Teachers Are Not the Problem

Finland: A bit more...

2012-02-20T15:06:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, we took a look at schools in Finland in a post titled "What does Finland know that we don't?" Some additional information has come to light that may be of interest.

The National Association of Independent Schools (www.nais.org) has published an article by Patrick Bassett titled "The Finnish Model." Here are some things which are NOT involved in the excellence of Finnish schools:

1)"In Finland, there are virtually no private schools."

2) "It’s not more years of schooling, since compulsory school education starts at grade 1 (age 7) and ends in grade 9 (age 16), after which virtually all (95 percent) of Finland’s students voluntarily attend either upper secondary academic school (headed for university) or upper secondary vocational school (headed for the workplace or to further higher education in polytechnic institutes)."

3) "It’s not small class sizes, since Finnish classes are often 30 students with only one teacher (and few specialists, and the teachers are expected to teach all skills and subjects)."

4) "It’s not a longer school day or longer school year, since school runs from 8:00 am to noon or 2:00 pm, depending on the age of students, and the school year is no longer than in the U.S."

5) "It’s not nationally centralized control (like that of the French) but rather national curriculum standards with local implementation. (A Finnish third-grade teacher told us that, of the 25 periods per week of classes, about five are dictated subjects/skills from the national standards; in the rest, she improvises.)"

6) "It’s not accreditation. There is none in Finland. The federal ministry, with some periodic sampling testing to assure quality control, trusts the local authorities to meet the national standards."

7) "It’s definitely not high-stakes testing, since most of the testing that occurs is formative, not summative. As noted, the government does do periodic sample testing of students to make certain the students, their schools, and the system continue to perform highly (and intervenes aggressively if a school falls behind), but the government refuses to publish the test results for the press or public, eschewing the mania of League Tables in Great Britain and school rankings in the U.S. based on test scores."

What, then, makes the Finnish schools so successful? Bassett quotes an international report on the best-performing schools in the world: " “Get the best teachers; get the best out of teachers; and step in when pupils start to lag behind.”

Get the best teachers.

"As we’ve known in the U.S. education industry for a long time, the single most important factor for student and school success is high-quality faculty. While the U.S. public system identifies “high-quality” as “highly-qualified,” meaning “certified” (i.e., having an education degree or having taken a battery of education courses), independent schools in the U.S. have long rejected that definition in favor of hiring “high-quality” teachers, meaning those who have a degree in the subject they love and teach (i.e., math and physics majors, not education majors, teaching math and physics)."

" 'Getting the best teachers' means that all teachers must have master’s degrees and that only 10 percent, the cream of the crop of undergraduates, are accepted into the teacher training program. The ministry deliberately restricts access to the program, believing that restrictions increase attraction (a strategy also employed by Teach for America, which routinely attracts five or more candidates for every position). In Finland, it’s not the money but the status and prestige of teaching that attracts the best and brightest into the profession. Ditto for Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, where teachers are also revered."

"Takeaway #1: To improve educational outcomes in U.S. schools, we need to develop a winning strategy for attracting talent. In cultures like ours that don’t give high status to teaching, more money may have to do (until we successfully elevate the profession’s status)."

Get the Best Out of Teachers

"A second arena in which American education falls short, in both public and private segments of the industry, is in “professionalizing the profession.” While there is much talk and some progress in creating “professional learning communities” (PLCs) for teachers, and there is some promise in creating digital communities, we fall far short as a country of what our competitors in the world marketplace are committed to. In Finland, groups of teachers visit each other’s classrooms and plan lessons together, in a system called “lesson studies” that include “rounds” just like the medical profession. Teachers also get an afternoon off per week for professional development (including for school substitutes)."

"Takeaway #2: American schools are way too underinvested in annual professional training and could benefit immensely from creating true PLCs focused on peer learning, peer observations, and collaborative lesson-planning."

Step in when pupils start to lag behind.

"A factor contributing to the success of the Finnish system is the use of early and powerful intervention when a student begins to fall behind. Frequent diagnostic testing (“formative testing”) at early stages reveals students who need extra help, and the Finns provide it intensively (with one special-needs teacher for every seven special-needs students in some schools). ...in Finland, about a third of students receive remediation."

"Takeaway #3: It turns out that all kids can learn, given good teachers, early and intensive intervention, and a supportive school and peer culture. U.S. schools need to move from a medical model (learning disabilities) to a diversity model (learningdifferences), and re-orient themselves to identify, value, and use a student’s strengths as “workarounds” and palliatives to weaknesses."

Anything else?

"Finland is a small, homogenous country of five million, with a common value of high regard for education. Literacy and fluency are a national priority, contributing to good results in literacy examinations. Children see adults reading all the time, since Finns on average check out 18 books from the library per year. (It’s minus 40 degrees for long spells in the winter, so indoor activities like reading are popular.) The Finns, by policy, are committed to fluency in foreign language, as there are two national languages, Finnish and Swedish, taught throughout school. Just about everyone I met also spoke English, in part because Finnish TV uses no dubbing — only subtitles, so children hear English all the time."

"Few textbooks are used, the Finns preferring project- and problem-based approaches integrated with learning in the larger community, and tempered with lots of practical education elements and daily chores at the school. ICT (Information and Communication Technology) is integrated at all levels, including media literacy."

In what other profession?

2012-02-14T13:38:00.000-05:00

David Reber, a HS biology teacher in Lawrence, Kansas, wrote a wonderful piece titled "In what other profession..." It was published in August, 2010 at the Examiner.com website.

He was upset about the responses that had been received regarding a letter he had written to his local paper. He wrote the letter because he"... received a letter last week from the Kansas State Board of Education, informing me that my children’s school district had been placed on “improvement” status for failing to meet “adequate yearly progress” under the No Child Left Behind law." Reber "...thought it ironic that our schools were judged inadequate by people who haven’t set foot in them..."

He noted that many of the responses to his letter began with the phrase "In what other profession..." We've all seen statements such as "In what other profession do you receive 14 weeks of vacation every year?" So, Reber put together some "In what other profession..." questions of his own. You may find some of these useful:

1) "In what other profession are the licensed professionals considered the LEAST knowledgeable about the job? You seldom if ever hear “that guy couldn’t possibly know a thing about law enforcement – he’s a police officer”, or “she can’t be trusted talking about fire safety – she’s a firefighter.”

2) "In what other profession is experience viewed as a liability rather than an asset? You won’t find a contractor advertising “choose me – I’ve never done this before”, and your doctor won’t recommend a surgeon on the basis of her “having very little experience with the procedure”.

3) "In what other profession is the desire for competitive salary viewed as proof of callous indifference towards the job? You won’t hear many say “that lawyer charges a lot of money, she obviously doesn’t care about her clients”, or “that coach earns millions – clearly he doesn’t care about the team.”

"But look around. You’ll find droves of armchair educators who summarily dismiss any statement about education when it comes from a teacher. Likewise, it’s easy to find politicians, pundits, and profiteers who refer to our veteran teachers as ineffective, overpriced “dead wood”. Only the rookies could possibly be any good, or worth the food-stamp-eligible starting salaries we pay them."

"And if teachers dare ask for a raise, this is taken by many as clear evidence that teachers don’t give a porcupine’s posterior about kids. In fact, some say if teachers really cared about their students they would insist on earning LESS money."

"If that entire attitude weren’t bad enough, what other profession is legally held to PERFECTION by 2014? Are police required to eliminate all crime? Are firefighters required to eliminate all fires? Are doctors required to cure all patients? Are lawyers required to win all cases? Are coaches required to win all games? Of course they aren’t."

"If a poverty-stricken, drug-addled meth-cooker burns down his house, suffers third degree burns, and then goes to jail; we don’t blame the police, fire department, doctors, and defense attorneys for his predicament. But if that kid doesn’t graduate high school, it’s clearly the teacher’s fault."

"And if someone – anyone - tries to tell you otherwise; don’t listen. He must be a teacher."

Let's defend our pensions.

2012-02-10T15:45:00.000-05:00

In a recent post, I gave details of Gov. Cuomo's proposed "Tier 6" pension "reform." If you are unfamiliar with this proposal, click here for the details.

In the coming days, columnists, editorial and letter writers will wax poetic about what a wonderful, cost-saving "fix" this will be for the current "unsustainable" public employee pension system. Whether you're talking with that "know-it-all" neighbor or relative, picking up your pen to respond to a letter in the paper or calling a radio talk show, it helps to have the facts close at hand. Here are the facts:

Our pensions are not outsized.

The average pension for members of the state and local employees' retirement system is about $19,000/year. For the NYS Teachers' Retirement System, the average pension is around $39,000/year.
76% of pensions are less than $30,000/year.
Those receiving the large pensions so often in the news are overwhelmingly high-level management and political appointees.

Public employees contribute to their pensions.

86% of pension plan income comes from earnings on pension investments. 14% comes from employer and employee contributions.
Unlike members of most private sector retirement plans, most of New York's public workers pay taxes on the contributions they make to their pensions.
By the way, even though public employee pensions are exempt from NYS taxes, private sector pensions are also exempt up to $20,000/year as are Social Security benefits.

Public employees do NOT earn more than their private sector counterparts.

While it is true that the "average" public sector worker earns more than the "average" private sector worker, it is also true that the average diner is a multi-millionaire in any restaurant Bill Gates walks into. We need to compare apples to apples, and the "basket" of public sector workers is very different than the basket of private sector workers.
We expect people who have invested their time and money in advanced education and training to earn more than those with lower educational levels. Many more public sector jobs require college or professional degrees. When comparing public and private sector workers with the same educational levels, public sector workers earn 7-10% less than their private sector equivalents, even when both wages and benefits are factored in. (Want proof? See the 6-part blog post beginning with Let's lay this myth to rest once and for all!.)

Public employees have sacrificed.

In 2010, public employee retirement benefits were reduced under "Tier 5." These reductions--already in effect--will save NY taxpayers $35 billion over the next 30 years.
State employees have negotiated new contracts that include wage freezes, pay lags, dramatic increases in healthcare premiums, unpaid furloughs and other wage and benefit reductions, saving millions in tax dollars.
Local government and school district employees have taken the same freezes and reductions as their state employee counterparts to reduce local taxes; many even voluntarily reopened their contracts to agree to these cutbacks in an effort to avoid layoffs.
Despite these sacrifices, thousands of teachers, nurses, police officers and fire fighters across the state are standing in the same unemployment lines as private sector workers.

401(k) plans were never meant to replace traditional pensions.

Time Magazine ran a 2009 cover story titled "Why it's time to retire the 401(k)." In the story, they said "...the 401(k) was never meant to replace the employer-guaranteed pension fund, supplemented by Social Security, as the cornerstone of our nation's retirement system."
The National Institute for Retirement Security recently stated that "the embedded economic efficiencies of defined benefit (i.e. traditional pension) plans make them nearly half the cost of defined contribution (i.e. 401k-type) plans."
NIRS continues: "To prove the point, an example was cited of a 62-year-old with a target retirement benefit of $26,684. Under the DB [traditional pension] plan, annual contributions of 12.5% of payroll would be required and $355,000 would need to be set aside by age 62. In contrast, the DC [401(k)] plan would require annual contributions of 22.9% of payroll and $550,000 would need to be set aside by age 62. As stated in the report, "The DB plan can do more with less, providing the same benefit for nearly $200,000 less per participant."
Again from NIRS: "Here's how: DC [401(k)] plans are individual focused and, in order to ensure she/he does not outlive retirement savings, the individual must save enough to live to a very old age — typically 95 to 100. By contrast, a DB [traditional pension] plan pools the contributions of many people, with a goal of saving enough for an average life expectancy for each member of the plan. An average life expectancy, which actuaries calculate with a high degree of accuracy, is much lower than 95 to 100— meaning it is necessary to set aside significantly less per DB plan member."
For more, see the post titled "What's so bad about 401(k)-type plans?"

New York's pension system is strong.

Unlike other states which skipped a few required payments to their pension funds, New York has a fully-funded pension plan. Every required payment has been made. There are no unfunded liabilities hiding in a closet.
The Pew Center issued a report two year ago calling New York one of the best-managed pension funds in the country.
Wall Street greed and fraud caused the collapse of the stock market in 2008-2009. This has caused a temporary "uptick" in required employer contributions. (The employer contribution is calculated using a five-year rolling average of investment performance.) Stocks have done well since 2009 and it is reasonable to expect that the employer contribution rate will begin to decline, not continue to shoot up to unsustainable levels.

Tier 6 hurts all workers.

Although the plan would apply to new public employees, current public employees and retirees will be harmed as the current traditional pension system would be undermined by fewer new members. The larger the pool, the greater the ability to diversify and share risk.
Private sector employers who have maintained traditional pension plans will use the state's example as an excuse to terminate their own plans.

(Thanks to the NYS AFL-CIO for some of the above.)

Cuomo and teacher evaluation.

2012-02-08T14:26:00.000-05:00

Two of our last three posts have concerned the fight over how much of a New York teacher's evaluation will be based on standardized tests. (See The Devil's in the details and Some editorial writers get it and some don't for complete background.)

The short version is that NYSUT cooperated with the state last year in coming up with a law that allocated 20% of a teacher's evaluation to standardized test results. After the law was passed, the Board of Regents unilaterally changed that 20% to 40%. When they were taken to court, the judge agreed with NYSUT that 20% did not mean 40%, and the state is appealing that ruling.

Enter Gov. Cuomo who is threatening to impose his own evaluation system by Feb. 16. How can that be? Well, it seems that in recent years governors have discovered that they can legally include such measures--which the legislature cannot strip out-- in the budget bill.

There was an interesting column published the other day in the Albany Times-Union that sheds additional light on this matter. Here's some of what Fred LeBrun had to say: "It could just as persuasively be argued that he, Andrew Cuomo, is the one primarily responsible for "blocking progress" toward a statewide teacher evaluation format that would pass muster with the feds for $700 million in Race to the Top funds, the State Education Department and the unions. All those stakeholders were on the verge of signing just such an agreement last year, an agreement that did include a rigorous new teacher evaluation standard. But the governor intruded with a letter May 13, 2011, specifying he wanted a higher reliance on state standardized tests as a measure of teacher effectiveness than even the law allowed."

"Bear in mind, the Education Department, Board of Regents and education commissioner are all supposed to be independent of the executive branch, and what the governor wishes or doesn't. Historically, there have been colossal battles between the education establishment and prior governors over attempted intrusion. Not this time. Negotiations buckled after a crude, last minute attempt by the Regents to placate the governor. That failed, winding up in a lawsuit. Since then, I'm told the governor has destabilized negotiations a couple of times when an agreement was only a few words away." [Emphasis mine.]

"Clearly, Cuomo has an agenda here. What that is, who knows, but it is not the betterment of public education in New York. His continual bashing of those who are the front-line troops of education is having an enormously corrosive effect....Well, I'm going to ask you again to do a reality check on the Cuomo rhetoric. Because he single-handedly is the one responsible, through his reductions in school aid, for the loss of music and art teachers, remedial programs, enrichment programs, advanced placement courses, even kindergarten and prekindergarten in many schools across the state. While he was distracting the public by pinning the tail on the teacher, the administrator, and the so-called "bureaucracy," he was eviscerating public schools from Montauk to Williamsville. It was not the Legislature, it wasn't the teachers, and it surely wasn't the local school boards. It was the governor, one heck of a lobbyist, who made those choices." [Emphasis mine.]

"The most absurd aspect of this year's plan to "reform" New York public education is to introduce competition among school districts for much of the state aid available. "Competition works," he said more than once. Sure, when the playing field is level and the contestants evenly matched. Pitting high-needs districts against the affluent is ridiculous; pitting them against each other is right out of Spartacus. One irate school superintendent for the Genesee Valley called poor districts going at each other for school aid a "Dickensian competition. That conjures an image of a two shabby public orphanages brawling out on the street to see which one will be fed dinner." [Emphasis mine.]

"Properly funding high-needs districts, rural and urban, shouldn't be an afterthought or some game of "blame the victim," as Cuomo is making it. It should be a budget imperative for a state as wealthy as ours, even if it means irritating high-resource school districts which won't do as well..."

"Last May 15, Cuomo met a surprising defeat. He publicly called for a voting down of local school budgets. They were approved instead at a near-record level. Don't mess with our schools, the majority were saying. It's a message still in the air as the governor heads for the teacher evaluation showdown. If he appears to broker a deal between education professionals that would have happened anyway, he can escape. If he tries to become the new education czar, watch out." [Emphasis mine.]

Oh, there's one last thing. That $700 million that everyone's so worked up about? All of that money is in targeted funds. None of it would be available to districts to put additional teachers in classrooms.

NY Comptroller disagrees with Governor about public pensions.

2012-02-03T13:47:00.000-05:00

The details of Gov. Cuomo's proposed Tier 6 pension plan are becoming clearer. According to a recent article in NYSUT United: "Lifetime employee contributions would vary from 4 to 6 percent; state workers, including educators, would have to work 12 years to be fully vested; retirement age would be increased to 65; and pensions would be based on a five-year final average salary." In addition: "The Tier 6 proposal would reduce public employees' retirement income by calculating every year of credit at 1.67 percent — regardless of years of service."

In other words, a teacher's pension after a 35-year career would be 58% of final average salary compared with the current figure of 70%. And, since the FAS is based on 5 years, instead of the current 3 years, the pension would be a reduced percentage of a reduced FAS.

In addition, within 30 days of entering the profession a new-hire must make a irrevocable choice between the above traditional pension (defined benefit) or a new 401(k)-type defined contribution plan. Under this new plan, the employer would contribute at least 4% per year, and vesting would take place after one year.

Why should current inservice or retired teachers care about this? There's a very good reason, and we'll get to it in a bit.

First, let's talk about the NYS Comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli. The comptroller is the financial watchdog for the state. Surely he must be in favor of this proposed change. Not even a bit.

The comptroller is also the sole trustee of the retirement system which covers most state and local employees, other than teachers who have a separate--but similar--system. The systems share the same tier structure. As the sole trustee, DiNapoli is very familiar with the numbers involved in the retirement systems.

According to the Update (the publication of the New York State and Local Employees Retirement System): "Comptroller DiNapoli has supported--and will continue to support--our current system of providing a defined benefit plan for retirees."

DiNapoli is also quoted in the NYSUT United article referenced above: "401(k)s were never intended to replace pensions," DiNapoli said. "They were designed as a saving mechanism to supplement Social Security and pension income, and I think they have certainly proven inadequate to provide retirement security." A National Institute on Retirement Security study found traditional defined benefit pension plans operate at nearly half the cost of 401(k)-type plans." [Emphasis mine.]

(For details on why defined benefit pension plans are less costly to the employer, see What's so bad about 401(k) plans.)

So, why should inservice and retired teachers care about the retirement plans for new hires? The health of the fund which pays current pension benefits depends on investment income, contributions from employers and contributions from current inservice teachers. Any teacher participating in a 401(k)-style system will no longer be contributing to the common retirement fund. Their contributions will be held separately in an individual account for their sole benefit. This will weaken the ability of the common fund to provide payments to current retirees.

Some editorial writers get it, and some don't.

2012-02-01T11:24:00.000-05:00

Let's examine two recent editorials which address the topic of avoiding the loss of federal Race-to-the-Top funds because NY has no teacher-principal evaluation system in place. The Buffalo News sees it this way:

"Finally, the well-being of students is going to take precedence over the well-being of the teachers unions....The only ones rubbing salt into the wound are intransigent unions putting the interest of their members above those of students. Why wouldn't anyone wanting the best for students welcome an evaluation system that, in some small part, factors in student performance? Good teachers should want to eliminate the bad apples for the sake of students and their own reputations." Click here to read the full editorial.

The Utica Observer-Dispatch took the time to identify the root of the problem: "Here’s the problem: The law on a teacher evaluation system was originally developed in a cooperative effort between the state and NYSUT. It called for 20 percent of an evaluation to be based on test scores, 20 percent on local assessments and 60 percent on principal evaluations. But at the last minute, the plan was changed, calling for up to 40 percent of a teacher’s grade to be determined by statewide test scores. NYSUT filed suit, and last August, a court agreed, saying the second 20 points in the evaluation could not come from the same measure. That’s been appealed."

It seems to be a simple concept. NYSUT cooperates with the state in developing--and passing--a law making 20% of a teacher's evaluation based on test scores. The state unilaterally changes that to 40% (although, as we pointed out in the last blog post no standardized test exists which would apply to almost 80% of the state's teachers). NYSUT sues to block this change and, last August, a court agreed with NYSUT. Then, the state appeals the ruling. So how is it that the union is accused of dragging its heels over the issue?

The Utica paper continues: "...it was disingenuous of the state to essentially renege on the deal by changing the rules afterward to allow up to 40 percent of a teacher’s — or a principal’s — evaluation to be based on state standardized test results. That’s ridiculous. An education plan that encourages teaching to the test is a bit dubious to begin with, and giving 40 percent weight to standardized tests results reinforces that and takes local initiative out of the equation. That’s not acceptable. Apparently the court felt so, too." Click here to read the entire Utica editorial.

The devil's in the details.

2012-01-25T14:23:00.001-05:00

It all sounds so simple to most people. Test kids on what they know, then base their teacher's evaluation on what they've learned shown by the test. Those teachers with good "value added" results get tenure and higher pay. Those with poor results get shown the door.

If you believe that the problem with K-12 education in America is infiltration by gangs of bad teachers who don't give a damn whether their students learn or not, this sounds like a solution. If you believe this, you probably haven't spent much time in an American school. The vast majority of teachers desperately want to see their students learn, but teachers don't control the system. (See Let's stop blaming the teachers!)

But, for the moment, let's talk about "value added" performance evaluation for teachers. Just what standardized test will we use? The New York Times recently ran a story by Michael Winerip pointing out some problems. "For teachers in subject areas and grades that do not have state tests (music, art, technology, kindergarten through third grade) or do not have enough state tests to measure growth (every high school subject), it is the state’s responsibility to create a system of alternative ratings. In New York, that will have to cover 79 percent of all teachers, a total of 175,000 people. The only state tests for assessing teachers are for English and math, from fourth grade to eighth." [Emphasis mine.]

Not wanting to appear "bossy," federal officials have left the nuts and bolts of evaluation up to state officials who are, in general, passing the problem along to local officials. With the exception, that is, of how much the "value added" score should count towards the teacher's total evaluation grade.

"In May 2010, the teachers’ union and department officials, including [NY State Education Commissioner] Dr. King, agreed that student scores on state tests would account for 20 percent of a teacher’s evaluation. In August 2010, Mr. Duncan visited the state union’s headquarters in his Race to the Top bus (he really has one) and told union and department officials that New York had won a grant “because of your collective leadership, your act of courage.” [Emphasis mine.]

"In May 2011, with no warning, Dr. King and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo rammed a measure through the Board of Regents making state tests worth up to 40 percent of teacher evaluations. In August, a state judge ruled that they couldn’t do that." [Emphasis mine.]

"For the last month now, as federal officials have pressed for a resolution, the governor and the commissioner have been berating the union. Like children who change the rules in the middle of the game, they appear to be counting on a lot of screaming to distract the crowd." [Emphasis mine.]

Back to the question of how to come up with a numerical score for the "value added" performance of teachers in fields such as music, art, physical education, special education, technology, science, social studies, and high school subjects. Do we create paper and pencil standardized tests? That's very expensive. What kind of written test would we give for second grade gym?

Apparently, NY has sent out guidelines. Let's take band as an example. "Several weeks ago the state sent out a guide. The band teacher could listen to every child play at the start of the year and assign a score from 1 to 4. At the end of the year,” the state guide says, “the teacher re-evaluates their students.” (Someone needs to evaluate the state’s grammar.) The teacher again grades students from 1 to 4, and the sum of the progress they have made during the year determines the teacher’s rating."

Paul R. Infante, the director of fine and applied arts for the Commack School District on Long Island sees some problems with this system. "There is such a variety of ability, he said, that setting a fair baseline at the start of the year would mean assigning children a wide range of music pieces to perform. Just to find the appropriate pieces, he said, the band teacher would have to listen to each child play. A child could be terrible at sight reading but have a nice sound. So in fairness, the teacher would have to spend a few weeks helping 100 children prepare pieces just so they could be tested for their initial rating.
'It would take so much time away from instruction to focus on the assessment,' Mr. Infante said."

Mr. Infante goes on to suggest that perhaps outside evaluators would need to be hired to "...assess the accuracy of the ratings a teacher gave, to make sure they were not artificially low at the start of the year or artificially high at the end." All this while schools are laying off staff.

The state, of course, will see that things go smoothly. The catch here is that "the State Education Department’s budget had been reduced 40 percent in the past few years, staffing [is] thin and the ultimate responsibility for monitoring [will] be left to principals, superintendents and school boards. The main state role, he said, will be to 'provide guidance and models.' "

Well, what could possibly go wrong with this plan?

Part 6: Let's lay this myth to rest once and for all!

2012-01-22T09:20:00.004-05:00

As detailed in the previous blog post, the research by the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics of the University of California concluded the following:

"Following the 2010 elections, multiple states took action to curtail collective bargaining rights arguing that public sector unions were a major cause of state budget deficits. A close examination of the available evidence finds that the claim that public sector unionization leads to greater deficits does not withstand scrutiny."

"The public sector workforce has not been growing relative to the population; this is true in union and non-union states alike. There is no correlation between the share of public workers in unions and the size of the public sector workforce. This belies the notion that public sector unions are increasing the demand for their product."

"Compensation has fallen as a share of state expenditures over the last twenty years; this is true for both high and low-union states. Controlling for education, experience and other relevant factors, public sector workers are not more highly paid than their private sector counterparts. Public sector unions provide workers with a voice on the job and enable members to choose their form of compensation. This has generally led to a greater share of compensation paid in health and retirement benefits than in cash wages. "

"Budget deficits were primarily caused by the housing crisis and subsequent economic downturn which resulted in a decline in revenues as the economy contracted. Finally, controlling for the decline in housing prices, we find no statistically significant correlation between union density, union strength and the size of state budget deficits."

"For states to address their budget deficits, the most important factors are national economic growth and a resolution to the housing crisis. Solutions that focus on cutting state and local budgets can be expected to further weaken the economy."

Before ending, let's look at one last thing specific to our state. Much groaning can be heard that the cost of public pensions has risen to unsustainable levels. Here's an interesting chart from the website of the New York State Teachers' Retirement system showing employer contribution rate (ECR) since the 1920's:

Note that the ECR is based on a 5-year rolling average of the performance of NYSTRS investments. This means that the losses incurred in the financial collapse of 2007-2008 will soon work their way out and be replaced by the large gains of recent years. Unless there is another collapse, it is reasonable to assume that the ECR will decrease in coming years.

Finally, if you'd like to have all 6 of the posts in this series combined as a nice pdf that you can download, print, and tape to the nose of that annoying relative or neighbor who is among the group saying that "everybody knows that public employees earn more than those in the private sector," click here for just such a file! [NOTE: When originally posted, the links in the pdf did not work. That problem has been corrected.]

Part 5: Let's lay this myth to rest once and for all!

2012-01-19T14:25:00.000-05:00

Over the last 4 posts, we've looked at the research that shows that when total compensation is viewed (i.e. wages plus benefits), public employees are not overcompensated. If anything, they are somewhat undercompensated.

The research done by Heywood and Bender is not an outlier. Their work has been replicated in other national studies. Two examples are Debunking the Myth of the Overcompensated Public Employee by Jeffrey Keefe of the Economic Policy Institute and The Wage Penalty for State and Local Government Employees by John Schmitt of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

There is one additional question to address before we can lay this entire myth to rest: Were public sector workers and their unions to blame for state budget problems?

Twelve states have attacked collective bargaining by public sector unions in 2011: Wisconsin, Ohio (since repealed by voters), Indiana, Arizona, Idaho, Michigan, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah and Wyoming. All accuse public sector workers--and their unions--of being at the root of state budget deficits. Once again, the answer is in the research.

The Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics, part of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment of the University of California, has published a 2011 study titled The Wrong Target: Public Sector Unions and State Budget Deficits.

"The large state deficits have frequently been blamed on a growing public sector. For example, Governor Scott Walker warned that Wisconsin 'cannot grow if our people are weighed down paying for a larger and larger government.' However, the size of the public sector has not grown in recent years, neither in terms of public sector employment levels nor public sector compensation." [Emphasis mine.]

Let's look at the numbers. "State and local government workers as a share of the workforce has been relatively steady since 1979....Overall, the share of workers in state and local employment averaged 14.2 percent over the thirty year period and ranged from a low of 13.6 percent at the height of the boom in 1999 to a high of 15.2 percent in the great recession in 2009 reflecting the greater loss in private sector employment—over 5 million private sector jobs were lost that year. By midway through 2011, the share of workers employed by state and local governments had fallen back to 14.6 percent." [Emphasis mine.]

"Not only has the share of state and local government jobs remained relatively steady as a percentage of all jobs, but state and local government employment per thousand residents has also remained steady....In 1990, the United States as a whole had an average of 17.2 state workers per thousand residents. In 2009, there were 16.8."[Emphasis mine.]

"Might union states be different? New York Times columnist David Brooks argued, “public sector unions can use political power to increase demand for their product.” If he is correct, we should expect states with high public sector union density—the share of public sector workers in a union—to have more public sector workers per thousand residents, than states with lower public sector union density. In order to test this hypothesis, we examine the ten states with the highest share of public employees in unions and the ten states with the lowest share of public employees in unions. .. the lowest union density states averaged 69.1 state and local employees per thousand residents in 1990 and 74.6 in 2009. The highest union density states averaged 65.1 state and local employees per thousand residents in 1990 and 68.3 in 2009. The number of state and local employees per thousand actually fell in the high union density states between 2001 and 2009....No correlation was found between public sector union density and the level of public sector employment in a state. Contrary to Brooks' assertion, there is no evidence that public sector unionization has resulted in a growth of the public sector workforce." [Emphasis mine.]

"Not only has the number of public sector workers per thousand residents remained steady, but public sector compensation as a share of state budget has actually declined....The share of state spending that went towards compensation fell steadily between 1992 and 2002 and remained stable from 2002 to 2009." [Emphasis mine]

"The average share of the budget spent on compensation over the time period for the ten most highly unionized states was 19.6%, compared to 18.7% for the ten least unionized states. By 2009, that gap between the two groups had narrowed to 0.5% (19.8 vs 19.3 percent)...Budget deficits were not caused by an increase in funding going to compensation for public sector workers." [Emphasis mine.]

Part 4: Let's lay this myth to rest once and for all!

2012-01-17T10:48:00.000-05:00

As shown in the last blog post, once we correct for differences in education, experience, training, etc. we can then compare the basket of workers in the private sector with that in the public sector on an "apples-to-apples" basis. When this is done, we find that not only are wages of public sector workers 11-12% less than comparable private sector workers, this negative wage differential has been increasing for public sector workers since the mid-1990's. [see pg 9 of the Heywood/Bender study.]

But what about the benefits? Surely they must be much better for workers in the public sector? Let's go to the numbers.

Heywood and Bender looked at benefits "in nearly two dozen categories, including pensions, insurance, bonuses and supplemental pay, paid leaves, and legally required benefits (e.g., Social Security, Medicare)." They did find that "benefits comprise a larger portion of compensation in state and local government; thus earnings are a smaller share of compensation in state and local government."

The difference, however, is not large. They found that benefits as a share of total compensation across the entire private sector amounted to 29.15%. In large private firms (100+ employees), benefits were 31.42% of total compensation. The figure for local and state governments is 32.65%, hardly a dramatic difference! [Emphasis mine.] (Large firms were broken out of the private sector data because many state and local governments also have 100+ employees, allowing a more accurate comparison.)

When looking at benefits, we must recognize that some of these benefits are at least partially paid for by employees in both sectors. According to the study: "in March 2009, the share of family medical coverage plans paid by private sector employees averaged 30 percent, while that share paid by state and local employees averaged 27 percent. Interestingly, if one limits the size of the employer to 500 workers or more, the share by private sector employees is only 24 percent, while the state and local share remains 27 percent." [Emphasis mine.]

What about retirement plans? In doing a comparison here, we must recognize that there are two different types of retirement plans in use in our country. The "traditional pension" plan is often referred to as a "defined benefit" plan because the worker's retirement benefit is a defined amount based on years of service and final average salary. While most state and local governments provide such a "defined benefit" plan for their employees, less than 25% of employers in the private sector provide such a plan.

Over the past decade or two, most private sector employers have moved to a "defined contribution" type of plan. Most readers will recognize this type of plan by its more common name, "401(k)." In this plan, the employee makes a contribution of a percentage of pay, sometimes matched--up to a certain point--by the employer. These funds are invested in a small number of mutual funds and whatever accumulates during the worker's career is what the worker takes away to live on (plus Social Security and other savings) during retirement.

(For a more detailed comparison of defined benefit vs defined contribution plans, see the blog post titled "What's so bad about 401(k)-type plans?"

Comparison is further complicated by the fact that "28% of state and local workers are not eligible for Social Security." But, "when limiting state and local pensions to those in which workers are eligible for Social Security, the employee contribution rate averages 5%. This can be compared to the private sector average contribution rate of 6% for defined-contribution plans and essentially zero for defined benefit plans." [Emphasis mine.]

When you put it all together (wages plus benefits), how do the numbers shake out? When comparing total compensation state workers are behind their private sector counterparts by 6.8%, while local government workers trail by 7.4%. If you compare them with just the large firms in the private sector sample, state workers trail their private counterparts by 10.4% with local workers trailing by 9.8%. [Emphasis mine]

Heywood and Bender conclude with this paragraph: "There are several implications of our exercise. First, the compensation of state and local workers is not excessive. Second, this remains true when including benefits. Third, the pattern of results over the last 20 years has generally been one of declining relative earnings of state and local workers compared to similar private sector workers. Fourth, this remains true in most of the states that we examined, although some heterogeneity exists. These implications lead to the policy prescription that now is not the time to advocate for large-scale rollbacks in the compensation of state and local workers. Although the current recession calls for equal sacrifice, the long-term pattern indicates that state and local workers are not, on average, overcompensated. If the goal is to compensate state and local sector employees in a manner comparable to those in the private sector, the data do not call for reductions in state and local wages. If anything, they call for increases." [Emphasis mine.]

There is still one more part of this myth to lay to rest: That public sector unions, through their political influence, are exacerbating state and local financial problems. That's coming up.

Part 3: Let's lay this myth to rest once and for all!

2012-01-15T09:54:00.000-05:00

To review: This all began when a local WNY paper opined that labor costs in the public sector were "out of whack" with the private sector. (Click here to see the related blog post.) No support was given for this claim, they were just making the argument based on the idea that "everyone knows" this to be the case.

In the next post, Let's lay this myth to rest once and for all, we identified three "everybody knows" statements which are demonstrably false:

1. Public sector compensation is out of line with that in the private sector.

2. Public sector pay and benefits are the major cause of the financial difficulties being visited upon the states.

3. Public sector unions, through their political influence, are exacerbating state and local financial problems.

In Part 2: Let's lay this myth to rest once and for all, we looked at research done by experts in the field who concluded that public sector compensation is in line with that in the private sector. In fact, when considering wages plus benefits, comparable public sector workers were, if anything, more poorly compensated than private sector workers. Now we look inside the study.

Heywood and Bender point out that "...the characteristics of state and local government employees differ dramatically from those of the private sector. State and local governments consist disproportionately of occupations that demand more skills and earn higher wages. As a consequence, the typical state or local government employee has substantially more education, training and experience. Adjusting for these differences is required to compare apples to apples. Indeed, adjusting for these differences typically explains most of the observed earnings advantage of the typical state and local worker....State and local government workers across the country are more than twice as likely to have at least bachelor's degrees. Thus, the fact that public sector workers receive greater average compensation than private sector workers should be no more surprising than the fact that those with more skills and education earn more." [Emphasis mine.]

The researchers go on to look at the public vs private pay differentials once corrections are made for education, training and experience. Here is their summary for the years 2000-2008.

Average Public-Private Wage Differentials, 2000-2008

	State-Private (%)	Local-Private (%)
Full Country	-11.4	-12.0
California	-9.8	-6.1
Texas	-16.6	-17.6
New York	-7.0	-5.9
Pennsylvania	-4.5	-12.9
Illinois	-12.5	-13.3
Michigan	-10.1	-11.2
Florida	-4.8	-0.2

They conclude that, over this time period, "State workers earn 11% less and local workers 12% less than private sector workers." Notice that the wages for NY workers are 6-7% below those for comparable private sector workers for this period.

But wait, "everybody knows" that it's really the benefits of public sector workers that are really "out of whack" with those in the private sector. Maybe public sector wages are lower, but the obscene benefits will more than make up for the lower wages.

Think so? Benefits will be the subject of the next post.

Part 2: Let's lay this myth to rest once and for all!

2012-01-12T11:45:00.002-05:00

The previous blog post left us discovering that the average public-sector worker does indeed do better than the average private-sector worker in total compensation (wages plus benefits). All it takes to find this out is simple arithmetic, which most reporters are quite capable of handling. That's why these figures are so often reported in the popular press.

And so, end of story. Nothing more to see here, please move along. But wait! There's a gigantic assumption involved in all of this: That the "baskets" of workers we are comparing contain comparable sets of workers. Are we comparing apples to apples or apples to oranges?

This is where we need to replace the arithmetic of reporters with the economic research methodology of the Ph.D's, the folks trained to investigate how these two "baskets" of workers may be different and how we may go about actually making valid comparisons.

We need, for example, to look at studies such as Out of Balance? (Comparing Public and Private Sector Compensation over 20 Years). This study was done for the Center for State & Local Government Excellence and the National Institute on Retirement Security by Drs. John Heywood and Keith Bender and published in April, 2010. Dr. Heywood is distinguished professor in the Department of Economics and Director of the Masters in Human Resources and Labor Relations program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Dr. Bender is associate professor in the Department of Economics and in the Masters in Human Resources and Labor Relations Program at the same institution.

Heywood and Bender set out to "...examine the extent to which state and local government compensation in the United States is comparable to compensation in the private sector." They point out that "Levels of compensation help determine both the competence and efficiency of governmental services. Excessive levels waste resources, depriving the governments of the opportunity to address other costly objectives or to reduce burdens to taxpayers. Insufficient levels make it difficult, if not impossible, to attract workers of the quality needed to provide the services demanded by citizens."

They conclude that "Comparability with the private sector is the most generally accepted standard by which economists and compensation specialists judge whether the processes for determining compensation in the public sector are working."

In the Executive Summary of the study, they list their conclusions:

1) "Public and private workforces differ in important ways. For instance, jobs in the public sector require much more education on average than those in the private sector. Employees in state and local sectors are twice as likely as their private sector counterparts to have a college or advanced degree."

2) "Wages and salaries of state and local employees are lower than those of private sector workers with comparable earnings determinants (e.g., education). State employees typically earn 11% less; local workers earn 12% less."

3) "Over the last 20 years, the earnings for state and local employees have generally declined relative to comparable private sector employees."

4) "The pattern of declining relative compensation remains true in most of the large states we examined, although some state-level variation exists."

5) "Benefits (e.g., pensions) comprise a larger share of employee compensation in the public sector."

6) State and local employees have lower total compensation than their private sector counterparts. On average, total compensation is 6.8% lower for state employees and 7.4% lower for local workers, compared with comparable private sector employees."

Their final paragraph reads: "This recession call for equal sacrifice, but long-term patterns indicate that the average compensation of state and local employees is not excessive. Indeed, if the goal is to compensate public and private workforces in a comparable manner, then the data do not call for reductions in average state and local wages and benefits." [Emphasis mine.]

Things are getting interesting! In the next post we'll take a look at some numbers inside the study. In case you're wondering, New York was one of the "large states" which were specifically studied and we will have some interesting numbers concerning our state.

Let's lay this myth to rest once and for all!

2012-01-10T11:32:00.000-05:00

We've all heard the statements by public officials. Gov. Scot Walker of Wisconsin said "we can no longer live in a society where the public employees are the haves and taxpayers who foot the bills are the have-nots." He also said that his state "cannot grow if our people are weighed down paying for a larger and larger government." His March 2011 budget address included the idea that Wisconsin's growth was being hindered by a "government that pays its workers unsustainable benefits that are out of line with the private sector."

In 2010, Senator Scott Brown of Mass. said "It's not right that lesser-paid private sector workers suffering through a recession have to pay for expensive government salaries."

Journalists Michael Fletcher and Brady Dennis (Washington Post) say that "...public employees often enjoy more generous pension and health-care benefits, and these are at the root of the long-term budget problems confronting many states."

David Brooks, conservative columnist for the NY Times argues that "public sector unions can use political power to increase demand for their product."

The "Publisher's notebook" piece which was the subject of the last blog post opined: "...other problems stem from the public-sector contracts that keep labor costs in our state, county, schools and municipalities out of whack with the private sector."

So, to sum up-

1. Public sector compensation is out of line with that in the private sector.

2. Public sector pay and benefits are the major cause of the financial difficulties being visited upon the states.

3. Public sector unions, through their political influence, are exacerbating state and local financial problems.

Here's the problem with these statements: They are all statements that "everybody knows" to be true. How do we know that? Because we have heard them repeated again and again. But here's the rub: They are all demonstrably wrong! So, let's get about the business of doing the demonstrating.

To keep blog posts to readable lengths, we'll do this over several posts.

Let's begin by looking at the state-by-state differential between private- and public-sector workers. These figures include both wages and benefits. The source is a recent USAToday article on the subject. A positive difference means that the average public employee earns MORE than the average private-sector worker, while a negative difference means the average public-sector earns LESS than the average private-sector worker.

Rank	State	Difference
1	Nevada	$17,815.00
2	Rhode Island	$17,603.00
3	Hawaii	$12,243.00
4	Florida	$9,099.00
5	California	$7,977.00
6	Connecticut	$7,687.00
7	South Carolina	$7,590.00
8	Montana	$7,396.00
9	Maryland	$6,931.00
10	New Jersey	$6,681.00
11	Michigan	$6,436.00
12	Iowa	$6,178.00
13	Vermont	$5,811.00
14	New Mexico	$5,715.00
15	Oregon	$5,607.00
16	Alabama	$5,001.00
17	Maine	$4,912.00
18	Mississippi	$4,713.00
19	Arizona	$4,310.00
20	Arkansas	$4,196.00
21	West Virginia	$3,655.00
22	Nebraska	$3,130.00
23	Wyoming	$3,116.00
24	Delaware	$2,911.00
25	Idaho	$2,855.00
26	Alaska	$2,764.00
27	Utah	$2,611.00
28	Louisiana	$2,473.00
29	Ohio	$2,392.00
30	Kentucky	$2,313.00
31	South Dakota	$1,909.00
32	North Carolina	$1,857.00
33	Wisconsin	$1,802.00
34	New York	$1,699.00
35	Oklahoma	$1,667.00
36	Pennsylvania	$1,567.00
37	Minnesota	$1,259.00
38	Indiana	$1,183.00
39	Washington	$532.00
40	Illinois	$485.00
41	D.C.	$457.00
42	North Dakota	$389.00
43	Tennessee	-$765.00
44	Missouri	-$1,075.00
45	New Hampshire	-$1,876.00
46	Virginia	-$2,328.00
47	Kansas	-$3,229.00
48	Colorado	-$3,391.00
49	Texas	-$3,580.00
50	Georgia	-$3,875.00
51	Massachusetts	-$4,688.00
	Total United States	$2,511.00

We can draw at least two conclusions from these figures-

1) New York is much farther down the table than many would have us believe. At number 34 out of 51, the average public-sector worker earns about $32/week more than the average private-sector worker. That's hardly enough to allow the difference to be called "out of whack."

2) The table seems to confirm the argument that public-sector compensation (with the exception of 9 states) is greater than that for the private sector.

Well, not really. And therein lies a story about reporters who can do arithmetic and Ph.D's who can do research. And that's where our next post will begin.

Local paper pins the stupid meter!

2012-01-08T11:02:00.001-05:00

I think it's fair to say that the editorial position of the Dunkirk Observer regarding public employees is that they are a whining bunch of overpaid, underworked spoiled brats who have no concept of the real world and should be thankful that they can feed so greedily at the public trough. And that's on a benevolent day.

And then I came upon the "Publisher's notebook" for January 6, 2012 containing the following gem:

"If you happen to believe public-sector salaries are comparable to what is earned in the private sector, consider how you manage your household. There, many of us are attempting to reduce our costs.

Residents will pay a teenager $15 to mow their lawn or $10 to shovel their walk. So why would we pay public-workers salaries that top $50,000 - not including the pensions, days off and benefits - for those doing the same job on a larger scale?"

During the past month, I celebrated my 68th birthday. In thinking back over everything I have heard during the past 68 years, I do not recall any statement even approaching this level of stupidity.

Now I have great respect for the snow fighting ability of teenagers. My wife and I flew back to Buffalo several years ago right after a snowstorm of historic proportions. Our first hint of trouble was the group of teenagers armed with snow shovels sitting in the front of the SunPark shuttle taking us to the parking area across from the airport.

When we reached SunPark we were among the lucky ones who could identify our car by the top of the radio antenna as cars were completely buried by the storm. The teens were digging out cars for tips, and they made a bundle that day!

Still, I have difficulty imagining Chautauqua County's roads being cleared at 4 AM during a raging storm by a phalanx of teenagers armed with shovels working for tips. First of all, how would they get to the roads that needed clearing? Would they need to shovel their way to route 60 from their homes? Perhaps all able-bodied teens would be required to spend the night at the fairgrounds whenever a storm was predicted.

Amazingly, no reader who commented online concerning this idea thought it was a good one. Here are three comments:

"Would you please publish the names of young $10 snow shovelers? I have been on Route 88 in the middle of a snow storm and if your shovelers are available will they shovel this driveway? Oh yes, sometimes they have to be ready to do it from Midnight to 7am, alone, in the hills and valleys of the region."

"By the way, do you also think high school kids could run this paper? After all, they do have to write papers for school. If they dont know something, many just make it up. Seems like they would be perfect for the job."

"Are you seriously comparing public sector employees, who operate heavy, complicated equipment and deal with many chemicals, among other things, with neighborhood kids who mow lawns and shovel sidewalks?"

By clicking here, you can read the Publisher's notebook in its entirety. The writer was once again making the argument that our region is in tough shape partly because of the ridiculously high labor costs in the public sector. This argument appears to accepted fact--like those "death panels" we were warned about last year--because it is repeated again and again. Is it factual? No one seems to present the facts to back it up. It's just something that "everyone knows."

Well, a slightly larger newspaper, USAToday, recently ran a series of articles concerning this topic. Their work includes some actual numbers which are quite interesting when examined. That's the subject of the next post.

Remember Wisconsin and Ohio? Say hello to Indiana!

2012-01-06T14:48:00.001-05:00

Remember the union-stripping laws passed in Wisconsin? Remember the union-stripping laws passed in Ohio, and then repealed by the overwhelming majority of voters? Well, here comes Indiana, and it has a lot to do with the Superbowl. Since the NFL playoffs begin tomorrow, this is a timely story as explained so well by Rachel Maddow on her show last night.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

UPDATE (1/7/2012): The NFL Players Association speaks out against proposed Indiana law. Click here for the full story.

What does Finland know that we don't?

2012-01-05T12:14:00.002-05:00

After taking some time off for the holidays, it's time to investigate an important topic: Finland. Everyone seems to agree that Finland's educational system is the best in the world. What can we learn from them?

Smithsonian Magazine ran a story last year titled "Why are Finland's schools so successful?". The article is worth reading in its entirety, but here are some of the highlights:

"Finland’s schools were not always a wonder. Until the late 1960s, Finns were still emerging from the cocoon of Soviet influence. Most children left public school after six years. (The rest went to private schools, academic grammar schools or folk schools, which tended to be less rigorous.) Only the privileged or lucky got a quality education."

"In 1963, the Finnish Parliament made the bold decision to choose public education as its best shot at economic recovery.....It was simply the idea that every child would have a very good public school. If we want to be competitive, we need to educate everybody. It all came out of a need to survive.” [Emphasis mine.]

"Practically speaking—and Finns are nothing if not practical—the decision meant that goal would not be allowed to dissipate into rhetoric. Lawmakers landed on a deceptively simple plan that formed the foundation for everything to come. Public schools would be organized into one system of comprehensive schools, or peruskoulu, for ages 7 through 16. Teachers from all over the nation [who are recruited from the top 10% of their classes] contributed to a national curriculum that provided guidelines, not prescriptions. Besides Finnish and Swedish (the country’s second official language), children would learn a third language (English is a favorite) usually beginning at age 9. Resources were distributed equally. As the comprehensive schools improved, so did the upper secondary schools (grades 10 through 12). The second critical decision came in 1979, when reformers required that every teacher earn a fifth-year master’s degree in theory and practice at one of eight state universities—at state expense. From then on, teachers were effectively granted equal status with doctors and lawyers. Applicants began flooding teaching programs, not because the salaries were so high but because autonomy and respect made the job attractive. In 2010, some 6,600 applicants vied for 660 primary school training slots... By the mid-1980s, a final set of initiatives shook the classrooms free from the last vestiges of top-down regulation. Control over policies shifted to town councils. The national curriculum was distilled into broad guidelines. National math goals for grades one through nine, for example, were reduced to a neat ten pages. Sifting and sorting children into so-called ability groupings was eliminated. All children—clever or less so—were to be taught in the same classrooms, with lots of special teacher help available to make sure no child really would be left behind. The inspectorate closed its doors in the early ’90s, turning accountability and inspection over to teachers and principals. “We have our own motivation to succeed because we love the work,” said [principal] Louhivuori. “Our incentives come from inside.” [Emphasis mine.]

".... Educators had little idea it was so successful until 2000, when the first results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test given to 15-year-olds in more than 40 global venues, revealed Finnish youth to be the best young readers in the world. Three years later, they led in math. By 2006, Finland was first out of 57 countries (and a few cities) in science."

"Still, there is a distinct absence of chest-thumping among the famously reticent Finns. They are eager to celebrate their recent world hockey championship, but PISA scores, not so much. “We prepare children to learn how to learn, not how to take a test,” said Pasi Sahlberg, a former math and physics teacher who is now in Finland’s Ministry of Education and Culture. “We are not much interested in PISA. It’s not what we are about.” [Emphasis mine.]

"There are no mandated standardized tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students’ senior year in high school. There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions. Finland’s schools are publicly funded. The people in the government agencies running them, from national officials to local authorities, are educators, not business people, military leaders or career politicians. Every school has the same national goals and draws from the same pool of university-trained educators. The result is that a Finnish child has a good shot at getting the same quality education no matter whether he or she lives in a rural village or a university town. The differences between weakest and strongest students are the smallest in the world, according to the most recent survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “Equality is the most important word in Finnish education. All political parties on the right and left agree on this,” said Olli Luukkainen, president of Finland’s powerful teachers union." [Emphasis mine.]

"Teachers in Finland spend fewer hours at school each day and spend less time in classrooms than American teachers. Teachers use the extra time to build curriculums and assess their students....It’s almost unheard of for a child to show up hungry or homeless. Finland provides three years of maternity leave and subsidized day care to parents, and preschool for all 5-year-olds, where the emphasis is on play and socializing. In addition, the state subsidizes parents, paying them around 150 euros per month for every child until he or she turns 17. Ninety-seven percent of 6-year-olds attend public preschool, where children begin some academics. Schools provide food, medical care, counseling and taxi service if needed. Student health care is free." [Emphasis mine.]

"Besides Finnish, math and science, the first graders take music, art, sports, religion and textile handcrafts. English begins in third grade, Swedish in fourth. By fifth grade the children have added biology, geography, history, physics and chemistry." [Emphasis mine.]

"Some of the more vocal conservative reformers in America have grown weary of the “We-Love-Finland crowd” or so-called Finnish Envy. They argue that the United States has little to learn from a country of only 5.4 million people—4 percent of them foreign born. Yet the Finns seem to be onto something. Neighboring Norway, a country of similar size, embraces education policies similar to those in the United States. It employs standardized exams and teachers without master’s degrees. And like America, Norway’s PISA scores have been stalled in the middle ranges for the better part of a decade." [Emphasis mine.]

"In the United States, which has muddled along in the middle for the past decade, government officials have attempted to introduce marketplace competition into public schools. In recent years, a group of Wall Street financiers and philanthropists such as Bill Gates have put money behind private-sector ideas, such as vouchers, data-driven curriculum and charter schools, which have doubled in number in the past decade. President Obama, too, has apparently bet on competition. His Race to the Top initiative invites states to compete for federal dollars using tests and other methods to measure teachers, a philosophy that would not fly in Finland. “I think, in fact, teachers would tear off their shirts,” said Timo Heikkinen, a Helsinki principal with 24 years of teaching experience. “If you only measure the statistics, you miss the human aspect.” [Emphasis mine.]

To sum up, Finland has one common system with common, nationwide goals. Its teachers are chosen from the top of their classes, and teaching careers are as sought after as medicine and law because of respect and autonomy. Your school will have the same resources whether you are in a university town or a small rural town. Students are taught to learn, not how to take tests. Educators--not billionaires or politicians--run the educational system. And, looking at the subjects taught, it seems that much more is expected of their students. Oh, and don't forget that educating everyone was seen as their best shot at economic recovery.

Sounds like there are some lessons to be learned.

UPDATE (1/7/2012): Here's a piece of video that ran on the NBC Nightly New last year with additional information on Finland's schools. (Sorry, you have to put up with a few seconds of NJ Gov. Christie at the beginning!)

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Is your doctor going to be forced out of Medicare?

2011-12-21T13:26:00.000-05:00

You've probably been watching the ongoing dustup in Washington concerning the continuation of the payroll tax cuts. Maybe you've been thinking "Thank goodness it doesn't affect me since I no longer receive a paycheck." Boy, are you wrong!

Included with this bill is a two-month extension of the Medicare "Doc Fix." The "Doc Fix" is a yearly ritual in Congress "...required by a 1990s budget law that failed to control spending but never got repealed. Instead, Congress passes a temporary fix each time, only to grow the size of cuts required next time around." This according to a piece in today's Huffington Post.

If the "Doc Fix" is not passed, Medicare payment to doctors will decrease by 27.4% as of January 1. (Medicare says that it will withhold payments to doctors for the first 10 business days of 2012 in hopes that the "Doc Fix" can be put into place. According to Medicare, any backup beyond 10 days is not possible without crashing its computer systems.)

If you have moved recently, you may have encountered difficulty finding a new doctor. Medicare payments are not lavish, and some doctors have simply refused to see new Medicare patients. If payments decrease by almost 30%, many more doctors are likely to opt out of Medicare.

Almost everyone expects the "Doc Fix" to eventually pass, so why is this happening? It mostly has to do with the inability of Congress to vote on things separately. Instead, they combine something that one side wants into a bill with something they don't want in hopes of using the "want" as leverage.

The current situation is also an example of poor negotiating practices. According to Ezra Klein in today's Washington Post: "Remember what everyone thought was happening here: Mitch McConnell was negotiating with Harry Reid on behalf of Senate and House Republicans. Those negotiations were successful. Almost every Senate Republican voted for the resulting bill. Boehner went to sell that bill to his members. But then the House Republicans rejected it, and we were back at square one."

Everyone who has ever served as a negotiator for their union understands one of the basic rules of negotiating: Don't send someone to the table unless they have the authority to make a deal.

Your holiday survival kit.

2011-12-18T12:24:00.001-05:00

It's time to head out to grandma's house for big holiday gatherings. (Yes, I said "holiday" not "Christmas." I checked my calendar and there appear to be several holidays in the next couple of weeks.)

At any rate, for many of you the lowpoint of your holiday gathering will be the relative--or neighbor--who carries on about the sad state in which public employees--including teachers--have placed the country. It's always fun to respond to their generalized bloviating with those nasty "fact" thingies. Here's a list of previous blog posts which you can print and stuff into your suitcase for just such an opportunity:

Assertion: Public employees earn way more than those in the private sector.
Facts: "Everybody knows" that public employees earn more than those in the private sector.

Public pay vs private: Truth is in the numbers.

Assertion: Public pensions are bankrupting the states.
Facts: Pensions NOT bankrupting the states!

Sometimes the comments tell the story.

The growing mythology surrounding public employee pensions.

The sky is falling: Not!

Assertion: Teachers earn too much.
Facts: Pay teachers more.

Teacher pay around the world: How we compare.

Teachers earn too much? Really?

Assertion: You're all just jealous of the rich.
Facts: Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%.

Assertion: We spend too much on education as it is.
Facts: A number that's hard to believe.

Assertion: Our schools are failing; unions defend bad teachers; billionaires know best; charter schools are the answer; more effective teachers are the answer.
Facts: 5 myths about education.

Assertion: Tenure means a job for life.
Facts: Tenure DOESN'T mean a job for life.

Assertion: Teachers don't work a full year.
Facts: Teachers don't work a full year?

Assertion: Public sector jobs aren't real jobs.
Facts: Relax teachers, your job isn't real!

Assertion: Bad teachers are the cause of our educational problems.
Facts: The grand coalition against teachers.

The grand coalition against teachers, part 2.

Let's stop blaming the teachers.

And then a teacher picked up her pen...

Finally, you might want to ask where your antagonist gets their news. Fox? Probably. Here's an interesting piece of research widely reported a little over a month ago:

"A new poll suggests people might be better off watching no news at all than tuning into Fox. Fairleigh Dickinson University surveyed New Jerseyans about the Arab Spring in Egypt and Syria, among other current events, and found that self-identified Fox News viewers were less likely to answer correctly than consumers of other news outlets. Fox viewers even did much worse than those who don’t watch any news....The results — controlled for partisanship, education, and other demographics — imply that there is actually something counterproductive about watching a Fox News program. Meanwhile, newspaper readers and fans of NPR, The Daily Show, and Sunday TV news, did the best overall." [Emphasis mine.]

Don't you just love research?

Teachers earn too much? Really?

2011-12-13T11:27:00.000-05:00

Well, that's the conclusion reached by a new study published by right-wing thinktank the American Enterprise Institute. To quote AEI: "We estimate that public school teachers receive total compensation roughly 50 percent higher than they would likely receive in private sector jobs." In fact, they conclude that teachers are "overcompensated by 52%."

Many researchers have weighed in to point up serious faults in the methodology of this study. One of them is Jordan Solomon of George Washington University, who attended the presentation of the study. You can find his comments on the methodology in Maureen Downey's "Get Schooled" column in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Solomon concluded: " When confronted by an employee for an association representing retired teachers, the presenters admitted that their goal from the outset was to demonstrate that the benefits for teachers were too high. It would appear that Heritage and AEI set out to produce a paper that allowed conservative governors to denigrate teachers and chastise their unions for the “high” salaries and cushy benefits paid to teachers." [Emphasis mine.] Who would have expected it?

Let's pause for a moment and examine pay vs performance in the private sector. Anyone remember Carly Fiorina? Fiorina was the Hewlett Packard CEO who was ousted by her board of directors after a record of failure. She walked away with a $42 million severance package, then ran for governor of California claiming her private sector experience as a "job creator" would put California back on its feet. Sadly, she neglected to mention that while at HP she laid off 18,000 workers. How's that for "pay for performance?"

John Merrow, education correspondent for the "PBS Newshour" writes in the NY Daily News--not usually a teacher-friendly venue--to point out some interesting facts concerning private sector pay and performance.

"The average teacher today earns about $55,000. At least 75 CEOs earn that much in one day, every day, 365 days a year. According to the AFL-CIO’s “Executive PayWatch,” the CEO who ranked No. 75, David Cote of Honeywell, was paid $20,154,012, for a daily rate of $55,216.47".

"Unlike wages for teachers, CEO salaries have been soaring in recent years. Forty years ago, the average public school teacher earned $49,000, adjusted for inflation. That’s a raise of a whopping $150 a year for 40 years, or about one quarter of 1% annually." [Emphasis mine.]

"[The pay for performance model] doesn’t seem to be true on Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms, where the pay of the CEO is often at odds with his company’s performance. Take Cisco’s John Chambers. The website 24/7 Wall Street ranks Chambers as America’s most overpaid CEO, based on his total compensation of $18,871,875 even as the price of Cisco common stock fell 31.4 %."

"In fairness, some teachers are overpaid, because they have “retired on the job” and are just going through the motions until they can retire for real. Of course, there’s a big difference between being overpaid at $55,000 and being overpaid at $20,500,000, which is what Carl Crawford of the Boston Red Sox earned for hitting .255 with just 11 home runs last season. Like the CEO of Honeywell, Crawford earns about $55,000 a day, every day, 365 days a year. "

Merrow points out one other difference: "Teachers spend their own money on supplies for their classrooms. That came to $1.33 billion in school year 2009-10, or $356 per teacher, according to the National School Supply & Equipment Association. I will wager several packs of colored pencils that Dauman, Cote and the other high earners do not drop by Staples to pick up office supplies for their secretaries."

Retirement in America is in trouble.

2011-12-05T15:11:00.000-05:00

Back in the "good old days" of a couple or three decades ago, the American retirement system was described as a three-legged stool. One leg was Social Security, while the second was the company pension and the third was individual savings. Together with the security of Medicare, these three legs would provide a reasonable level of comfort and security in our "golden years."

How times have changed! Today's USA Today carries an article titled "Many have little to no savings as retirement looms." Their assessment: "For many Americans, the golden years are quickly taking on a tin-like hue. After a vicious decade of no growth for the stock market, including two 401(k)-eating bear markets and persistently sky-high unemployment, more Americans are finding themselves in their 50s and 60s with practically no money saved for retirement."

What happened? Well, to begin with, about 80% of Americans find one leg of their retirement stool missing: their pension. Pensions disappeared in the private sector when one company after another discovered they could save money by switching to a 401(k) defined contribution plan. Employees thought it sounded great. They would contribute a part of their salary, their employer would match their contribution (up to a point), and they would get to have a say in the management of their retirement funds. What could go wrong?

Well, let's begin with the fact that the average employee is nowhere near the financial wizard they thought themselves to be. The folks who made a career of managing the "old fashioned" defined benefit pension plan really did do a better job of managing money than the average do-it-yourself investor.

USA Today points to an example: :"The people [financial advisor Joel] Redmond encounters most who are lacking sufficient retirement savings weren't necessarily delinquent or negligent. Many had money saved but were wiped out by the sour stock market in the past decade and poor investment strategies, Redmond says."

"That's what happened, in part, to Robert and Connie Cabana of Tampa, who are both in their 60s. Robert built up a sizable 401(k) working as a financial executive at Verizon. Connie was a business assistant for a local irrigation supply company. Connie was laid off four years ago; Robert was let go three years ago."

"But the serious hit to their retirement, which wiped out half their 401(k) savings, resulted from the stock market and an overexposure to risky stocks, they say. Now, 75% of their 401(k) is gone, and they have "very little" left, Robert says."

Then there's the matter that their employers probably never mentioned: To provide the same level of retirement income, those in 401(k)-type plans must accumulate twice as much money as in a traditional defined benefit pension plan. (For a complete explanation of this see "What's so bad about 401(k)-type plans?")

Nobody bothered to mention that:" A 65-year-old retiree would need to have $1.1 million saved to draw $50,000 a year in inflation-adjusted dollars, assuming 3% inflation and a 5% annual return from investments. That's if the investor is lucky enough to get a 5% return, which, given the flat-line returns of stocks the last decade, might give some pause."

That's a tough order considering that: " More than half of all workers, 56%, say they have less than $25,000 in savings, according to a survey by the Employee Benefit Research Institute." As for retirees: " More than half of retirees, 54%, report they have less than $25,000 saved. That's up dramatically from 2006, when 42% said they had less than that."

What's the meaning of all of this for those of us lucky to be members of the NY State Teachers' Retirement System? Simply this: There is little chance that the traditional pension will make a comeback in the private sector. Those without a pension will more frequently ask why they should pay taxes to provide public employees with a benefit they no longer have any hope of enjoying themselves.

We must stay vigilant--and politically active-- as the retirement "race to the bottom" continues.

Have grandchildren? Give their parents this book!

2011-12-01T14:12:00.002-05:00

Those of us who are grandparents like to think that one of our most important functions is to draw upon our vast array of life experiences in giving advice to our grandchildren.

I used to think this was true, and then I read Thomas Friedman's new book, "That Used to be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back." He made me realize that the world I grew up in--particularly the world of economics and work--had changed so rapidly and so completely that my experiences could no longer serve as a guide to my grandchildren.

You may recall that Friedman--A NY Times columnist and winner of 3 Pulitzer Prizes-- wrote a book called "The World is Flat." According to Amazon's review: "What Friedman means by "flat" is "connected": the lowering of trade and political barriers and the exponential technical advances of the digital revolution have made it possible to do business, or almost anything else, instantaneously with billions of other people across the planet."

"The World is Flat" was written in 2005. Since then, according to Friedman: "When I wrote The World is Flat, Facebook didn't exist, twitter was a sound, the cloud was in the sky, 4G was a parking place, applications were what you sent to colleges and Skype, for most people, was a typo. That's how much the world has changed in just a few years."

Freidman sees the George Clooney movie, Up in the Air, as a perfect metaphor for the first decade of the 21st century. Clooney plays someone who is always on an airplane because he's hired by companies to handle the firing of their employees who are no longer needed due to advances in technology. Eventually, Clooney is replaced by a young woman who comes up with the idea that it's less expensive to fire people over the internet rather than in person.

He tells about a large law firm which is now downsizing during the current economic difficulties. When Friedman asked the firm's head which lawyers were being fired, he received a surprising response. The firm had added many competent lawyers during the boom times. They did the work assigned to them in a competent and professional manner. They have been let go. The lawyers who stayed were the ones who added something "extra" to their jobs. They figured out how to do their work more efficiently, or how information technology would allow the firm to move into new areas of work.

When I finished the book, I purchased copies for my children. I told my son that there were 3 reasons I was giving him the book: 1) It would help him do his job better and give him an advantage over coworkers who had not read the book. 2) He works with large corporations, and understanding how their worlds were changing would help him keep his job. 3) The world is changing so quickly that if he gives his son career advice based on his experiences, it will be outdated wisdom.

My daughter-in-law was wondering whether their son, who is currently in eighth grade, was being pushed too hard in school. His counselor was recommending several advanced placement classes when planning his high school courses. I told her a story from Friedman.

Friedman's mother-in-law is the board chairman at Grinnell College, which is a small liberal arts college in Iowa. Last year, 10% of Grinnell's applications came from China. Of those 250 Chinese applicants, 50% had perfect 800 scores on the math SAT. Those kids are the people who will be competing with my grandson for jobs in a few years. Friedman's comment is that even Americans in "good" schools aren't getting an education that's good enough when compared with the education that is provided by many other countries.

Let me conclude with a wonderful piece of video. It's Friedman talking about his book at the Aspen Ideas Festival. The video runs for about an hour, but I promise you it is one of the best hours you'll spend. Even if you don't read the book, you'll learn something.

Personally, I think the best gift you can give your grandchildren this Christmas is to give a copy of "That Used to be Us" to their parents. Here's the video:

The sky is falling: Not!

2011-11-18T11:38:00.000-05:00

Here we go again! Public employee pension systems are supposedly crushing the life out of state finances. Just listen to part of a recent column by Leo Hindery, Jr --former CEO of AT&T Broadband and Liberty Communications--in the Huffington Post. He is referring to the Rhode Island State Pension Fund.

"Rhode Island's state pension fund now consumes 10% of every state tax dollar, and this figure is currently projected to double within just the next few years....And the root problem? Until just this year, Rhode Island calculated its pension number by assuming an average annual rate of return on its investments of 8.25% -- in fact, for the last decade its actual average return on investment was only about 2.40%. And in each of the last 10 years the state's fund paid more money to retirees than the fund collected from state employees and taxpayers combined....Rhode Island is a microcosm of what's wrong with the country's $3 trillion worth of public pensions plans in the aggregate, and it's truly the 'canary in the (national pension crisis) coal mine'. The state -- just like 49 other states -- made promises it didn't sufficiently fund along the way and now can't keep. That bill has come due, so to speak, and...the state is being forced to choose among the state reneging on both past and future promises to workers, undermining its future by cutting back on investing in everything from schools to green energy to health care, or, even though in the midst of an ongoing recession, raising revenues through large tax increases."

It's interesting to compare this with the recent news release by the New York State Teachers' Retirement System:"A robust total fund return of 23.2% net of fees for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2011 was the largest rate of return posted in 25 years by NYSTRS. The figure was nearly double the previous year's return of 12.1%."

"The two consecutive years of double-digit returns helped the System regain much of the loss sustained during the devastating 2008-09 economic crisis. "

"As of June 30, 2011, total net assets were valued at $89.9 billion, an increase of more than $13 billion from a year earlier. NYSTRS has achieved returns well above the 8.0% assumed rate of return in four of the past six years. The System's 25-year annualized rate of return stood at 9.0% — or 100 basis points above the actuarially assumed rate. "

Remember that part about the Rhode Island system paying out more in benefits than it took in from members and employers? Here's the way the NYSTRS looks at it: "The NYSTRS plan has also proven to be extremely efficient and cost effective. For the 20-year period ended June 30, 2011, NYSTRS collected $15.3 billion in member and employer contributions while paying out $63.5 billion in benefits. Despite distributing nearly $50 billion more than it took in, System assets rose from $31 billion to $89.9 billion."

Are employer contribution rates skyrocketing out of control? Not for NYSTRS: "Due in large part to the System's long-term investment success, the employer contribution rate has remained in single digits over this same 20-year period. In the 1990s the average rate was 5.66% and in the 2000s it was 4.37%. The 11.11% rate applicable to 2011-12 payroll will be the first double-digit rate in 22 years."

It should be noted that the employer contribution rate is based on a rolling 5-year average of investment performance. That means that the losses which occurred in 2008-2009 will work their way out of the calculation in a couple of years. If the stock market doesn't plummet again, it is reasonable to assume that the ECR will actually decrease in the future.

Why is NYSTRS doing so well? The simple answer is that it is fully funded. Other state systems are also supposed to be fully funded, but in New York's case the required contributions by public employers were actually made each year. States such as New Jersey and California took several years off from making contributions as a way of keeping taxes lower.

As i have pointed out before, that's like contracting with someone to paint your house then, when the house is painted telling the painter, "I spent some of the money I was going to use to pay your bill on a big new flatscreen TV, so you'll have to accept less than the contract price." And then, you accuse the painter of being greedy when the painter insists that you pay him the agreed upon price!

Other state public employee pension systems may be in trouble, but it's not because of the "greed" of the public employees. If you hear anyone trying to lump NYSTRS in with those other systems, now you have the facts to set them straight!

And then, a teacher picked up her pen...

2011-11-11T14:24:00.002-05:00

I like Fareed Zakaria. He usually has intelligent, informed ideas concerning his specialty, foreign affairs. Last week, he wrote a piece called "When Will We Learn?" for Time magazine and my head nearly exploded.

Now, it didn't start out that way. I agreed with almost all of his thoughts. You really should click on the link above and read the entire article, it's not long. If you're short on time, here are some of his points:

"...it is worth noting that [Steve] Jobs got a great secondary education. The school he attended, Homestead High in Cupertino, Calif., was a first-rate public school that gave him a grounding in both the liberal arts and technology. It did the same for Steve Wozniak, the more technically oriented co-founder of Apple Computer, whom Jobs met at that same school. In 1972, the year Jobs graduated, California's public schools were the envy of the world. They were generally rated the finest in the country, well funded and well run, with excellent teachers. These schools were engines of social mobility that took people like Jobs and Wozniak and gave them an educational grounding that helped them rise."

"Today, California's public schools are a disaster, beset by dysfunction and disrepair. They rank at the bottom of the country, just as the U.S. now sits at the bottom of the industrialized world by most measures of educational achievement. The World Economic Forum ranks the U.S.'s educational system 26th in the world, well behind those of countries like Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Canada and Singapore. In science and math, we score even worse."

OK, no surprises here. I'm nodding in agreement. He continues: "....As American education has collapsed, the median wages of the American worker have stagnated, and social mobility—the beating heart of the American dream—has slowed to a standstill. Education is and always has been the fastest way up the socio economic ladder. And the payoff from a good education remains evident even in this weak recovery. The unemployment rate for college graduates is just 4%, but for high school dropouts it is 14%. If you drop out of high school—and the U.S. has a 25% dropout rate—you will have a depressed standard of living for the rest of your life." More nodding from me.

"The need for better education for most Americans has never been more urgent. While we have been sleeping, the rest of the world has been upgrading its skills. Countries in Europe and Asia have worked hard to increase their college-graduation rates, while the U.S.'s — once the world's highest — has flatlined. Other countries have focused on math and science, while in America degrees have proliferated in "fields" like sports exercise and leisure studies." More nodding, and groaning. The groaning is because I watched the Republican debate Wed. night and one of the two things Rick Perry could remember he would do away with as soon as he became president is the Dept. of Education. That'll sure help us catch up with the rest of the world!

Zakaria goes on to say we need to work harder, like they do in South Korea's schools and get better teachers, as in Finland. "Finland has great teachers, who are paid well and treated with the same professional respect that is accorded to doctors and lawyers. They are found and developed through an extremely competitive and rigorous process. All teachers are required to have master's degrees, and only 1 in 10 applicants is accepted to the country's teacher-training programs. The contrast with the U.S. is stark. Half of America's teachers graduated in the bottom third of their college class."

I like that part about being paid and treated well. My head is now bouncing like one of those bobble-head dolls on a dashboard. And then, my head explodes!

"There are many more ideas, many of them worthwhile and worth trying, but you can get lost in the details of the education debate. These two seem simple—work more and get better teachers. Yet implementing them is anything but simple. They bump up against an education system that is deeply resistant to change and teachers' unions that jealously guard their prerogatives. All the specific measures that would allow students to work more and good teachers to be identified and rewarded— more days, longer hours, merit pay—are mostly opposed by the teachers' unions and other guardians of the status quo." [Emphasis mine.]

You almost got it, Fareed, but you bought into the anti-teacher, anti-union BS being spouted by the education "reformers." I've never met a group of people who so desperately want to change the educational system as do teachers. Have a look. Teachers don't control the system! And I will not apologize for my union's position that adding hours, days or weeks to my work load should mean an increase in compensation.

So I reached for my keyboard. And then I stopped. I knew there would be an inservice teacher somewhere in America who would respond. This week's issue of Time proved me correct. Here's the letter that Laurie Floyd of Howell, NJ sent in response to Zakaria's piece. (Note: If you are unfamiliar with the Khan videos she mentions, please read the Zakaria piece.)

"Perhaps I shouldn't have read Zakaria's article after spending the last hour of my 10-hour teaching day looking for a copier that worked and then hand-stapling over 100 tests. I was probably a bit cranky to start. Then again, maybe I am a little tired of people who have never taught a roomful of 34 high school students telling me I am doing it wrong. I too love the Khan Academy model, but how would I get all my students to watch the Khan videos at home, on their own time, when many do not have a working computer and some do little, if any, homework?" (And, by the way, I do not teach at an inner-city or rural school; I teach in a wealthy suburb.) Instead of blaming us teachers, ask us what would actually improve education. Here's my answer: 1) Deal with childhood poverty, 2) hold students partly responsible for their education so they meet us at least halfway, and 3) give teachers more time to prepare and receive professional development. A working copier would help too."

I couldn't have said it better.

Some thoughts on the day after elections.

2011-11-09T09:24:00.000-05:00

Let's begin with the one that feels the best: Ohio. Voters there overwhelmingly repealed the law taking collective bargaining rights away from teachers, police, firefighters and other public employees.

The typical voter doesn't pay a lot of attention to politics, except close to election day. But they're not stupid. They're smart enough to get downright cranky when the folks who had just won an election with a promise of "Jobs, jobs, jobs" deliver, instead, an anti-union law which had never been mentioned during the election campaign.

Several states allow voters to overturn laws enacted by their state governments. It seems to be a good check on the power of the state, without going as far as the "voters make laws" ballot initiatives in states like California.

Maine also has the ability of voters to repeal state legislation, and it was used last night to overturn the new ban on same-day registration and voting. Maine had had same-day registration for almost 40 years, and they seemed to have liked it.

Maine voters apparently agree with Andrew Rosenthal's column in Monday's NY Times titled "Voter fraud: Does it happen?" Rosenthal went in search of the voter fraud that Republicans claim is serious enough to justify new "photo ID" requirements for voting. He looked at some of the deepest "red" websites, such as "Red State," to see what the fuss was about. His conclusion: "...from what I can tell every one of the Red State incidents revolved around corrupt poll workers or local officials or some other functionary messing with absentee ballots. That’s an age old problem but one that voter ID laws will not fix. I’m still not seeing evidence of large numbers of individuals impersonating someone else to cast a ballot or voting despite the fact that they don’t meet eligibility requirements. "

In Mississippi, 55% of that state's very conservative electorate refused to change the state constitution to define a fertilized egg as a person. This would have, of course, outlawed abortion in the state, but would also have outlawed forms of birth control--such as the pill--that prevent implantation of that fertilized egg in the uterus, and also prevent pregnancies that might lead to abortion.

It was interesting to see an interview with outgoing Mississippi governor Haley Barbour yesterday in which he gave thoughtful consideration to some of the downsides of the proposed change. He brought up one that I had not considered: ectopic pregnancy. A fertilized egg implanted somewhere other than the uterus--usually the fallopian tube--is a life-threatening situation for the mother. Under the proposal, the doctor could be charged with murder for removing the "person" from the mother. After explaining this, Barbour went on to say that he had voted "yes." It must be the water.

Closer to WNY, the Buffalo News reports that Erie County Comptroller Mark Poloncarz soundly defeated incumbent Chris Collins for the post of Erie County Executive. If you're not familiar with Erie County politics, Collins is a well-to-do businessman whose platform four years ago was to "run government like a business." Well, he did and that's part of the problem.

Donn Esmonde, in his column this morning in the Buffalo News, quotes UB political science professor Jim Campbell: "I think that's the downside of [Collins'] business experience. CEOs can do what they want, and people have to suck it up. But this is politics. People can answer back in the voting booth."

Governments are like business in that the guy in the corner office needs to be able to handle budgets, manage people, etc. Unlike business, however, the man at the top is not the ruler of all he surveys. There are those other pesky branches of government with equal powers in a checks-and-balances arrangement designed to prevent the head man from acting like a king.

Esmonde points out that this was the problem with Collins: "At times, Collins acted more like a king than a county executive. He denied the Justice Department full access to investigate mistreatment at county jails. He refused to release funds OK'd by the County Legislature, only loosening his grip after getting sued. Collins seemed not to comprehend, or at least not to respect, the Legislature's role as a check on an executive's absolute rule. All of it painted an image of the stereotypical hardhearted CEO, whom voters Tuesday decided they no longer wanted as county executive."

On balance, last night's elections results went a long way toward restoring my faith in the American electorate.

Young vs old wealth gap growing? Not so fast!

2011-11-07T14:54:00.000-05:00

There's a new report out today from the Pew Research Center which is sure to get a lot of attention in the days leading up to the congressional supercommittee report deadline of Nov. 23. Here are the first two paragraphs of the story from the AP as posted at the Huffington Post:

"The typical U.S. household headed by a person age 65 or older has a net worth 47 times greater than a household headed by someone under 35, according to an analysis of census data released Monday."

"While people typically accumulate assets as they age, this wealth gap is now more than double what it was in 2005 and nearly five times the 10-to-1 disparity a quarter-century ago, after adjusting for inflation."

Here it is in graphical form from a story at CNN/Money:

According to the CNN/Money story: "Net worth includes the sum of a household's assets (like equity in a home, car and savings and retirement accounts) minus its debts (like mortgage, car and student loans and credit card debt)"

Why the big disparity? CNN says that: "Perhaps the biggest factor leading to the wealth gap between the ages though, is the housing market....Most of today's older homeowners got into the housing market long ago, at 'pre-bubble' prices," the report said. "Along with everyone else, they've been hurt by the housing market collapse of recent years, but over the long haul, most have seen their home equities rise."

Read the full stories to get a better picture of what's happening, but this certainly doesn't help those who are trying to defend Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid from cuts by the supercommittee. On the surface, it looks like the geezers are making out like bandits while the young are getting screwed.

Let's go under the surface a bit. Suppose your net worth is $170,494. Are you rolling in clover? Maybe, until you consider healthcare costs.

Wait a minute! Old folks get free medical care through Medicare! No way. Take a minute and refer to one of my previous posts: Hey Washington, we've already got plenty of skin in the game! You will see that it is reasonable to assume that a retired couple on Medicare--and fully insured with medigap and prescription drug insurance--will have out-of-pocket medical costs approaching $10,000/year.

Actually, according to the Money page at US News, the picture is worse: " In the past, I've written that retired couples will need between $205,932 (Boston College Center for Retirement Research estimate) and $225,000 (Fidelity Investments estimate) to coverhealthcare costs in retirement."

"A new analysis by the nonpartisan EBRI puts the number for a couple currently age 65 at a staggeringly high $635,000, and that doesn't include long-term-care costs. This ultraconservative calculation is higher than the other estimates because it is designed to give the retired couple a 90 percent chance of having enough money to cover all health bills beyond what Medicare covers."

"However, if you are willing to accept a fifty-fifty chance of being able to pay your out-of-pocket expenses, $212,000 would be sufficient for a couple (right smack in the middle of the other two estimates)."

"EBRI also calculated that a 65-year-old single man will need $331,000 and a single woman $390,000 to be almost completely certain of covering all out-of-pocket retiree health costs. If you're willing to accept a fifty-fifty chance, those numbers can be halved, EBRI says."

How's that $170,494 net worth looking now? And isn't it wonderful that we old folks in the USA don't have to put up with one of those French or German health care plans that cover everything--including longterm care--at about half the per capita cost of the American system. We Americans are just so bright and--what's the word?--exceptional.

Oh, I know they're paying higher taxes, but take a look at those numbers I just quoted and tell me who's getting the better deal.

Is Social Security broke?

2011-11-03T15:38:00.000-04:00

OK, stop hyperventilating. The short answer is "not even close." But first, a couple of updates on my last post.

It now appears that the supercommittee is not looking at "clawing back" any Social Security benefits already in place. Instead, they are talking about reducing future benefit growth in a way that will result in about a 9% benefit decrease compared with the current system for someone who is now 65 by the time they reach age 90.

As I said in the last post, they want to use a different way of calculating the cost-of-living figure on which any increase in benefits is calculated each year. They claim that the current system is overly generous.

Right. That would be the overly generous system that resulted in ZERO cost of living increase for 2010 and ZERO cost of living increase for 2011. There will be a 3.6% increase in benefits for 2012, so that averages out to 1.2%/year for the last 3 years. Don't spend it all in one place! Oh, and don't forget that some of that increase will be eaten up by an increase in your Medicare Part B premium.

By the way, it turns out that the Bureau of Labor Statistics did a little experiment. They actually came up with a cost of living index based on what seniors buy. Turns out that the current figure used by Social Security is under-generous, instead of over-generous. Whoops!

Now, some idiots on the editorial page of the Washington Post are claiming that Social Security is broke because it's "cash negative" for the year. William Greider has a nice piece in The Nation called "Smearing Social Security," in which he addresses some of the more ridiculous claims. For example, the Post claims: "Adding billions to US budget woes,” the headline read. Instead of piling up surpluses, as the Social Security trust fund has done for nearly thirty years, this year the system became “cash negative.” Social Security, the Post warned, “is sucking money out of the Treasury.”

Greider goes on to say that "Last night, I heard a TV anchor remark in passing, “We just read that Social Security is in the red.” He answers: "Baloney. The truth—if truth is still relevant to Washington politics—is that Social Security has never contributed a dime to the federal budget deficits. Therefore, cutting Social Security for the elderly will do nothing to relieve the deficit problem....In fact, Social Security has piled up enormous surpluses—now $2.7 trillion—which the federal government has borrowed and spent on other things, wars or highways or corporate tax breaks."

And here's where another big lie about Social Security comes in. I'll bet you've heard someone say that there really isn't any Social Security trust fund, it's just a "bunch of worthless IOU's,"

Let's talk about that for a minute. Those "worthless IOU's" are U.S. Treasury Bonds. They're what used to be called the "widows and orphans" investment because the risk was as close to zero as you could imagine. They don't pay a ton of interest, but you're damn sure you'll get your principal back when the bonds come due.

Lots of people hold Treasuries in their portfolios and, trust me, they don't think of them as "worthless IOU's." Nations such as China have lent money to the USA and receive Treasuries in return. Trust me, China does not see these as "worthless IOU's." So why are the Treasuries held by Social Security any different. It's simple: they're not.

According to Greider: "The nation’s largest creditor is not China. It is the working people of America and their employers who collectively have amassed Social Security’s huge surplus through the weekly FICA contributions required by law. This wealth is the nest egg that will pay for swelling benefits as the baby-boom generation retires. Far from being broke or “sucking” billions from the Treasury, the Social Security trust fund will continue to accumulate larger and larger surpluses during the next ten years, reaching $3.7 trillion by 2022, according to the system’s trustees."

Greider's full piece is well worth the five minutes it will take to read it. Here's the link again:

http://www.thenation.com/blog/164375/smearing-social-security

One last thing: The last post generated some comments at the blog. Remember that comments in the blog are "moderated," which means that they are not posted immediately, Instead, they come to me via email and I approve their posting. I check my email several times each day, but there may be several hours between when you post your comment to the blog and when it actually appears, particularly if you're a night-owl and do it at 2 AM!

I continue to promise that all comments will be posted, whether you agree with my position or not. Moderation is used to avoid the obscene, hate-filled comments which I'm sure you have encountered in other places where comments are allowed without moderation.

I'm ticked off, and you will be too!

2011-11-01T17:43:00.002-04:00

How would you like to see your monthly Social Security check SHRINK by 3%? If you currently receive $1500/month, that would mean a DECREASE of $45 each month, or $540 each year. Well, get ready because that seems about ready to happen!

According to a piece by Dean Baker in yesterday's Huffington Post: "If anyone still questioned who owns Washington, the Congressional supercommittee charged with reducing projected deficits by $1.2 trillion seems determined to end any doubts. According to press accounts, both the Republicans and Democrats on the committee support a plan to reduce average Social Security benefits by 3 percent."

"This particular cut is especially pernicious since it will hit the oldest and poorest beneficiaries hardest. A person who is in their 90s and has been getting benefits for 30 years would see a reduction in benefits of close to 9 percent under the new cost-of-living adjustment formula apparently supported by members of the committee."

The claim is that the current method used to calculate the "cost of living" increase for Social Security recipients is overly generous. The claim is that when the price of apples, for example, in the "basket of goods" used to figure the consumer price index goes up, we don't continue to buy apples but, instead, purchase a less expensive fruit.

While this may be true, let's think about the things that seniors purchase. Look back over your expenses for the last year and I'll bet you find a large amount of your spending was on medical/dental expenses and prescription drugs. When medical costs go up, do you switch to the less expensive witch doctor? When prescription drug prices rise, do you switch to the less expensive herbal medicines? I didn't think so.

Notice that the 3% reduction is for the folks newest to Social Security. The older folks who have been receiving benefits for the longest time would have their benefits recalculated from the time they began receiving Social Security using the stingier cpi formula, thus the 9% benefit reduction for the 90-year-old mentioned above.

By the way, let's remember that Social Security has not contributed one penny to the deficit! It currently has a surplus which will allow current benefits to be paid for the next 25 years, and at a level of 75% of current benefits beyond that. If we simply remove the cap on earnings subject to Social Security taxes (currently at $109,000) any Social Security funding problem disappears.

Is Social Security an overly generous program? According to Jeff Madrick: " The average payment is $14,000 a year. It is getting less generous. It used to replace 55 percent of retirement income, but benefits were reduced in the 1980s. It now covers on average 41 percent of retirement income. In 2031, it will cover 32 percent of retirement income."

Madrick continues: "What will drive future budget deficits is Medicare and Medicaid, not Social Security, and for the umpteenth time, the reason is that overall health costs are expected to rise quickly. This means we have to reform our uniquely inefficient healthcare system. Congress is, as usual, diverting us from the real issues. No wonder Americans like Occupy Wall Street."

Who's on the "supercommittee?" Click here for a CNN/Money post giving information about the committee members.

It's Halloween and the political parties are exchanging costumes.

2011-10-31T17:17:00.000-04:00

I have a big file of "stuff I'd like to eventually get around to using" in these blog posts. I was looking through it this morning, and came across a special report done by the Washington Post earlier this year titled "Running in the Red: How the U.S., on the Road to Surplus, Detoured to Massive Debt."

The opening paragraphs caught my attention: "The nation’s unnerving descent into debt began a decade ago with a choice, not a crisis."

"In January 2001, with the budget balanced and clear sailing ahead, the Congressional Budget Office forecast ever-larger annual surpluses indefinitely. The outlook was so rosy, the CBO said, that Washington would have enough money by the end of the decade to pay off everything it owed."
"Voices of caution were swept aside in the rush to take advantage of the apparent bounty. Political leaders chose to cut taxes...."

Out of curiosity, I clicked on the "voices of caution" link and found myself reading a January 20, 1999 article covering Bill Clinton's next-to-last State of the Union address. I had long ago forgotten what he said. Here is some of the article:

"President Clinton appeared before a joint session of Congress last night to present an ebullient vision of a nation enjoying vast prosperity after six years under his leadership, a newfound abundance that he said should be used to prepare for the burden of a rapidly aging population in the next century."

"....announcing a policy barrage that includes one of the more ambitious initiatives of his presidency: a plan to devote some $2.7 trillion in projected budget surpluses over the next 15 years to Social Security"

"Clinton also proposed directing billions of the surplus to the Medicare health insurance program for seniors. Cumulatively, the president anticipates spending nearly 90 percent of the surplus on programs for the aged."

Clinton's ideas struck me as "prudent." a term which used to be closely associated with the Republicans. Many of you will remember Dana Carvey's imitation of George H.W. Bush on Saturday Night Live. "Wouldn't be prudent" was the big laugh-getter.

Thomas Friedman's new book "That used to be us: How America Fell behind in the world it invented and how we can come back" contains a wonderful description of how our parties have traded costumes:

"Neither of America's two major parties seems to be able to address in serious fashion the challenges the country confronts. Their political philosophies are worlds apart, and neither outlook is suitable for the present moment. The Democrats act as if government is the solution to all of America's difficulties; the Republicans act as if government is the cause of all of them. The Democrats behave as if virtually every program the government created in the twentieth century is perfect and cannot be changed in any way; the Republicans seek to send the country back to the nineteenth century, before any of those programs existed. Neither approach will give the country the policies it needs to succeed in the decades to come."

"In fact, the parties have reversed their historical positions. A generation ago Democrats stood for progressive change. Now they defend every federal program as if each were sacred. They have become the most conservative force in American politics. The term "reactionary liberalism" is not a contradiction in terms; it is an accurate description of the Democrats' approach to governance."

"The Republicans used to be the conservatives in the original, genuine, European sense, opposed to sudden, rapid shifts in public policy and prudent [NOTE: there's that word!] when it came to public finances. Now they are the party of fiscal radicalism and recklessness, cutting taxes without reducing spending and thereby pushing the United States ever deeper into debt."

"The two parties are, however, united on two things--unfortunately. Neither has the courage to take the necessary steps to address the dangerously high budget deficits: reduce spending on the main entitlement programs (Social Security and Medicare), raise taxes, and invest in the programs on which economic success depends. And neither has the courage to reduce America's, and therefore the world's, ruinous dependence on oil by raising the price of gasoline."

Trick or treat!

I saved $700 in 45 minutes last Sunday.

2011-10-25T15:22:00.000-04:00

Last month I did a blog post about the new "open enrollment" dates for Medicare, which run from October 15 through Dec. 7 of this year. If you missed it, click here to go to that post.

Practicing what I preach, I went to www.medicare.gov last Sunday morning, and looked at part D drug plans. In 45 minutes I had discovered a drug plan that would save me $700 in out-of-pocket costs next year compared with my current plan.

I used the "personalized search" option, which required that I know my medicare number and some other information which you can find on the front of your medicare card. Using the personalized--rather than general search--I was able to handle the whole enrollment process at the Medicare site, and Medicare will take care of canceling my current drug plan at the end of this year.

You will also need to know the names of the medications you take, as well as their dosages, so collect your prescription bottles and have them handy when you go searching for a new part D drug plan.

At $700 for 45 minutes of work, that's $933/hour. It's tough to find a job that pays that well, and you can do it from home in your bathrobe!

I'll bet you didn't know this about nursing home care.

2011-10-23T18:10:00.000-04:00

I was thumbing through the latest AARP magazine this afternoon, and ran across something both fascinating and frightening. It's on page 93. Here's the question that was asked:

"A nursing home recently sued my friend for $10,000 to pay for her father's end-of-life care. She had signed no papers and had no say in his choices or expenditures--is she responsible?" Here's the answer:

"In 30 states "filial responsibility" laws, while seldom enforced, say that adult children must care for parents who can't aford care for themselves....Some long-term care facilities that can't get payment for services--through the resident's funds of through Medicaid--are turning to the resident's children for restitution. Everyone with a parent in assisted living or a nursing home should understand the laws in the state their parent lives in. Check out the info at aarp.org/filial."

Here are the states WITHOUT filial responsibility laws:ME, NY, SC, FL, AL, MI, WI, MN, IL, MO, NE, KS, OK, TX, WY, CO, NM, WA, AZ, ID, HI.

Any state not listed above DOES have a filial responsibility law.

American Teacher: A movie you should know about.

2011-10-21T09:41:00.001-04:00

Remember how angry you got when the film Waiting for Superman told the world that the problem with our educational system is greedy, lazy, unionized teachers? Well, it's time for the other side of the story!

The new film, American Teacher, is directed by Academy Award winner Vanessa Roth and narrated by Matt Damon. It's produced by the Teacher Salary Project. Here's their description:

"THE TEACHER SALARY PROJECT encompasses a feature-length documentary film, an interactive online resource, and a national outreach campaign that delves into the core of our educational crisis as seen through the eyes and experiences of our nation's teachers. This project is based on the New York Times bestselling book Teachers Have It Easy by journalist and teacher Daniel Moulthrop, co-founder of the 826 National writing programs Nínive Calegari, and writer Dave Eggers. American Teacher is produced by Eggers and Calegari, produced and directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Vanessa Roth, and narrated by Matt Damon."

"Weaving interviews of policy experts and startling facts with the lives and careers of four teachers, our film, American Teacher, tells the collective story by and about those closest to the issues in our educational system—the 3.2 million teachers who spend every day in classrooms across the country. Through an interactive and evolving website and a feature-length documentary that brings together educational experts, student interviews, and a year of documenting the day-to-day lives and sacrifices of public school teachers, THE TEACHER SALARY PROJECT will bring an awareness to the real and imminent crisis in our educational system—how little we value our strongest, most committed, and most effective teachers, and the ripple effect this has on how our children learn and their potential for future success."

"In keeping with the storytelling styles of both Dave Eggers (writer) and Vanessa Roth (director), American Teacher is a character-driven film that explores this urgent issue through humor, irony, and the energy of the teachers who fill the screen. Since 2008, our team has closely followed the stories of four teachers living and working in disparate urban and rural areas across the country. The film's narrative balances the personal stories of each character with a mixture of interviews and animated facts and statistics by Stefan Nadelman, each highlighting the big sacrifices made by our nation’s teachers, and how these demanding costs force many of our greatest teachers out of the profession. The film is narrated by Matt Damon, who is passionate about education, and includes an original musical score by Thao Nguyen. American Teacher won the silver award in the documentary category of the 34th Annual Philadelphia International Film Festival."

"Research has shown that the top-performing school systems in the world all share one consistent feature: top-performing teachers. In the next five years, over one million teachers will retire. By following four feature teachers as they reach different milestones in their careers, our film tells the deeper story of the teaching profession in America today, and what we can do to invest in it for tomorrow."

Here is the trailer for American Teacher:

Just in case you have a continuing battle with a relative or neighbor who agrees with the Waiting for Superman model, the American Teacher website provides some interesting information, all nicely sourced as you would expect from teachers. [NOTE: If you click on any of the "source" links below, you will go to the same list on the American Teacher website. Mouseover the source link on that site to get the source citation.]

Studies prove that a great teacher can impart a year and a half's worth of learning to a student in one year. source

46 percent of teachers in public schools leave the profession within five years. source

Teachers make 14 percent less than people in other professions that require similar levels of education. source

In the next 10 years, more than 1.8 million of the 3.2 million teachers will become eligible for retirement. source

14 percent of teachers leave the profession each year; in urban districts, the turnover is higher: 20 percent.source

High turnover of American teachers costs our country over $7 billion every year. source

Teachers are priced out of home ownership in 32 metropolitan areas. source

Only 4.7 percent of college juniors would consider teaching at the current starting salary. 68 percent of college students said they would consider the teaching profession if it paid 50 percent more than the current occupations they were considering. source

The average starting salary for teachers in our country is $39,000; the average ending salary—after 25 years in the profession—is $67,000. source

In 1970 in New York City, a starting lawyer going into a prestigious firm and a starting teacher going into public education had a differential in their entry salary of about $2,000. Today, including salary and bonus, that starting lawyer makes $160,000, while starting teachers in New York make roughly $45,000. source

Teachers work an average of ten hours per day. source

92.4 percent of teachers spent their own money on their students or classrooms during the 2007-2008 school year. source

62 percent of teachers have second jobs outside of the classroom. source

61 percent of adults think teachers are underpaid given their level of training and importance to society. source

77 percent of U.S. adults feel teaching is among the most under-appreciated professions in the U.S. source

76 percent agree that many of the smartest people in society don't go into teaching because being a teacher doesn't pay enough. source

Good teaching over a sustained period can [help students] overcome the disadvantages of poverty. source

There are currently no screenings listed in the Buffalo area, but I'm on their newsletter list and will let you know when one is scheduled. You can click here for a current list of screenings.

Are colleges letting us down?

2011-10-18T15:09:00.000-04:00

I remember the first piece of advice I received when I started college in the fall of 1961. "Don't learn to play bridge, "said the dorm RA, "it's the surest way to flunk out."

The members of my fraternity were dead set against having a TV in the house. They saw it as a time-waster and a start along the road to flunking out. When Kennedy was assassinated, we had to trudge to the student union to find one of the few TV's on campus.

How things have changed! Kathleen Parker addresses the college problem in her September 30 Washington Post column, Our Unprepared Graduates.

"We often hear lamentations about declining educational quality, but the focus is usually misplaced on SAT scores and graduation rates. Missing from the conversation is the quality of what’s being taught. Meanwhile, we are mistakenly wed to the notion that more people going to college means more people will find jobs....Fundamentally, students aren’t learning what they need to compete for the jobs that do exist."

"The failure of colleges and universities to teach basic skills, while coddling [students] with plush dorms and self-directed “study,” is a dot-connecting exercise for Uncle Shoulda, who someday will say — in Chinese — “How could we have let this happen?”

"A 2010 study published by the Association of American Colleges and Universities found that 87 percent of employers believe that higher-education institutions have to raise student achievement if the United States is to be competitive in the global market. Sixty-three percent say that recent college grads don’t have the skills they need to succeed. And, according to a separate survey, more than a quarter of employers say entry-level writing skills are deficient."

Parker refers to a new book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, based on a study by Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia. Among the conclusions of their study:

"Our findings confirm earlier warning signs that college students on average are learning less, even as tuition costs in many institutions have risen sharply and competition for jobs has increased. With a large and diverse sample of over 3,000 students drawn from 29 four-year accredited colleges and universities, our study has broad implications."

"45% of our sample showed little or no evidence of improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing after two years. After four years at college, 36% showed no significant growth."

"If your association is with a highly selective institution, you may be thinking that these findings only apply to other colleges and universities. That is not so. There is more variation within institutions than across institutions: in other words, even students at the “best” schools have too often been provided with ways to navigate through four years of college with little academically asked of them. If students are not exposed to rigorous academic courses, they are likely to leave college with limited growth in the core collegiate skills that we measured. We found that certain programs and majors were consistently less successful in building reasoning and writing skills. Students in education, communications, and business had the lowest measurable gains." [Emphasis mine.]

According to Parker: "College students may be undereducated, but they’re not dumb and many feel short-changed. A recent Roper Organization study found that nearly half of recent graduates don’t think they got their money’s worth. The problem with education isn’t money — we spend plenty — but quality. Yet, instead of figuring out how to make education pay future dividends, higher-educational institutions are building better dorms with flat-screen TVs, movie theaters and tanning salons, according to a recent CNN report. If parents aren’t furious, they’re not paying attention."

Colleges have changed. They now view their students as "customers" and try their best to give the customer what he/she wants.

Note to college folks: What your customer "wants" is a degree from your institution involving as little work as possible, leaving as much time as possible for fine dining experiences and the social arts. What your customer "needs" is something else entirely.

Imagine it's December 8, 1941...

2011-10-13T17:25:00.002-04:00

Imagine it's December 8, 1941. Yesterday, the United States suffered a surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. We need to do something, and do it damn fast!

Now imagine that the defense powers of the country do not rest with a central, federal body but, instead, rest in the hands of 15,000 local "defense districts." This might have been done because we wanted "local control" of guns and the military. We didn't want any central authority in Washington controlling our local military hardware or personnel.

Oh, by the way, there is no central authority which can make the local defense districts work together in time of emergency. To ensure local control, the Dept. of Defense--along with the position of Sec. of Defense--was eliminated. There is some organization within each state, but that's still 50 organizations with which to work.

With a setup like this, just how do you imagine WWII would have gone?

Welcome to education in the United States of America!

We're getting out-educated by most of the world. Almost all of these nations have strong national control over their educational systems. They made out-educating the USA a matter of national security, and jumped in with both feet, with the aid of national standards and a national curriculum.

Us? Well, for a start, one of our two great political parties holds debates at which the candidates for national office try to top each other with how quickly they will eliminate the Dept. of Education if they are elected. No national organization needed here. It's clear that the good folks on the local school board in South Bubba Creek are perfectly capable of deciding how much algebra or physics their students need to succeed in today's world, and how it should be taught.

In reality, most Americans--including those good folks on the school board--have no idea how much the world has changed in the last 15 years. They think that the schools that were good enough in the 60's and 70's are good enough to protect our standard of living.

As Bill Gates told Thomas Friedman (also the author of The World is Flat) in his new book, That Used to be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back: "You always have to renew your lead. But we have to ask: Where did this lead come from in the first place? It was that we educated more people than the other guys, and we attracted more talent, and we built better infrastructure. We need to get back to work in renewing the sources of our advantage." [Emphasis mine.]

There is general agreement that we need to vastly improve our schools, and we'd better get to it quickly if we want to maintain our standard of living in America. Science, technology, engineering and math will be the key to our efforts.

So what are we doing? Our schools are losing teachers at an alarming rate. We're told that we can't afford teachers. That's like saying that we couldn't afford to build bombers during WWII. You don't cut back on the thing you need to win!

The math and science stuff? Well, we have one of our great political parties being actively antagonistic to science. That can't help.

Friedman's book has some great stuff about how the world has changed, and about the educational system we need to respond to these changes. I'll be sharing some of it with you. If you're a reader, it's well worth the money and the time.

Fact checking last night's debate.

2011-10-12T09:18:00.000-04:00

Draw whatever conclusions you wish from last night's Republican debate, but please begin the argument from actual facts. As with any political event, the candidates made some correct statements, but managed to slip in lots of half-truths, opinions masquerading as facts, and outright falsehoods.

Here are a couple of fact checks:

From the Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/fact-checking-the-post-bloomberg-debate/2011/10/11/gIQAdAugdL_blog.html

From Politifact.org:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2011/oct/11/fact-checking-dartmouth-gop-debate/

I couldn't afford to buy a politician, so I made this sign.

2011-10-07T14:41:00.002-04:00

The title of this post is but one of the many signs carried in New York by the "Occupy Wall Street" protesters. Both Paul Krugman of the NY Times and Donn Esmonde of the Buffalo News made Occupy Wall St. the subject of their columns this morning.

Krugman began his column by saying, "...we may, at long last, be seeing the rise of a popular movement that, unlike the Tea Party, is angry at the right people."

Krugman continues: "A weary cynicism, a belief that justice will never get served, has taken over much of our political debate — and, yes, I myself have sometimes succumbed. In the process, it has been easy to forget just how outrageous the story of our economic woes really is. So, in case you’ve forgotten, it was a play in three acts."

"In the first act, bankers took advantage of deregulation to run wild (and pay themselves princely sums), inflating huge bubbles through reckless lending. In the second act, the bubbles burst — but bankers were bailed out by taxpayers, with remarkably few strings attached, even as ordinary workers continued to suffer the consequences of the bankers’ sins. And, in the third act, bankers showed their gratitude by turning on the people who had saved them, throwing their support — and the wealth they still possessed thanks to the bailouts — behind politicians who promised to keep their taxes low and dismantle the mild regulations erected in the aftermath of the crisis."

The protest has sparked similar gatherings all over the country, including Buffalo. In today's column, Donn Esmonde links the Buffalo protest to the one in NYC. "The bankers and brokers got theirs. Meanwhile, in the real world, unemployment pushes 10 percent. Countless homeowners owe more on their house than it’s worth. Twentysomethings exit college with massive debt and minuscule job prospects. People work more for less. The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans have a collective net worth greater than the lowest 90 percent. Republicans moan about Democrats fueling class warfare, but that battle started a long time ago — and most of us are losing."

Esmonde is quick to point out that the protesters are just as angry at the Democrats: "For years, well-paying American manufacturing jobs have been exported overseas. The switch from a manufacturing- to a service-based economy has brought many people more pain than gain. The chickens are coming home to roost. Even die-hard Obama-ites are weary of waiting for change they can believe in from the president.

“Obama promised change, and then filled his Cabinet with Wall Street types”..... “How is that change?”

One of the Buffalo protesters sums it up this way: “I can’t afford to pay a lobbyist to get my voice heard,” she said. “We are out here to change things, because we know it won’t get done for us.”

So why should retired teachers care? This is really an extension of the fight that began in Wisconsin. Corporations and Wall St. would like nothing better than to see a world without any way for workers to have their voices heard especially through a union.

Politicians don't really lead. They look around for a parade and, if it seems big enough, they try to jump out in front of the marchers. That's what happened with the Tea Party. Maybe this parade will attract some "leaders" as well.

One last thing. On his Wednesday night show, Jon Stewart devoted the first nine minutes to Occupy Wall St. As only he can do, he highlighted the stunning hypocrisy of the media. Won't these people ever learn about an invention called videotape?

This clip is great! Do not miss it! There's a 30-second commercial, but the clip is well worth the wait!

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Let's stop blaming the teachers!

2011-10-04T14:48:00.000-04:00

From the 2008 report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce: "The problem is not with our educators. It is with the system in which they work." [Emphasis mine.]

The meaning of those two sentences is beautifully described in a September 16 article in the LA Times. The authors, Saul Rubinstein and Charles Heckscher are professors at Rutgers University and co-directors of the Center for Organizational Learning and Transformation; Paul Adler is a professor at the Marshall School of Business at USC. Their piece is titled "Moving Beyond 'Blame the Teacher.'" Here is the opening of their article. I'm quoting more than usual because almost every sentence is important to the argument they're making.

"Most of the current efforts to improve public education begin with the flawed assumption that the basic problem is teacher performance. This "blame the teacher" attitude has led to an emphasis on standardized tests, narrow teacher evaluation criteria, merit pay, erosion of tenure, privatization, vouchers and charter schools. The primary goal of these measures has been greater teacher accountability — as if the weaknesses of public education were due to an invasion of our classrooms by uncaring and incompetent teachers. That is the premise of the documentary, "Waiting for Superman," and of the attacks on teachers and their unions by politicians across the country." [Emphasis mine.]

They continue: "We see distressing parallels between this approach to quality in education and the approaches that failed so badly in U.S. manufacturing. Recall the reaction of domestic manufacturers in the 1970s as Japanese competitors began to take market share: Many managers and an army of experts blamed American workers. They denounced workers' "blue-collar blues," lackadaisical attitudes and union job protections as the chief impediments to higher quality, productivity and competitiveness." [Emphasis mine.]

"It took nearly two decades for manufacturers to realize that this diagnosis was deeply flawed and that the recommendations that flowed from it were leading U.S. industry further into decline. Recall the success of Japanese-run auto transplants operating in this country during the 1980s: They reached world-class quality levels with a U.S. workforce, in some cases a unionized workforce, while domestic auto companies continued to blame American workers and saw their quality levels stagnate."

"Noticing the discrepancy, a growing number of manufacturers turned to the teachings of the quality guru W. Edwards Deming. Deming argued that U.S. industry's failure was not in its workers but in the system they labored under. He taught that pushing workers to work harder in a poorly designed system cannot improve outcomes. U.S. firms were being outcompeted because they relied on an outdated management system in which decisions were all top-down, tasks were narrowly specialized and workers were told to leave their brains at the factory door. To fix quality, manufacturers needed to fix these systems, and to do that, they needed to involve workers in that effort. Do those two things, and American workers were willing and able to achieve world-class levels of performance." [Emphasis mine.]

" Much of the current wave of school reform is informed by the same management myths that almost destroyed U.S. manufacturing. Instead of seeing teachers as key contributors to system improvement efforts, reformers are focused on making teachers more replaceable. Instead of involving teachers and their unions in collaborative reform, they are being pushed aside as impediments to top-down decision-making. Instead of bringing teachers together to help each other become more effective professionals, district administrators are resorting to simplistic quantified individual performance measures. In reality, schools are collaborative, not individual, enterprises, so teaching quality and school performance depend above all on whether the institutional systems support teachers' efforts." [Emphasis mine.]

The authors go on to discuss a Rutgers study that showcases six examples of teachers, unions and administrators working together to produce outstanding educational results. One of the examples is Plattsburgh, NY.

Their conclusion: "As school begins, we would do well to remember Deming's lesson: In education as in industry, progress toward quality will require collaboration among administrators, teachers and their unions."

It's the engineers, stupid!

2011-10-01T12:08:00.000-04:00

The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce doesn't mince words. They hit the reader right between the eyes with this statement: ...the United States will have to be number one or two in technology leadership in every industry in which it expects to be a major competitor if we expect to maintain our current wage levels and grow our economy enough to maintain the standard of living of the society as a whole."

The commission continues: "This is not an argument about engineers. Engineers in this context are just a stand-in for the large body of people we will need with very high skills in mathematics, science, and technology, of whom our engineers are only a small part....if we want to continue to maintain our current standard of living, we simply must have a large and growing supply of world-class scientists, mathematicians, and engineers." [Emphasis mine.]

Then comes the most important sentence in their entire report: "...the point here is that while people who specialize in these disciplines alone are hardly sufficient, without them, nothing else will matter." [Emphasis mine.]

The Business Roundtable reported in 2005 that "The number of engineering degrees awarded in the United States is down 20% from the peak year of 1985. More than 50% of all engineering doctoral degrees awarded by U.S. engineering colleges are to foreign nationals."

Most of these foreign nationals used to stay in the USA, putting their degrees to work for our economy. Now, many return to their home nations. This has led Pulitzer-prize winning author Thomas Friedman to remark that the smartest thing our nation could do is to staple a green card to every advanced degree awarded to a foreigner in technical fields by a U.S. college.

Even as we produce a shrinking pool of technical talent, some of this talent is lost to other fields. 25% of MIT's graduates take jobs in the financial industry where they put their skills to work creating mathematical models for the esoteric financial products sold by the Wall Street casinos.

China? 33% of undergraduates in China are studying engineering.

Feel like doing something patriotic? Don't waste your time decorating your car with flags or magnetic ribbons, or looking for a flag pin to wear in your lapel.

If you really want to be patriotic, get a kid interested in math, or science, or engineering. The standard of living of our children and grandchildren hangs in the balance.

There were those who saw this coming.

2011-09-29T14:02:00.000-04:00

In 1990, the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce--a creation of the National Center for Education and the Economy(NCEE)--released a report titled America's Choice: High Skills or Low wages.

It's message: "In a globalized world, there would be no place for the low-skilled to hide. We had to educate everyone to the standards that the world's highest performers set."

Over the next few years, almost all of the recommendations were turned into legislation at the national and/or state levels. It was clear that standards-based education had taken a foothold.

It was widely assumed that India and China might become the world's workshop, but that "...the West would remain the brains of that workshop and would reap all the rewards that go with being the world's center for research, development, innovation, design, finance and marketing."

It was now clear that neither India nor China was onboard with that vision of the future. Our competitor nations were now offering high skills at low wages, a possibility which had not even been dreamed of in 1990.

And so, NCEE formed the NEW Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, whose report, Tough Choices or Tough Times was published in 2007.

The new commission realized immediately that nothing less than the American standard of living was at risk. With other nations ready to do both low- and high-skill work at low wages compared to ours, how would it be possible to continue America's high-wage standard of living?

They forecast that, unless dramatic changes were made in our educational system--not tinkering around the edges by getting rid of "bad" teachers or adding a few minutes to the school day--our standard of living would begin to decline.

And so it has. We hear daily on the news that the next generation is likely to have a lower standard of living than their parents. We were warned years ago, and went on to something more interesting.

There is, however, still time to turn things around, provided we can break the country away from its "politics as spectator sport" fascination. If we demand that our representatives concentrate on recognizing and solving our problems instead of focusing only on winning the next election, and as citizens we recognize that what needs to be done will not be easy, maybe we still have a chance.

Let's start with the one thing of ultimate importance, according to the commission. To paraphrase Bill Clinton: "It's the engineers, stupid!"

Manufacturing will never be the same.

2011-09-27T13:58:00.000-04:00

There are those who want to do whatever is necessary to return well-paying manufacturing jobs to America. Well, surprisingly, it's beginning to happen. As Joe Nocera points out in his column in this morning's NY Times, that's both good and bad.

Nocera tells the story of Stephen Gray, whose family-owned company builds factories for big firms. A couple of years ago, Gray had no more projects in the pipeline, and he was laying off employees. A little over a year ago, things began to look up and now his firm has 22 projects underway.

Siemens is building a plant in Charlotte, NC to turn out 280-ton turbines. According to Nocera: "When I asked Richard Voorberg of Siemens why the German company chose to put its new plant in Charlotte instead of, say, China, he said that for highly skilled work, the labor cost differential wasn’t very big and that, in any case, factors like shipping costs and efficiency mattered more. “For this kind of manufacturing,” he said, “the U.S. can compete with China.” Gray Construction’s backlog of projects suggests that other manufacturers — many of them foreign companies — have come to the same conclusion."

But, as Nocera points out, this is where the story gets depressing. Manufacturing has changed greatly over the last 50 years.

My undergraduate degree is in a field called industrial engineering. Fifty years ago, the industrial engineer's job was to take a manufacturing process and break it up into pieces that could be done by someone with an average IQ, and who showed up for work--on time--on a daily basis. In many cases, a strong back helped. The worker on the plant floor was encouraged to check his brain at the plant door. Any intelligence required would be supplied by those at a higher pay grade.

Then came the revolution in manufacturing caused by Japanese influence. Workers were organized into teams, and those teams were encouraged to use their brains to improve the manufacturing process.

Today, manufacturing is done mostly by robots and machines all controlled by computers. The people on the factory floor are mostly there to tend the machines and diagnose and solve problems created when the computers and machines misbehave. This requires lots of mathematical and mechanical skill as well as a good dose of independent thinking and creativity. Average intelligence and showing up for work on time isn't nearly enough anymore.

Nocera points out: " ...these plants offer something that has become increasingly rare: middle-class jobs that don’t require a college degree. The jobs pay between $20 and $30 an hour, plus benefits, allowing a skilled machinist to make a decent middle-class living. The key word, of course, is “skilled.”

The other problem is that modern manufacturing doesn't require all that many bodies. The Siemens plant will employ only 800 people. North Carolina has lost about 108,000 manufacturing jobs.

Even if we boost the skills of our non-college workforce and manage to bring manufacturing back to America, there will never again be enough manufacturing jobs to stem the tide of job losses.

So, how do we compete with the rest of the world? Once we get off the yellow-brick road of firing bad teachers and getting rid of unions, what will really make a difference in our educational system?

Turns out, the folks at the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce have some interesting ideas. That's next.

High-skills workers are in trouble too.

2011-09-21T09:33:00.000-04:00

I remember reading a story recently about a young man who was training to be a snowplow operator. When asked why he chose this particular job, he replied, "Because it can't be done from Bangalore."

Hospitals--particularly small to medium ones--used to have a problem if X-rays or other scans needed to be read during the overnight hours. In most cases, patients were told that they would need to wait until the radiologist came in in the morning. A true emergency meant rousing the radiologist from their bed.

Then came the internet. Now hospitals, in the middle of the night, can have scans read by a radiologist somewhere else in the world where it is the middle of the day. The scans are transmitted in digital form to the radiologist on another continent.

The NY Times recently ran a story concerning software that was putting lawyers out of work. In complicated lawsuits, with many boxes of documents to be examined, junior associates of law firms would normally spend (and bill) hundreds of hours for plowing through the documents.

Not anymore. Software has been developed which can do the same job resulting in the need for fewer lawyers.

How about pilots? Certainly a highly-skilled occupation. Newspapers recently carried stories about pilots losing some of their skills because modern passenger aircraft can takeoff, fly and land without any intervention from the pilot. Pilots are getting too little "hands on" flying, and coming up rusty when emergencies occur. The public, however, is unlikely to be willing to board a plane with an empty cockpit.

A few months ago, network news carried a story about a decreasing need for pilots in our Air Force. Rapidly expanding drone technology could be applied to aircraft that are now manned allowing us to remotely fly fighter jets, keeping expensively-trained pilots far from harm.

Yesterday's Washington Post carried a story about combining the capability of planes to fly themselves with facial recognition software. Drones would be aloft, flying on their own, while searching for faces of approved targets. When a target is acquired, the only human action required is approval of the shot.

It isn't just those with low skills who are in trouble in today's job market.

We can't say we weren't warned.

2011-09-20T13:09:00.001-04:00

In the spring of 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education issued A Nation at Risk—its eye-opening report that indicted education officials, school leaders, and the American public for complacency. The university presidents, eminent scientists, policymakers, and educators who made up the Commission refused to paint a happy face on the eroding quality of American education. They said that we had become self-satisfied about our leading position in the world and “lost sight of the basic purposes of schooling, and of the high expectations and disciplined effort needed to attain them.” [Emphasis mine.]

The above is the opening paragraph from the 2008 "look back" by the U.S. Dept. of Education 25 years after A Nation at Risk was published. You can click on the link and read the summary, but I'll save you the trouble: Aside from some minor changes, not much has changed. We can't say we weren't warned. Then, as a nation, we yawned and went on to more interesting things.

In 1990, the National Center on Education and the Economy published the report of the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. We were told that the era of high wages for low-skilled workers had come to an end. America would no longer be the world's manufacturer. Our skills were no longer "world class." We can't say we weren't warned. Then, as a nation, we yawned and went on to more interesting things.

In 2008, NCEE issued the report on the NEW Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. It reported that not only were low skill workers in danger, but high-skill jobs were increasingly being lost to other nations. Simply going to college was no longer a cure-all.

One would expect that news such as this would cause a furor and finally get America off its collective butt. According to ABC news, these are the top news stories of 2008:

John Edwards admits he had an affair.
Sarah Palin says she's ready to be VP.
"Last Lecture" prof. dies.
The Rev. Wright dust-up.
The economic crisis. (OK, this was really sorta big.)
Natalee Holloway
Election politics-as-sports 24/7.

Nothing about this new report. We can't say we weren't warned. Then, as a nation, we yawned and went on to more interesting things.

If only the skills of the American workforce were young, blonde and missing in Aruba. Then, maybe, someone would have paid attention to the story.

Oh, we're exceptional alright!

2011-09-19T08:30:00.000-04:00

Suppose you're running a business. Periodically, unless you're really stupid, you take a look at what your competition is doing.

You discover that your competition is making the same product as you, but their product is measurably better and it costs only half of your cost. What do you do?

Well, if your business is called America and the product is health care or education, you don't do much. After all, you're the world leader in just about everything. The rest of the world wants to be like the "shining city on the hill." Many of our citizens believe that we Americans are a special people with a special destiny to lead the world.

While that may have been the case a generation or so ago, it's tough to argue for "American exceptionalism" today. Let's look at a couple of examples: healthcare and education.

This weekend, I was reminded of a statistic of which we should all be aware. 50% of all American bankruptcies are caused by medical bills. Here's a statistic that hurts even more. Half of those bankruptcies due to medical bills happen to families who have health insurance.

Ours is the only developed nation in which parents go to bed every night afraid that if their kids--or they-- get sick they won't be able to afford medical care. In no other developed country do people lose everything they've worked for their entire lives because of medical bills.

Still feeling "exceptional?"

Faced with this reality, what do we do? We tinker around the edges, because this is America. Our system is the best because it's the "American" system. We're that shining city on the hill, etc. And the tooth fairy is real.

It's the same with education. Our competitors are clubbing us to death with their superior educational systems. They've developed these systems by watching us, then taking their systems to the next level.

Meanwhile, we sit back fat and happy convinced that there'll always be good jobs because this is America. Whatever is happening is just a temporary "ripple" that will soon pass.

We tinker around the edges of our system. If we just test our kids to death so that we can identify the "bad teachers," things will improve. If we add some hours to the school year, things will improve. If we use method A to teach reading instead of method B, things will improve. If we get rid of unions, things will improve.

The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce has taken a look at our educational system. Their conclusion: "The problem is not with our educators. It is with the system in which they work."

In the coming days, we'll take a closer look at their report.

We're into the 4th quarter, and we don't realize there's a game!

2011-09-16T11:32:00.001-04:00

Washington is having big arguments about how to put Americans back to work. In the short term, we need to find ways to cut the unemployment rate. Some will argue it can be done by lowering taxes and eliminating regulations. Others want to see more government spending to save teachers and other public employees.

Here's something that no one is willing to talk about: In the long term, none of this matters. We're screwed unless we wake up to what has happened around the world!

America used to have the best education system in the world, and the best-educated workforce. Students from all over the world flocked to attend our universities and, once they had graduated, they stayed in America to lend their newly-acquired skills to our workforce. The opportunities were here, not in China or India.

That was several decades ago. To use a sports metaphor other countries spent a lot of time watching our game films. We sent folks all over the world to help other nations improve their educational systems. Other countries bought into education big time. Improving their educational systems became a matter of national priority. In almost every case, they watched what we were doing, then figured out how to do it better!

In 1963, the economy of Finland was in serious trouble. The Finnish parliament decided that the way to bring prosperity back to Finland was to have an educational system second-to-none in the world. It was a national goal, and everyone recognized its importance. Ignorance became a threat to national security.

Today, the public schools of Finland stand atop the world's educational systems. Did they fire all the "bad" teachers, give lots of standardized tests to make teachers accountable, get rid of teacher unions? No.

They went to work making teaching an attractive occupation. Attractive enough to get students from the top third of their secondary school classes to choose a career in teaching.

There are no mandated standardized tests in Finland, apart from the one exam taken at the end of the senior year of high school.

Unions? Almost every Finnish teacher is a union member.

There's lots more to say about the Finnish educational system, but I'll leave that for the coming days.

What's important now is something else that no one is willing to talk about. The structure of the workplace has changed around the world. Those waiting for the return of the good old days where a high school diploma meant a standard of living pretty close to that of a college grad are going to be sorely disappointed.

There are no longer jobs that pay high wages for low skills. What few have yet realized is that high-skill workers are in trouble.

India has built a system of universities devoted to technology. Entrance to these schools (Indian Institutes of Technology, or IIT's) is by examination. How tough are the exams? Those who don't secure admission to an IIT are more than qualified to enter any of America's prestigious engineering schools, and many do. And then they go home, because opportunities abound there.

An Indian engineer graduating from one of the IIT's expects to start at $7500/year. An equally qualified American engineer would start at $45,000/year. Where would you send your engineering work if you owned a company?

More to come, but that's it for today.

Medicare change dates are different this year.

2011-09-13T22:19:00.001-04:00

We'll get back to our discussion of the economy and, in particular, the part that education must play in any solution, but first here's something important about Medicare.

We've become used to making changes in our Medicare coverage between Nov. 15 and Dec. 31. (Medicare calls this the "open enrollment period.") The new healthcare law has changed these dates.

Medicare's open enrollment period will now run from Oct. 15 until Dec. 7. This is a longer period than the old open enrollment period. The change is designed to do away with problems caused by people changing their coverage late in December and expecting the changes to be effective as of Jan. 1.

If you have a Medicare supplemental policy, a part D (prescription drug) policy or a Medicare Advantage plan, the sellers of these policies must send their new rates, drug formularies and coverage details for 2012 to you no later than Sept. 30.

If you do nothing, the policies you have in place will continue for 2012. (This is assuming that the company is still selling that policy. Rates almost certainly will increase.) It's worth a few minutes of your time, however, to look over the proposed changes, particularly with the part D (drug) plans.

Last year I discovered that my part D plan was going to drop one of the drugs I take from its formulary of covered drugs. In addition, they were going to raise the monthly premium by a mere 100%. I went to medicare.gov and found a plan that covered all my drugs, and saved me money in the bargain. I signed up online, and Medicare took care of the details involved in dropping my old part D plan.

Note these dates on your calendar. They're important for both your health and your wallet!

3 generations and you're out.

2011-09-13T16:55:00.000-04:00

[NOTE: This is part 6 of a multi-part post. Click here to go to part 1, click here to go to part 2, click here to go to part 3, click here to go to part 4 click here to go to part 5.]

I have a theory about family-owned companies, and I think it may have some meaning with regard to our economy. I call the theory "three generations and out."

Beginning a business is not easy. It involves lots of planning, market research, financing and work days that far exceed 8 hours. When someone in generation 1 started a business, they probably drafted their kids. (What's not to like about free labor?) The kids (generation 2) probably learned the business from the ground up, helping with any job that required their efforts. Generation 2 saw just how much work was required to run things properly.

Assuming the business did well, one or more members of generation 2 eventually took over from generation 1 and continued to grow the business. Along the way, generation 2 gave birth to generation 3.

Generation 2 had probably grown the business into a money-maker and, as they aged, life grew much more comfortable for generations 2 and 3. In most cases, however, generation 3 saw the business as simply the source of their nice home, cars and gadgets. Unlike generation 2, they were probably not drafted as a source of free labor. Generation 3 may have had little interest in making jam, fixing cars, or whatever the business was about.

In many cases, when control of the family business passed to generation 3, they took executive positions--along with a nice salary--but they lacked the skills or drive to continue growing the company, and it faltered.

Certainly, this is not true of every family-owned business. Some generation 3 members recognized their lack of real interest and sold their companies. Some generation 2 members got their kids to get out of their fancy cars long enough to really learn the business.

In the business that is our economy, I would liken our parents to generation 1. They grew up during the depression and ran smack into World War II.

Having a bad day? Think about them. They were born into a world in financial ruin and grew up just in time to go off to fight in a war. For how long? Well, if you have any of your parent's WWII paperwork, you know that they were in it "for the duration."

We're generation 2. Most of us were born near the end of the war and grew up watching our parents work pretty hard to build a life for their families. We heard the stories of the hardships of the depression and wartime first hand from the folks who lived them. We knew that we would have to work hard if we wanted to get ahead. Many of us were the first in our families to go to college.

And then came generation 3. I first realized I was dealing with generation 3 one day in the early 90's when I was teaching a non-regents physics class. I was talking with the students about how Japanese students were blowing them away in math and science. One girl raised her hand and told me, "But Mr. Steinfeldt, those kids don't have any social life!" And there, in front of me, was generation 3.

To use a sports metaphor, they were born on third base and thought they had hit a triple. But the economy doesn't work that way. At one point in time, America had the best-educated workforce in the world. Not any more.

If you'll allow me just one more sports metaphor, just because you won a few Super Bowls in the 1970's doesn't mean they automatically keep sending you a Super Bowl trophy every year.

Next: We're into the 4th quarter, and we don't even know there's a game going on.

We interrupt our discussion of the economy...

2011-09-08T09:37:00.000-04:00

I'm sure many of you watched last night's Republican debate. Since we have spent a fair amount of time at this blog discussing the importance of facts, and how they are often abused, I thought you might be interested in some "fact-checking" on last night's debate.

I'm fond of Politifact, the Pulitzer-prize-winning effort of the St. Petersburg Times. They try to steer a middle-of-the-road course and delight in nailing politicians of both parties when they don't let the facts get in the way of making an argument. Here's the link to their effort re last night's debate:

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2011/sep/07/fact-checking-reagan-library-debate/

The Washington Post also has a fact-checking column, and you will find that they checked some statements that Politifact did not, and vice versa. Here's their link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/fact-checking-the-gop-debate-at-the-reagan-library/2011/09/07/gIQAFrz5AK_blog.html?hpid=z1

Personally, the statement that made the evening for me was from Gov. Perry. In defending his position that climate change science is "unsettled," he noted that "Galileo was outvoted for a spell."

Having taught about Galileo for a few decades, I found this an interesting slant.

What Gov. Perry failed to mention was that those fun folks who "outvoted" Galileo were a large group of religious fundamentalists who had both religious and secular power, and were convinced that the Bible told them the correct position to take relative to whether the Sun orbited the Earth or vice versa.

Thankfully, we do not face this situation in our modern world.

It's better than free money!

2011-09-06T16:27:00.004-04:00

[NOTE: This is part 5 of a multi-part post. Click here to go to part 1, click here to go to part 2, click here to go to part 3, click here to go to part 4.]

The last 25% of Peck's article talks about things which could be done to assist the economy. Sadly, there are no "magic bullets" included in the article.

There are, however, at least two items which should be obvious to us all.

The first involves our infrastructure. We all know it's in sad shape. 100-year-old pipes under city streets fail on a regular basis, and looking up as you pass under a bridge is often a terrifying experience.

Recall that construction work has been the "sponge" that soaked up many of the men who a generation earlier would have held manufacturing jobs. The housing bubble has burst, and they're out of work. They'd be happy for work, and we'd be happy for them to begin paying taxes again.

But you can already hear the voices from Washington saying, "Where will the money come from?" President Obama has said that we'll find "offsets" in the budget to pay for infrastructure rebuilding. If that doesn't work out, we should borrow it, and let me explain why.

A few day ago, Ezra Klein of the Washington Post pointed out that "The real yield on Treasury debt has, in recent months, turned negative." In simple terms: "The “yield” on Treasury debt is how much the government pays to borrow money. The “real yield” is how much it pays to borrow money after accounting for inflation. When the “real yield” turns negative, it means the government isn’t paying to borrow money anymore. Rather, the situation has flipped, and the government is getting paid to keep money safe. It also means that America is facing perhaps the single greatest investment opportunity in decades." [Emphasis mine.]

Klein continues: "Usually, the U.S. government has to pay quite a bit to borrow money. In January 2003, for instance, the interest rate on a seven-year Treasury was about 3.6 percent, which gave investors a yield of more than two percent after accounting for inflation. Right now, the interest rate is 1.52 percent, or minus-0.34 percent after accounting for inflation."

"Here’s what this means: If we can think of any investments we can make over the next seven years that have a return of zero percent — yes, you read that right — or more, it would be foolish not to borrow this money and make them."

"The case is even stronger with investments we know we will need to make over the next decade. The economy will get better, and as it gets better, the cost of borrowing will rise. The longer we wait, in other words, the more expensive those investments will become."

"Our infrastructure is crumbling, and we know we’ll have to rebuild it in the coming years. Why do it later, when it will cost us more and we very likely won’t have massive unemployment in the construction sector, as opposed to now, when the market will pay us to invest in our infrastructure and we have an unemployment crisis to address?"

"Everyone knows we have worthwhile investments to make. The real reason we won’t take advantage of this remarkable opportunity is ideology: Republicans argue that deficits are the only thing that matters for our recovery — unless anyone attempts to close them through tax increases, and then tax rates are the only thing that matters for our recovery. And Democrats have stopped even attempting to challenge them."

"As an economic theory, that’s just dead wrong. Deficits matter, but in the long and medium term. What matters now is getting the unemployment rate down."

Next: Three generations and you're out!

A cultural divide.

2011-09-06T14:40:00.007-04:00

[NOTE: This is part 4 of a multi-part post. Click here to go to part 1, click here to go to part 2, click here to go to part 3.]

Continuing with Peck's Atlantic article: " Men’s difficulties are hardly evident in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street. But they’re hard to miss in foundering blue-collar and low-end service communities across the country. It is in these less affluent places that gender roles, family dynamics, and community character are changing in the wake of the crash."

"In a national study of the American family released late last year, the sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox wrote that among “Middle Americans”—people with a high-school diploma but not a college degree—an array of signals of family dysfunction have begun to blink red. “The family lives of today’s moderately educated Americans,” which in the 1970s closely resembled those of college graduates, now “increasingly resemble those of high-school dropouts, too often burdened by financial stress, partner conflict, single parenting, and troubled children.” [Emphasis mine.]

"“The speed of change,” wrote Wilcox, “is astonishing.” By the late 1990s, 37 percent of moderately educated couples were divorcing or separating less than 10 years into their first marriage, roughly the same rate as among couples who didn’t finish high school and more than three times that of college graduates. By the 2000s, the percentage in “very happy” marriages—identical to that of college graduates in the 1970s—was also nearing that of high-school dropouts. Between 2006 and 2008, among moderately educated women, 44 percent of all births occurred outside marriage, not far off the rate (54 percent) among high-school dropouts; among college-educated women, that proportion was just 6 percent. The same pattern—families of middle-class nonprofessionals now resembling those of high-school dropouts more than those of college graduates—emerges with norm after norm...." [Emphasis mine.]

"A cultural chasm—which did not exist 40 years ago and which was still relatively small 20 years ago—has developed between the traditional middle class and the top 30 percent of society.....As the journalist Bill Bishop showed in his 2008 book, The Big Sort, American communities have become ever more finely sorted by affluence and educational attainment over the past 30 years, and this sorting has in turn reinforced the divergence in the personal habits and lifestyle of Americans who lack a college degree from those of Americans who have one. In highly educated communities, families are largely intact, educational ideals strong, and good role models abundant. None of those things is a given anymore in communities where college-degree attainment is low. The natural leaders of such communities—the meritocratic winners who do well in school, go off to selective colleges, and get their degrees—generally leave them for good in their early 20s."

Now, perhaps, you have a better understanding of the inside workings of the unemployment problem. "Let's all go to college," isn't going to be the one-size-fits-all fix, although education SHOULD be a HUGE player in our path to recovery. We should remember, however, this line from Peck's article: "True recovery from the Great Recession is not simply a matter of jolting the economy back onto its former path; it’s about changing the path." [Emphasis mine.]

Tomorrow: It's better than free money!

Just who is "the rest of America?"

2011-09-05T16:17:00.008-04:00

[NOTE: This is part 3 of a multi-part post. Click here to go to part 1 or click here to go to part 2.]

We left off yesterday with this quote from Peck's Atlantic article: "Three years after the crash of 2008, the rich and well educated are putting the recession behind them. The rest of America is stuck in neutral or reverse."

If we have any hope of understanding our economic problems, we need to know more about "the rest of America," because some of the rest are doing pretty well, some so-so and some not well at all. Unfortunately, it's the "not well at all" group that makes up almost 60% of our economy.

It shouldn't surprise a group of teachers that a worker's place in "the rest of America" depends on what educational level that worker attained. It probably would surprise them, however, to learn where a 4-year college degree places the worker in the group.

"Recently, as technology has improved and emerging-market countries have sent more people to college, economic pressures have been moving up the educational ladder in the United States. “It’s useful to make a distinction between college and post-college,” Autor told me. “Among people with professional and even doctoral [degrees], in general the job market has been very good for a very long time, including recently. The group of highly educated individuals who have not done so well recently would be people who have a four-year college degree but nothing beyond that. Opportunities have been less good, wage growth has been less good, the recession has been more damaging. They’ve been displaced from mid-managerial or organizational positions where they don’t have extremely specialized, hard-to-find skills.” [Emphasis mine.]

"College graduates may be losing some of their luster for reasons beyond technology and trade. As more Americans have gone to college, Autor notes, the quality of college education has become arguably more inconsistent, and the signaling value of a degree from a nonselective school has perhaps diminished. Whatever the causes, “a college degree is not the kind of protection against job loss or wage loss that it used to be.”

"Without doubt, it is vastly better to have a college degree than to lack one. Indeed, on a relative basis, the return on a four-year degree is near its historic high. But that’s largely because the prospects facing people without a college degree have been flat or falling. Throughout the aughts, incomes for college graduates barely budged. In a decade defined by setbacks, perhaps that should occasion a sort of wan celebration. “College graduates aren’t doing badly,” says Timothy Smeeding, an economist at the University of Wisconsin and an expert on inequality. But “all the action in earnings is above the B.A. level.”

So, the workers with graduate or professional degrees are seeing brightening prospects and those with a B.A. are on an increasingly slippery slope. That is, if they can find work. Law schools report a 10% drop in applications due to difficulty in finding work for beginning lawyers, and there are lots of folks with a B.A. waiting tables at your favorite restaurant.

Still, they're doing better than the groups in serious trouble: HS drop-outs and those with only a HS diploma. "The true center of American society has always been its nonprofessionals—high-school graduates who didn’t go on to get a bachelor’s degree make up 58 percent of the adult population. And as manufacturing jobs and semiskilled office positions disappear, much of this vast, nonprofessional middle class is drifting downward."

For the men in this group, the downward drift has been masked--during the last decade or so--by the housing bubble. "During the aughts, construction provided an outlet for the young men who would have gone into manufacturing a generation ago. Men without higher education “didn’t do as badly as you might have expected, on long-run trends, because of the housing bubble.” But it’s hard to imagine another such construction boom coming to their rescue."

"One of the great puzzles of the past 30 years has been the way that men, as a group, have responded to the declining market for blue-collar jobs. Opportunities have expanded for college graduates over that span, and for nongraduates, jobs have proliferated within the service sector (at wages ranging from rock-bottom to middling). Yet in the main, men have pursued neither higher education nor service jobs. The proportion of young men with a bachelor’s degree today is about the same as it was in 1980. And as the sociologists Maria Charles and David Grusky noted in their 2004 book, Occupational Ghettos, while men and women now mix more easily on different rungs of the career ladder, many industries and occupations have remained astonishingly segregated, with men continuing to seek work in a dwindling number of manual jobs, and women “crowding into nonmanual occupations that, on average, confer more pay and prestige.”

"As recently as 2001, U.S. manufacturing still employed about as many people as did health and educational services combined (roughly 16 million). But since then, those latter, female-dominated sectors have added about 4 million jobs, while manufacturing has lost about the same number. Men made no inroads into health care or education during the aughts; in 2009, they held only about one in four jobs in those rising sectors, just as they had at the beginning of the decade. They did, however, consolidate their hold on manufacturing—those dwindling jobs, along with jobs in construction, transportation, and utilities, were more heavily dominated by men in 2009 than they’d been nine years earlier."

"“I’m deeply concerned” about the prospects of less-skilled men, says Bruce Weinberg, an economist at Ohio State. In 1967, 97 percent of 30-to-50-year-old American men with only a high-school diploma were working; in 2010, just 76 percent were. " [Emphasis mine.]

Tomorrow: A cultural divide.

Can we save the middle class?

2011-09-05T15:26:00.006-04:00

[NOTE: This is part 2 of a multi-part post. To go to part 1, click here.]

"IN OCTOBER 2005, three Citigroup analysts released a report describing the pattern of growth in the U.S. economy. To really understand the future of the economy and the stock market, they wrote, you first needed to recognize that there was “no such animal as the U.S. consumer,” and that concepts such as “average” consumer debt and “average” consumer spending were highly misleading."

"In fact, they said, America was composed of two distinct groups: the rich and the rest. And for the purposes of investment decisions, the second group didn’t matter; tracking its spending habits or worrying over its savings rate was a waste of time. All the action in the American economy was at the top: the richest 1 percent of households earned as much each year as the bottom 60 percent put together; they possessed as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent; and with each passing year, a greater share of the nation’s treasure was flowing through their hands and into their pockets. It was this segment of the population, almost exclusively, that held the key to future growth and future returns. The analysts, Ajay Kapur, Niall Macleod, and Narendra Singh, had coined a term for this state of affairs: plutonomy."

These are the opening two paragraphs of an article titled "Can the middle class be saved?" by Don Peck in the September issue of The Atlantic. It's a wonderful look inside the American economy, and I would highly recommend your reading the entire article. But, it's about 18 pages, so it is my intention to pass along the relevant highlights.

"In a plutonomy, Kapur and his co-authors wrote, “economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few.” America had been in this state twice before, they noted—during the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties. In each case, the concentration of wealth was the result of rapid technological change, global integration, laissez-faire government policy, and “creative financial innovation.”

"According to Gallup, from May 2009 to May 2011, daily consumer spending rose by 16 percent among Americans earning more than $90,000 a year; among all other Americans, spending was completely flat. The consumer recovery, such as it is, appears to be driven by the affluent, not by the masses. Three years after the crash of 2008, the rich and well educated are putting the recession behind them. The rest of America is stuck in neutral or reverse." [Emphasis mine.]

If we have any hope of understanding our economic problems, we need to know more about "the rest of America," because some of the rest are doing pretty well, some so-so and some not well at all. Unfortunately, it's the "not well at all" group that makes up almost 60% of our economy.

Tomorrow, we'll see who's in this group, and you may be surprised.

It's been coming at us relentlessly for at least 40 years.

2011-09-05T15:05:00.000-04:00

It's been coming at us relentlessly for at least 40 years. The American economy has been undergoing a slow but inexorable sea change and, just as with the proverbial frog in the pot of ever-warmer water, we didn't notice what was happening.

But we did compensate for the increasing temperature of the water.

When we were kids, the standard model family had dad working a job with a company he'd probably stay with his entire career, then draw a pension when he retired. Mom would stay home and raise the kids. When the kids grew up they'd go off to college or take a job in one of the local manufacturing plants and probably do better financially than their teachers in the local public school.

As the years went on, it became more and more difficult to support a family on what dad earned, and so mom joined the workforce. And that helped, for awhile. (In the 1960's only 12% of married women with young children were working for pay; by the late 1990's, 55% were.)

Eventually, even having two earners could not support the standard of living most families had become used to and, little by little, family debt began to grow. (From the late 1990's to 2007, typical household debt grew by a third.)

According to former Labor Sec. Robert Reich: "As long as housing values continued to rise, it seemed a painless way to get more money. Eventually, of course, the bubble burst. That ended the middle class's remarkable ability to keep spending in the face of near stagnant wages."

And so now most of us have come to the realization that the economy is in serious hot water. It's more than just a little recession that we've been used to experiencing every few years. There is serious pain abroad in the land and we're being told that there does not seem to be any expectation of things getting better anytime soon.

The president will be speaking Thursday evening about the crisis, but you won't have any hope of knowing if he's coming up with helpful ideas unless you have looked inside the "big picture" of "economy bad - many unemployed" to understand the parts of the economy that are doing great, and those that aren't. In addition, we need to understand why parts of the economy are in serious trouble.

Stick with me for 2 or 3 days, and you'll be able to give a more intelligent listen to the speech Thursday evening. And, you'll discover that teachers and education play a HUGE part.

(Note: Statistics in this post come from a column by Robert Reich in the NY Times.)

Should this be the last Labor Day?

2011-09-05T12:46:00.000-04:00

Here's the lead paragraph from E. J. Dionne's column this morning in the Washington Post:

"Let’s get it over with and rename the holiday “Capital Day.” We may still celebrate Labor Day, but our culture has given up on honoring workers as the real creators of wealth and their honest toil — the phrase itself seems antique — as worthy of genuine respect."

How do you suppose this statement would poll? "Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

"These heretical thoughts would inspire horror among our friends at Fox News or in the Tea Party. They’d likely label them as Marxist, socialist or Big Labor propaganda. Too bad for Abraham Lincoln, our first Republican president, who offered those words in his annual message to Congress in 1861."

Dionne says that there has been a huge cultural shift. "In scores of different ways, we paint investors as the heroes and workers as the sideshow. We tax the fruits of labor more vigorously than we tax the gains from capital... and we hide workers away while lavishing attention on those who make their livings by moving money around."

"...we are now inundated with news (and “news”) about the world of capital. CNBC and the other financial media are for investors what ESPN is for sports junkies. We cheer the markets, learn the obscure language of hedge fund managers and get to know some of the big investors in off-field interviews. Workers are regarded as factors of production. At best, they’re consumers; at worst, they’re “labor costs” cutting into profits and the sacred stock price."

Dionne concludes: "With the worker disappearing from our media and our consciousness, isn’t it only a matter of time before Labor Day falls off the calendar? As long as it’s there, it should shame us about our cool indifference to the heroism of those who go to work every day."

This seemed appropriate for Labor Day.

2011-09-04T12:41:00.001-04:00

A "pull quote" by the lead story in the opinion section of this morning's Buffalo News was from the 1992 presidential debates. It's part of Ross Perot's famous "giant sucking sound" answer. It seems even more appropriate this Labor Day.

Don't stop listening when you get to the famous quote. The last point he makes is breathtaking in its ability to foresee the future.

Teacher pay around the world: How we compare.

2011-09-02T12:50:00.000-04:00

It's like listening to a broken record: Teachers are overpaid, over-benefitted, vacation-heavy whiners who need to need to connect with the "real world."

Great rant but, when one takes the time to actually examine the inconvenient things known as "facts," the rant doesn't hold water.

Jack Jennings, president and CEO of the Center on Education Policy, has a column at Huffington Post that presents an interesting way to look at the issue of teacher pay around the world.

According to Jennings: "A few months ago, the widely respected Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development released Building a High Quality Teaching Profession: Lessons from Around the World, which analyzes how high-performing countries have created highly professional and effective teaching forces. Included in this report is a telling chart which shows that American teachers are paid less than teachers in many other countries."

"For each participating nation, OECD calculated the ratio of the average salaries of teachers with 15 years' experience to the average earnings of full-time workers with a college degree. The U.S. ranked 22nd out of 27 countries on this measure. In the U.S., teachers earned less than 60% of the average pay for full-time college-educated workers. In many other countries, teachers earn between 80% and 100% of the college-educated average."

The countries in which teachers earn 80% or more of the average pay for full-time college-educated workers include: Spain (125%), New Zealand (98%), Germany (98%), Australia (95%), Finland (95%), Sweden (95%), Belgium (90%), Scotland (90%), Denmark (85%), France (85%), England (80%), S. Korea (80%) and Netherlands (80%).

Keeping company with the USA in the 60-79% bracket are: Austria (78%), Greece (75%), Portugal (70%), Norway (70%), Estonia (68%), Poland (65%), USA (60%).

Who do we beat? Italy (58%), Slovenia (55%), Hungary (50%), Iceland (50%) and the Czech Republic (50%).

That annoying know-it-all down the block might argue that teaching is only a part-time job. Teachers work from 7:30 until 3, have lots of vacations and the summer off. You and I know that's a load of bull, and remember, we have the hard numbers to prove it.

In a previous post, we quoted another OECD study: " American teachers are the most productive among major developed countries, according to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development....Among 27 member nations tracked by the OECD, U.S. primary-school educators spent 1,097 hours a year teaching despite only spending 36 weeks a year in the classroom — among the lowest among the countries tracked. That was more than 100 hours more than New Zealand, in second place at 985 hours, despite students in that country going to school for 39 weeks. The OECD average is 786 hours."

The study (posted on the website of the Wall Street Journal) went on to say: "And that’s just the time teachers spend on instruction. Including hours teachers spend on work at home and outside the classroom, American primary-school educators spend 1,913 working in a year. According to data from the comparable year in a Labor Department survey, an average full-time employee works 1,932 hours a year spread out over 48 weeks (excluding two weeks vacation and federal holidays)." [Emphasis mine.]

So, in fact, teachers do work the equivalent of a "full-time" job, and the comparison with full-time pay in the OECD study is perfectly justified.

Jennings quotes Education Secretary Duncan in a speech to the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards on July 29: "Money is never the reason why people enter teaching, but it is the reason why some people do not enter teaching, or leave as they start to think about beginning a family or buying a home. Today, too often the heart-breaking reality is that a good teacher with a decade of classroom experience is hard-pressed to raise a family on a teacher's salary."

Jennings concludes: "It is difficult to advocate for higher salaries for teachers during these hard economic times, but we aren't going to make long term progress economically if we don't have a better educated citizenry. Business leaders have been saying this for years. Paying teachers higher wages and getting and retaining good teachers is integral to achieving that goal."

Turn off the bubble machine! (Speculators - part 4)

2011-09-01T01:36:00.001-04:00

Speculative bubbles form when a lot of money flows into a commodity whose price is expected to keep climbing. We have seen one recently in housing.

The thing about bubbles is that they alway burst. The 2008 oil price bubble burst, and oil prices dropped back to around $33/barrel. The housing bubble has certainly burst. Eventually you run out of people who are dumb enough to keep paying higher and higher prices.

Matt Taibbi likens a bubble to investing in a watermelon dropped off the roof of a skyscraper. The trick, he says, is to get your money out before the melon hits the pavement.

What you don't seem to run out of is people dumb enough to create another bubble (like the current oil bubble) or stop commodity bubbles from happening so often.

Congress could insist on going back to the former rules governing speculation, but that would involve doing something that would cost Wall St. lots of money. Even though it would save the American people a lot of money, somehow I think Wall St. will win.

Our political parties don't seem to be able to come to grips with the reality of speculation. Remember the 2008 presidential campaign?

The Republicans were convinced that the problem was the supply of oil. The mantra was, "drill, baby, drill!"

The Democrats were equally convinced that the problem was the demand side. Americans were simply using too much oil.

All the while, the supply was more than adequate and demand was actually decreasing.

According to Taibbi: "Asked why politicians continue to harp on things like drilling or hybrid cars, when supply and demand have nothing to do with the high prices, [former Congressman Bart] Stupak shakes his head. "I think they just don't understand the problem very well," he says. "You can't explain it in 30 seconds, so politicians ignore it."

Now, we've been using oil as an example, but the same thing has happened in virtually all the commodity markets. On Aug. 25, the McClatchy papers ran a story titled "Got 10 bucks for a cup of Joe? Speculators bid up coffee prices." Here's some of what they have to say:

1) "If you're angry that Wall Street speculators have been driving up the price you pay for gasoline, these same big financial investors now are pushing up the price of your cup of joe."

2) "The retail price of coffee in July was up 20.7 percent over the same month last year."

3) "Coffee-industry veterans blame financial speculators. They say they're taking advantage of global supply hiccups to drive up coffee prices by adding volatility to the trading of contracts for future delivery of coffee. It's not as debilitating to family income as high crude oil prices, but the phenomenon is the same."

4) "Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, complained in March that he had no trouble obtaining coffee beans — there's no supply shortage — and that speculators were to blame for soaring coffee bean prices on commodity exchanges."

5) "During the first week of August 1995, slightly more than 46,000 coffee futures contracts were traded. In 2001, the first year after investment rules were relaxed and Wall Street money poured into commodities markets, the number rose to almost 76,000 contracts a week. During the first week of August 2008, the month the U.S. financial system began a near-meltdown, 196,805 contracts were traded — actually down from a record 284,000 contracts traded in early March that year.

This all points to the entry of financial players who never intend to take delivery of coffee. Some are Wall Street banks and hedge funds; others are so-called "massive passives," big institutional investors such as pension funds that bet on rising prices."

And now, as the late Paul Harvey would say, you know "the rest of the story."

Up popped deregulation. (Speculators - part 3)

2011-08-30T22:19:00.000-04:00

In yesterday's post, we saw that "supply and demand" could not account for the spike in oil prices, and we learned about the basic operation of the commodities markets and the function of "speculators" in those markets.

The commodities markets functioned nicely for 50+ years after the creation of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the 1930's. Speculators were limited by regulation to a small fraction of the market.

According to Mat Taibbi, in his July 9, 2009 article in Rolling Stone titled "The Great American Bubble Machine": "In 1936, however, Congress recognized that there should never be more speculators in the market than real producers and consumers. If that happened, prices would be affected by something other than supply and demand, and price manipulations would ensue."

By 1990, most of the allowed speculator seats had been purchased by large banks such as Goldman-Sachs. In 1991, a Goldman-owned speculator (J. Aron) wrote to the CFTC and asked for an exemption to the speculation rules. The CFTC granted this request to be treated as a producer/consumer rather than a speculator, escaping the limits placed on speculators.

A subsidiary of a large and powerful bank received a favorable ruling from a government agency. How on Earth did this ever happen? Who would have expected such a thing?

In short order, the CFTC granted the same exemption to 14 other speculators, and we were off to the races. According to the McClatchy article referenced yesterday: "Prior to the 1990s, speculators made up about 30 percent of the futures market. In the latest reporting period, the ratio on May 3 stood at 68 percent speculators to 32 percent users of oil. Meanwhile, the volume of total reported trades has grown five-fold since 1995, underscoring the impact of speculation on futures markets."

Taibbi says: "So what caused the huge spike in oil prices? Take a wild guess.... the root cause had almost everything to do with the behavior of a few powerful actors determined to turn the once-solid market into a speculative casino. Goldman did it by persuading pension funds and other large institutional investors to invest in oil futures — agreeing to buy oil at a certain price on a fixed date. The push transformed oil from a physical commodity, rigidly subject to supply and demand, into something to bet on, like a stock. Between 2003 and 2008, the amount of speculative money in commodities grew from $13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of 2,300 percent. By 2008, a barrel of oil was traded 27 times, on average, before it was actually delivered and consumed.... By the middle of [the summer of 2008], despite rising supply and a drop in demand, we were paying $4 a gallon every time we pulled up to the pump."

Tomorrow: Turn off the bubble machine!

First, some facts about oil. (Speculators-part 2)

2011-08-30T09:13:00.001-04:00

I've been harping on the idea that facts are important, so I think I need to begin with a few facts about oil. These are from an article titled "Speculation explains more about oil prices than anything else" which appeared May 13 in the McClatchy newspapers.

1) "There is no shortage of oil stocks by historical standards. There's an estimated 3 million to 4 million barrels per day (bpd) of excess oil production capacity in the world today."

2) "The U.S. consumed 20.68 million barrels per day in 2007. Then came the financial crisis, and consumption dipped to 19.5 million bpd in 2008. Last year the number was 19.5 million bpd. This year's projection is 19.28 million bpd."

3)"Could it be that refineries aren't able to produce enough gasoline? No. Refiners are running their plants at below cruising speed, and they've got lots of room to produce more if consumers need it. The latest data from EIA on the rate at which refineries are utilized showed a rate of 79.8 percent in February. That's 20 percent below full-blown production, and it hasn't been that low since 1986. If demand for gasoline were soaring, these plants would be cranking at a higher rate."

4) "Some 70 percent of contracts for future oil delivery are now bought by financial speculators — largely big investment banks and hedge funds — who never take control of the oil. They just flip the contract for a quick profit."

To understand what's going on, we need to step back a bit and understand how the commodities markets work. It's really very simple.

The commodities market is simply a place where someone who produces a commodity (e.g. wheat) can meet a buyer for that commodity (e.g. cereal makers) and make a deal.

Sometimes a buyer or producer can protect themselves against possible future fluctuations in price by entering into what's called a "futures contract." Southwest Airlines enhanced their bottom line because they had purchased futures contracts on jet fuel at what turned out to be prices much lower than current prices when the fuel was actually delivered. (This is really a kind of bet entered into by buyer and seller. In this case the buyer won.)

There is one more player in this market: the speculator. Sometimes when a farmer has wheat to sell, the cereal maker has full grain storage facilities. Sometimes when a cereal maker needs grain, it's the wrong time of year for a crop.

The speculator buys grain from the farmer and holds it until the cereal company has a need, then hopes to sell it to the cereal company at a small profit. Speculators are a necessary part of the functioning of the market.

In the early part of the 20th century, to say that there were a lot of "shenanigans" in the commodity markets would be an understatement. During the FDR era, in the 1930's, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission was established to regulate the commodities market, and the market functioned quietly for the next 50 or so years.

Speculators were regulated to be a small part of the market. There were limits on how many speculators there could be, and how big a share of the market they could control.

Then came the era of deregulation, but that's our next post.

Have you noticed? Prices keep going up.

2011-08-29T12:01:00.000-04:00

I was listening to my wife talk to her brother on the phone. She remarked that "Prices on everything keep going up." That caught my attention, since I had heard her say the same thing to others several times in the last few days.

It's hard to believe that we're told that this is a time of low inflation. So low that Social Security hasn't had a COLA in the last two years.

But it's not only food prices that have gone up. All of the items known as "commodities," e.g. copper, coffee, corn, silver, natural gas, oil, cocoa have risen sharply in price.

We're told that it's all a matter of "supply and demand." China and India are growing economies demanding more oil for their cars, drinking more coffee, etc. This additional demand makes prices rise.

There's only one small problem: When you look at the actual figures--it's those damned "facts" again--they don't support the "supply and demand" argument.

There is a view, however, which is supported by the figures. It involves the wonderful world of Wall St. "casinos" which brought the economy to the brink of collapse just a couple of short years ago.

The argument is that Wall St. has opened some new tables at their "casinos" labeled "oil," "coffee," "copper," etc.

The folks who play at these tables are, for the most part, large investment banks, hedge funds and other large institutional investors such as pension funds. They are known as "speculators."

To understand what's happening, you need just a little background in understanding the commodities markets. (Stop snoring! This stuff is costing us all big money!)

I started to learn about this after the oil "bubble" of 2008. Remember that? That was the previous foray of gas prices into the $4+/gallon range. That turned out to be speculator-driven, and here we are again.

I've spent a couple of years, off and on, looking into this, and my "teacher" gene makes me want to share my newly-found knowledge with others.

This story is too long for a single post, so I'll break it up over a few days. We'll begin tomorrow with a VERY SIMPLE explanation of how the commodities markets work.

Trust me, it won't be boring. Frankly, I find it fascinating to understand how my hard-earned money is being stolen right out from under my nose!

Have we forgotten Horace Mann?

2011-08-28T14:23:00.000-04:00

Joe Six-pack probably couldn't tell you about Horace Mann, but a teacher could. A recent NY Times editorial points out that: "Public education was built on the philosophy articulated by Horace Mann, the Massachusetts reformer who pioneered the Common School: a system “one and the same for both rich and poor” with “all citizens on the same footing of equality before the law of land.”

How's that working out these days? Turns out, not so well.

The Times gives some examples:

"Many schools that have already reduced hours, increased class sizes and eliminated electives are also now charging fees for workbooks, use of lab equipment and other basic instructional materials; extracurricular activities long considered essential are now available only to students who can afford them."

"In Medina, Ohio, The Wall Street Journal reported, it now costs $660 for a child to play on a high school sports team, $200 to join the concert choir and $50 to act in the school play. High school students in Overland Park, Kan., pay a $120 “activity programming fee” and a $100 “learning resources fee.” In Naperville, Ill., they are charged textbook and workbook fees, even for basic requirements like English and French, according to The Chicago Tribune."

Have you heard that the January Regents exams have been saved from cancellation for the coming school year? Did you know that it is because NYC mayor Bloomberg and 5 other wealthy folks raised $1.5 million to pay for them? Next year, maybe we'll just have a bake sale.

"Most state constitutions, in fact, guarantee all students a sound, basic public education. These constitutional rights cannot be put on hold, even in tough times. It is unconstitutional to call on parents to pay for textbooks and lab fees for required courses. And art, music, sports, basic educational support services and many extracurricular activities that promote learning, creativity and character are not luxuries; they, too, are essential features of a sound, basic education."

The Times concludes: "It is disgraceful that essential components of our public education system now depend on the charitable impulses of wealthy citizens."

Things have gotten better.

2011-08-26T08:10:00.000-04:00

I remember summers in Rochester, NY, when I was growing up. They were different from the summers my children and grandchildren have experienced.

As the summer advanced parents began to keep a closer eye on their kids. Not because of any fear they might be molested. It was a virus that terrified both kids and parents.

Everybody knew the symptoms of polio. Kids and parents were scared of permanent braces or life in an iron lung. Public swimming pools closed during the "polio season."

Well, no longer. Things have gotten better.

When I was younger, one used to hear the term "exploratory surgery" quite often. Today, we ask patients to lie down and slide into a hollow tube for a CAT scan. Things have gotten better.

When I was teaching physics, I often used medical imaging as an example when some politician raged against a seemingly silly research project.

"It's doubtful," I would say, "that if you were in charge of funding medical research, you would chose to spend taxpayer money researching the results of slamming high-speed electrons into pieces of metal, but that research produced X-rays and began the march of non-invasive medical imaging."

Today, I'm thinking about the people of Galveston, Texas. When they went to bed on the evening of September 7, 1900, they had no idea that more than 8,000 of them would die the next day in a hurricane that would become the greatest natural disaster ever to hit the USA.

They had absolutely no idea it was coming.

As I write this, we know that a hurricane of possibly historic proportions is moving up the east coast. We watch it on radar on the nightly news. We see it from space on the Weather Channel. Reasonably reliable computer models tell us where it's headed.

I have people I care about in the path of this storm. You probably do too. Unlike the people of Galveston our loved ones have plenty of warning. They have the time to protect both life and property.

Things have gotten better.

And then they came for the ultimate public employee.

2011-08-24T14:07:00.000-04:00

First they got rid of the "antiquated" notion of defined-benefit pensions in the private sector. Public employees at all levels are well on their way to the glories of defined-contribution (401(k)-type) retirement plans. The last target standing seems to be the military.

In the military, half-pay retirement is available to those who survive 20 years. Your retirement pay begins as soon as you retire, not years later at age 65.

When volunteering for military service can mean multiple deployments in locations where the temperature can reach 125-degrees, all while carrying 80 pounds of gear and body armor--not to mention being shot at--retirement pay is a good incentive to sign up for service.

That may be about to change. According to a Washington Post column by Andrew Bacevich, prof. of history and international studies at Boston Univ. and a former army officer:

"The Defense Business Board (motto: “Business Excellence in Defense of the Nation”), a panel of corporate types who advise the Pentagon’s civilian leadership, has trained its sights on a problem that urgently needs fixing: the military retirement system."

"Didn’t know it was broken? Well, a recent DBB study concludes that military benefits are “more generous and expensive” than those available in the private sector, and have therefore become “unaffordable” and “unfair.” Created back when military skills did not easily translate into civilian second careers, the system is also unnecessary, the study argues. And with retirees no longer dying as quickly as they once did, it’s inconvenient to boot."

One hardly knows where to begin. Military retirement benefits are "unfair" because they're better than those in the private sector? Let's just mention a couple of possibilities as to why this might not be true. First, while assembly line work at GM is often tedious, there have been precious few reports of GM workers being killed on the job by either sniper fire or exploding IEDs.

Second, military personnel often find private sector contractors doing jobs that used to be done by the military (e.g. guarding U.S. embassies), often at pay rates that are at least triple that of the soldier or marine that the contractor replaced.

As far as "translating into civilian second careers," has anyone noticed that returning veterans are at the top of the list of groups having difficulty finding work in today's economy?

According to Bacevich: "...the DBB wants the Pentagon to jettison the concept of a lifelong retirement pension. In its place, the board would institute a tax-sheltered savings account to accompany service members into the post-military workplace. Counting on civilian employers to contribute to that account, while stipulating that benefits would be “payable at age 60 to 65” rather than at 40 or 45, would reduce the money that the Pentagon is obliged to set aside. In effect, providing for Capt. Smith’s retirement would become an individual responsibility, shared by however many employers Smith could induce to pitch in — not a responsibility that the Pentagon alone would have to bear. Less money added to retirement accounts would mean more money for the stuff that matters: wars and weapons."

Or, maybe we could just fight a few less useless wars, and use the savings to treat those who had to fight the necessary wars in a decent fashion. Just a thought.

Who's paying no taxes?

2011-08-23T12:18:00.000-04:00

With a nod toward Jeff Foxworthy and his "you might be a redneck" series: If you can say something true in a way that makes your listeners reach a conclusion that isn't, you might be a politician!

One last example, and this one's just a bit easier than the last post. This was said by Rick Perry on August 13, but he's only the latest to make the same observation:

“We’re dismayed at the injustice that nearly half of all Americans don’t even pay any income tax.”

In her Aug. 15 column at the Washington Post, Ruth Marcus observes:

"Perry’s statement conjures visions of America as Slacker Nation, where the overburdened wagon-pullers drag an increasingly heavy burden of freeloaders. His number is correct but, like other conservatives who have seized on the statistic, Perry draws from it a dangerously misleading lesson."

Marcus refers to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center to explain that our progressive income tax system is "designed to help the working poor and low-income seniors." The Center points out that a couple with two children is entitled to the same standard deduction ($11,600) and personal exemptions ($3,700) as anyone else. If that couple's income is less than $26,400 they have zero income for tax purposes.

Marcus says: "Does Perry truly see this as an “injustice”? Does he believe his “dismay” should be alleviated by raising the tax burden on these households?"

"In addition, the notion that these households pay no taxes is flat-out wrong. They pay — leaving aside state and local sales, income and property taxes — federal gasoline and other excise taxes and, most significantly, payroll taxes on every dollar they earn. These taxes are regressive. Everyone pays the same share, regardless of income, so they hit the poor hardest, and they counterbalance the progressivity of the income tax code."

Marcus goes on to point out that only 18% of households pay neither income or payroll taxes. Of these, 10% are elderly and 7% earn less than $20,000 per year.

She says: "Assuming that Perry isn’t worked up about Slacker Grandmas, the relevant “slacker share” — people who are supposedly comfortably ensconced on that wagon the rest of us are pulling — is in single digits rather than “nearly half.”

When one looks at the totality of all taxes paid, the picture is a little different.

" Examining the total tax burden — state, federal and local — Citizens for Tax Justice calculated that the top 1 percent of households (average income, $1.3 million) earned 20.3 percent of income and paid 21.5 percent of taxes in 2010."

Marcus concludes: "The tax code is studded with a costly bevy of deductions and preferences — mortgage interest, employer-sponsored health insurance, retirement savings — that benefit wealthier taxpayers over those with modest incomes. If Perry wants to go after injustice in the tax code, he’ll find ample targets. Failing to tax poor people enough isn’t among them."

BONUS:

On last Thursday's Daily Show, Jon Stewart addressed this issue and "nailed it" as only he can do. Here is that segment, which is split into two parts:

Part 1:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

World of Class Warfare - Warren Buffett vs. Wealthy Conservatives

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

Part 2:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

World of Class Warfare - The Poor's Free Ride Is Over

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

Fact right, conclusion wrong.

2011-08-22T10:02:00.000-04:00

Yesterday we looked at the age-old art of "just makin' stuff up." It's everywhere.

Remember the U.S. Senator who made a speech on the Senate floor in which he claimed that abortions were 90+% of what Planned Parenthood did? Then his office had to issue a statement saying that the Senator's speech "was not meant to be factually accurate."

Sometimes people say something that is 100% factually accurate, but they say it in a way that leads the reader/listener to a totally wrong conclusion. Rep. Michelle Bachmann made such a statement on Aug. 14, and on the Sunday morning talk shows later that week. Even being forewarned that there's a "trap" in this statement, it's hard to find. See if you can pick it out.

"Well, I think the one thing we have to do is reject the new normal level of spending under the Obama administration, because President Obama amped up spending to never-seen-before levels. . . . I mean, one example I'll give you is, we had one employee at the federal Department of Transportation that made $170,000 a year at the beginning of the recession. We had the trillion-dollar stimulus, and 18 months into the recession, we had 1,690 employees making over $170,000. Government has really been growing at — a lot of largesse, but the people in the real world aren’t. And that’s what has to change. Government has no conformity at all with the real world."

Glen Kessler, who writes the "Fact Checker" column for the Washington Post, received several emails from readers wondering about the accuracy of this statement. Here's what he had to say:

"On the surface, the fact appears astonishing — a huge increase in big-paying government jobs under Obama. But this is one of those statements one has to unpack very carefully, because Bachmann uses what is essentially a correct statistic regarding government salaries in a very misleading way. "

"Note that although the GOP presidential aspirant starts out by talking about the “never-seen-before levels” of spending under Obama and then mentions “the trillion-dollar stimulus,” the example she cites — the number of Transportation Department employees making more than $170,000 — uses the metric of “the beginning of the recession.” There’s a reason for that phrase: The recession started in December 2007, 13 months before Obama became president."

"In other words, Bachmann gives the impression that she is talking about something that Obama did, but in fact, the big increase in government pay that she denounces started under Obama’s Republican predecessor, George W. Bush."

"Bachmann’s use of the phrase “beginning of the recession” suggests she knows full well that the pay raises did not occur under Obama, and yet she persists in leaving the impression that Obama is directly responsible for boosting the number of employees making more than $170,000."

"That makes her statistic, while technically correct, deliberately misleading, especially since Obama has actually frozen federal salaries."

You can read Kessler's complete column at this link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/michele-bachmanns-too-good-to-be-true-stat-on-federal-workers/2011/08/15/gIQAZaqbHJ_blog.html

Tomorrow, we'll do one more factually misleading statement. This one involves taxes. Then we'll leave the area of fact abuse and move onto other items of interest to retirees.

Not true? What the hell, say it anyway!

2011-08-20T15:09:00.002-04:00

Let's begin our look into how facts can be abused with the most straightforward case: simply ignoring them.

The 2012 campaign seems to be in full swing and, when looking for examples of the abuse of facts, politicians are such low-hanging fruit.

A while ago, I told you that this blog was going to stay away from national politics--except where it applied to retired teachers. That's still my intent. I'm not going to advocate for any political party or candidate. I know some of you are more conservative, and I respect that.

Having said that, I intend to use some of the current Republican presidential candidates as examples of fact abuse. Why? Because they're in the news, and you may recognize the statements they made and your reaction to these statements. You may find yourself saying, "Hey, I fell right into that trap."

Don't Democrats ever abuse the facts? Of course they do! I'm sure you could find President Obama using each of the techniques I'll point out. The current crop of Republicans, however, are relative "newbies"--with a couple of exceptions-- and don't do nearly as well at hiding their abuse of facts as old hands on the national stage.

Still, if you feel the need, please feel free to point out instances in which Democrats apply the same technique. Send it as a comment, and it will be posted.

Let's begin with a claim the governor of Texas made before he even got into the race. Here's what Kurt Anderson had to say in a recent NY Times column:

"Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion. Perry is even entitled to his opinion that states such as Texas might want to secede, as he threatened at a Tea Party rally two years ago. But he’s not entitled to his own facts. “When we came into the nation in 1845,” he’d earlier told some bloggers visiting his office, “we were a republic. We were a stand-alone nation. And one of the deals was, we can leave anytime we want. So we’re kind of thinking about that again.” That special opt-out provision is entirely fiction, a Texas myth the governor of Texas apparently thinks is real."

See the trap here? Perry is talking about Texas. He's not just any Texan, he's the governor of Texas. When he says something about Texas, you assume he knows what he's talking about! Did you fall into the trap? I did, until I took the time to check it out on my own.

Still, let's give the man the late Texas political humorist Mollie Ivins called "Gov. Goodhair" a pass on this one. Apparently lots of Texans believe this myth.

Here's a more recent example, as covered by Jonathan Weisman of the "Washington Wire" blog of the Wall Street Journal:

"During his debut in Iowa Sunday night in Waterloo, then again on Monday at the Iowa State Fair Monday, Gov. Perry brought up [a] phantom “obscene, crazy” regulation in Texan terms."

“If you’re a tractor driver, if you drive your tractor across a public road, you’re gonna have to have a commercial driver’s license. Now how idiotic is that?” he thundered to the fair crowd in Des Moines, with the rejoinder, “What were they thinkin’?”

"For a small-government conservative on the presidential campaign stump like Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a new federal regulation forcing farmers to get commercial drivers licenses would make a perfect example of Barack Obama’s Washington run amok."

"But there is no such regulation" [Emphasis mine.]

Oops. There goes that trap again. His audience assumed he knew what he was talking about.

There had been rumors of such a regulation spreading through the farm community--as there were rumors that the government was about to confiscate guns and ammunition soon after the Obama victory.

Even though the government had issued a statement saying "The common sense exemptions that allow farmers, their employers, and their families to accomplish their day-to-day work and transport their products to market” should remain in place. We have no intention of instituting onerous regulations on the hardworking families who feed our country and fuel our economy," Perry went for it anyway.

And why not. Even though his opponents would be filtering every word looking for ways to trip him up, it was a good line for the farmers, who probably wouldn't see him get caught by the Wall Street Journal anyway.

Up next: Leading the reader/listener to a false conclusion by saying something absolutely true..

Just the facts, ma'am.

2011-08-19T16:39:00.002-04:00

I love facts. They're the things that make it possible to find solutions to our problems.

I often tell my conservative friends that I'm certain that if we got a group of 10 of their like-minded friends together with a group of 10 of my like-minded friends, we could solve whatever problem we wished to work on.

Why? Because we would actually want to solve the problem, not keep controversy alive to boost our ratings or look toward triumph in the next election.

No matter what the problem, the first item of business, after identifying the problem to be solved, would be to collect the pertinent facts. No facts to work from, no solution possible. Facts are that important.

It seems that facts are in a bit of difficulty these days. First of all, they're harder to come by in our daily reading.

I just began reading a book titled "Blur: How to know what's true in the age of information overload." It's by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, who are also the authors of "The Elements of Journalism."

We all know that newspapers and magazines are having a hard time staying alive in this digital age, but this quote from the opening of the book caught me by surprise: "The numbers are shocking. In the initial ten years of the twenty-first century, newspapers saw nearly half of their ad revenue disappear, Roughly a third of all newsroom jobs vanished. The audience and revenue for network news were less than half what they had been twenty years earlier. More than two billion dollars in news gathering [ability] annually disappeared."

Remember TV series like "Lou Grant" or movies like "All the President's Men?" Newspapers made exciting drama because they had the resources to speak truth to power, and to uncover when power was screwing with the rest of us. The editor was always asking the reporter: "Do you have two sources for that? You do? Then print it!"

Newspapers and magazines had editors and fact-checkers. I know from experience that when a writer submitted an article to a national magazine, it was assigned to a fact-checker who verified every single fact from the article.

Then came the internet, devoid of editors and fact-checkers. "The most fundamental change," say Kovach & Rosenstiel, "is that more of the responsibility for knowing what is true and what is not now rests with each of us as individuals."

It's a "reader beware" situation with facts today. They can be used--and abused--in some rather clever ways.

Remember the argument in Wisconsin about the pay and benefits of teachers and other public employees? "Everybody knew" that teachers were better off than workers in the private sector.

How did they know this? Because the average pay of public employees was higher than the average wage for a worker in the private sector. That is a fact, so case closed. No need to investigate further. Pay no attention to the additional facts behind that curtain!

You see, if one recognizes that the public workforce is made up of a lot of highly educated people such as teachers, engineers, nurses, doctors, etc. and compares the pay and benefits of comparably-educated members of the public and private workforces, an entirely different fact emerges. Taking into account both pay and benefits, public employees in Wisconsin earn less than their private counterparts with equal educational levels. For specifics, see the following blog post:

http://rsteinfeldt.blogspot.com/2011/06/public-pay-vs-private-truth-is-in.html

Facts are so complicated. That's why I would like to give you a few examples of how facts can be misused in the next couple of posts.

Winds of change reach from Wisconsin to Ohio.

2011-08-18T10:25:00.001-04:00

Well, that didn't take long. You might remember that in my next-to-last post, What's new from Wisconsin, the last line quoted a NY Times editorial about the results of the Wisconsin recalls: "...voters around the country who oppose the widespread efforts to undermine public unions — largely financed by corporate interests — should draw strength from Tuesday’s success, not discouragement."

It took less than 24 hours for the winds of change to reach from Wisconsin to Ohio. In a "hastily-called" news conference, Ohio governor John Kasich offered to modify some of the more draconian provisions of that state's "union-stripping" law, in return for calling off the November statewide vote on that law.

The law was put onto the November ballot by collecting over 900,000 valid signatures, almost four times the required number. It should be noted that current polling shows that Ohio voters will reject that law by a margin of 24 points. Proponents of repeal are turning a deaf ear to the governor's proposal.

If, earlier this year, you suffered through the wave of anti-teacher, anti-union laws as they were passed in several states, you deserve this "feel good" moment. Enjoy this clip from Wednesday's "Rachel Maddow Show." The first 3 minutes are a quick review of what happened in Wisconsin, then it's on to Ohio.

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