SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

And That Ain’t Hay

Further to the controversy raging in our last Sunday at the Movies post, this Globe and Mail article reports that the Ontario public high school teachers' union is asking its members to pay a special 0.3% levy to boost its strike protection fund n preparation for next year's bargaining period. Said levy will raise about $10 million a year. And this is just one of the four Ontario teachers' unions (albeit the biggest one)!  

But it serves to give one a glimpse of how much money the teachers' unions have at their disposal. If .3% equals about $10 million, this means that every year the Ontario public high school teachers' union gets about $3 billion dollars in dues alone. It has no collection costs (the school boards collect and transmit teachers' dues for the unions) and pays no taxes. And of course the unions have additional revenues, for example hefty investment incomes and things like the $1 million the Ontario government recently paid this union to cover bargaining costs. I'd be interested in looking at the union's financial statements but I can't seem to find them online.

Elected School Boards and the Dangerous Illusion of Democracy

One hundred and fifty years ago when public schools were invented, each school had its own governing board of trustees elected from its community, with each trustee known to the electors and accountable to them. And usually the system worked quite well. But then schools began to be amalgamated, with one board of trustees overseeing multiple schools, and the more schools overseen by a single board the less democratic and accountable the trustees became. Now we are in the situation described by this article about US municipal elections.

The article speaks in terms of a 20% voter turnout rate in Ohio:  in Ontario the percentage of citizens who vote for school board trustees ranges from 20% to 30%. As in Ohio, the teachers' unions take a big interest in the school board elections and encourage their members to vote for designated candidates, with the result that most Ontario school boards are dominated by educators. Thus the school boards are not at all democratic, nor do they represent the community's interests in overseeing the community's schools.

Elected school boards are an expensive way to pretend that school boards are doing the people's will.

Competing for Market Share

Anyone who has recently shopped at a grocery store or watched TV or bought a new car is aware of the bewildering array of options out there. Competition and the free market has that effect.

But until recently, the Ontario education sector has managed to shelter itself from the need to differentiate its service very much, offering more or less the same program to most of its customers. Apparently this is starting to change: witness these two Globe and Mail articles that exclaim over how popular some differentiated options have turned out to be.  French Immersion.   Self-directed Learning.

These two articles suggest that educators are receptive to new ideas if they will halt the declining enrollment that Ontario's publicly-funded schools are experiencing. It's not full-blown competition and a free market - far from it - but it's a start.

Sunday at the Movies (Teachers’ Unions)

This clip talks about an arrangement whereby a Pennsylvania school district has been paying the salary of the teachers' union president since 2000. If Doug would care to respond to this, I will be happy to pass along his comments. I am under the impression that similar arrangements are in place in Ontario, but I've been wrong before. 

Becoming Competitive

"And let it be noted that there is no more delicate matter to take in hand, nor more dangerous to conduct, nor more doubtful in its success, than to set up as a leader in the introduction of changes. For he who innovates will have for his enemies all those who are well off under the existing order of things, and only the lukewarm supporters in those who might be better off under the new. This lukewarm temper arises partly from the fear of adversaries who have the laws on their side and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who will never admit the merit of anything new, until they have seen it proved by the event."  Nicolo Machiavelli

This story from Oakland, CA illustrates the truth of Machiavelli's six-hundred-year-old quote (human nature doesn't change). Although Oakland schools are for the most part disastrous for their students, the new-broom superintendent is encountering strong resistance - from many quarters - to his efforts to improve them. Most interesting to me is the suggestion that the teachers' unions are directing most of their fire at the charter schools while seemingly oblivious to the threat that open enrollment (Oakland parents can now send their children to any public school - charter or conventional - in the district) is posing. 

Oakland education leaders have long enjoyed a very comfortable life because they were more or less the only game in town. It's like a cookie manufacturer with a monopoly. Of course, the cookie manufacturer loves having his customers over a barrel, and of course the cookie manufacturer will fight tooth and nail to preserve his monopoly. But when push comes to shove, if the cookie manufacturer can't make his new competitors go away, he will have to improve his own products and customer service and maybe even lower his prices. That's how competition works.

Right now, in Oakland, the education manufacturers are still in the first phase - trying to make the new competition go away. For the children's sake, let's hope they fail.  H/T TB

Money makes the mare go

Educhatter's latest blog concerns the red carpet that Prince Edward Island is rolling out for a group of Amish immigrants. Because the Amish insist that their children go to their own schools, as opposed to publicly-funded schools, the province was asked to amend its very restrictive laws governing home-schooling, and that turned out to be no problem at all! Obviously, the prospect of hard-working farmers and enhanced provincial revenue trumped lawmakers' anti-homeschooling prejudices. 

The lesson is that school choice proponents in other jurisdictions just have to find a monetary imperative that will motivate their politicians to allow more school choice. One does exist:  to wit: for every student who leaves the publicly-funded system to attend a private school with a partial subsidy, the government saves the difference between the public school per-pupil cost and the cost of the subsidization. In Ontario, for example, the government pays roughly $12,000 per public school student. If it were to offer parents a $6,000 subsidy towards private school tuition, it would thus save $6,000 a year for each student who transferred to a private school. At this rate, it wouldn't take long for savings to add up:  if, say, 100,000 students accepted the offer, the government would save well over half a billion dollars a year (Iess the cost of students already enrolled in private schools). 

It's true that this amount is less than the cost of the cancelled gas plants; however, this saving would happen every year, and would likely increase in magnitude as the private schools improved their service and capacity.

Politics makes strange bedfellows

Click here for a thought-provoking opinion piece about The New York Times' vendetta against charter schools in general and Success Academies in particular. As the piece points out, the Times closes its eyes to all sorts of egregious teacher actions at public schools but instead zeroes in on one rather-mild-by-comparison misdemeanor at Success Academy. 

This begs the question of why The Times, a very left-leaning organ, has a hate-on for charter schools. After all, these New York charter schools are giving tens of thousands of disadvantaged students a life-changing education, and you would think that The Times would be over the moon about this. Presumably it would be swooning if the same feat was being pulled off by a conventional public school? Weird.

BTW, this begs the further question of how appropriate it is for The Times - in fact, all newspapers - to push extremely biased points of view.

Unleashing teachers’ potential

Click here for an interesting article about incentivizing employees. There is no mention of the education sector in the article, but the principles are easily extended to schools. 

At present, teachers get paid more if they take additional courses,  stay on the job for a long time, or get out of the classroom by becoming a principal, consultant, or union official. How much their students learn is irrelevant in most jurisdictions. It would take some careful thought, but if we can put a man on the moon we can surely devise ways to reward teachers (and principals) for better academic achievement.

Of course, those devising the pay scheme would have to care about student achievement, and at present I'm not sure any of them do....   H/T JE

L’Etat C’est Moi

A controversy is raging in Quebec because the new education minister sends his children to private school. more  

Personally, I don't see anything wrong with this. After all, Quebec's private schools are partially subsidized by the government - giving them status as part of the government's network of education options. And in any case, parents would be remiss if they let political considerations interfere with their decision-making when it comes to their children's well-being. For example, no one insists that the children of tobacco executives smoke.

But I do see something very wrong with politicians that on the one hand restrict their citizens' choices when it comes to their children's language of instruction or religious instruction but on the other hand send their own children to English-speaking and/or religious schools. Lots and lots of politicians do this - for example, Lucien Bouchard and Jacques Parizeau. 

Does anyone know whether the private school that the new Quebec minister of education sends his kids to is English-speaking or religious?  H/T TB

Be careful what you ask for….

The Ontario Government has introduced a new scheme whereby students from low-income families will not have to pay any tuition fees for their post-secondary education.  more

This six-year-old School for Thought posting suggests that this is a bad idea and the students will pay for the government's mistake.