One Response to “Intersting gender/age numbers in this layoffs story”

1. Anonymous Says:
   November 15th, 2009 at 2:35 pm

   This comment has nothing to do with this story, but this comment refers to something I assume will be covered eventually in this blog and I wanted to mention it now. This morning on Meet The Press, they had on Arne Duncan, Newt Gingrich, and Al Sharpton to talk about the problems with education in America. They also had taped comments from Randi Weingarten and Michelle Rhee as well as part of a speech by President Obama. The first thing was that while they mentioned the problems with dropouts racially, there was not a peep about the difference by gender. Where was Richard Whitmire when you needed him? They did focus a lot on the question of how to remove substandard teachers. They all seemed to be in agreement and all were critical of the teacher’s unions in preventing this. The one thing that they didn’t talk about at all with regard to that was the question of who evaluates the teachers in order to insure that this process of teacher removal is fair. Do you let it be decided totally by the numbers by student test scores? The unions would say how do you insure that there is some sort of equalization for the students that different teachers start with. Relative to this blog, what if you have a class with 20 boys and 5 girls. Their achievement on year end tests is mediocre. You have another class with 10 boys and 15 girls. They do better. Do you fire the teacher of the class with 20 boys and 5 girls because of the lower test scores? And if you don’t use test scores, who decides who are teachers worthy of firing? Do you leave it to the administrators? Do you make their word final? Do you trust that they don’t simply dislike the teacher for personal reasons and are lowering their evaluation of them because they have an ax to grind? This has been a huge problem with whistleblower protection laws and it is well known that, to a great degree, it is desirable to encourage whistleblowing. Look at horrors like Willowbrook. But there has virtually never been a whistleblower protection law that has been able to withstand the ability of those in charge to “get” the whistleblower. For some reason, the unions are very worried about this and it is one of the reasons that they insist on job protections for tenured teachers that make it difficult for an administrator to simply fire a teacher without clear cause. The other big thing from Meet The Press today in their discussion was the talk about the 4+ billion that Arne Duncan apparently has available to provide for improving schools. They did not make it clear just what was going on here. Apparently, these funds are for innovative ideas on how to improve education. Arne Duncan seemed to say that he would provide no funds to any district that didn’t make it easy to eliminate substandard teachers. If I heard that right, I suspect little of the funds will ever be used since I can’t see unions allowing districts to gut teacher protections in order to get the money. Beyond that, it wasn’t clear how they were doing this in any event. If it is simply part of the overall process by which grants are provided to districts, I suspect that there is less there than it seems in terms of impact. I suppose the interesting thing would be if a district said that they wanted a huge amount, say $500 million of the 4+ billion and offered the union to vastly increase salaries if the union agrees to amend the contract to remove virtually every teacher protection. That would be wild. But there were virtually no details that were talked about on the show. They did talk about how wonderful charter schools are. But there was no discussion of how atypical most charter schools are. There was no discussion of how they cherry pick in some overt and mostly fairly subtle ways. There was no discussion of how charter schools can function with no teacher contracts and virtually no teacher protections partially because there are so few of them. In conclusion, I think that while it was interesting to at least have them on for the discussion on Meet The Press, that when push comes to shove, it still indicated that there is a “consensus”, certainly between Arne Duncan and Newt Gingrich, that if you can crush the unions, you will have educational nirvana. I just wish that somebody would come out and say that explicitly, then that line of educational theory could be pushed and the results observed.

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