When the New York Times Opinion Editors Call Your School System "A National Disgrace"...

Ronald Bailey | September 4, 2007

...Let's hope that puts the local teachers union and bloated administration on notice that real reforms are coming soon. The Times' editors write:

Washington has long been infamous for having the worst performing big-city system in the country. But The Washington Post exposed the scope of the problem earlier this summer in an eye-opening series. According to The Post, the city ranks first in terms of the budget share devoted to administration and last in spending on teachers and instruction. The imbalance is particularly disturbing, given that the District’s children fare worse at school than children in other big cities...

In the past, superintendents who wanted to restructure the disastrously dysfunctional central office were hampered by laws that guarantee displaced administrators the right to keep their salaries even as they moved to lower level jobs in the schools. The City Council will need to eliminate those laws if Washington is ever to remake its schools.

Translation of the last paragraph: The new superintendant needs the power to demote feather-bedded administrative staff. Better yet, how about giving her the authority to fire underperforming administrators and teachers?

Surely one of the chief reasons the DC school system is so wasteful and unproductive is because it's in nobody's interest to save taxpayer money or provide a quality education. Generally public schools are not run for the benefit of students. Instead they are run for the benefit of teachers and the educrats in the central office. So why not make it someone's interest to save money and turn out a quality education? Take the $11,000 per pupil the DC public schools spend and give it to parents as a voucher. Then let parents make the decision about which schools are actually educating their children. Or at the very least adopt the successful school choice program that San Francisco has.

Comments

|9.4.07 @ 4:02PM|#

So what happens to all those administrators with nothing to do, but whose salaries are guaranteed, when all the parents take their kids to other schools?

|9.4.07 @ 4:05PM|#

Wait, I thought we had No Child Left Behind and that would fix everything!

|9.4.07 @ 4:12PM|#

This phenomenon of bloated central administrations happens all over. I got two words for you: Pinellas County Florida.

ed|9.4.07 @ 4:20PM|#

Ha ha. 2 words when he said 3. That's subtle.

|9.4.07 @ 4:25PM|#

So what happens to all those administrators with nothing to do, but whose salaries are guaranteed, when all the parents take their kids to other schools?

School Lunch Program.

|9.4.07 @ 4:38PM|#

Really, the complete failure of the education system is a mixed blessing. While, on one hand, you feel sorry for the kids who are going to have their future ruined by the public education system, on the other hand nothing builds support for privatizing education than failing public schools.

Right now, in hardcore demoratic strongholds, you are seeing real support for privatizing education.

1. People are so desperate that they are willing to try anything to get an education... including resorting to the free market.

2. Socialists are completly unwilling to make any significant reforms to the system, so it means that libertarians and free market types are the only ones offering any solutions.

Russ 2000|9.4.07 @ 4:55PM|#

nothing builds support for privatizing education than failing public schools.

I dunno. It also seems to build support for throwing more money at public colleges.

|9.4.07 @ 5:05PM|#

"Ha ha. 2 words when he said 3. That's subtle."

I guess since the very next post called me out on it, it wasn't very subtle. @8-{]}

|9.4.07 @ 5:06PM|#

DC actually spends $18K per student, not $11K. I simply take schools' annual billion dollar budget and divide it by the number of students enrolled, 55,000. That comes out to a little over $18K per student. The $11K figure, which I have seen before, must be a teachers' union or DC Council spin that doesn't count major expenses as the real number is about 50% higher.

I posted about this on cutdctaxes.blogspot.com a while back so if you want the details you can go there.

|9.4.07 @ 5:17PM|#

In WA state, the teachers' unions are like God. They lobbied against an initiative to allow vouchers, and it lost. They are now lobbying to eliminate the supermajority requirement for school levies. Something tells me it will pass, but we'll still have to have the supermajority for a voucher measure, not to mention gambling and lottery measures as well. Because, you know, that wouldn't be fair.

|9.4.07 @ 5:50PM|#

According to The Post, the city ranks first in terms of the budget share devoted to administration and last in spending on teachers and instruction.

Um, not to burst your bubble, but this kind of doesn't prove your repeated claims that teachers are getting fat off this system. In fact it kind of outright denies it.

Alice Bowie|9.4.07 @ 6:15PM|#

It has nothing to do with Money

Unfortunately, it has 2 do with
1. the Kids that go to those schools
2. the Parents (if they even exist)
3. the culture

The reason it costs so much is NOT b-cause of the teachers high salary...it's because of the Medal Detectors, Private Security, Policing, Behavor Problems, Special Ed, the 'me no spece de english' crowd.

|9.4.07 @ 6:40PM|#

Alice, a couple of things:

A) Wow, that's interesting grammar and punctuation.
B) If it has nothing to do with money, that's a huge relief, we can make some serious budget cuts.

We have similar levels of expenditure here in peaceful Portland Oregon, and fairly poor results.

I feel terrible for the people compelled to participate in them, but I rejoice for the future generations that will be spared a public education system that is adversarial to student needs, instead focused on preserving jobs and growing budgets.

|9.4.07 @ 6:50PM|#

A) Wow, that's interesting grammar and punctuation.

Give Alice a break, she went to public school.

|9.4.07 @ 7:19PM|#

Leonardo,

The real number is even worse than you think. The real enrollment in DC schools is not 55,000, because as it was recently reported, only 80 percent of that figure actually report to school. Thus, it appears that the DC school system is also over-reporting enrollment in order to hide the true boondoggle going on.

|9.4.07 @ 7:20PM|#

I do wish that people would quit blaming teachers for these problems. The majority of teachers actually are hard working and willing to do whatever is necessary to educate their students. But a large part of this majority choose to not belong to teachers unions. What happens is those who are underperforming or who care only for themselves are overrepresented in the unions. Just like so many of our society's other problems, a small group of activist and a bunch of bureacrats are the ones who are really causing many of the problems we have, while a silent majority of those involved just try to do their job the way it should be done.

|9.4.07 @ 7:24PM|#

Taktix,

My guess is not only that Alice went to public school, she teaches it. My child's second grade public elementary school teacher could not even spell properly at a second grade level, as I learned when she made 5 spelling mistakes on a test she administered to my daughter. (This did not, of course, prevent her from teaching the children the standard PC theories on 'social justice') When this was brought to the attention of the principal, she pledged to 'counsel' my daughter's teacher. My daughter now goes to private school...good luck to the rest of you!

|9.4.07 @ 7:44PM|#

DC spends the largest amount of money per capita in the nation on its El-Hi students (there is some question about whether school administrators are inflating pupil numbers to get more money) and from the news accounts and pictures in DC TV and press coverage, the schools are deteriorating--holes in walls, ceilings and floors, lack of reliable heat and air conditioning, lack of basic instructional materials, the schools are dangerous, and the students often receive substandard food to boot.

The top administrators of the teacher's union were recently tried and convicted of looting the union's funds to pay for their lavish lifestyles and stories of scams to divert money budgeted for schools are regular items in DC area newspapers as are stories about how badly D.C. students are performing and how generally bad D.C. school teachers are.

It doesn't help either when the D.C. government spends tens of thousands of dollars on summer programs that do things like teach "nail culture" to girls to raise their "self esteem."

The schools, it seems to me, are just one of the scams making up the dysfunctional, kleptocratic D.C. government which, in essence, is just one big scam. a parasite, sucking the life blood out of D.C. residents and enriching the crooked and crafty at the expense of the average citizen.

|9.4.07 @ 7:52PM|#

I remember reading that DC has as large an administration as Philadelphia- which is 3 X bigger and no model for efficiency.

Massive GE style layoffs- the only answer.

|9.4.07 @ 7:58PM|#

The schools, it seems to me, are just one of the scams making up the dysfunctional, kleptocratic D.C. government which, in essence, is just one big scam. a parasite, sucking the life blood out of D.C. residents and enriching the crooked and crafty at the expense of the average citizen.

Alas, that is all too often a description of big city government. If they had fewer tasks and fewer dollars, the theft from the public would be reduced but not eliminated. IOW we've got to watch them like a hawk, and always suspect them of perfidy.

LarryA|9.4.07 @ 8:02PM|#

Let's hope that puts the local teachers union and bloated administration on notice that real reforms are coming soon.

Don't hold your breath. Alice is correct, it's not about money. It's about the fact that all the parents who care have taken one look at the mess Alice and her friends have made of the public schools and either put their kids in private school or moved away.

So what happens to all those administrators (and teachers) with nothing to do, but whose salaries are guaranteed, when all the parents take their kids to other schools?

Fire them all; let the market sort them out.

|9.4.07 @ 8:08PM|#

George Tenet fangirl, were you educamated in the DC school district? The article says *budget share*, not dollars.

Let me give you an example. Suppose 3 school systems spend $8000, 9000, and 12,000 per student. (Think my school district, Detroit, and DC.) The spend, respectively, 10%, 15%, and 20% on admin and (ignoring other costs) 90%, 85%, and 80% on teachers.

That means the the spending is split, respectively, at 800/7200, 1350/7650, and 2400/9600 between admin and teachers. DC *STILL* would spend way more on teacher for worse results (evidently even worse than Detroit) *DESPITE* the difference in share.

So, despite your inability to see this, Bailey's bubble is unburst, and the teachers are getting fat off the system. I'm not sure the article did this on purpose in order to fool those who (supposedly) received their education in public schools like DC's, but it evidently worked for you.

Look, it would probably produce better results if we paid the teachers 75% of their salary on the condition that they remain at home, then use the other 25% to buy books that we throw into a locked classroom full of children. It couldn't be much worse.

James Quentin Clark|9.4.07 @ 8:13PM|#

When it comes to our obscene failure of an education system, blood is on everyone's hands. The corrupt teacher's unions, wasteful administrations, pandering politicians, ignorant parents, even the students - everyone plays their part. The teachers are certainly to blame too; sure they're hard working, sure they're well intentioned, but they keep the system going. The structure of monopoly government education is such that it is the exception that anyone can do some meaningful, genuine teaching.

I have a degree in education and have taught in NYC, another horrible system. I made the decision to not work as a government school teacher because I came to the conclusion that serving as an agent of a compulsory state schooling system was not an honest form of work.

Alice's offensively written post does not even scratch the surface. Metal detectors and special education are not the problem, nor is it the fault of kids who don't speak English. There is little incentive for efficiency or quality in most domestic government programs. The crappy state of the schools allowed NYC to get judges to award them billions of dollars.

DC needs more than just the chance to fire some overpaid bureaucrats. They need to take a meat ax to that whole system.

|9.4.07 @ 8:24PM|#

"Surely one of the chief reasons the DC school system is so wasteful and unproductive is because it's in nobody's interest to save taxpayer money or provide a quality education."

Well, there is a little something called the voters. The same parents that you guys are depending on to make the right choice in choosing among private schools are the ones that voted the "educrats" in. They could always vote them out.

"Generally public schools are not run for the benefit of students. Instead they are run for the benefit of teachers and the educrats in the central office."
And private companies are run for the benefit of the consumer? They are run for the benefit of the owner(s), hopefully they benefit the consumer (in this case students and parents), but that's no more why they are run than public schools.

There is a difference of course. Private companies are under no obligation to serve those who cannot afford their services, of which there will always be some in a market. That is fine when we are talking about luxuries like tvs or computers, but every child needs an education. Do you want government to foot the bill but the private sector to reap the rewards? That's called socialized costs, private benefit. Yay.

|9.4.07 @ 8:26PM|#

Ron Bailey,

Take the $11,000 per pupil the DC public schools spend and give it to parents as a voucher.

According to the Census Bureau, Washington DC spent in excess of $15,200 per pupil for the 2005 school year. (Go here and look at the spending on table 6 and the enrollment in table 18.)

According to the NEA, DC spent more than $16,500 per pupil in 04-05. (Go here and check out table H-16.)

So, yeah, I'm thinking those vouchers should be quite a bit more than $11,000 per family.

|9.4.07 @ 8:27PM|#

Many teachers are not hard-working. They call in sick 20 times a year (in a 180-day work year) and do as little as possible. Yet the good teachers, who never call in sick, and do as much as possible, defend them out of "solidarity."

One way to promote reform in places like DC, where I live, is to disallow deductability of state and local income taxes for the federal tax. A great many people in DC, like me, take almost no interest in public affairs, because it's irrelevant to our lives. We live in safe areas, we don't have kids, and the tax burden isn't outrageous, because of all the conveniences of city life. If DC residents felt the full bite of DC taxes, there would be more interest in DC politics. Right now, the people who care most about DC politics are employees of the city government.

Alice Bowie|9.4.07 @ 8:53PM|#

Here in NYC... there are some good Public Schools. Some of them are like TOTAL HELL.

Basically, If u DON't Have the Money 2 move 2 a Good town with a good public school system ... UR FUCKED...

If u DON't HaVe the Money 4 Private school...UR FUCKED...

In NYC Suburbs... the taxes and property values of GOOD SCHOOL SYSTEMS are REAL REAL HIGH. Yet, they spend LESS than the PRISON-Like Schools in the Bronx, Jersey City, Camden, Newark, etc., etc. etc.

Perhaps if we eliminate the Board of Education ... it may work.


However, only the children of parents with $$$ will get a decent education.

Alice Bowie|9.4.07 @ 8:56PM|#

Ever since RON REAGAN ... The spirit in the country has been a mean spirited anti-people one...in every way.

From immigration, minimum wage, soc sec, education, etc. ONLY the STRONG $$$ will survive.

RON REAGAN once said...u can't help the weak by punishing the strong

I say screwing the weak ... is not a good idea

|9.4.07 @ 9:12PM|#

I doubt I'm the only poster here who attended good public schools (Livonia Schools, Michigan). I received a quality K-12 education (at least as much as I was willing to work).

Still, I had teachers that were useless. Some taught me Absolutely Nothing for an entire semester. Were these teachers in any danger of losing their jobs or even losing out on a pay raise (longevity pay)?
Nope, they would have had to commit a felony or stopped coming to work completely. I would like some of the defenders of the public schools status quo to justify this state of affairs.

Has anyone who attended public middle and high schools not been inflicted with an incompetent teacher? Be honest now.

|9.4.07 @ 9:18PM|#

Wow, you can really tell that Alice Bowie attended public schools. Sorry Alice, marching in commie protests isn't educational. Try some self study especially a logic course.

|9.4.07 @ 9:32PM|#

I'm shocked that Mr. Bailey would advocate the neocons favorite panacea: vouchers. The only thing that vouchers would do is move us one step closer to destroying what's left of the private schools.

The ONLY solution to the crisis in American education is to ABOLISH the government schools.

Ari Tai|9.4.07 @ 9:41PM|#

Time for an experiment along the lines of when New Zealand's hit the wall and had to rebuild (and everyone there did, and still does, belong to a union). Take a particularly depressed DC neighborhood. Write a declaration that the (18K) dollars will follow the student. Create per building school boards and give them the power to do everything but set the $/student for their school. Let only parents of children vote for their school's board members (one vote per child). New Zealand did this nationwide and quickly turned equivalent education disasters in some of their poorest and most destitute neighborhoods into models for us all (McTigue's talk has the details).

DC should also experiment with gun control. Suspend their anti 2nd amendment court case for the time it takes to run a test. Take a high-crime area and have the police give out previously confiscated and refurbished guns, ammunition and free training to all adult residents in that area. Make it mandatory in the worst area to carry the weapon concealed. Advertise the fact on street signs. Measure the crime over the next year or two and if violent crime shrinks to a quarter of what it is today, duplicate in other neighborhoods, else take the new facts to the court as a justification. Note that the metric is not, cannot be murder rate, because sadly murder is not as caustic to civil society as being enslaved by violence - because if you're dead, you don't care, if you live in fear of your next beating, mugging or home invasion, you do and this damages all your relationships.

For more on New Zealand's success, here's a delightful talk by one of their ministers at the time, Maurice McTigue, at UCCS.

|9.4.07 @ 10:05PM|#

"Has anyone who attended public middle and high schools not been inflicted with an incompetent teacher? Be honest now."

In the immortal words of Bart Simpson 'well duh'. Teaching is no different than any other profession. There are a small amount of outstanding teachers, a small amount of incompetent idiots, and a very large amount of AVERAGE teachers. Just like the posters on here. I imagine that most of you are just average. Some are incompetent, and some are outstanding. But I am willing to bet that there is a larger percentage of teachers who perform at a level above average than there are posters on here who perform above average, because some of us do it for more than just the damn paycheck.

Unfortunately, it seems that more of the incompetent ones gravitate to large systems like New York City and D.C. and they are the ones who end up in the news.

|9.4.07 @ 11:44PM|#

The program in Washington DC is actually "No school administrator left behind" . Although there are many good, dedicated teachers, the nature of the public school system is such that it attracts a larger portion of incompetent nitwits than the private sector. I say this as a former public school teacher.

We had a saying in our credential program, "Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, teach teachers. Those who can't teach teachers end up as school administrators.

Paul|9.5.07 @ 1:18AM|#

I thought we had No Child Left Behind and that would fix everything!

It will now that the Dems have the House.

|9.5.07 @ 1:23AM|#

So what happens to all those administrators with nothing to do, but whose salaries are guaranteed, when all the parents take their kids to other schools?

School Lunch Program.

Does he mean they can become cafeteria workers or something more along the lines of "It's people"!?

|9.5.07 @ 2:03AM|#

Just to go back to an earlier comment that purported to show that teachers were living off the fat of the lamb because rouughly 80% of the money was going to teacher's salaries: If as someone has stated, the real cost per pupil is $18,000, or 14,400 per pupil. If they each had 4 pupils, then this would mean 65,600 per teacher which is probably well in excess of the average salary (average not the red-meat high end salary).

Can someone here explain how this number of 4 pupils per teacher is not a gross exaggeration? Your explanation has got to be able to correct this by a factor of somewhere between 5 and 8--not a puny 1.5.

I think in general education managers at any level try to inflate the amount of money spent on education by lumping in educational "support" with actual classroom teaching. Maybe that's the reason or maybe because folks don't look critically at numbers that support their position.

nichevo|9.5.07 @ 4:28AM|#

Now I'm not from America, but the idea of paying teachers based on performance is something that comes up here in Australia too. I wonder why people think that's a great solution?

Joe from Accounting sits at his computer all day, playing Solitare. If management promotes him because they think he's working long hours at his desk, is that fair? More imporantly, how does that make Joe's colleagues feel?

What criteria for performance do you use that's fair to both the calculus teacher in a leafy suburban school and the special ed teacher in a rough urban school?

I think the best solution is to fix the system. The more teaching is viewed as a highly-paid, well-respected job, the less you're going to have to worry about incompetence. There are plenty of insightful ideas here about how to do this, the core idea of most of them is getting the money to where it's needed (classrooms) rather than where it's wasted (administration).

Keep up the good work!

|9.5.07 @ 4:48AM|#

Obviously, some sort of voucher system is the only answer. Good teachers can and do teach anywhere, be it public or private schools. The only people who get screwed by vouchers are the dysfunctional public education bureaucracies and the unions they are in bed with. The question is, when are voters going to get fed up with the self-serving, feather-bedding public employee unions who rule out any sort of competition in education because to them, the public school system exists for the welfare of themselves, not the children? It's no accident that this public education fiasco exists in the one-Party Democratic stronghold of DC.

|9.5.07 @ 7:29AM|#

What criteria for performance do you use that's fair to both the calculus teacher in a leafy suburban school and the special ed teacher in a rough urban school?

You have a point nichevo, there may not be one unilateral metric for evaluating teacher performance. All the more reason to abandon the public school monopoly and allow different measurement techniques, as well as different pedagogical styles, to compete with one another. Let the consumers decide which is best.

|9.5.07 @ 9:17AM|#

Or at the very least adopt the successful school choice program that San Francisco has.

The article which tries to imply the schools are successful with statements like this?

"Yes, there is still work to be done but I am very confident that Miraloma will be the next Rooftop or Alvarado." (Rooftop and Alvarado are two previously average schools that are now considered top-notch by parents due to high student achievement.) Greatschools.net had 19 similarly positive reviews for Miraloma."

What a load of fluff: parents generally rate their own kids' school as "good," regardless of what they're really like, and, compared to other CA schools, all three schools mentioned above range from mediocre to pretty damned bad in the API statewide rankings. (Greatschools.net).

Vouchers don't change any educational results but they might be used to cut sosts. Theoretically.

robc|9.5.07 @ 9:26AM|#

Vouchers don't change any educational results but they might be used to cut sosts.

Im not sure how they would cut costs (or even sosts), in thoery, the same amount is being spent either way. But, if a student uses a voucher to go from a crappy public school to attend a good (or even average) private school then educational results would have to increase, right? Im sure some parents would use the voucher to pull their kid out of an average public school and send him to a crappy private school, but that would probably be rare, and everyone has their own means to measure results, so who is to say they havent improved the result they are going for?

|9.5.07 @ 11:24AM|#

I pity the poor slobs stuck in DC...

A kid who wants an education can get an education anywhere, even at home.

DC's real problem is multi-generational poverty, despair, and lethargy. Vouchers might help, but most of those kids are destined to become the next generation of the hopeless with or without vouchers.

The Wine Commonsewer|9.5.07 @ 1:54PM|#

Almost as bad as Locke High School in LAUSD where the NEA teachers have voted en masse to leave LAUSD and the union and sign on with Greendot Charter schools. They've got all the money in the world but the principal says that ain't the problem.

The Wine Commonsewer|9.5.07 @ 2:01PM|#

S/B

Locke High has all the money in the world but the principal says that ain't the problem. LAUSD is the problem.

Vouchers can change educational results and they can cut costs. As soon as kids have a right of exit from the children's prison they've been assigned to, strange things happen. San Francisco city schools is a perfect example and they didn't even use vouchers. All they did is institute open enrollment. BAM! immediate improvements at all grade levels because once the local admin office people realize that if all the kids leave their school cuz it sucks, they don't have a job anymore.

The Wine Commonsewer|9.5.07 @ 2:09PM|#

Mr Le Mur, you are incorrect about San Francisco Schools....

See this 2006 Reason Mag article by Reason's Director of Education

|9.5.07 @ 6:45PM|#

As far as I can tell, the D.C. schools are run exactly as well as every other D.C. municipal agency. You'd have a difficult time finding worse corruption and decay in the Third World.

|9.5.07 @ 6:48PM|#

JorgXMcKie:

"George Tenet fangirl, were you educamated in the DC school district? The article says *budget share*, not dollars."

Nope and yup. But that doesn't prove what you think it proves. In fact, budget share is probably more supportive of my point than net dollars. If teachers were really the dominant force in the system, if the DC schools were truly "run for the benefit of teachers", then one would expect teachers to be receiving a relatively large portion of the total budget share. After all, they would want to use their clout to increase their own pay as much as possible (given that teachers are, of course, lazy and greedy). The fact that they do not do this, that indeed they receive an incredibly low portion of the total budget, indicates that the school district is not being run by teachers and is not being run for the teachers' benefit.