President (To Win Colorado)
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(D) Kamala Harris
(R) Donald Trump
80%
20%
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(R) V. Archuleta
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2%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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5%
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(D) Jason Crow*
(R) John Fabbricatore
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90%
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30%
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95%
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June 13, 2007 02:26 AM UTC
45 Comments
1) I don’t know if combining districts on a per-county basis is a good idea. Some counties are huge and spread out, while others are so densely populated that they’re about as spread out as the first, if not by miles, then by an effective distance between schools. Then there are the counties that have a large population center with a handful of schools, and small towns with schools further out – naturally the small schools get screwed because the people with the most votes (i.e., for school board) or who pay the most in property taxes care most about the city schools. I’m a proponent of school districts being as big as they need to be, but no bigger. Heck, I’d even venture to say that *smaller* is better, because more people can be more involved in education. (Which I’d argue is the main problem with education – not money, but community participation)
2) The power to hire and fire teachers? You’re going to buy life insurance before the CEA gets wind of such a radical idea, aren’t you? I hope so. 🙂 Seriously, that would probably be the best single reform you could offer. Sure teachers don’t have the job security, but if they suck and aren’t teaching anything, why should they? It kind of defeats the purpose, I think.
3) Vouchers. Yes. There are already de facto voucher programs in the rural areas – if a farmer owns land in multiple districts, he gets to pick which one his kids go to. Why shouldn’t every one get that freedom?
And now, probably the most (marginally) useful part of my reply for your purposes: There was an attempt in Ignacio a while back to institute an education reform program. I don’t remember the specifics (it’s been a while) but there’s a paper on it over at the Independence Institute website. It was about basically instituting the concept of paying teachers what they’re worth. You can read the II’s report on it there.
http://www.independe…
Now all the haters can complain about what a bunch of right-wingers they are. Bring the love.
Best of luck with the project.
I just printed off that bad-boy and I’m going to read it tonight. Thanks.
Interesting point is that Denver county has one school district, but I’m having a hard time getting feedback as to how people feel that it works. My thought is that by having one district, the state can more uniformly distribute money, and the counties can pool their assets, hopefully making local dollars go further. Get more bang for your buck, cut through red tape, and get more money in the class room without spending more. Does that change your mind at all?
Remember, I’m trying to find weaknesses in my argument here, so don’t hold back….
If funds are distributed by county, then either the rural counties will end up with a gold mine, or the more densely-populated counties will get screwed.
Either way, though a solution that concerns itself with cash doesn’t work on the real problem: That the problem with education isn’t a lack of funds. Sure, it’s nice to have the internet and whatever cool new toys you can have in every class room. But if it were the only and best answer, then we’d have the *best* educational system in the world, not the most mediocre.
The key to education is, wait for it, caring about education. When you get students and families and communities involved in schools, you get good education. When as many people show up to a school board meeting regarding the future of a terrible or great teacher as do for the hiring or firing of a coach, you get good education.
I submit that every solution you can come up with that will encourage that sort of behavior will do more than any sort of mill levy plan.
But, once again, I should apologize for not bringing any real material to the argument. Though you can probably find a pretty strong NON-correlation between money and results in education, if you need the research.
“If funds are distributed by county, then either the rural counties will end up with a gold mine, or the more densely-populated counties will get screwed.” What I’m trying to fix is problems like what we have here in E.P. county. D-11 is a huge school district, but most of the properties in the district are not valued as high as other surronding areas, and a lot of the big businesses (that are taxed too) are outside the district. So the biggest district in the county is getting shafted because it can’t get its hands on the money already being generated by the county. By combining the districts, all the money is pooled together in one big pot, and you can allocate the countie’s money to all of the countie’s schools. This would also allow you to get rid of some administrative positions.
Rural counties would get shafted, but that’s where the state would come in and help make up the difference.
You’re right, the problem isn’t the amounts being spent, it’s where it’s being spent. By the time it passes through all the hands the money passes through, there’s not a lot left for in class spending. Which is why I’m trying to get rid of another layer of bureaucracy by combining districts.
I completely agree that getting parents involved is another huge piece that I haven’t hit on. My problem is that I haven’t a clue how to get parents involved. Suggestions in this department would be AWESOME because I’m stumped.
I’m not an expert on your situation in D-11, so this question is probably stupid, but I’ll ask it anyway: What if you broke up D-11, instead of making it bigger? You could cut the top of they bureacracy, and most of the middle, thus making the small pot of money go farther when it comes to the end result.
What are the economic and educational advantages of larger districts? What are the disadvantages? What about the same for smaller districts?
My feeling (and, honestly, it’s just that) on how to get people involved is to have smaller schools and districts. When there are fewer people to do the same amount of work, and when you know all the people involved, it’s harder for parents to get lazy with volunteering and being involved. There’s a greater sense of ownership, and, indeed, a greater real authority in how the school is run. The theory here is that when you have 10 people involved, each person’s vote is 1000% more important than when you have 100 people. And that’s not counting the influence a person can have by knowing and interacting and persuading more frequently and successfully with a smaller number of people.
Beyond the numbers game, though, it’s largely cultural. When you have a culture of a community that’s very interested in education, you have a better school. People can *say* they value education all they want – it even works when they roll over for a tax increase earmarked for it. But when it comes to *doing* something about education, very few are inclined to do so. And there’s very little any program can do in that respect to get people to put their time and money where their mouth is.
Maybe *lowering* taxes (and thus removing the excuse that they’ve already given enough), you encourage more involvement. (Or at least discourage dis-involvement) I know it’s crackpot, but crazier things have happened. Besides, guilt works great for the Catholic Church. 🙂
Cutting the district into smaller portions wouldn’t help with funding, but it might help with involvement. Personally, I think the lack of involvement has more to do with the need of having two working adults per household to make ends meet, but that could be another issue.
One problem about having smaller districts is teacher pay. Each district has its own scale, and since there isn’t a state wide standard, it makes it hard for smaller districts to compete-there was a good article about it in the gazette here in the springs the other day. Smaller districts could work if there was a state standard of pay that the state could help subsidize.
Great points though, keep ’em coming!
Both the Post and the NYT have had op-eds in the last few days, and letters, about public versus private schools and why public school teacher burnout rates are so high. (A huge proportion of teachers, over a third, aren’t still teaching 5 – 10 years later.) I think the main pressures public K-12 teachers face are a) low pay, b) increasingly disparate needs and preparation from students, c) no support from administration, school board in addressing those needs (i.e. if parents come complaining to you that their precious cherub couldn’t possibly be disruptive and inattentive, the admin won’t back you up on a punishment — like that Kansas teacher who failed 20% of her class for plagiarism, then had the failures rescinded by the school board who didn’t want to stand up to the whiny parents).
Right now your proposal addresses the first factor (but I’m not sure by how much; with student debt the way it is, teacher salaries would have to be substantially increased to make up for less job security), but I think the latter two factors are just as, if not more, important. (I’m also not sure how solvable they are.) Private schools will always be able to reject the harder to teach kids (unless they’re wealthy!), so public schools really need significantly more resources to deal with this.
You might also want to read Jonathan Kozol’s books; specifically *Savage Inequalities* and *American Apartheid*. He makes a pretty compelling case that the biggest problem facing public K-12 education is the gap between the kind of education wealthy public school kids get, and the one lower-income students get. He’d be a good devil’s advocate for you.
I’ll have to take a look at those letters. How long is the book? If I have time to read it….
My thoughts on teacher pay is that it would need to be enough of an increase to a)pay teachers enough to attract qualified applicants and b)make the fact that principles would have more power and equal trade off. Having said that, my teacher at the college thinks that the entry level pay is good, but that the burnout occurs after 5 years when they still aren’t making that much more than they were.
Likewise, a spinless administration is a large part of the problem too, and likewise large pay checks alone wouldn’t make up for a district that has poor administration.
Do you think vouchers would help equalize the desparity between the education that the rich and poor receive?
They’re around 400 pp each, but pretty punchily written — I think they’re fast reads. But if you only have time for one, I’d go with Savage Inequalities, even though it’s older (80s) — but he compares per-pupil spending and tax rates in schools in the same city in 5 or 6 cities around the nation, and shows how huge the disparity is (2 to 1 per-pupil spending; often property tax rates are actually higher in the poor districts, but the net amount is still lower). And some of the details (i.e. sewage running in halls, 20 year old textbooks, etc.), are pretty grim. My experience as a student (attended good HS, did debate around the city in lots of poor schools), and volunteer work since with public schools, absolutely bears this out.
I’m currently skeptical of voucher programs for two reasons. First, the ones I’ve seen don’t offer enough of a voucher actually to pay for much tuition at a private school, so it really wouldn’t help most low-income families. (Unless they go someplace sketchy like Hope Online, which doesn’t help.) And second, since private schools can reject whomever they want for whatever reason they want, there would always be a pretty big disparity of access — wealthy students who could pay full freight (and maybe make donations to the school’s fund) could get accepted lots of places no matter what their liabilities; poorer students would have many fewer options. But philosophically, I’m opposed to voucher programs because I just believe in the Jeffersonian arguments for public education (education for citizenship), and money that goes to vouchers drains away from public schools that have some pretty dire needs.
I figured your idea with pay was to try to get a better pool of teachers, and to retain them. And I agree that’s an important goal; I would like to see generally better qualified teachers in K-12. Where I disagree with your prof is on burnout. Sure, I think low pay nags at teachers (and I’m not a K-12 teacher, for the record), especially as they continue in their careers. But I think it’s the panoply of all the stressors that make the low pay infuriating. My sense (I work in higher ed, and have done volunteer work with some DPS students and teachers) is that folks who go into teaching generally go into it for the right reasons — they want to work with students (they had a powerful teacher in school and want to pass that along). What drives them out are the obstacles to doing that work — endlessly changing state and federal initiatives that require them to constantly assess and reassess what they’re doing, how and when (and what they ought to be teaching), along with the stuff from the earlier post. My anecdotal sense is that public school teachers could tolerate the lower pay if it came with some respect, *some* curricular freedom, and some ability to enforce discipline in the classroom. But without those three things, no dice.
And for me the big and getting bigger issue is ADA. Increasing numbers of students require pretty expensive accommodations for education. I absolutely support that for physical disabilities, but I’m skeptical of some of the learning disabilities (I think they’re overdiagnosed, and underdefined), as well as the expense of the accommodations (notetakers, extended time on tests [i.e. separate testing sites]). And lots of ADD adolescents happen to have pretty crappy attention spans (duh), so they’re pretty disruptive in class. Everything I’ve seen indicates that the numbers of students being diagnosed with learning disabilities will only increase. Private schools will always be able to sidestep those students entirely (unless, as I said earlier, the parents have tons of money to throw at the school). It’s a huge handicap for public schools that will require a big commitment of public resources, which I don’t see coming. So my fear is that a voucher program would exacerbate the problem by taking money away from public schools that they’re going to need to deal with this increasing population.
Well, that was a post of Sieverdingesque proportions (if hopefully less invective). Sorry, may be more than you asked for. Good luck with the project.
I like that phrase. You brought up some great points about vouchers, and I probably won’t have time to read the book before the project is due. I’ll probably just crank it out and read the book later. Thanks again
I think you made some great observations about teacher burnout. I think higher pay would help and be a good first step but wouldn’t in and of itself solve the burnout problem.
What kind of stuff do you do in higher ed?
that increased pay would be a huge first step towards addressing teacher burnout. My only concern is that ultimately if teaching isn’t a competitive profession (not just well-paid but respected and intellectually inviting), we’d end up with fewer people even applying for teaching jobs, let alone sticking with them. (I’m struck that teacher burnout is even higher than lawyer burnout, where salaries are high [though less so when you factor in law school loans], but they suffer from the same respect, intellectual variety, integrity issues.)
And I’m a professor. Not burned out!
And I’m not surprised that you wouldn’t have time to read the books, but my memory is Savage Inequalities has some charts about spending disparities; you may want to flip through for them. (I remember student schedules; in fact I’m on them now with scholarly writing.)
Thanks for the chat.
Glad to hear that you’re not burned out! I’ll see if I can find the book.
I think that teaching is still a highly regarded profession (certainly more regarded than lawyers), but they still get A LOT of crap.
Your insights have been invaluable. I’ll let y’all know how it goes!
…had to do mostly with pay inequity. A system that rewards longevity instead of success will always have a hard time holding innovative, creative, smart people. And a system that doesn’t attract and keep the majority of the best will be a system that invites disdain. (Please don’t tell me about the exceptional teachers–I know they exist and I honor their service. But they’re exceptions for a reason.)
hire and fire teachers is that the incentives the guide principles decisions are more about convenience than quality. This is a classic problem of public sector enterprises in general, and one just as salient in education as in other un-market-disciplined bureaucracies. It would only work if principles were facing career suicide for failing to keep the highest quality human capital, and, currently, the reality is that they face career suicide for keeping high quality human capital in many instances.
Elaborate on your points here? I think I follow you for the most part, and I am interested in seeing how principles may face career suicide for retaining high quality human capital. Is it a system thing, or a budget problem, or neither?
You may want to look into what the P20 Education Council will be recommending over the summer, since many of your same interests are being discussed in all levels of government. http://www.colorado….
One quick resource:
Colorado Education Colorado
http://www.greateduc…
Also, interview (if you have time) state board of education members, district board members, teachers and principals. While it may not representative of the entire state, you may gain some personal information from all levels that you can relate back to how your proposed changes would effect them and their pupils.
Seriously. I work with inner-city DPS kids and it’s brutal knowing that a majority of them are not going to do anything with their lives. It’s just brutal. Have you ever looked at the Arrupe School?
Unions are a huge problem. I haven’t heard about Arrupe School, mind giving me the low-down?
I asked Michael Bennett last summer how many teachers he’s fired in two years. I think he told me that he had fired one. Out of 4000? That’s a problem. But not the biggest problem. Teachers don’t dare discipline students in any way, and children in their classes that are allowed to get away with non-assimilation drag the whole class down. Most of the teachers I know are very good at what they do, and heroes for trying.
Here was a recent article on Arrupe. 47 out of 47 seniors graduated, and the kids at the school are targeted as low income, minority students. Exactly the kids that aren’t graduating from DPS. How could this have happened?
Arrupe is exactly the kind of school that would be a great voucher possibility. Jesuit Education, but for crying out loud, a 100% graduation rate, and 46 of the 47 are going to college next year as well.
Of course, according to the Chairman of the State Education Committee if you think this is a good thing, you have a special place in hell reserved for you.
I haven’t been so angry at someone in years as I was when I heard about Merrifield’s comments. He’s directly contributing to this mass of uneducated, angry, unemployable youth that didn’t have to be that way just by his unbelievable myopia by protecting the Union’s power at the expense of these children. Our own elected reps are so out of touch with the reality, and they seem to be proud of it. It’s offensive.
Question for you, what part of the state are you in? I hear that there may be a town hall meeting in EPC this summer about education alternatives…
they’re far from the major problem. You have to think about this one in whole-system terms. First off, there’s really no way, politically, to raise teachers’ salaries substantially, and there’s no way, economically, to attract many of the best and the brightest with current salaries. People who go into teaching tend, mostly, to be people who didn’t feel they could make it in any other profession, or people who wanted a secure job with lots of vacations that wouldn’t impose too much pressure on them. Most great teachers are teachers because their passion for the job outweighs the costs in lost lifetime earning potential. Unions hardly affect them at all, one way or the other (except that unions, by removing quality as a relevant criterion, make excellent teachers no more valued than lousy ones).
But to argue that the problem with unions is that they protect lousy teachers misses an important point: Given the structure of things, the supply of great teachers will remain stagnant (and abysmally low), so that any lousy teacher removed for incompetence is likely to be replaced with another lousy teacher! Actually, the main function of unions is negotiating new contracts, and without the pressure they impose, teacher salaries would be even lower, and more than a few of those excellent teachers would be dissuaded after all. So teachers’ unions, in spite of their obnoxious qualities, do some substantial good, as well as some hard. It’s not an easy calculation determining which they do more of.
Obviously, their role of opposing experimentation and innovation weighs in on the negative side, but that role is a true representation of the subculture of education. How do we, as a society, maintain a high quality of public education, if we, as a society, flaunt our disregard for the opinion of the educational community in regards to education? Frankly, I think the educational community has its head up its ass, but that doesn’t change the fact that we will attract even fewer great teachers (and chase out many that we already have) if we marginalize them even more than we already have.
In sum, it’s a very, very complicated set of interwoven dynamics in play here. Try not to reduce it to anything too tidy.
I cant find your original question as to what the other avatars are, but the answers are: Rama and Krishna.
Krishna (7) and Buddha (8). I took ninth since it hadn’t yet been taken! But, if I screwed up, being the Buddha isn’t so bad….
I looked on wikipedia. Here’s the link: http://en.wikipedia….
There were ten avatars, not eight, and you were right, Rama was 7 and Krishna was eight (Buddha being ninth). I guess it’s too late to change my name to “the 11th avatar of vishnu!”
Anyway, your round-trip ticket to nirvana is in the mail. I’m obviously not going to be going any time soon….
As much as that is appreciated I dont know how good it is going to feel to return to my present state after reaching total enlightenment.
It’s due to a change in policy: When people get to stay, productivity goes down (material wealth being less coveted). It’s bad for the economy. Sorry.
Well, its better to have reached total enlightenment and returned than never to have reached to enlightenment at all…thats totally cheesy.
That is the same reason they kicked me out of Shangri-La.
recognize Buddha as the Ninth Avatar, and I believe that only the very old-school Mahayana Buddhists really adhere to that. (I could be wrong about Mahayana Buddhism – it’s been 15 years since I took that Eastern Religions class in college.) It’s kind of one of the things that makes Buddhism a different religion altogether from Hinduism rather than one of Hinduism’s sects.
wasn’t failing me completely!
I was reading too much into your post. You mean that Hindus don’t recognize the Buddha as an avatar at all? As I recall (and we’ve already seen what that’s worth), his recognition as an avatar was particular to Hinduism, *not* Buddhism, as a way of absorbing Buddhism into Hinduism in India itself.
I’m unaware of any Hindus who believe the Buddha, who was a real man, was an avatar like the mythic Rama and Krishna; there may be some sects that do but it would seem to me that such a belief would be one of the defining distinctions between Buddhism and Hinduism.
and get back to the other with the straight poop.
“Not it!”
If my old copy of Huston Smith’s World’s Religions ever turns up I may look it up… Don’t hold your breath. 🙂
That teachers unions do something that to me, strikes me as odd when compared to other unions. They meddle (to me anyway) a lot in the product being produced. The auto industry unions doesn’t tell Ford how to make their cars. Why do the education unions have so much power to stop reforms? I don’t want to over-generalize, but unions have done a lot to oppose reform, and I don’t see that changing. If they want to negotiate pay and such, fine. But what business do they have dictating what should or shouldn’t be done in the classroom?
Because they represent the teachers who teach in the classrooms. If teachers lose the ability to influence what happens in the classrooms, they are less satisfied in their job (which is why unions meddle). If they are less satisfied in their job, they leave, and dispropotionately the best leave (since they can make more money elsewhere in any case). Comparing this public sector job which pays a salary that attracts a lot of sub-par teachers, with private sector jobs in which salaries are largely determined by the supply and demand of the labor market, doesn’t work: Disgruntled excellent auto workers aren’t in jobs which are paying them a fraction of what they could earn on the open market doing something else. That is a crucial variable, that can never be ignored. Any policy, no matter how rational by all other measures, that diminishes teacher satisfaction, will impose grave costs on the overall quality of teachers remaining in the available pool. Either we have to institute policies which allow teachers, by virtue of excellence, to earn 2 or 3 times what they currently earn, or we have to coddle them. But policies that both continue to stiff them *and* make the job less pleasant will inevitably chase away many of the best teachers we currently have, or might have in the future.
And nicely said. I still disagree, mostly because I don’t think that teacher’s unions can make teachers less disgruntled by making the classroom experience better. They hold up reform, which could improve the quality of the education, and I think burnout occurs because of pay and the lack of enforcement by the administration (since you can’t punish disruptive students….). While I respect your view, I think that for the most part, unions are part of the problem, not the solution.
Education is a political football, at all levels. Administrators must be sensitive to parents and the populace in general, and, as in many things, the highly vocal fanatic fringes carry disproportionate sway. The highly vocal fanatic fringes in America tend to be anti-intellectual, and so excellent teachers, who are often intellectuals, eventually say or do something to offend these groups. As such, they (the excellent teachers) tend to be a political liability in the long run. Much prefered are less-intellectual teachers who know how to perpetuate the status quo without rocking any boats. That’s a big part of why American education is so sub-par. To put it simply, the best teachers are systematically weeded out (not completely, since there are some who can balance their excellence with complete inoccuousness, but they are a minority of the best teachers who enter the profession).
I see what you’re saying. What’s the balance between getting good teachers and backing them up, and being able to fire them when the seriously mess up? Just thinking in type here….
decentralized process. Every teacher should be subject to removal due to incompetence or immoral conduct, but should always be granted a very public hearing on the matter, and assigned counsel. If they truly are incompetent, or have acted immorally, the burden of proof would simply be “a preponderance of the evidence,” not “beyond a reasonable doubt.” We would thus be able to remove a good many incompetent teachers, and protect a good many excellent ones who are currently completely vulnerable (particularly in their first years, without tenure).
the funding ideas you have for the school districts.
You mentioned above that the counties would be administering the funds going to the schools. Is that correct? If I understood you correctly, you’re thinking one school district for each county and the funding would flow through the counties, not the school districts themselves.
Tell me more about what you’re thinking.
One of the ways that school districts are funded are through mill levys (levies?)on properties. Businesses end up paying a nice chunk, so a district that has lots of businesses or higher property values get more money. Likewise, a district lacking in businesses or high property values lacks some resources. My prime examples are here in El Paso county….
So my thought is that if you combine districts into one per county, the disticts can better pool the resources it’s already generating throughout a county instead of disproportionately spreading the resources out. Then the state could administer funds at a larger level, cutting the amount of times money passes through the state government’s hands, and administrative costs can be saved.
This would allow the bigger and more well off counties to be less dependant on the state, and allow the state to shift funds to less well off counties.