By Larry Sand

The National Education Association, whose state affiliate is the California Teachers Association, just came out with a “research” report which should be taken about as seriously as the Tobacco Institute study that denied the link between smoking and lung cancer. The “Rankings of the States 2012 and Estimates of School Statistics 2013” report is filled with half-truths and worse. The summary tells us that education is hurting in America and the problems revolve around the fact that we don’t spend enough. We are led to believe that per-student spending is insufficient, we don’t pay our teachers enough, and class sizes are too big.

But then, lo and behold, we get a real study from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which historically has supplied us with objective international comparisons. Released last week, their latest, a 440 page tome, is filled with statistics that lay to waste much of the NEA’s tired plea for more spending on education.

From an Associated Press summary of the report, we learn:

“The United States spent more than $11,000 per elementary student in 2010 and more than $12,000 per high school student. When researchers factored in the cost for programs after high school education such as college or vocational training, the United States spent $15,171 on each young person in the system—more than any other nation covered in the report.

“That sum inched past some developed countries and far surpassed others. Switzerland’s total spending per student was $14,922 while Mexico averaged $2,993 in 2010. The average OECD nation spent $9,313 per young person.” (Emphasis added.)

Ranking

According to NEA’s way of thinking, being the top spender should result in the U.S. producing the best students, but this is not the case. In fact, far from it. AP continued:

“U.S. fourth-graders are 11th in the world in math in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, a separate measure of nations against each other. U.S. eighth-graders ranked ninth in math, according to those 2011 results.

“The Program for International Student Assessment measurement found the United States ranked 31st in math literacy among 15-year-old students and below the international average. The same 2009 tests found the United States ranked 23rd in science among the same students, but posting an average score.”

What about teacher salaries?

The OECD report found:

“The average first-year high school teacher in the United States earns about $38,000. OECD nations pay their comparable educators just more than $31,000.

“That trails Luxembourg, which pays its first year teachers more than $72,000 a year, but far exceeds the $10,000 paid to first-year high school teachers in Slovakia. Among all educators, U.S. payrolls are competitive. The average high school teacher in the United States earns about $53,000, well above the average of $45,500 among all OECD nations.”

And of course, the countries with the smallest class sizes are the most successful, right?

Well, no. There is absolutely no correlation. For example, countries with about 30 students per elementary school class — Chile, Japan, Israel and Korea — do better than we do with about 20 kids per class when it comes to students completing an upper secondary education.

Spending

Via Choice Media, Paul Peterson, Director of the Program on Education Policy and Government at Harvard University, states the obvious:

“We do not spend our money wisely. We don’t have a very competitive system. Anytime a monopoly spends money, and our education system is a monopoly, it is not spending money efficiently. We don’t hire our teachers the right way. We don’t pay the best teachers more money and we don’t get rid of our weakest teachers because we pay everybody the same rate except for their credentials and their years of experience. We don’t have a way of easing the weakest members of the teaching force out of the profession.”

Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues.

(Cross-posted from Union Watch.)

Oct. 17, 2012

By Larry Sand

It’s time to “just say no” to the small class-size pushers and eliminate seniority as a staffing mechanism.

Small class size means less work for teachers. Parents seem to think that their child will be better educated in a room with fewer classmates. Unions love fewer kids in a class because it equates to a larger workforce, which means more money and power for them. Only problem is that small class size does not lead to greater student achievement. It just means more hiring, then laying off the same teachers and punishing taxpayers who needlessly pay for a bloated workforce.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal published “The Imaginary Teacher Shortage,” an op-ed by professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas Jay Greene, in which he exposes the small-is-better canard:

“For decades we have tried to boost academic outcomes by hiring more teachers, and we have essentially nothing to show for it. In 1970, public schools employed 2.06 million teachers, or one for every 22.3 students, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s Digest of Education Statistics. In 2012, we have 3.27 million teachers, one for every 15.2 students.”

Greene also addresses the fact that, as hiring increases, there is less likelihood of a student getting a good teacher. And a having a good teacher is the most important factor in student achievement.

“Parents like the idea of smaller class sizes in the same way that people like the idea of having a personal chef. Parents imagine that their kids will have one of the Iron Chefs. But when you have to hire almost 3.3 million chefs, you’re liable to end up with something closer to the fry-guy from the local burger joint.”

Too many teachers

Just three months ago, director of Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom Andrew Coulson wrote a similar op-ed in the same newspaper. The subhead in “America Has Too Many Teachers” sets the tone:

“Public-school employees have doubled in 40 years while student enrollment has increased by only 8.5%—and academic results have stagnated.”

In the body of the piece, he gives us some numbers to chew on. Whereas Greene talks specifically about teachers, Coulson refers to the entire “public school workforce”:

“Since 1970, the public school workforce has roughly doubled—to 6.4 million from 3.3 million—and two-thirds of those new hires are teachers or teachers’ aides. Over the same period, enrollment rose by a tepid 8.5%. Employment has thus grown 11 times faster than enrollment. (Emphasis added.) If we returned to the student-to-staff ratio of 1970, American taxpayers would save about $210 billion annually in personnel costs.”

I contributed my own two cents on the subject in City Journal in July of 2011:

“In 1998, Hoover Institution senior fellow and economist Eric Hanushek released the results of his impressive review of class-size studies. Examining 277 separate studies on the effect of teacher-pupil ratios and class-size averages on student achievement, he found that 15 percent of the studies found an improvement in achievement, while 72 percent found no effect at all—and 13 percent found that reducing class size had a negative effect on achievement. While Hanushek admits that in some cases, children might benefit from a small-class environment, there is no way ‘to describe a priori situations where reduced class size will be beneficial.’”

So, basically, almost three-quarters of all the studies showed no benefit to small class size, and of the rest, almost the same number revealed negative effects as positive ones.

Layoffs

While it is a personal hardship for a teacher to be laid off, no one should be surprised when it happens. When economic times are good, it’s easy to buy into more hiring. But good economic times don’t last forever; and when, suddenly, we can’t afford all the teachers we have hired and some need to be let go, it is brazen of the self-righteous, small class-size true believers to mislead the public with their hand-wringing and political posturing.

And we can’t say we weren’t warned that there were going to be problems. Back in April of 2004, teacher union watchdog Mike Antonucci wrote:

“Enrollment Figures Spell Big Trouble for Education Labor.

“The U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) regularly reviews enrollment figures, comparing past years with expectations for the future. Its most recent report shows clearly that the fat years of teacher employment are over, and the lean years may last much longer than anyone has previously predicted.

“NCES compared the period 1988-2001 with its projections for 2001-2013. The differences are stark. While public school enrollment increased 19 percent between 1988 and 2001, it is expected to grow only 4 percent between 2001 and 2013. During the period 1988-2001, the number of public school teachers grew by an astonishing 29 percent. The forecast for 2001-2013 is growth of only 5 percent–or less than 0.4 percent annually.”

Then in June 2004, referring to Rankings and Estimates, a National Education Association report, Antonucci wrote:

“In 2003-04, American public elementary schools taught 1,649,027 more pupils than they did in 1993-94. But there were 247,620 more elementary school classroom teachers in 2003-04 than there were in 1993-94. Simply put, for every 20 additional students enrolled in America’s K-8 schools in the last 10 years, we hired three additional elementary school classroom teachers.”

So clearly, having fewer teachers is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is tragic when we lose the good ones. Throughout much of the country, the decisions as to which teachers get laid off are determined by archaic seniority policies.

Teachers-of-the-year are laid off before their mediocre or incompetent counterparts simply because the latter may have been hired a few days before the former. This is no way to run an education system. The sooner we get away from the smaller-is-better myth and turn our attention to scrapping the industrial style “last in, first out” method, the better.

About the author: Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues.

By John Seiler

Check out Gadfly Radio’s latest broadcast. Featured first is Gustavo Arellano, ace reporter for the OC Weekly, on the riots in Anaheim that followed the police shooting death of an unarmed man. The second guest is Larry Sand, talking about education reform.

Martha Montelongo is the great host, with comments by Ben Boychuk of City Journal California and yours truly.

Link:

http://gadflyradio.com/podcasts/anaheim-pds-criminally-violent-weekend-track-record-gustavo-arrellano-oc-weekly/

Editor’s note: This is cross-posted from our friend Larry Sand. The NEA is the parent union of the powerful California Teachers Association.

July 24, 2012

By Larry Sand

The teachers union uses bogus numbers to con the public into believing that education needs more funding.

The National Education Association is relentless in its quest to raise taxes. In its latest gambit — “Massive Budget Cuts Threaten America’s Children” — the union claims that “…America’s schools have added 5.4 million students since 2003.” The only documentation for this outlandish number – an 11.1 percent increase – is a link to another article where they state the same fiction.

However, the National Council for Educational Statistics, an organization without an agenda, tells a far different story. NCES says that in 2003-2004 there were 48,540,375 K-12 students enrolled in the nation’s pubic schools. In 2010-2011, that number climbed to 49,484,181, an increase of just under 944,000 students – a 1.9 percent gain.

NEA also tries to convince us that severe spending cuts are dooming our children to an inferior education. But Mike Antonucci offers a realistic look at spending data culled from the U.S. Census Bureau. He came up with a chart which shows that between 2004-2005 and 2009-2010 per student spending increased 22 percent nationwide (9.3 percent after correcting for inflation.)

However, as Antonucci points out, the spending flattened out toward the end of that five year period. And in all likelihood we will be in for a decrease in the near term. But, what must be determined is how spending correlates to student achievement.

Compared to other countries around the world, we are fourth in spending after Luxembourg, Switzerland and Norway. Yet,

“The three-yearly OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report, which compares the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds in 70 countries around the world, ranked the United States 14th out of 34 OECD countries for reading skills, 17th for science and a below-average 25th for mathematics.”

Not much of a correlation there. What about individual states? A recent study about the U.S. failure to close the international achievement gap released by Education Next finds nothing at all convincing.

“No significant correlation was found between increased spending on education and test score gains. For example, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey posted large gains in student performance after boosting spending, but New York, Wyoming, and West Virginia had only marginal test-score gains to show from increased expenditures.”

Class size

The spendthrift teachers unions and their fellow travelers insist that we need more teachers because small class size is an essential component to a good education, but there is no evidence to back up this assertion. In fact, in a wonderfully contrarian op-ed, Cato Institute’s Andrew Coulson makes his case that “America Has Too Many Teachers” and other school employees.

“Since 1970, the public school workforce has roughly doubled—to 6.4 million from 3.3 million—and two-thirds of those new hires are teachers or teachers’ aides. Over the same period, enrollment rose by a tepid 8.5%. Employment has thus grown 11 times faster than enrollment. If we returned to the student-to-staff ratio of 1970, American taxpayers would save about $210 billion annually in personnel costs.”

Referring to the NAEP tests, also known as the nation’s report card, Coulson says that in spite of the increased workforce,

“These tests, first administered four decades ago, show stagnation in reading and math and a decline in science. Scores for black and Hispanic students have improved somewhat, but the scores of white students (still the majority) are flat overall, and large demographic gaps persist. Graduation rates have also stagnated or fallen. So a doubling in staff size and more than a doubling in cost have done little to improve academic outcomes.”

Ah, but what about the kids who do get lost in larger classes? A story in the Huffington Post addresses this, focusing on a sweet eight year old girl in New York City who is having a tough time in school because, due to budget cuts, her 3rd grade class now has 32 students. To be sure some students are hurt by being in bigger classes. But despite the appeal to sentiment, it is hardly a universal truth.

Teacher-pupil ratio

Hoover Institution senior fellow and economist Eric Hanushek has devoted much of his time studying this issue. In 1998, he released the results of his impressive research.

“Examining 277 separate studies on the effect of teacher-pupil ratios and class-size averages on student achievement, he found that 15 percent of the studies found an improvement in achievement, while 72 percent found no effect at all—and 13 percent found that reducing class size had a negative effect on achievement. While Hanushek admits that in some cases, children might benefit from a small-class environment, there is no way ‘to describe a priori situations where reduced class size will be beneficial.’”

In our fiscally tough times it is more important than ever not to be swayed by emotion, demagoguery, and plain ol’ BS. Americans must do their due diligence and not be conned by the hucksters. And be especially wary of the teachers unions; the snake oil they sell is particularly venomous.

About the author: Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network  — a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues.

Editor’s note: This first appeared on UnionWatch.org.

May 7, 2012

By Larry Sand

Last month, the drone-like National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel gave a talk at the annual gathering of the Nebraska State Education Association. The California Teachers Association is an affiliate of the NEA.

Van Roekel unleashed the same tired old class warfare hogwash that teacher union leaders have been yammering about for years. The latest version of this old whine stresses closing corporate tax loopholes. As I wrote earlier, the NEA claims the U.S. can recoup $1.5 trillion in taxes if those greedy corporate types would just pay their “fair share.” Van Roekel conveniently omits the fact that NEA took in $400 million in 2010-2011, mostly in dues forcibly taken from its members, and didn’t pay one red cent in taxes.

Van Roekel then reprised another union mantra — claiming that NEA must pursue “social justice.” He said,

“You can’t have an organization with our core values and not care about social justice.”

“You can’t have a democracy and not care about social justice, whether it’s discrimination based on race or religion or sexual orientation, discrimination is discrimination and it’s wrong. And we as an organization have to stand up and say that.”

The subject of social justice — its history and damage that it has caused — could fill volumes. But here is an abridged version:

Social justice (SJ) is based on the concepts of human rights and egalitarianism, and involves fostering economic equality through progressive taxation along with income and property redistribution. Around since the late 19th Century, this philosophy made its foray into education in the early part of the 20th Century when John Dewey, a progressive, and his socialist partner, George Counts, challenged teachers to replace the development of each student’s individual talents with a focus on social justice.

The bedrocks of American culture and our economy — capitalism, individualism and competition — were frowned upon, to be replaced with distributive egalitarianism, collectivism and statism. Also paramount to the SJ movement was the socialization of children. Historically, schools had partnered with parents in reinforcing the values of the family. But over time, progressive educators came to assume a disproportionate role.

National philosophy

The progressive philosophy soon became part of the national zeitgeist with even President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, getting into the act. He said in a speech in 1914, “I have often said that the use of a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible.” (Bold added.)

The effect of the SJ movement on education cannot be exaggerated. The changes were not dramatic at first, but over the years, SJ picked up steam. By the 1960s, SJ had become mainstream, especially in our nation’s colleges. University professors who spouted this poison did much damage, as many college students of that period became the tenured radicals who still infest our schools of higher education — most notably in the social science and education departments. And therefore today, our future teachers sit at the feet of ed school professors who teach them more about how to indoctrinate students than to prepare them for the more traditional “participation in public life as well as success in private life.”

As a result, in our elementary schools, instead of learning basic skills and the real history of the country, students are all too often taught nonsense like anti-racist math and that America is evil and can be saved only by a litany of progressive “isms” — environmentalism, feminism, socialism, etc. Several months ago, I reviewed Kyle Olson’s excellent book, “Indoctrination: How ‘Useful Idiots’ Are Using Our Schools to Subvert American Exceptionalism,” which documents how public schools today are being used to turn children away from the ideals that have made this country extraordinary.

Political activism

By the time American students finish their K-12 indoctrination, they are primed for the big finale – the university. The seeds that were planted in the elementary schools come to a hideous bloom in college. Last month, the non-partisan California Association of Scholars came out with a scathing report, “A Crisis of Competence: The Corrupting Effect of Political Activism in the University of California.” In his review of it, Peter Berkowitz wrote,

“The analysis begins from a nonpolitical fact: Numerous studies of both the UC system and of higher education nationwide demonstrate that students who graduate from college are increasingly ignorant of history and literature. They are unfamiliar with the principles of American constitutional government. And they are bereft of the skills necessary to comprehend serious books and effectively marshal evidence and argument in written work.”

Excluding from the curriculum those ideas that depart from the progressive agenda implicitly teaches students that conservative ideas are contemptible and unworthy of discussion. This exclusion, the California report points out, also harms progressives for the reason John Stuart Mill elaborated in his famous 1859 essay, “On Liberty”: “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”

Unfortunately, while many Americans do not ascribe to SJ tenets, too many of us are ignorant of its agenda or have become apathetic to its dangers. In 2009, admitted terrorist Bill “Mad Bomber” Ayers co-edited the “Handbook of Social Justice in Education,” a 792 page “Hate America First” manifesto which brazenly instructs teachers how to spread the collectivist dream to America’s children. As many of us emit a collective yawn, the poisoning of young minds continues unimpeded.

Is it any wonder that the “Occupy” movement is saturated with young people who, beyond a few clichés, cannot articulate what exactly it is that they are demonstrating against? They just know that some people have more money than other people and that’s just not fair. The regnant attitude is, “If you’re rich and I’m not, you owe me.”  If Dennis Van Roekel and his ideological comrades have their way, the dumbing down and radicalizing of American youth will ultimately destroy the very foundation of this society. But hey — everyone will be equal, all right — equally miserable.

About the author: Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network — a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues.

This article first appeared in UnionWatch.org.

MARCH 7, 2012

By LARRY SAND

Last month, Education Week published “What Research Says About School Choice,” in which nine scholars analyze the results of various studies concerning “school choice” — the quaint notion that parents should be able to choose where to send their kids to school. The report boasts no ecstatic claims, nothing about lions and lambs, no Hallelujah moments — just a sober look at the 20 year-old movement to end mandatory zip code school assignments. Some of the findings:

Among voucher programs, random-assignment studies generally find modest improvements in reading or math scores, or both. Achievement gains are typically small in each year, but cumulative over time. Graduation rates have been studied less often, but the available evidence indicates a substantial positive impact.

Among voucher programs, these studies consistently find that vouchers are associated with improved test scores in the affected public schools. The size of the effect in these studies varies from modest to large. No study has found a negative impact.

A third area of study has been the fiscal impact of school choice. Even under conservative assumptions about such questions as state and local budget sensitivity to enrollment changes, the net impact of school choice on public finances is usually positive and has never been found to be negative.

Charter Movement

Also last week, the California Charter School Association released its second annual “Portrait of the Movement: How Charters are Transforming California Education.” Not a sales pitch or compilation of cherry-picked data data, the CCSA report is an honest look at California’s 900 plus charter schools which educate about 400,000 students. A few of its many findings:

Charters that serve low-income students exceeded their prediction at high rates relative to the traditional system; students at charters serving low-income populations are five times more likely than their non-charter counterparts to be served by a school in the top 5th percentile.

Charter schools are more likely than non-charters to have both above average academic performance and above average growth. They are less likely than non-charters to perform below both state averages of status and growth.

A small number of low-performing charters were closed after the 2010-11 school year.

Earlier this month, the results of a study about school choice and its effects on crime in North Carolina, conducted by David J. Deming, assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, were released. This study examined neither vouchers nor charter schools, but rather a district-wide open enrollment policy whereby any student could apply to any school within the district. If a popular school had more enrollees than seats, a lottery was held. The rather stunning findings:

In general, high-risk students commit about 50 percent less crime as a result of winning a school choice lottery.  Among male high school students at high risk of criminal activity, winning admission to a first-choice school reduced felony arrests from 77 to 43 per 100 students over the study period (2002-2009).  The attendant social cost of crimes committed decreased by more than 35 percent.  Among high-risk middle school students, admittance by lottery to a preferred school reduced the average social cost of crimes committed by 63 percent (due chiefly to a reduction in violent crime), and reduced the total expected sentence of crimes committed by 31 months (64 percent).

The study finds that the overall reductions in criminal activity are concentrated among the top 20 percent of high-risk students, who are disproportionately African American, eligible for free lunch, with more days of absence and suspensions than the average student.

Hence, the ability to choose the school that a child attends not only increases chances of a better education, but also greatly decreases the likelihood that the youth will become a criminal. And not only doesn’t it cost anything, lower crime rates have been shown to be a boon to local economies.

Parent Trigger

Another kind of school choice was recently attempted by parents at Desert Trails Elementary School in Adelanto, a Mojave Desert town in eastern California. Tired of low test scores, some parents organized and got more than 50 percent of the parents at the school to sign a “Parent Trigger” petition, which would give them the right to choose a different type of school governance. Their choices included firing the principal, removing some of the faculty, shutting the school down or turning it in to a charter school. Linda Serrato, Deputy Communication Director of Parent Revolution, explains that this particular petition laid out two options: “…negotiate with the parents to give them the autonomy they need to turn around their school, or they will use the Parent Trigger to take their school away from the district and convert it into a community charter school, run by local parents and educators.”

However, the Wall Street Journal reports that the California Teachers Association, a union that will go to great lengths to maintain the status quo and thus its political power, sent out “representatives” to Adelanto to disseminate “information” to the parents there. (“Union speak” alert: “Representatives” and “information” really mean sending unidentified operatives to petition-signers’ homes and feeding them lies about the petition that they just signed.)

The unionistas’ door-to-door rescission campaign managed to scare enough signers into revoking their signatures, thus nullifying the proposed action. CTA pulled the same stunt in Compton, the first time parents rose up and “pulled the Trigger.”  But after a legal challenge, in which the parents were successfully represented pro bono by the firm of Kirkland and Ellis, the Trigger went forward, and produced the opening of a new charter school. Apparently, Kirkland and Ellis are ready for a second go-round and will represent the parents in Adelanto.

Overdue Idea

School choice is an idea whose time is long overdue. Scholars know it. Charter school attendees know it. Crime free youths in North Carolina know it. Parent activists in the Mojave Desert know it.

The nearsighted, the naysayers, and the beneficiaries of the current failing status quo — moribund educrats, reactionary school boards and power-mad teacher unions — realize they could be in trouble and will desperately fight to extinguish the fires of reform whenever and wherever they can. But as parents and taxpayers become enlightened about the advantages of choice and empowered  to take action, their opponents — with their lame assertions, name calling, sophistry and bullying — will see their hegemony wilt and ultimately will be rendered powerless.

About the author: Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network — a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues.

JAN. 30, 2012

By LARRY SAND

January 22 through 28 marked the second annual National School Choice Week. While much of the rest of the country can celebrate some successes since last year, California’s education reformers often spend their days fighting rearguard actions just to preserve hard-won but modest gains. Nationally, the 2010 elections galvanized school reformers and led to such a quick succession of victories that the Wall Street Journal dubbed 2011 “the Year of School Choice,” while City Journal similarly called it “The Year of the Voucher.” By contrast, in California, the 2010 elections signaled new legislative assaults on charter schools, on open public school enrollment, and on parent empowerment.

It’s an amazing turnabout. As the Journal’s editors noted, no fewer than 13 states enacted school-choice legislation in just the first half of last year—creating new voucher programs in Indiana and expanding existing ones in Wisconsin, Florida, and Ohio; eliminating charter school caps in North Carolina and Tennessee; and authorizing new tuition tax credits in Louisiana and Florida. Manhattan Institute senior fellow Marcus Winters noted last autumn how in the previous decade, the expansion of school-voucher programs had “slowed considerably” because of defeats at the ballot box and in state courts. Now, however, “the push toward vouchers is coming from a new breed of reform-minded politicians from both parties. Once a taboo subject, vouchers are now talked about openly on the campaign trail, and politicians are hiring reformers to run high-profile school systems.” Democrats who see school choice as a civil-rights issue have adopted what was once exclusively a Republican concern.

Where’s the Golden State?

Where was California in all of this? With a high school dropout rate hovering around 30 percent and a majority of college-bound graduates requiring remediation in English and math, the Golden State would appear to be a prime candidate for serious reform. But with a calcified state Legislature, an impenetrable state education code, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a powerful state teachers’ union, and a governor who owes his 2010 election to union support, preservation of the status quo is almost a given.

California does have a fairly extensive system of public school choice, but meddlers in the Legislature continually imperil it. California boasts more than 900 charter schools—public schools allowed to operate outside the bounds of typical school district regulations and union contracts—and that’s more than any other state. While most studies have shown charters to be better than traditional public schools, some say there is no difference between them. At worst, charters do the same job as traditional public schools for less money. Only about 15 percent of California’s charter schools are unionized, which is why the California Teachers Association—the top political spender in the state—has made a priority of eviscerating the existing laws rather than expending time and resources trying to organize hundreds of independent schools. Gov. Jerry Brown, in an encouraging display of political fortitude, stood up to the CTA last autumn when he forced legislative leaders to withdraw a series of anti-charter bills and vetoed several other bills that would have undermined charters’ independence.

Homeschooling Survives

Homeschooling similarly survived an onslaught from the state education establishment. About 200,000 homeschoolers reside in California today, though in 2008 it appeared that the number would be reduced to zero. The Second District Court of Appeals ruled that all instructors of children must have a state teaching credential, thus disenfranchising practically every homeschooling parent. A higher appeals court reversed the ruling five months later, claiming that homeschools are, in effect, private schools where no teaching credential is needed. While homeschooling represents the ultimate in parental control, relatively few families can afford to have one parent stay at home and become a full-time teacher.

A novel approach to school choice in California is the Parent Empowerment Act, better known as the parent trigger. The law, passed in 2010 by a single vote in both legislative chambers, lets parents of students in failing schools file petitions to force changes in school governance. The beauty of the law, written by former Democratic state Sen. Gloria Romero, is that it bypasses the traditional bureaucratic and union entanglements. If at least half of parents at a qualifying school sign a petition, the local district must undertake one of several prescribed options, including shutting it down or converting it into a charter school. Needless to say, the law—a bête noire for the entrenched education special interests—was attacked and nearly derailed. But buses full of determined parents lobbied heavily last year before the state Board of Education in Sacramento, and the parent trigger survived. Parents have “pulled the trigger” only twice so far—most recently two weeks ago—so it’s difficult to assess its impact. Even if more parents exercise the petition option, the law limits the number of schools eligible to be triggered at 75 (even though 1,300 schools qualify as failing).

‘Opportunity Scholarships’

What California needs most and doesn’t have are vouchers, which most advocates now call “opportunity scholarships.” Under a voucher system, a portion of public money designated to educate a child would follow the student to a school of the parent’s choosing. It could be a traditional public school, a charter school, or a private school. Seventeen such programs exist across the country, and after two decades, we have a good idea of vouchers’ effectiveness. Greg Forster, a senior fellow with the Foundation for Educational Choice in Indiana, reviewed ten empirical studies of voucher programs. According to Forster, “nine find that vouchers improve student outcomes, six that all students benefit and three that some benefit and some are not affected. One study finds no visible impact. None of these studies finds a negative impact.”

Voucher opponents insist that such programs “siphon money away from public schools.” What they’re saying, in effect, is that private schools will perform better at the expense of public schools. True, public schools would lose some money under a universal voucher system, but there’s no evidence that this would make them any less effective. In a separate review, Forster discovered that “[19] empirical studies have examined how vouchers affect outcomes in public schools. Of these studies, 18 find that vouchers improved public schools and one finds no visible impact. No empirical studies find that vouchers harm public schools.” Even in the world of public education, competition works.

Initiatives

California has twice tried and failed to enact voucher legislation through the initiative process. Voters decisively rejected voucher measures in 1993, and again in 2000. The reasons for these lopsided losses are many. But with more states and the District of Columbia embracing opportunity scholarships, and greater public appreciation that the educational status quo is unacceptable, perhaps Californians would be more receptive to a voucher law now, even a limited one. Of course, should such an initiative make it to the ballot, the teachers’ unions would spend every penny and every ounce of human capital to keep vouchers from becoming a reality.

California would also benefit from a tax-credit scholarship program, which would allow individuals and corporations to receive a state tax credit for making donations to nonprofit organizations, which in turn would use the money to fund private school tuitions. Currently, 16 states offer some form of tax-credit scholarship program. But as with vouchers, tax credits could be a tough sell in a state where legislators are averse to any form of “privatization.”

If California is to afford its citizens a top-flight public education, as it once did, voters and policymakers must come to grips with the fact that education should be first and foremost about children. For far too long, the emphasis in public education in the state has been on the perks given to adults. As long as special interests remain in charge, California’s children won’t get the education that they deserve.

Larry Sand, a retired teacher, is president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network.

I’ve been fighting for at least 15 years the bad idea that smaller classrooms necessarily are better. California enacted class-size reductions in the mid-1990s. With budget problems, that “reform” now is being reviewed.

The class-size reductions were advanced by then-Gov. Pete Wilson, who likely would have used the supposed reform as a plank in his presidential bid had it not gone nowhere. And the teachers’ unions backed it because that meant more members for their group, more union dues to the unions and more union political clout. It’s part of the reason the teachers unions, especially the California Teachers Union, are so powerful today.

Wilson, a Republican, effectively empowered the major Democratic group with tax money.

As I pointed out at the time in numerous editorials in The Orange County Register, the problem is that there’s a limited pool of talented teachers. Would you rather be in a large class with a great teacher, or in a small class with a crummy teacher?

The dilemma is not academic. That’s just what happened to the child of some friends of mine the past academic year. The kid had a great teacher in a large class. Then the school split up the class. In their folly, the school thought the smart kids — like my friends’ kid — would better survive the class with the new, inexperienced teacher, who also just wasn’t as good as the old teacher.

It’s a monopoly government system, so objections by the family were politely listened to, then ignored.

Larry Sand

Our friend Larry Sand has a new article up on City Journal’s California section on class-size reduction. A retired teacher, he’s the president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network. He writes:

Everyone agrees that smaller classes are better, right?

In a word: no. Much of the rhetoric supporting small classes is demagogic and runs afoul of the research. Let’s begin with the oft-heard union claim that classes are getting larger. Not quite. A U.S. Department of Labor chart, courtesy of teacher-union watchdog Mike Antonucci, tells the tale. Since the mid-1950s, the number of public-education employees—including teachers—has risen steadily and inexorably nationwide. Brief hiring disruptions occur only during recessionary times, which result in a minor diminution in personnel. Immediately following the downturn, however, the hiring resumes with gusto. The result is that since the mid-1950s, the U.S. student population has increased by 60 percent, while the number of public education workers, including teachers, administrators, and other non-certificated staff, has exploded by 300 percent. (For every new member in California, the union pockets more than $600 a year in dues.) Antonucci has reported on this phenomenon for years. When the economy inevitably contracts, the bellyaching and the hand-wringing about laying educators off begin anew.

What’s more, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, teacher-pupil ratios across the nation have diminished steadily since 1955, when the ratio of public school teachers to students was 26.9 to one. By 1970, the ratio was 22.3 to one. And by 2007, the last year for which federal government statistics are available, the ratio came down to 15.5 to one. In California, going back to 1999, the student-teacher ratio across all elementary and secondary schools was 20.9 pupils. Today, it’s 21.3—a paltry 1.9 percent increase.

Does class size matter to education outcomes? According to Jay Greene, chairman of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, most of the evidence on which the “smaller-is-better” crowd relies comes from Tennessee’s STAR project, an experiment conducted in the 1980s, the methodology of which has been questioned by researchers. Other studies tell a different story. In a 1998 study, for example, Stanford’s Caroline Hoxby found that “reductions in class size from a base of 15 to 30 students have no effect on student achievement.” In 1998, Hoover Institution senior fellow and economist Eric Hanushek released the results of his impressive review of class-size studies. Examining 277 separate studies on the effect of teacher-pupil ratios and class-size averages on student achievement, he found that 15 percent of the studies found an improvement in achievement, while 72 percent found no effect at all—and 13 percent found that reducing class size had a negative effect on achievement. While Hanushek admits that in some cases, children might benefit from a small-class environment, there is no way “to describe a priori situations where reduced class size will be beneficial.”

For many, the possibility that reducing class sizes may have negative effects on student achievement might at first seem counterintuitive. But what happened to student test scores as classes got smaller between 1970 and 2007? Nothing, according to data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, widely regarded as the nation’s report card. The fact is, scores have stagnated for almost 40 years. Moreover, classes are larger in Korea and Japan—two countries that regularly clobber us in educational comparisons.

There’s more in the full article.

Of course, in California today, the facts are the last thing Gov. Brown, the Democratic Party and their union bosses care about.

Only the current economic crisis has brought about a rethinking of class sizes.

July 9, 2011

Here’s part of a new article in the City Journal by Larry Sand of the California Teacher Empowerment Network. Given California’s poor performance — 49th of 50 states on national tests — something has to be done.

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LARRY SAND

One Small Strike Against Teacher Seniority