photo credit: 2create

I saw a post on Facebook, and later an email, with a title about how overpaid teachers are. The post went on to show mathematically that teachers are not overpaid by any reasonable measurement. Teachers and their unions would certainly appreciate the logic in their favor but the real value that I found in the post was not simply the numbers presented but the example that the post provides of using numbers to keep the debate uninformed. While it showed very convincingly that teachers are not overpaid (either literally or in relation to the service they provide) it masked the complexity of the issue by ignoring the crucial questions of how much we spend on education (it’s much more than teacher pay), whether we can afford the cost (whether or not the cost is a bargain), and what other alternatives we could explore to address the real issue (which is how we make sure that our children have a decent education available to them).

First let me list a few numbers (and their sources) that I would like to use in illustrating what was unsaid in the other post. I would like to thank Becky Edwards for helping me obtain the current numbers for the state of Utah that I am using. (Becky is currently the Representative for House District 20 in Utah and a member of the House Education Committee.)

• The post compared teaching to babysitting and, using that assumption, concluded that parents should be perfectly happy to pay $20 per day for 6.5 hours of babysitting for each of their school aged children. Using that $20/day figure they calculated that teachers would be making over $100K per year. I don’t expect to use that $100K figure but wanted to include it here to briefly illustrate the conclusion of the original post.
• The post also claimed that the average teacher salary was only $50K per year. I will be using that number because it seems reasonable and convenient but would like to state that I have made no attempt to independently verify its accuracy or its source.
• The state of Utah currently spends $3.34 Billion on elementary education per year.
• The state of Utah currently employs 32,473 elementary school teachers. (As far as I can tell that does not count administrators and other staff.)

It is easy to see that teachers salaries are only a part of what we spend on education. Multiply 32,473 by $50K and we get $1.62 Billion or 48.6% of our education budget. The other 51.4% goes to other education costs. Note that none of this education budget even includes the various book fairs, walk-a-thons, and other fundraisers that schools are perpetually engaging in. If the issue were simply a matter of teachers salaries we could easily pay them more. The fact is that less than half of our education cost is teacher salaries. Whoever originally wrote the document was probably thinking of all the fuss in Wisconsin where the Governor and the Republican members of their legislature are pushing legislation that would take away the collective bargaining rights of teachers for things other than salary – that should give us a clue that the real problem is not teachers with exorbitant salaries but rather unsustainable long-term benefits such as pension and health care costs.

I recently read an article about how dire the fiscal situations of state and local governments are in this regard (of course that is more than teacher salaries or even education) and the obstacles that stand in the way of fixing the structural problems that prevent something as simple as a salary cut or a tax increase from solving the issue:

. . . in most places, state legislators are overmatched by savvy public-employees’ unions and by pension-fund managers wedded to the status quo. Their influence explains why, though 18 states enacted some sort of pension reform in 2010, very few will offer real, long-term relief to taxpayers.

I feel very fortunate that my own State Senator, Dan Liljenquist, had the position and expertise to make sure that Utah is one place where we have enacted reforms that effectively address those structural imbalances. (To learn more about Dan and his efforts to make sure that Utah has a sustainable fiscal future read the article or visit his website.)

I also recently talked to a friend of mine who is a Democrat and a public school employee. I thought it was very telling to hear him bring up the subject of what was happening in Wisconsin and express his hope that the governor and the Republicans there would be able to win this fight and break the teachers union. His perspective was that unions only effectively protect the incompetent educators. He contends that the educators who are good at what they do are hampered by the fact that unions make it nearly impossible to fire ineffective educators or to pay effective educators based on their merit. While he believes, as I do, that there was a time when unions were a necessary tool to ensure that owners of various industries did not exploit their workers the fact is that the unions of today are more often the bullies. The contracts that teachers unions negotiate burden taxpayers with costly benefit packages while taking their dues out of the anything-but-excessive salaries of teachers and then they cry foul when taxpayers suggest that they should not pay part of teachers’ salaries when those teachers are spending their time on union activities rather than classroom activities.

The conversation with my friend illustrated the wide variety of alternatives that need to be considered in order to address the education issue. Simply throwing more money at the issue will not solve it. We need to look at ideas like merit pay, year-round school, reduced class sizes, increased parental involvement, etc. Some of those ideas seem promising to me, others seem neutral or even counterproductive. One idea I have not heard suggested anywhere that sounds very promising to me is grade clustering. Having a teacher teach, for example, three grades would allow for much more continuity in the education of each student. If the teacher still had a class size of thirty they would only have ten new students in one year that they would have to get to know and they would have more flexibility to have students work with older or younger peers based on their shared personal ability-levels. This would also allow parents to work with a single teacher for an extended period of time so that they could collaborate more effectively rather than working with a virtual stranger for the entire school experience of at least their first child. To buy into this we would have to accept the fact that teachers are not interchangeable automatons where there is little overhead involved in switching teachers every single year throughout a student’s academic career.

The $3.34 Billion Utah spends on education represent a substantial part of the roughly $12 Billion state budget – a budget that must also go to pay for so many other services that we collectively expect our government to provide such as higher education and various types of public safety and welfare services. Anyone who says that we should devote more money to education should make sure to offer some examples of where the state should get more revenue or what state services should have their budgets reduced to free up the money they want to give to education. It is also perfectly fair to ask whether there are areas in the $1.72 Billion in education spending that does not go to teacher salaries that is wasted. Do we pay administrators too much or employ too many administrators? Are we using our physical resources effectively?

Regardless of what side of the debate someone is on, it does no good for anyone to hold up the Teachers’ Salary straw man and proceed to beat their opponent in effigy.

When all attempts at progress either backfire or have no discernible effect its time to seek further insight and experience. Such has been the case for us recently as we have found it impossible with only the expertise of ourselves and our families to address the unacceptable behaviors that have been grinding upon the life of one of our children and by extension adding tension and discomfort in the lives of everyone else in the family. Our first visit with the therapist introduced a very hopeful path for us called Parent-Child Interaction Therapy. After the visit I started doing some research to find out what else I could learn about this therapy. What I found was that virtually all the information available was directed at a clinical audience – in other words it was all textbooks for therapists and those studying to become therapists. Besides that, I also learned as I talked with our therapist at the next visit about what I had found, that much of the information that is available is either inaccurate or simply out of date. She said that it seems that those with experience with PCIT have little interest in making information available to a lay audience because the information is most valuable when professional coaching is being given to the parents as they implement the principles of PCIT. While I have no expectation that parents without the help of a trained therapist would be able to get the full benefits of PCIT, I also believe that parents who are hearing about this and wondering if it really is useful for their situation, or perhaps parents like us before we met with our therapist who recognize a problem like ours but have no idea what might finally give them the breakthrough they need, should have more information available that is geared towards them which would provide an overview of the therapy. Because of that I have determined to take notes of our journey through PCIT and write publicly about this little adventure.

Right now we are right at the beginning so, by way of introduction, let me share one already published resource that those who are interested may seek out. When I talked to our therapist about the lack of information she directed me to seek out the book Parenting the Strong-Willed Child. She explained that it was a companion to the clinical book Helping the Noncompliant Child which addresses Oppositional Behavior. While that is not exactly our issue it is somewhat similar and the book is geared towards parents which is better than anything we have been able to find on PCIT.

While I intend to share this in a way that is hopefully useful for anyone who is exploring, considering, or experiencing PCIT, I also want to share it in a personal way, rather than from some sterile, theoretical but parent-targeted perspective. That leaves me trying to figure out exactly where to share details and where to stick to generalities. In the spirit of that balancing act, let me just start by saying that I won’t be sharing the name of our therapist unless at some point I get her permission to do so. For purposes of comparison by those who might be exploring this type of therapy let me say that PCIT is geared towards children between the ages of 2 and 9. We currently have four children in that age range and while we are doing this therapy for a specific child I can already see principles and skills in the therapy that will prove useful in dealing with others of our children as well.

photo credit: sigma.

As if to prove the point I made in my last post about passing out casts and crutches, the Seattle Post Intelligencer this week published an essay from Brad Soliday, a teacher in eastern Washington, where he shares his perspective about how the increasing money bring allocated to education is being misspent because it is focusing on a mistaken solution.

I doubt it is truly coincidental that while real education spending has risen 49% in the last two decades it is dysfunctional or broken families that have seen a corresponding rise in society rather than educational outcomes (which have flat-lined despite the ever rising funding). This should be irrefutable proof that those perpetually sounding the cry that education is underfunded are either misinformed or intentionally deceptive (I’m sure there are some who fall into each of those camps). Education is under-supported due to the disintegration of a solid family foundation in society but money cannot solve that problem.

Mr. Soliday puts into words a disturbing fact that many people would be unwilling to articulate:

Many educational reforms attempted in the last fifteen years are an attempt to recreate or substitute for the structure, attention, discipline, support, love and expectations of a healthy family.

I can’t imagine that there are more than a very few people who truly believe that such an attempt could ever be truly successful.

Perhaps my favorite part of the essay is the prescient statement at the end in which he summarizes:

For forty years educators and politicians have been trying to raise test performance and reduce dropout rates by “fixing” schools. These efforts have largely failed or returned meager improvements. They have failed because they are trying to fix the wrong institution. Schools are not the problem and schools are not the solution. The disintegration of the family is the problem and its restoration is the only solution (to several social issues besides educational achievement).

Schools and teachers can always improve, they can do better, and they can make the difference for tens of thousands of individual students, but they cannot make up for systemic dysfunction in the most important institution in America, the family.
(emphasis added)

Mr. Soliday ends by offering some conclusions about the true way forward in education. Among them he offers this, which sounds very much like something prophets and apostles have been telling the world for fifteen years already:

Curriculum, programs, and even laws should be developed to promote and protect the family, especially the role and responsibility of fatherhood.

In a discussion board for my Using Technology to Enhance Learning class I made a proposal (on March 18th this year) based on teachers having a scarcity of time and the fact that teachers are underpaid partially because they are they are only paid for 9 months out of the year and they have to figure out summer employment if they want to keep working for the other three months.

If all of the preceding premises are true, wouldn’t it be great if teachers could get paid over the summer to take classes on new learning theories and new technologies where the assignments would consist of the teachers developing plans and ideas of how to integrate that new knowledge into their teaching.

Among the many responses I got that really interested me was this one from a teacher in Corning, New York named Micheal Simons:

I taught for two months in New Zealand at the end of my student teaching in 2000…

They operate on a GREAT schedule – I apologize that I can’t remember all of it:

They don’t have a “summer” (agricultural) vacation, first of all. Christmas (during the summer, down there!) vacation is the longest time off from school, I believe, and is approx. 5 weeks or so. Then, they return for 9 weeks, then are off for 3, then on for 9, and so on – YEAR ROUND.

I think that schedule is simply fantastic – a great balance, and it gives teachers 45-day chunks (with no days off, I think) in which to plan units, lessons, etc.

With a schedule like that, then, I can see teachers getting what [David] was suggesting – we’d have 3 week chunks during which we could get more training, go to a lengthy conference, work toward identifying “best practices,” and more!

-Mike

I wonder if anyone else has any thoughts about such an idea now that the class is over.

I rarely just link to things like this, but I have been very excited to discover Mathemagenic where Lilia is interested in exactly what I have begun to pursue in my PhD studies. The difference is that she is way beyond me as far as the work she has done. Her list from November 17, 2004 looks like a very good list of things that will need to be studied in our quest to understand blogs academically. I just don’t want to forget it.

I like what Moon has to say about Social Presence and the disconnect between student appreciation for social presence – high classroom satisfaction – and student performance with social presence – no significant improvement in student performance.

It seems intuitive that better social presence would lead to higher classroom satisfaction and that higher classroom satisfaction should translate into higher student performance. I do not doubt the research on student performance being unconnected to social presence, but as I think about it and how it really is counter-intuitive I am beginning to wonder if that might indicate that we are not measuring the right things as we track student performance.

Anybody in class reading my site will probably read PeiJu’s blog also, but just in case I highly recommend her Explaination of the first claim. I think she has hit the nail right on the head.

Okay, I’ve been thinking more about this than I should have (it woke me up at 4:00 in the morning) and I have a great idea for how to keep good blog dialogs visible – we should publish a journal of blogversations which are academic in nature. I’m not sure how to get this all down in writing, but I’ll try to summarize my thinking here and see what we come up with together.

“Articles” would consist of all the blog posts, comments and trackbacks of an idea that grew into a conversation. Each piece of the conversation would be attributed to the author of that piece and at the bottom of the conversation would be a list of contributing authors – everyone with a trackack into the conversation – with links to their blog pages. All content would be licensed under an appropriate CC license. The editors might have to seek permission sometimes from some potential contributors if they have too restrictive of licenses on their sites. Off the top of my head I can think of two such conversations from Nate, this one and quantum cognition. Obviously there are plenty of others out there, but those were just the first two examples that came to mind right now.

The structure of the journal would be to have an editorial board who would help to monitor and gather conversations as they emerge. We would need to have standards about what constituted a conversation (ex. at least two posts each from at least two authors) and then add those conversations to the journal that met the criteria as well as updating conversations in the journal that have grown since they were included. Besides the articles we might include an editorial piece that is just for the journal not more than once a month that talks about trends that the editors are seing in educational blogging.

The journal needs to be syndicated in blog friendly format (RSS) and non-blogger friendly format (email distribution when new articles or editorials come out) so that non-bloggers can be exposed to the rich conversation in a format they are comfortable with. When new articles are mailed out we can send links to those articles that have been updated since the previous mailing.

I have more ideas about the structure of the database that would support the journal but I’m not sure I have the know how to make the software to power the journal (we might be able to modify WP or something). Beyond that we would need hosting and a domain (EBD.org?) before we could really get under way. Maybe we should write a grant to fund the endeavor. By now my post has become confusingly complex so let me know what you think about the idea and how you would be willing to participate.

This is the type of site that we could advertise .

I enjoyed Rovy’s little rant. I agree that the lack of creativity is not rooted in the ISD process, but rather it is rooted in the lack of a design culture among LPs. We are taught how to develop things and then we follow the ADDIE recipe (or whichever flavor we favor). We have taken all the creativity out of design and turned this into learning science. We lose the artistry so that we have become cooks instead of being chefs.