Betsy DeVos statement on historically black colleges and universities

Parents Forum
201

@fretfulmother , I think you missed the point entirely. The independent schools I mention are no different in their admission process than many public schools of choice/ magnet schools. Kids with major behavior issues are sent to a remedial high school in our public district. The public schools of choice/magnet HS are oversubscribed by 3x. Kids who do not fit in there, after admission, go back to regular public HS. The public magnet school also does not have a pool or football team - kids who want to participate play on the regular HS teams.

As far as parent involvement goes, it is not surprising that parents who are paying $25K in excess of their public school education taxes are going to value their child’s education a lot. You could also say the same for parents who enroll their children in schools of choice/magnet public schools which are often further away, have inconvenient transportation options, etc.

The private HS teachers know exactly what their duties are, and are hired for multiple skill sets (e.g. tennis coach and math teacher). They do not have uncompensated time. It is union rules in public system which drive costs up and reduce quality- like rules mandating only certain duties, no flexibility, near lifetime job security, etc. For example, in our local public elementary school, kids are unsupervised before school starts - doors are locked until 10 min before start time. How hard would it be to have teachers supervise kids before school starts?

It will take some clear thinking to improve educational outcomes, and part of that is prioritizing spending to get maximum value. I merely pointed out that our private, independent schools make choices - like smaller class sizes- which produce better outcomes then the public system at the same cost. By the same logic fully funded vouchers would extend that opportunity to more families.

The socialist rhetoric, like “drain funding and send it to billionaires”, does not make any sense in this context. That is exactly what common core does, vouchers actually localize control down to the parental level.

202

@TooOld4School

What about students with documented physical or mental/learning disabilities which impact their ability to learn without reasonable educational accommodations under the ADA? Private schools can and do exclude such students in practice whether it’s outright rejection or by strongly encouraging the parents to return such a student to their local public school.

Though I attended a selective public magnet right before/during the period when the ADA became implemented at the Federal level, my selective public magnet did provide such accommodations for students with documented disabilities.

While some jerky teachers like one with whom I had a personality conflict as a HS freshman/sophomore tried to refuse and summarily, flunk one older classmate with a documented disability which merited extra test time right before I started there, the DOE/courts basically ordered himto cease his violation of the state/DOE rules and provide the accommodations the older classmate was entitled to under those rules.

Incidentally, that account from several older classmates and later, classmate with the documented disability himself in question is another reason among others why I still regard that teacher with much contempt.

203

The comparison between private and public school results does need to use comparable groups of students to produce useful information. In addition to parental SES and education level and prior student achievement before entering the schools being compared, a factor that needs to be controlled is whether the student is a “choice” student or a “default” student.

Private school students are all “choice” students, meaning that the student and/or parents actively chose to send the student to the private school. Public school students include a mix of “choice” students and “default” students, where the latter students and their parents may not care as much about education as the former, who are more comparable to private school students in this respect.

“Choice” students in public schools would be:

  • Those who chose to enroll in a different school or special program other than their default public school.
  • Those who applied to or would have chosen a different school or special program, but were unable to attend (not admitted, could not make commuting work, could not pay tuition if different school is private).
  • Those who actively chose to stay (or would have chosen to stay) in their default public school even if they had other possible choices. This group can be hard to distinguish between those who passively enroll in the default public school. It could include students whose parents actively chose residence location to get into a particular public school.

“Default” students in public schools would be:

  • Those who passively enroll in the default public school with no desire to consider alternative public or private schools.
  • Those assigned to continuation or reform schools, or those who have been expelled from other schools.

It is entirely possible that private schools could perform better compared to public schools when only “choice” students are included – or the other way around. Of course, individual private and public schools could be high and low performers, or suitability for specific students.

204

@TooOld4School - we will agree to disagree, as I believe all of my points still stand.

To say that “unions drive up costs” and to claim that teachers don’t do extra work, is to say that you would rather teachers earned less or did even more work for the money that they do earn. This is certainly at odds with my opinion, and at odds with comparisons of teacher pay to pay in comparably educated alternative professions.

I don’t know anything about your elementary school and its drop-off policies, but there needs to be some limit; when do you expect your neighborhood teacher-slaves to show up to babysit your children? Twenty minutes before school? An hour before school? When you see the Starbucks person setting up machines but the doors are still locked, are you a person who bangs on the door to get special early service just because you showed up?

In my district, we do all kinds of extra work, but it is voluntary and not forced on us: writing college recommendations; individual meetings with children about all kinds of academic and life issues that come up; chaperoning events/dances/SATs… I’m darn pleased to be talented and lucky enough to have a school hire me without having to do two jobs (“tennis coach and math teacher”) for my one salary. And I’m savvy enough to appreciate the labor movement having paved the way for this and frankly for a lot of labor benefits that we all enjoy, such as weekends.

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They do drive up costs. While salaries may be comparable to the private sector, the benefit plans including health care and retirement are well above what the private sector. Coupled with a nine month work year and tenure, union teachers are in a much better situation than most private employees.

The you read stories like this when NYC has to pay $29 million a year to teachers they cannot fire nor can they allow to teach. Think of the children that could be helped in NYC for $29 million a year!

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/city-spend-29m-paying-educators-fire-article-1.1477027

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Actually, most teacher friends work longer than 9 months due to mandatory workshops during part/most of the summer months and in the early years, continuing ed requirements.

It also excludes the fact continue to work off-the-clock after school/weekends in grading voluminous homework/exams which IMO is far worse than any private sector job I’ve worked in…including ones where I was on call or worked up to 90+ hours/week…because I am only dealing with ostensible adults, not minors and their parents.

207

“They do drive up costs. While salaries may be comparable to the private sector, the benefit plans including health care and retirement are well above what the private sector. Coupled with a nine month work year and tenure, union teachers are in a much better situation than most private employees.”

@Zinhead
Salaries are much lower than comparably-educated positions in the private sector.

Healthcare: teacher plans are now generally bundled into plans very like other municipal employees but with higher employee costs (including unfortunately in MA - the GIC plan) - judging from my own experience with talking to spouse, friends, my own previous other job offers, etc. - no one is paying much for teacher healthcare, and certainly not what would be offered in most of the private sector for similar-size employers

Retirement: I believe I already explained that teacher pensions in MA are fully funded by teacher contributions, i.e. the “cost” to anyone else is ZERO.

9-months: As @cobrat said, and I’m sure you actually do know this, most teachers have to take on another summer job and also work well beyond “scheduled” time to finish grading, professional continuing ed, etc. But even if you look at teacher salaries as only per 0.75 of a year, they’re still lower than what many could make in comparably-educated positions.

Tenure: Explained above in previous posts.

However - I don’t dispute that unionized employees “are in a much better situation than most private employees” (just not generally by pure dollars of measure). My suggestion to fix this is to encourage more labor unions in this country as we had, as I previously pointed out, during a time when blue collar workers could honorably support a family.

So do “unions drive up costs” - ?? Not really. A sensible way to understand this is that unionized employees are empowered to get a more appropriate compensation for their labor. Thus the employer has to pay more of the actual cost (probably still not all of their actual cost, viz. externalities for pollution etc.) of running a business.

If you rewrote that as “unions prevent unscrupulous employers from treating employees like cr*p, so their profits end up being lower” - then sure, I agree. :slight_smile:

208

When I was a teacher, I was paid only for nine months’ work. I had the option to have it spread out over 12 months if I wanted, but I was not paid for the months I was not working. I had to work summers as a temp or in a restaurant to cover my bills. I rarely had a day where I wasn’t bringing work home. Developing lesson plans took a lot of time outside class, since I was a new teacher. That got a little less time consuming as I gained experience, but unless one is really stagnant, lesson plans done on off time remain a requirement. My state is non union fwiw.

I had a very modest lifestyle, but it was hard to make it. I didn’t get into cc debt, but I saved very little and had a really really small emergency fund. I got out of it after only three years. Kudos to those who stick it out.

209

@fretfulmother , I am glad you have a good personal situation.

Unionized teachers are paid above market rates. That is great for the teacher, but not so good for the public. That is indisputable and the reasons are easy to see - collusion between politicians approving teacher contracts and union contributions to politicians. (In the private sector the health of the employer provides the check on union wages.) So saying that teachers are paid less than their similarly educated peers is just wrong. What’s even worse for the members is that high dues are taken directly from the teachers to support politicians and policies that many don’t agree with. It is not surprising that many unionized teachers in RTW states are leaving their union. Those teachers don’t see the value in the union either.

Either way, teachers should be paid at market rates.That works pretty well for the private sector and discourages oversupply, and rewards those who are better. It doesn’t matter what ‘similarly educated’ wages are, that is subject to lots of manipulation, and wages vary a lot by subject and geographic areas. In the US most teachers come from the bottom 50% of college graduates, which makes the wage differential even more astonishing.

210

A large part of that is due to the fact teachers are among the lowest paid professionals given educational requirements which combined with the rank disrespect I’ve seen parents/larger US society give K-12 teachers was one key factor in why most of my public magnet HS classmates or those who graduated in the top 50% or higher from undergrad…especially the elite/respectable colleges overwhelmingly opt for more lucrative and/or respectable careers…and with far less job-related stress on top of it.

On the flipside, in nations with higher performing K-12 systems/students, the teaching profession is higher paying and confers a much higher degree of respect from society on par with/greater than medical doctors, engineers, university Profs, corporate execs, computer programmers/IT, etc.

Correspondingly, teacher education programs in those societies are in such demand that students must be among the top academic achievers. For instance, at least top third to even start Ed School to be a public teacher/education administrator in Singapore. Same is the case in many foreign countries including ROC(Taiwan)*.

Also, teachers in those societies aren’t blamed by parents or larger society for classroom disciplinary issues** or shudder student/parental pushing for more lenient grading or other forms of special treatment.

  • The National Taiwan Normal University which was started and continues to be focused on training future educators has been one of Taiwan's most elite colleges for several decades. In my parents' HS/college years, it was #2 behind NTU and was already a distant pipe dream for most university applicants like my mother and an uncle who were rejected outright.

** Any lapses in student discipline is considered the fault of the students and to an extent, their parents.

One manifestation of this is Japanese public school teachers do have the right to refuse to teach a lesson for the day if the students or even one student’s behavior is disruptive and it’s held against the students. For them to remedy this, the students are expected to apologize to the teacher for the disruptive behavior and agree to prevent a repeat of the disruption in writing…and be held with their parents to that effective contract by self-policing.

In Taiwan middle/high schools in my parents’ and same-generationed friends/relatives, school/classroom disciplinary matters are delegated to officials in change of civil defense training in middle schools or military officers/NCOs responsible for preparing high school/vocational school students for civil defense/mandatory period of military service after graduation.

211

Teaching is relatively low pay, but some of this is ridiculous.

Few teachers work 90+ hour weeks, even if you include time grading papers, developing lesson plans, and managing an EC.

If you hate the job because you can’t stand working with children, then just about any other profession would be better for you.

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@roethlisburger

It’s not about not being able to stand working with children.

It’s more that there’s a far greater responsibility incurred from having minors as students along with extra work such as being responsible for classroom disciplinary issues or being put in no win situations because of a few overly entitled parents like the ones I’ve witnessed** who were unreasonably demanding and snobbed on the teachers in my middle/high school because they felt “superior” for being employed as senior corporate execs/ibankers/finance folks with elite MBAs, engineers, etc.

  • During my stints volunteering for parent-teacher nights as a translator in junior high/high school. When comparing notes, all the fellow student volunteers cited this as one major reason why they immediately dismissed teaching from serious consideration as a career....especially those in the estimated top third of the class**.

** The portion of my public magnet HS graduating class admitted to at least one Ivy/peer elite college

213

In regard to some of the comments about teacher pay: pensions are the budget killers. The average Illinois teacher retiring with ~35 years of service receives total pension benefits of ~$75,000 per year. In the private sector, trying to plan on a retirement income of $75,000 at a standard withdrawal rate of 4% would require savings of $1,875,000. That is not a shabby benefit tacked on to teacher salary and massively more money than most people save. The unfortunate thing for the teacher (or any pensioner) is that it leaves them with nothing to pass on to potential heirs and a career of work vanishes.

214

@WISdad23 , Unfortunately, it’s pretty easy for politicians to promise benefits whose costs are born by future taxpayers. In the case of states like Illinois and California it’s probably going to cause state insolvency.

Most universities use a defined contribution system ; for instance my wife’s uni contributes an amazingly generous 10% of salary while the employee contributes 5%. Thee individual owns it free and clear except for payment of state and federal taxes when withdrawn. That’s the reason academics tend to have pretty comfortable retirements, while not burdening the taxpayers as much.

215

Private companies got into similar trouble with defined benefit pensions (promising more pension than they funded, leading to huge losses later on their underfunded pensions), which is presumably why most have shifted to defined contribution pensions (e.g. 401(k) plans).

216

@WISdad23 @TooOld4School - You are misinformed about Illinois, ironically completely reversed. I know this from my own family members; the pensions breaking the system are professor pensions from public colleges/universities there (!) - not the K-12 teachers.

As for “The unfortunate thing for the teacher (or any pensioner) is that it leaves them with nothing to pass on to potential heirs and a career of work vanishes” - this is breathtakingly strange to say. Do you seriously imagine, after stating yourself, “In the private sector…[the equivalent pension would be] massively more money than most people [can] save” - that an employee attempting to save for her own retirement would have more to “pass on” to heirs? Also, how does a career vanish - I hope my impact is a heck of a lot more than financial.

It sounds like “don’t spend on iPhones” “let them eat cake” - a bizarre reading of what happens to poor and middle-income people financially in this country. Seriously? Don’t provide a pension because then they won’t have savings for their heirs??
…
As for the previous accusation that I used “socialist rhetoric” when I referred to billionaires diverting public money, I take issue with this accusation. First of all, I’m not sure why the statement would be socialist. In case some think my words are, nonetheless, meaningless rhetoric, let me explain the details:

When a charter school gets its funding, it attempts to spend e.g. $12K per kid instead of e.g. $18K per kid. (By the way, I am not a person who says “steals money from public schools,” as I do think that a case can be made to redirect a portion of one’s own taxes to a school of one’s choice - not the entire amount, as we all must pay to have the free public schools available in our society.

An ideal charter school, you might be imagining, is a group of highly-involved families and community members, who try to revise the school day, or add minutes of History or hire fantastic new young teachers who have a lot of energy, without worrying about a piece of paper from a certain college. The hope is that everyone in the game is really pushing for children’s success.

However, what actually happens is that the charter starts with less money per child. They are therefore unable to hire teachers who have as much training or experience, because excellent employees won’t work under those conditions. (As an aside, I know that union benefits are valuable - that’s why I was OK with giving up more $$$ in STEM private employment, in addition to my skill/passion at my craft.)

Let’s say you still have energetic, if untrained, teachers. Then they have to figure out how to meet certain requirements, which usually include proficient/advanced standardized test scores. More and more children are crowded per classroom, to keep within budget, so teaching methods and discipline are generally much less flexible than in other private or public schools.

In most charter schools, kids with special needs are overtly or covertly counseled out. Additionally, in many charter schools, they “move away from” traditional grade levels, which a charter student explained to me means that while she’s been in high school for three years, she doesn’t count as a “sophomore” yet - until she passes her standardized state test. This is a way to game the numbers, but not great for children. (This student was working part-time at a clothing store and was talking about her school experience when I was shopping; it was very interesting and a random encounter.)

Then among other ways of teaching to the test, the charter schools are coerced to purchase software, books, test-prep materials, and other items from the investing companies. Even in “non-profit” charter schools, this is a direct funneling of state money to the billionaire investors. In “for-profit” schools, they get an additional cut. Didn’t any of you wonder why these investors suddenly care about the education of poor children in this country?

So public money, which was previously going to expenditures that yes, included teacher benefits that help to keep [highly-educated] middle class workers in the middle class - is now going directly to for-profit corporations. Hence my statement that Prop-2 was because Walmart smelled a big pile of money and moved in to take it (unsuccessfully).

Oh, and ETA - I forgot to mention that sometimes money/vouchers can be funneled to religious organizations, in what seems to me, a direct Establishment Clause violation. I went back and read that article about St. Louis’s Catholic schools, and to my shock, it isn’t just that students are coerced to participate in religious ceremonies (the accommodation for non-Catholics is a Christian blessing and the request to cross arms over their chest to refuse Communion) - but that the reasoning behind opening Catholic schools widely is overtly a method of overt outreach/conversion!

Betsy DeVos has allied her self shamelessly with these folks.

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@fretfulmother, I disagree with your assertion about charters being somehow specifically coerced to buy test prep materials et all. I think you would have to acknowledge that public/private/charter/magnet, there is a huge sum of money being spent on software/textbooks/test prep material. That is a massive piece of education funding/waste that I haven’t heard anyone in this or the previous adminstration address. And much of that is as “dirty” as the NEA/AFT funnelling campaign contributions to legislatures in order to fight “anti union” reform bills. The testing companies spend enormous sums with state Boards of Ed (and I assume the Feds) trying to get this or that flavor of the month theory approved, often to the tune of several millions of dollars in sales of their respective products. I am just not sure how that is different depending on whether a particular state has vouchers or whatever.

And not to sound condescending, but it is refreshing to see someone who is an educator acknowledge that a draw to teaching is the benefits available. I spent a long time in the private sector and now work in the public. My benefits are comparable to my wife’s. They are light years ahead of what is available in the private sector. That’s a huge thing.

I also want to say that it is tiring to hear all the arguments about how teachers work after school, and have to take classes in the summer. I get it, most of us do. My wife is a teacher, my mother was a teacher, my uncle, mother in law, step mother, etc. People who say teachers work only 8-3 are nuts. But teacher’s don’t often pull 60 hour weeks either. And at the end of the day, no one takes ten weeks of continuing education classes in the summer. Even after you account for summer vaction, teachers get generally two weeks at christmas, a week or so in the spring and at least another ten days off during the school year. Does it suck that this vacation is fixed in a way that private vacations generally are not? Sure. But no one gets the vacation time teachers do. That’s just a fact, and is something that should be considered when discussing compensation.

Do teachers in general make less in salary then less “comparably educated” professionsals? Maybe, particularly at the lower rungs of the salary table. I also think this depends a lot on the region of the country, the particular school district and the type of education we are talking about. My wife, as an example, has a BA and two masters. But her degrees are in things that are suited almost exclusively to education. I don’t know what “comparably educated” means in that context. Either way, her salary by itself would put a family of four solidly in the middle class. That’s not horrible. I think a lot of times people look at degrees as fungible and say well, a teacher with two masters isn’t making as much as an accountant at an accounting firm with an MBA, or an actuary at an insurance company with a BS/MS in math. And then they seems to ignore the fact that the teacher probably is making a ton more than the person with a BA/MA in gender studies (I am comparing my wife and sister here, btw). Again, it is a much more complicated picture than people are willing to admit, on both sides.

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Just quickly during lunch:

  1. Yes, Prometric and the others are raking it in with testing, but I'd compare public to charter in that regard as the fox bothering the hen-house on occasion, vs. running the thing! Also, text-books are supplied by a wide range of sources in traditional public schools. (At my school, we as a science department have almost total freedom when it's time for a replacement text.)
  2. Comparable education/$$ - OK, just comparing it within my own self - my only two jobs aside from teaching were as an engineer and a short time of lab research previously.

I left my engineering job, taking a 50% (50% !!) pay cut to start teaching in private school, and the benefits had also been much better in the engineering job. At the time, with no family to support, I think I might have done it even without fringe benefits of any kind, just because being in the classroom and talking to teenagers about STEM etc. made me so happy.

However, when it was time to think about supporting a family and the next career step - either getting a real Ed credential to go to a public school, or go back to some kind of STEM private sector job - there’s no question that the unionized benefits allowed me to follow my passion, because the benefits made up for the real $$ discrepancy when I would have the stable family-friendly job.

Also no question that I couldn’t have supported my family in any real way, had I stayed in private school or gone to charter school. (The charter school told me, with my offer, “it’s not much, but you said you’d like the ability to walk to work so that counts for something, too”.) At any rate, I hadn’t been sure of where I wanted to go, so I applied for eight jobs, of which four were private, three public, and one charter. I got seven offers, and I think I chose the best match for me, since it’s well over a decade and I’ve rarely had a bad day at work. :slight_smile:
…

As a side note, I don’t think teachers are overpaid relative to the “market” - in my district, a single mom teacher with tenure earned so little relative to the community that she qualified for Section 8 housing.

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p.s. this is a list of sources that I have not yet vetted, but on the face of it (from the Ed School at Ithaca College) it seems like they might be informative, though of course there will be a bias as everyone has bias:

http://www.ithaca.edu/wise/school_choice/

220

Where I am, and I assume this is accurate for most places, this will depend largely on how many kids and how new of a teacher. My wife now with our two kids? Ain’t gonna qualify for assistance anywhere in the country. A one or two year teacher with a BA and 3 or 4 kids? Maybe qualifying for some type of assistance if she is living in a high income area while working in some of the less desirable districts. Probably more likely for one working in a catholic school. But then again a one or two year non specialized employee working in a local company is probably in a worse financial position if for no other reason than the access to excellent heath care and time off provided to the public school teacher.

At the end of the day, the average salary for an elementary school teacher (the lowest compensated) is $43,500 acording to pay scale. This is not that different than payscale’s salary range for other jobs requiring a bachelor’s, like office manager ($30,600-$61,000), marketing coordinator ($32,000-$54,100), account manager ($35,500-$75,300) or graphic designer ($29,700-$57,700), particular when you factor in benefits and the extensive additional time off teachers get compared to those professions.