me: >>> With _which_ public was it that the LA union lost credibility? all of >>> the people in LA? or just the upper-middle class and rich ones? the >>> one that David Shemano talks to? which one?
David Shemano writes: > You are in LA. The LA Times articles had people talking like few other > political issues. What was your sense?< I live in Torrance (a northern extension of Orange County in some ways) and stopped reading the L.A. TIMES awhile back (the New York TIMES and the Daily BREEZE do the trick). I don't know very much about the L.A. Unified School District, except that they are better on special education issues than most of the small-town school districts in L.A. County (with Torrance being an exception, not coincidentally). That's not because of the benevolence of the district superintendents as much as the fact that they have more resources and have been subject to lawsuits (cf. Shawnda Smith). My sense is that too many make too many generalizations about what the "public" thinks without presenting evidence. I do know that the "public" is not some kind of undifferentiated mass that thinks in unison. I'd guess that some people were jazzed by the L.A. TIMES' attack on the public-school teachers (and their privacy rights). They're more likely to be upper-middle class and rich types, especially those who were already antagonistic to public schools, think of teachers as servants, and wanted public funds for private schools -- and/or whose kids don't go to public schools. Others (PTA types), who see teachers (and not administrators) more as colleagues to be worked with build the schools and defend against further funding cut-backs, rather than as servants, were significantly less jazzed. But I don't really know, not having a thumb on the popular pulse. I haven't seen any poll data (or better information) on this subject. So what I just said should be seen as an impressionistic observation, not a scientific assertion. Like so many generalizations of this sort, it reflects biases more than knowledge. (Part of trying to be scientific is being aware of possible biases.) David: > We are close to a family in which the husband is very active in the LA > teachers union. My sense from talking him is that he senses, and I use him as a proxy, that based upon the positive general reaction to the LA Times articles (and the negative reaction to the response of the union to the articles), is that the general public now sees the unions as self-interested as opposed to primarily interested in the success of the public school system as a whole. My goodness, the LA Times editorializes against the teachers union, and the LA Times editorial page is not the reactionary LA Times of 70 years ago.< The L.A. TIMES has been making giant leaps to return back to the bad old days, because of its financial problems and its takeover by the Tribune Corp. and then by Sam Zell and his goons. I do not deny that the teachers' union has PR problems and that the mass anti-union efforts of the L.A. TIMES and their allies have made them worse. That was the newspaper's goal, of course. me: >>> By the way, following the precedent set by the LA TIMES, all of the >>> bar exams scores of all of the lawyers in California should be posted >>> on line, along with how many times they had to repeat the exam before >>> passing it, their ranks in their law-school graduating class, their >>> salaries, their win/loss record in court, their number of publications >>> in law journals (and the quality rankings of those journals), their >>> accusations of malfeasance, etc., etc. To make information-processing >>> more manageable, the state should give all lawyers a rating (based on >>> a weighted average of merit measures such as those I just listed, >>> using eminently objective weights) which should be also published on >>> line. It should be like the signs that the Los Angeles Health >>> Department makes restaurants post in their windows: each lawyer should >>> be graded with an A, a B, or a C (based on a 100-point score), while >>> those who get lower grades would be shut down. Just as diners should >>> know if their restaurants are unhealthy, the lawyers' potential >>> customers should know, too. After all, a lawyer might be able to hurt >>> you much more than a restaurant can: you share private information, >>> etc. > First of all, bar pass/fail information is public, as are bar disciplinary > actions.< But it should be made much more obvious, with a clear "A", "B", "C", or shut down rating, something that's easily understandable to the consumers. If we're going to treat teachers the way the self-styled education reform movement wants to, getting rid of independent unionism, tenure, etc. we should be consistent. If teachers are to be treated like servants, so should lawyers. In fact, the case for treating lawyers as servants is stronger, since they are officers of the court. In fact, lawyers should have to re-take the bar exam every few years to keep their licenses. No-one can keep a driver's license forever without taking a re-test every few years. > Second of all, US News & World Report just listed our little boutigue firm in > the "National Tier 1" of national bankruptcy firms, which we found quite amusing. http://bestlawfirms.usnews.com/firmprofile.aspx?firm_id=33105&tab=overview < I wasn't referring to David's law firm, but to lawyers in general, as a class. I'm sure that he's a fine lawyer. > Third, you seem intent on ignoring my point that evaluating knowledge > producers is really hard and subjective, which is why I think it so important that the decisionmaker be properly incentivized. The reason people are searching for an objective criteria to evaluate teaches is precisely because subjective evaluation by an incentivized decisionmaker is effectively prohibited.< "Incentivizing" teachers is really easy: if you want them to to teach to the test (or teach students how to cheat on the test), judge them & reward them largely on the basis of standardized tests, putting major emphasis on those tests with explicit punishment for doing poorly. (The higher the stakes, the greater the incentive for teachers to cheat, as shown by the big rise in this kind of cheating.) If you want them to be extremely defensive and cynical, hiding information from administrators and the like, treat them like servants, imposing even more bureaucratic rules to control their work (including preventing the cheating that other parts of the "reform" plan encourages). This is especially true if the administrators earn exalted salaries and do not benefit from any extended experience as teachers. If you want them to do their job "just for the money" (rather than as part of a profession that has inherent pleasure), emphasize monetary awards and punishments. They clearly would refrain from paying money to make up for the inadequacies of the budget. After all, if punishment = getting less money, then why should teachers continue to punish themselves? On the other hand, if you want students to learn a wide variety of different materials and to see how different aspects of knowledge fit together, you have to stop the emphasis on standardized tests. Not everything can be quantified. If you want teachers to be dedicated to their jobs rather than being mercenaries who are temporarily "teaching," you have to treat them as professionals and respect the elected leaders of their collective organizations (including unions). More and more economists (but alas not very many, since the base which they started at is so low) are becoming aware of the way in which "extrinsic motivation" (the response to incentives arbitrarily created by bureaucrats and markets) crowd out "intrinsic motivation" (the response to the inherent joy of doing a job well and the like). That is, if the teachers aren't active decision-makers in the education process (even beyond their individual classrooms) and are instead treated as someone to be "incentivized," they will stop doing a lot of work for free and insist on being compensated for all costs. They'll have an attitude similar to that of many non-unionized factory workers and some unionized ones: "it's a job, I get paid, let's see if I can do as little work as possible for those bastards." All of this doesn't mean that so-called objective tests don't play a role. Rather, they should be instituted -- and their results judged -- in conjunction with the input from teachers, who are treated like adults, allowed to join unions, elect their leaders, etc. It also doesn't mean that the public school system couldn't be improved. A major thing is to reverse the Reaganite-inspired and Prop. 13-enforced cut-backs in school funding. The collective effort to improve the schools would be much less of a zero-sum game (teachers vs. bureaucrats, etc.) if there were more funds available. But the "school reform movement" is continuing the Reaganite triumphalism, thinking it can break the teachers' unions and reform education on the cheap. It can treat students like donkeys to be "incentivized" with carrots and sticks. me: >>> If teachers don't have privacy rights (so that their personnel records >>> are made public), why should lawyers have them? David: > It really is insightful that you think student test scores are teacher > personnel records.< They aren't inherently part of personnel records. Rather, they _become_ part of the teacher's personnel records when the L.A. TIMES and other self-appointed guardians of the "public interest" (i.e., higher newspaper circulation, advertising revenues, and the hobby interests and political biases of the owners) decide to aggregate then and to publicly attach them to individual teachers, who are then names and (in some cases) shamed. (One teacher committed suicide, though I'm not sure that it was due to the public airing of his ratings, despite what I heard on the news. He must have been on the edge already.) As should be obvious, student test scores are the test scores of individual students, which only partly reflect the input from teachers. The idea of judging the _teacher's abilities_ using these scores ignores the role of a variety of different factors which affect the scores, such as the resources that the parents have, the resources available to the schools, the abilities of the teachers to compensate for budget cut-backs by spending their own money and time,[*] elements of luck, and the way in which "problem" students are assigned to specific teachers. Usually, self-styled libertarians would object to treating students as anything but individuals and their test scores as reflecting anything but their individual ability to take that kind of test. They would thus object to aggregating their scores the way the L.A. TIMES did, which erases each student's individuality. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. [*] I wonder: what would happen if budget cut-backs made prosecutors chip in their own funds to keep prisoners in jail and defense lawyers had to help pay for the defendants' food? would the prisoners be fed better? _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
