Archives for Education

Time to Rethink Regulations of Online Learning

Posted by John LaPlante on Wednesday, January 11th 2012

Is there anything new under the sun? Just maybe, when it comes to education. Mitch Pearlstein, president of the Center of the American Experiment, has a new report about online learning. It offers a review of online learning in Minnesota-what we’re doing right, what could be done better, and what we should change.

Pearlstein offers three major recommendations:

Take far greater advantage of the huge online possibilities of Post-Secondary Enrollment Options.
Review all state education laws and regulations for their fit with online learning’s new possibilities
Make it possible for Minnesota and national scholars and other experts to teach online classes;

I’m especially interested in the third recommendation. It’s consistent with a recommendation I made for a forthcoming report. It’s very easy to oversell the power of online learning to transform the educational blob, but I think it can be very useful for some people.

category: Education, John LaPlante

School Districts, Unions, and the Taxpayer

Posted by John LaPlante on Wednesday, January 4th 2012

When the Legislature removed the requirement that school districts be in place by January 15, it changed the dynamics of negotiations. According to a report in the Star-Tribune, “More than 200 Minnesota school districts remain without teacher contracts, significantly more than two years ago, and there’s no longer a state-imposed Jan. 15 deadline to penalize those that don’t reach agreements.”

There was some rationale for having the deadline-it helped the state budget become more predictable. That was an important consideration, since the state pays for the bulk of school expenses. But the old law was lopsided: It imposed a penalty on the district, but not on the union. You might say that the penalty ought to apply to both, but then again, I’m not sure a penalty is a good policy in the first place. After all, it’s not as if members of the board that doesn’t come to an agreement will suffer personal financial harm.

But I’d like to focus on a few other interesting things I found in the article:

#1 The problem of “I can’t do anything to earn more money.”

“The latest settlement [in the Anoka Hennepin district] grants no cost-of-living increases for a third straight year, meaning about half of the teachers will see no increases after raises for experience and education are factored in.”

The term “raises for experience and education” means this: a bigger paycheck. Yet you may sometimes hear a teacher say something like “we haven’t taken any pay raises in X years.”

That is true for teachers who have reached the top end of their pay scale. (Quick example: You’re a teacher and you have an MA. You get another $500 for each year of experience you have, up to 10 years. But each additional year after 10 yields no extra pay.)

But why should that be? This time-plus-credits approach offers no incentive for outstanding service, and no disincentive for mediocre service. Bring some elements of performance-based pay into effect, and those teachers with 10+ years of experience can hope to earn a bigger paycheck.

#2 There’s more to compensation than the paycheck.

In St. Paul, a key issue has been whether to limit class sizes, as teachers seek.

All other things equal, a teacher with 25 students have an easier job than a teacher with 35 students. Moving to smaller classes is a way to increase teacher compensation, since it represents the same pay for less work.

#3 The Legislature and governor should stop using the school-aid shift as a budgeting tool.

The biggest factor in delayed settlements this year is late approval of state aid to schools in the July special legislative session after Minnesota’s government shutdown.

When the state obligates itself to pay for something, it ought to pay on time. Enough said.

#4 The problem of the board and the union working against the public.

The early settlement made it easier for the district and teachers to work together to pass two of three levy referendums on the November ballot.

Contrast two sets of actors. The first is a private company and its union. The second is a school board and its union. Both sets of actors have two tasks: Decide how to increase their revenue, and decide how to divide up the money that’s already coming in.

But the two groups have some substantial differences.

The private company can go out of business, moderating the demands of its union. Public schools, as units of government, cannot go out of business. This removes some of the incentive that would moderate the demands of the union.

The private sector company and union cannot compel anyone to buy its product. The public school (more or less) can.

The private sector union has very little say in who sits on the board of the company. The public school union is almost always a significant and even dominant player in the process of deciding who sits on the board-leading to the spirit, if not actual practice, of self-dealing.

As a result, in the public sphere, the union and the management work against the public.

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What’s the solution? Here’s my ideal: Every student gets $X per year from state and local funds, which can be used for any school. (This sounds like a voucher, but it could be organized along the lines of a refundable tax credit as well.) Give districts much more flexibility in how they spend money and let them charge tuition. Make it easier for charter schools and even for-profit schools to open. Let parents supplement the voucher/credit if they wish, so some schools can offer a high-priced business model and others can offer a low-priced model.

And then let the hundreds of thousands of parents, students, teachers, and board members, of all sorts of different schools, sort it all out through their voluntary actions. Schools that don’t come to a sustainable financial arrangement in time suffer the consequences. Those that do reap the rewards.

category: Finances, John LaPlante

Union Authorizes Charter Schools: Opportunity, or Trojan Horse?

Posted by John LaPlante on Tuesday, December 13th 2011

Minnesota, one of the leading states in the charter-school idea, how has a new player in charter schools: a teachers union.

According to Governing magazine, “Minnesota Guild of Public Charter Schools became the first charter authorizer in the United States to be sponsored by a teachers union.” (See also Minnesota Public Radio. Your taxes support it; you might as well use it.)

One key idea of charter schools is to strip away some of the red tape. Another is to allow for more experimentation (pedagogy, curriculum, what have you) than is allowed in the traditional public school. Authorizers don’t actually run charter schools; instead, they oversee a contract (“charter”) that it holds with the school’s board of directors.

The guild is an effort of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, which in turn got some financial help from the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The AFT is the second-largest teacher union in the country, second only to the National Education Association (NEA) in membership. (In Minnesota, the two have combined into “Education Minnesota.”)

In an op-ed published by the Star-Tribune the head of the MFT argues that unions and charter schools can and should go hand-in-hand. Lynn Nordgren says, “As professional educators and union members, we want and need to be part of the charter school conversation.”

That sounds good. My first response is, “the more, the merrier.” But is the union happy talk believable?

Unions have to date been quite absent from the charter-school scene. In fact, only 604 of the nation’s 4,315 charter schools (12 percent) have collective bargaining agreements. Most of the time, those 604 schools got a union contract because state law required it. Only 9 percent of charter schools build from the ground up are unionized, suggesting that people looking at charter schools as a way to start with a new slate don’t think that a union is helpful. Furthermore, some commentators have observed that teacher unions have

Several leaders in the pro-reform community say that unions present a danger to the charter school idea.

Writing two years ago, Jay P. Greene, professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, said that “Despite their proclamations about supporting charters, the actions of unions and their allies in state and national politics belie their rhetoric.” Unions, he says, “may say they support charter schools, but they only support charters after they have stripped them of everything that makes charters different from district schools.”

More recently, Kyle Olson, head of a union watchdog Education Action Group, warned that unions still “desire to co-opt (and ultimately destroy) charter schools remains.” He cites one local union boss who says that if charter schools become more and more subjected to the rules (including those in union contracts) that govern traditional public schools, they will “dry up.”

In her Star-Tribune essay, Nordgren paid tribute to one-time (and now deceased) AFT president Al Shanker, saying “The original vision of public charter schools” espoused by Shanker “was inspiring.” But it’s clear, given the large sums we’ve spent on schools for (at best) modest improvements in performance and governance that fundamental changes are required. Can we get them from unionized charter schools? Charter schools authorized by public school unions? Paul E. Peterson, professor at Harvard, says that union solidarity with the charter school model has been extremely qualified. While Shanker did support support the idea of charter schools (before there ever was one), it was based on the assumption that his union would still be a key player. “For Shanker and his heirs, the collective bargaining agreement always came first.” Once it became clear that charter schools could be run without unions, Shanker lost his enthusiasm.

Norgren, in her op-ed, claims that many charter schools are substandard (true) and that union oversight will lead to high quality schools (debatable, given the record of, well, the non-charter public schools that we know today).

If union leaders, and especially unionized teachers, are tired of micromanagement by district employees and state and local politicians, I can appreciate that. It’s normal and probably good for an employee to say “nobody knows this job as well as I do.” And to be sure, there plenty of laws and regulations that stifle good teachers. Unfortunately, much of the burden that bears down on teachers has been imposed by the unions themselves.

As a rule, I’m all in favor of less regulation of any organization, rather than more. So I’ll make an offer to the teachers union, and I would offer it even if there were no charter schools around: Let’s repeal most state and federal laws governing schools, and fire administrators wholesale. You run the show at your district. At the same time, let’s make it easy for any one to start a school (no teacher licensing requirements, for example) and make it easy for children to attend whatever school their parents want (including religious schools). To quote a famous and thankfully dead political leader, “let a thousand flowers bloom,” and with that, competing methods of running, credentialing, and monitoring schools. And then we’ll let the millions of voluntary choices made by parents, taxpayers, teachers, school leaders, and other parties shape the educational landscape.

Will they buy this offer? Of course not. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that the first priority of a union leader is to continue to be a union leader, and after that, to maintain the power of the union. So while it’s good that Minnesota has another organization that will oversee charter schools, legislators and the people ought to make sure they oversee the union.

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Update: In reviewing an article about the development in the trade newsweekly Education Week, I find this comment: “A separate report from the Center for Reinventing Public Education, also out today, finds that despite more flexibility in some areas, like work hours, unionized charter schools often contain the same kinds of step-and-lane pay scales, due process, and grievance procedures (though expedited) as those in public schools.” The report itself says, “while these new contracts innovate in many ways, they could go much further given the opportunity to create contracts from scratch.”

Will a union-created authorizer of charter schools be willing to oversee a non-unionized charter school? If not, the distinction between its charter schools and those of a traditional public school may not as great as it could be.

category: Charter schools, John LaPlante