Monopolists and politicians band together against students.

One of my earliest memories of school days, most of which were just a blur, was the time the teachers went on strike. Of course, we students were enthusiastic supporters of the teachers. It wasn’t that we cared one twaddle about their contract. But when they were on strike we were off from school. Our self-interest happened to coincide with their self-interest. But I learned, over the years, that the self-interest of the teachers and that of the students often do not coincide. And when they conflict the teachers, with some notable exceptions, will screw over the students.

The teacher’s unions are powerful lobbies for a special interest group -- their members. And teachers will use emotive language about the “good” of the children while lobbying for their own financial well being. Now, the optimal situation for the teachers themselves, for setting teacher benefits, is to have a monopolistic provider of education negotiating with a labor monopoly. And if the monopolistic provider is a bunch of third rate politicians more the better.

The union knows it can pour money into campaigns, in the name of the children of course, to unseat recalcitrant politicians who don’t obey the orders of the union to fleece the taxpayer for more benefits for teachers. Unions love it when politicians are the providers because Big Labor are experts at manipulating the political system for their own self-interest, no matter the actual consequences to the students.

For instance, the unions frequently have pushed through regulations which make it almost impossible to fire lousy teachers. Bad teachers harm generations of students. But the unions lobby to defend those crappy teachers from any discipline. And perhaps it ought to be that way. The union’s job is not to provide a quality education to students. It is to give teachers as much as possible out of the public purse. They do their job and they do it well. Teachers benefit and students get screwed over. Politicians get rewards and taxpayers pay the bills.

Politicians tend to line up to kiss ass when the teacher’s union comes along because it is powerful. Some years ago, in a previous existence, I ran for office. And our campaign headquarters was calling voters. I, like the campaign volunteers, was on the phone as well. I hated campaigning with a passion. But we had a bank of phones and I was on one calling around.

We would ask people what they thought about five different issues. If they agreed with my position on 3 or more of those issues we would inform them and ask them if we could send them campaign literature. The only call I remember was when I got a teacher on the line. She outrightly stated: “When it comes to voting I just follow the instructions of the union.” Well, no wonder so many students turn out to be independent thinkers. But lots of teachers act the same way. They obey orders and do what the union tells them to do. And that means they vote according to union dictaates and fund campaigns according to union preferences.

The teacher’s unions hate non-political education -- that is any education provided outside the direct control of the politicians. It makes it much harder, if not impossible, to manipulate the system in order to pick the pockets of taxpayers while providing mediocre education, if one is lucky. To maximize the profit of its members the union has to do what it can to protect a state educational near-monopoly. And that means smashing, when possible, alternative education.

I previously reported on a successful alternative school in Dayton, Ohio. Most the students were African-American and the students came from mostly impoverished families. Yet all the graduates had been accepted into university. The teachers at this school are dedicated to helping the students. And most are union members and the school was a state funded alternative school. It was rare in that it worked well.

But when the budget for the school district required cutting the union demanded that teachers be fired according to seniority not their teaching skills. Good teachers were to be fired, if only recently hired, while crappy teachers had job security merely for hanging on for so long. That is how the union puts the needs of students first.

Utah recently passed a universal voucher system for students. Each student, who prefers an alternative school, will receive a fraction of the funding that would have gone to the school and that funding will follow the student to the alternative school. It cuts education costs because no student receives the full amount that would have paid their state schooling. The students and their parents have more choice and are happier. State education has a little less income but a lot less expenses. And their classrooms aren’t as crowded -- they used to say that was a problem.

I thought that the progressive and political Left community ought to embrace this and open alternative schools themselves. Utah is pretty much a Republican monopoly and I felt that humanist, secularists, such as myself, would prefer to have schools teaching “our” values as opposed to those which push a Theopublican agenda. I urged non-Republicans to embrace the voucher system in order to create real diversity in Utah by opening alternative schools.

But the Utah Education Association, the big labour front for the teachers, is pushing to eradicate vouchers. There must be no choice for students. The ability to manipulate the political system for the benefit of teachers, at the expense of taxpayers and students, must not be threatened. Big Labour is throwing in millions to push for a referendum so that they can spend more millions in order to scare voters with false claims about the evils of chose in education. And the Democrats are lining up with the labor monopoly. There is no surprise there.

With money from the unions, a front group has gathered signatures to strip choice from the system. Now the battle goes to the voters directly and you can bet that the teacher labor monopoly will inundate little Utah with cash in order to protect their self-interest. They will use every myth and lie they can muster.

They will say it strips money from public education, ignoring the fact that it increases funding per remaining student in the state system since departing students remove all their direct costs but only a portion of their financing. They will say it creates segregation even though private schools tend to be more ethnically and economically diverse than most state schools. What they won’t say is that this threatens the perks of the unions. And the Democrats won’t say that they are in bed with this labor monopoly.

The more secure the educational monopoly the more the teachers can receive in benefits. They, in turn, have to give a fair percentage of those funds to the union as a protection racket. And the racketeers have to buy off the politicians to keep the vicious cycle going. The politicians find it easiest to purchase support from the Democrats. So the Democrats are loyal to the unions -- and well they should be, a dog should always obey the master who feeds him.

The sad thing is that the students may well end up stripped of choice to placate the greed of the members of Big Labour. And the chance to build decent, secular schools that promote basic liberal values will be destroyed to protect the self interest of teachers, their unions, and some politicians.

How to distort the facts about school vouchers.

An article by Sam Dillon for the New York Times is a decent example of bad journalism. He won’t think so. Apparently the New York Times didn’t think so either since they published it. I say it is shoddy, not because it was badly written, but because there was an obvious bias in it. I would not fault an opinion piece having bias but this was a news story.

Let’s start with some Journalism 101 as I was taught it. A journalist is supposed to write an article with the more important facts at the top and the less important facts at the bottom.

One should be able to read the first paragraph and have a synopsis of the story. This is done due to space limitations. An editor can’t know precisely how much space he will have for any one article. He may think he has 10 column inches of space and find he has only eight. With deadlines he can’t ask the journalist to rewrite the piece. Instead he takes a pair of scissors and simply cuts the bottom paragraphs until it fits.

If the story is written correctly no critical information is lost. You may lose some clarification or some back up material. But the basics of the story are there at the beginning of the story.

Dillon’s story is about Washington, D.C. education vouchers. In the first sentence he says that students in the voucher program “did not show significantly higher math or reading achievement”. That is the main point he stresses or the most important fact he found in this story.

His second point was that the students attended “private schools” “at taxpayer expense”, which he later tells us was $7,500 per student.

His third point was that the parents, mostly African-Americans, love the program because they said they felt the schools they were sending their children to were much safer. However, the students didn’t seem to think they were much different. (And we all know how well kids are at determining risks.)

Dillon’s lead fact was that there was no major improvement in test scores for voucher students. But if you go down to the 7th paragraph, about halfway through the story, you discover his lead fact isn’t so critical after all. “The students had been attending private schools for an average of less than a year when they were tested for the study, not much time for their new academic environment to affect performance.”

Now why is that buried halfway through the article when the claim that there was no improvement is in the first sentence? If the students hadn’t even completed their first year at the new schools, then why make a big deal about the lack of improvement? And why separate these two details by several paragraphs?

Every journalist knows, or ought to know, that the farther down the story that a fact appears the less likely it is to be noticed. Many people will read the first paragraph or two and then go on to another article. If you want to distort the perceptions of the readers you can make a claim at the beginning of the article but only present the counterclaim near the end of the article.

In the first paragraph we learn the students attended “private schools” at “public expense”. About two-thirds down we find out that each student in the voucher program actually cut the cost for the District. The money for the vouchers “was about half the average public expenditure per student in the District of Columbia public schools.”

I also thought I’d check. The budget for the public school system in DC is $1.53 billion for the coming fiscal year. And the number of students in the school system is 62,110. If every student in DC were on a voucher the cost would be $466 million. That’s not half the cost, as Dillon claimed, but less than one third the cost, actually about 30%. There is a huge differences between 30% and 50%. Perhaps Mr. Dillon learned his math at a public school.

Let’s assume that there will be no improvement at all for these students ever -- a major assumption and a false one. Does that show vouchers are a bad idea? First, in this case it shows that the private schools can do just as well as the public schools at a much lower cost. Even a 50% savings in costs, without a decrease in learning, is of some importance. This article could just as easily have said: “A study released today showed that students in a voucher program received the same level of education, but at half the cost, of those in state schools.”

Imagine a gasoline brand being sold that gave the same performance as what you use now at one third the cost. That would be considered a major advance for the motorist and newspapers stories would be hailing the cost cutting. The same education, at a significantly lower cost, is a major improvement even if Mr. Dillon doesn’t think so.

Various studies show students in voucher programs do have a modest improvement in their test scores. But that doesn’t tell the full story by any means. While better testing scores are an indication of success the real improvement is in the percentage of students who manage to graduate. For instance ,Milwaukee’s voucher program had a graduation rate of 64 percent. That is poor in my opinion but it was well above the graduation rate for government schools there the same year: 36 percent.

And while various studies have shown improved test scores and higher graduation rates for voucher students not one study has shown the opposite. The most the critics of vouchers have claimed is the line that Dillon was feeding people in his article -- that there was no major improvement. And that rests on the assumption that learning the same skills at half, to a third, of the cost is not an improvement.

Utah has education vouchers: why liberals should embrace the change.

Utah has become the first US state to introduce a full school choice program for students. Of course the real beneficiaries of state education have never been the students but the unionized educators who see public schooling as way to transfer wealth from parents and taxpayers to teachers and bureaucrats. Teachers unions and the Democratic lapdog opposed giving parents choice in regards to schooling.

Under the new legislation, which has been signed by the governor and is now law, parents will be able to claim a voucher of between $500 and $3000 to help send their children to private schools. Voucher values are higher for lower income parents than for higher income parents.

The flaw is the bill is that it excludes anyone now attending a private school. Ideally it should also attach all education funding to the students and have the funds follow the student. School districts that do poor jobs would see funding cut as students abandon the failed schools for more successful ones.

A particularly stupid remark came from state Senator Gene Davis, a Democrat, who said: “It’s about taking taxpayer dollars and giving them to private industry.” Really? Then so do food stamps for the poor which Democrats support. Welfare recipients are given other people’s money to spend in privately owned grocery stores. They don’t spend that money down at the city hall canteen.

Democrats don’t seem particularly worried if welfare cheques are spent with the crack dealer of the beneficiaries choice? They aren’t stopping taxpayer funds, via welfare recipients from going to the local liquor store. Now why is it that they are so concerned about whether parents spend their money on good schooling if they don’t worry about how welfare recipients spend their money? Could the difference be that the teacher’s unions pour millions of dollars into the Democratic Party. Democrats are pro-poor unless, of course, they get more money from wealthy unions and then they’ll sell out the poor in a flash.

At least with school vouchers the parents are given back some of their own money to spend at the school of their choice.

This might help solve one problem. A state legislator is trying to use the power of the state to prevent students at schools from forming a Gay/Straight Alliance on campuses. There are 14 such student groups in Utah already.

Tim Beagley, a former member of the Utah Board of Education argues that the legislators can now stop trying to micromanage the schools.

Legislators can start by killing some bills currently before them. For example, they no longer need to tell districts how to elect their board members. If parents don't like how their district works, they can leave. No government oversight is required. In their own words, people can vote with their feet.
They don't need to regulate school clubs. If parents don't like the clubs at their school, they can choose another education vendor. They don't need to tell schools what to do if students are truant. If you don't approve of the way your school handles problem children, you can now take your child to a school that is more to your liking.
They don't need to regulate what teachers say in the classroom. If you don't like what your teacher is telling you or your child, you can go somewhere else.
After they cut the red tape from this year, they can start hacking away at regulations from prior years. At long last, we can abandon all that useless testing. Accountability now resides strictly with the parents, not the government. We can get rid of No Child Left Behind. We don't need UPASS, CRTs, NAEP or Iowa Basic Skills. Best of all, we can throw out that ridiculous high school graduation test. It only seemed to catch the students with severe disabilities or poor English skills anyway.
Parents can tell if their student is progressing adequately.
If the Legislature really believes in free markets and parental control of education, legislators need to step out of the way of both.

Now what I would like to see is for some of the good teachers in the schools to form their own educational co-op. A private school, contrary to the ranting nonsense from the Democrats, need not be a private company at all. The co-op can be formed by teachers and it can provide a decent education to students without the micromanagement of the state. Get the rules and regulations out of the way and let the teachers teach.

I would like to see good quality, secular, private schools teaching kids. Instead of bitching about private education mainly being run by religious groups secular liberals need to open their own schools. Consider this my friends on the Left. You can have a school where you don’t have to turn over the ID date to the military for recruitment as you do with state schools. You can have a school where you don’t have to have some fundamentalist nutter come in with his version of sex education -- as you do in the public schools. You don’t have to worry about some board of education forcing theology on you in the form of so-called Intelligent Design.

Now if I were a resident of Utah (and quite honestly I can’t envision that ever happening) I would be jumping up and down with joy especially if I were on the political Left (and where I am is anybody’s guess). Here are the facts. Utah is a Theopublican state and it will be a Theopublican state for a long time. In a state system of education that means the Theopublicans will be running the system. They will decide what is taught, how it is taught, what texts to use, etc. Now here is your chance to have a school with different values. Use it.

So find a few teachers. Check out the local United Church of Christ congregation and see if they have a church big enough to house a school during the week. Go to the various liberal congregations and organizations in the state who will be just as unhappy with Right-wing controlled schools as you. Now you have some students. Use those vouchers to help cover the costs. Education doesn’t have to be expensive to be good. Here is your chance to run a school by your own values and show that it works.

Consider a classroom with 25 students. Assume they are lower class students qualified for the full voucher of $3000. That is $75,000. That ought to cover a salary for the teacher, school books and pay the church something for the use of their facilities. If the church can hold five classes of that size you have a budget of $375,000. I can see with that sort of income you should be able to run a fair school if you aren’t wasting funds on lots of bureaucrats who don’t teach. And that is assuming no income from the parents, no donations from local groups or businesses, etc.

I think this is a prime opportunity for those of us who are secular humanists to get the kids out of the hands of the Theopublicans and give them the education they deserve. Stop whining and get that school going now.