teachers are based on a 1300 hour year, versus the 1800+ hours that you or I work, the extra column shows what the annualized salaries would be if teachers worked a more "traditional" schedule.

I also think it's interesting to break the salaries down by gender because it shows how silly it is to compare aggregates like this.  Are Bellevue teachers underpaid or overpaid?  the followup question that must always be asked is "compared to what?" Clearly, if you look at the raw numbers, women overall are paid less than men overall, just as teachers overall are paid less than many other occupations, and Bellevue overall is paid less than Mercer Island.  But unless you know something about the hours worked, the level of productivity and experience, and other work conditions such as quality of the students, total take home pay of a teacher's household, and the other zillion factors that go into any decision for whether one individual takes a particular job or another -- unless you know all that, it's impossible to say.

Well, almost impossible.  At free-market companies we know exactly what the correct salaries should be because they are based on competition.  A small business that pays its employees too little will soon find itself without employees, and employees who are paid too much relative to what they produce will soon find themselves without jobs.  Why don't we use the same, simple idea -- the one that works in every other successful vibrant industry -- for schools?

Am I wrong?  Do you have a better way to figure out the "correct" salaries for teachers?

[update: still trying to fix the formatting of those tables.  Also updated the MI salary data because apparently I messed up the number of teachers in the pool]

Education voters: Litzow or Maxwell?

Continuing my slow, on-going look at the results of the August primary for the Washington State 41st Legislative district, this week I've been trying  to answer the question of which candidate has greater support among "education voters", those who rate a candidate primarily on how strong he/she is on education issues.

Bear with me, because I'm making a lot of assumptions, so the following analysis is murky and prone to all kinds of noise. But I'm interested at the high level if there is a strong correlation between certain types of voters and those who go for either Marcie Maxwell or Steve Litzow. Of course, it's very hard to tell without doing an actual poll of voters, but there is one rough measure that I thought would be interesting to compare: those who voted in favor of Simple Majority during the last election.

Short answer: at least on Mercer Island the correlation is very weak and it's hard to read much into them.  Here's the data by neighborhood:

	Litzow % in Primary	L-(SM)	M-(SM)
Island Park School	52%	57%	52%
Islander Middle School	54%	63%	53%
Lakeridge School	52%	55%	51%
Mercer Is Boys and Girls Club	54%	69%	59%
Mercer Island City Hall	59%	83%	56%
Mercer Island Fire Station	43%	61%	82%
Mercer Island High School	52%	66%	62%
West Mercer School	50%	58%	58%

The column L-(SM) represents voters who backed Steve in the August Primary as a percentage of those who voted yes on Simple Majority last Fall.  M-(SM) is the percentage relative to Simple Majority of Marcie voters.  No, the data aren't adjusted to account for different levels of turnout, and of course issues were completely different in the two elections, but for this first, rough look, I'm assuming both candidates are equally affected by any differences, so that any net biases cancel each other out.

Although the results are too weak to say there is any advantage to Steve Litzow, this is not good news for Marcie Maxwell.  Many people would have expected that, given her strong activities on behalf of Simple Majority in the last election, she would have an advantage among these voters, however slight, but that appears not to be the case, and arguably the data shows the opposite.

Assumptions and caveats

• To many people, Simple Majority is about taxes and whether it should be hard or easy to raise them. But I'll argue that the campaign promoting Simple Majority did a good job of promoting it as a simple referendum on public schools, period. If you think schools are important enough to raise taxes if necessary, then you probably felt bad voting against Simple Majority so that's the sense why in this analysis I'm using it as a proxy for "education voter".  Very weak assumption, but it's the best I've got.
• Although neighborhoods tend to have similar voting patterns, many other factors have far more influence on voting behavior at this level. A candidate who did lots of doorbelling, for example, would trump other opinions, if all else were equal.
• I have no idea how likely it is that a Simple Majority supporter turns up in the primary.  If Simple Majority voters were underrepresented in the primary's low turnout, then this analysis is meaningless.

After the Simple Majority vote last Fall, I demonstrated that there were some patterns consistent among the SM voters, so aside from these huge caveats I'll argue that the fact there aren't more significant patterns tells you at minimum whatever drove Simple Majority results is not driving results for this election.

Shy teachers

I think the Bellevue teachers strike is horrible. I don't care what the issues are in this dispute, the real competition is global, with kids in other countries and districts where the teachers and administrators are hard at work today. 

So as I was driving down 148th SE in Bellevue this morning, and I saw teams of strikers waving at those of us doing our part to help (not hurt) global competition, I came prepared with a sign, hand-written by my 6-year-old: "Teachers go back to work!!!".  I also had my camera ready, because I wanted to see how they respond.

Then a funny thing happened: they immediately covered their faces with signs!

Does anybody know why?  In repressive countries the authorities like to send cameramen into crowds of protesters as a way to intimidate them, but this is America. If you are publicly exercising your right to free speech, why would you be afraid to have your photo taken?

I'm assuming that they don't mind photos taken by journalists or TV crews.  (Or maybe with "real news media" the strike leaders are able to arrange that only certain photos are taken).

I have a theory: many (most?) of the strikers find the picket line a little demeaning. They think of themselves as professionals just like me. They think striking is for unskilled coal miners, or for those who have no other job options.  They also know personally the students and parents they are hurting with this strike, and they are, well, a little ashamed.

Bellevue Teachers Strike

While my kids are busy packing for their first day of class here in Mercer Island public schools, their friends in nearby Bellevue get to take the day off now that the union representing Bellevue teachers voted to go on strike.  I'm not from Bellevue, so I can't claim to understand the issues  (something about a 6% raise and flexibility in easier curriculum), but I'm pretty sure that the teachers in India and China are going to work today.  If this were Mercer Island public schools I would be pretty irate, so I'm a little curious why the Seattle Times this morning only had quotes from parents and students who support the strike. 

But who cares what I think?  This is a perfect opportunity to find out more about the candidates for the Washington state 41st legislative district.  Both Marcie Maxwell (who is endorsed by the teachers unions)   and Steve Litzow are running on strong pro-education platforms.  What do they think about the strike, and what if anything would they do as legislators? 

A typical politician will just say, ambiguously:  "I urge both sides to show restraint and focus on our children".  I want a legislator who says something more meaningful.  As of this morning, neither candidate has anything on their web site discussing Bellevue schools explicitly, so I sent email to both campaigns to see what, if anything they have to say.

What do you think?

Our historical blind spots

It seems to me that each of us has a blind spot in our understanding of recent history that makes us unable to fully appreciate many of the most important lessons that are obvious to people even slightly older than we are.

Where did you learn what you know about big historical events, like Columbus' discovery of America or the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor? Mostly, you learned in school, augmented later with bits and pieces you picked up in references from popular culture, movies, documentaries, books or articles.  But when was the last time you formally studied history? For most people, it was high school or possibly a year or two into college. Very few people, even the most informed and curious, read much history after that.

Meanwhile, what was the age at which you started to pay serious attention to current events, by regularly reading a newspaper/magazine, watching TV news, or (these days) following a particular internet news source? Most informed people, I think, start somewhere between age 15 and, say, 25.

The trouble with history education is that it takes many years before the events can be put into enough context to write a worthwhile textbook. Not only that, but history classes are usually organized chronologically, which means that the most recent events are covered near the end of the class--often when there is a rush to wrap up everything.

The net result is that there is a significant gap -- a blind spot -- between the events you learn about from your teacher and those you ultimately learn about through personal experience by following current events. That blind spot, I figure, lasts anywhere from five to twenty years, depending on how up-to-date your text books were and how soon you started to pay attention to current events.

In my case, I know very little about the 1960s, and relatively little about the 1970s. They didn't teach me in school and I was too young (or unborn) to appreciate the daily news. I missed a whole bunch of important events: the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Apollo moon landings -- things that people just a few years older than me can remember vividly.

People born in the 1980s have a similar blind spot about the Reagan years, the end of the Cold War, and the first Gulf War.

If you were born in the 1990s, you'll need to work extra hard to understand Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, 9/11, Saddam Hussein. They won't teach you much about these things in school, so you'll have to pick it up from dinner conversations with your parents, or from explanatory paragraphs late into articles about something else.

I just finished reading a fascinating history book about the 1970's (I'll write more later) and I'm just amazed at how many of the mistakes people made then are being repeated today. It occurs to me that we make these mistakes because today's policy makers just weren't old enough to understand then what was happening and they never had the opportunity to formally study that period of history.  These are people who are very knowledgeable about the 80s and 90s (they were adults by then), and they know about the 40s and 50s too (because they did well on their history exams) but the in-between years are lost.

For example, I'm too young to have ever been subjected to the military draft, but I'm too old to have learned about it in school.  I can't even imagine what it would be like for the government to force an 18-year-old (boys only, not girls) to become a soldier, yet it was completely normal for people just a little older than me.  Those who studied it in school are, I bet, better prepared to discuss the concept than somebody with a blind spot like mine.