Commentary and Criticism about the National Education Association
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“I remain committed to a true millionaire’s tax and to closing corporate tax loopholes …”
New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, 2018 “Billionaire David Tepper has moved from New Jersey to Florida, and the loss of his income tax could leave a $140 million hole.” NY Post, 2016 “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana, 1905 INTRODUCTION – Pension Postscript Consider this blog entry a “postscript” to our recent pension analysis entitled: Teacher’s Unions vs. “Tax Donkeys” In case you didn’t read that post, here is a definition that you need to keep in mind as you read today’s commentary: “Tax Donkeys” are taxpayers who, although forced to bear the costs of government programs, can also opt out by picking up stakes and moving to lower tax states. TAX THE RICH? – It sure sounds reasonable … If you have been paying any kind of attention to national politics, you know that many states are in bad shape fiscally speaking. Well the governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, thinks he has the answer. He proposes to fix the problem … “… in large part by raising taxes on millionaires, corporations, and hedge fund managers.” Make the rich pay their fair share – sounds reasonable, right? Sort of … until you realize that Murphy may be a bit “history-challenged.” It turns out that two years ago a certain wealthy hedge fund manager, David Tepper, decided to move out of high tax New Jersey and into low tax Florida. “One Top Taxpayer Moved, and New Jersey Shuddered” While no one knows exactly why he moved, you have to consider the tax aspect of the situation. According to Fortune Magazine, his income in 2015 was $1,200,000,000. Assuming that he paid the top tax rate in NJ of 8.97%, his contribution to the state would have been approximately $107,640,000. Of course he probably had deductions, etc. so the actual tax figure would have been lower. But even if you assume it is one-half of that total – $54,000,000 – that is a lot of money by any standard. So you can understand why that particular “Tax Donkey” would want to make the move to Florida where there is no state tax and no estate tax. TAX THE RICH? – But what about human nature? So Phil Murphy wants to tax the rich some more? Does he expect them to just bend over and accept it? Maybe he needs to pick up a copy of Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action to understand how individuals act in the real world. Here are Mises’ own words from the forward to that book: "the outcomes of countless conscious, purposive actions, choices, and preferences of individuals, each of whom was trying as best as he or she could under the circumstances to attain various wants and ends and to avoid undesired consequences." TAX THE RICH? – Once they go, they don’t come back … Were the politicians in New Jersey concerned at all when Tepper moved out of state back in 2016? Consider this comment from Frank Haines, a budget officer with the Office of Legislative Services: “If a very wealthy individual — potentially a significant taxpayer to the state — relocates and relocates not only as we've been reading about it but really relocates for tax purposes ... beyond our reach, then that's something to be aware of.” "Something to be aware of?" How’s that for an understatement. But will Murphy’s tax increases end up with more “Phil Teppers” moving out? Mark Twain is alleged to have said: “History doesn’t repeat itself – at best it sometimes rhymes.” So maybe the “Tax Donkeys’ will move out or maybe they will find another similar way to avoid having to fork over their hard-earned money to the state. Either way, is it worth the chance? After all, once they go, they don’t tend to come back. Already since the end of the Great Recession “… more than 3.5 million Americans have left high-tax blue states like California, New York, and many others in the Northeast, for low-tax red states like Arizona, Florida, and Texas. As it now stands, pension funds in so many states are way underfunded. It seems to us that teachers kind of need those “Tax Donkeys” to stay put …
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"How would you feel about having the same job, responsibilities, expertise and experience as the person next to you, but working for free several weeks out of the year? That’s essentially what the pay disparity between women and men amounts to.” NEA President Lily Eskelsen Garcia, April 2018 “Prior to the passage of the collective bargaining law for public employees in New Jersey, men were often paid more than women for the same work in our schools. The collective bargaining process leveled the playing field for women in public education.” NJEA Vice President Sean Spiller, April 2018 The National Education Association supports collective bargaining - no surprise there. One of the things it has accomplished is a narrowing of the gender pay gap to, essentially, zero. If you are not familiar with teacher contracts, they are set up as a series of steps. You are paid based on the number of years you have been working in the district. Take a look below at Miami-Dade County Public Schools Contract for 2017-18. As you can see, every teacher that has worked 10-11 years (male or female) gets paid the exact same amount - $44,075. So that’s a good thing right?
There is no gender gap in public schools – they have “leveled the playing field for women.” Let me introduce you to the Law of Unintended Consequences … Clearly, collective bargaining had the intended consequence of making teacher pay fair. But what about the unintended consequence of this process? It ensured that bad teachers got paid the same as good teachers. Consider this. Let’s pretend that you have been teaching for 10 years. You do such a great job that you are awarded Teacher of the Year status in your district. Guess what collective bargaining gets you? The exact same salary as that teacher who shows up one minute before school starts, uses 15-year-old lessons (when he isn’t showing movies), doesn’t volunteer to do anything outside of his contractual obligations, calls out sick whenever he wants and leaves promptly at 3:00 every single day. You can thank the NEA for that. “A central goal of education is teaching critical-thinking skills. Inquiry-based teaching is an excellent path to this goal… the method focuses on student discovery over pushing information from the instructor.” Erik Kyle, The Phases of Inquiry-Based Teaching “Most people are overwhelmed by the sheer mass of educational fads… virtually all educational trends with any substance are transformed into fads by a flawed or superficial understanding of the basic idea behind the trend … which is unfortunately typically the case in schooling today.” Linda Elder and Richard Paul, Educational Fads INNOVATIVE OR JUST ANOTHER FAD Design Thinking, Project Based Learning, 21st century skills … These are the names of some current educational fads being implemented in schools across the nation. A quote from Pinterest argues for their effectiveness by combining them all in the same sentence: “Design thinking and PBL [Project Based Learning] can bridge what we know and how we innovate. Try combining these two practices as an instructional framework for teaching 21st-century skills.” “Is that statement, with its impressive use of fancy terms that I have never heard before, really true,” wonders the non-educationally-initiated layperson? Maybe. But it also might just be an example of the roll-out of the latest popular approaches to student learning – what I have termed educational “fads.” It seems that every 20 years or so, professionals in the field of education come up with new and “innovative” ways to teach that they swear will improve the learning of students – only to drop them after a few years of trial. For a long list of the educational fads from the past 30 years, check out this list at the Pennington Publishing Blog. Another great list can be found at: The Foundation for Critical Thinking PICK A FAD, ANY FAD: From “Design Thinking” to “Inquiry Learning” Well, last week, the NEA published an article by Mary Ellen Flannery about a new and innovative approach to learning called Design Thinking. I have been looking for an excuse to write about this topic for a while, and now Flannery has provided the opportunity. Let me make clear at the outset that I will not be writing specifically about Design Thinking. Instead, I will be focusing on another related instructional fad called Project Based Inquiry "Learning" (sometimes shortened to just Inquiry "Learning"). They are related. One of the individuals quoted in Flannery’s article, Dan Ryder, acknowledges the relationship when he says of Design Thinking: “It’s more than a new approach or five-step process to problem solving, and more than a 2.0-version of project-based learning.” Others have also noted the connection between the two educational fads. For example, Tom Barrett makes the following comment in an article called Applying Design Thinking in 4 Different Ways in Schools: “However in the school environment the process and principles of design thinking can be applied to a number of different relevant domains [like the] Inquiry Learning Process.” PROJECT BASED INQUIRY SCIENCE (PBIS) I chose to focus on Inquiry “Learning” because my school district is considering the adoption of a science program called Project Based Inquiry Science (PBIS) for its middle school students. To prove my point that Inquiry “Learning” is not appropriate at this grade level, I picked out one particular unit to evaluate - Air Quality. The opening activity for this unit asks the students to pretend they are real scientists working in the field. They are then given ten pictures, each of which shows “an example of a human activity or product that affects air quality.” The goal of this activity is twofold:
So what is the big deal? Well if this activity is just being used as a way to elicit the student’s prior knowledge about the topic of air quality, it is probably OK. There is nothing wrong with getting the students thinking about a topic before you actually teach it. But to tell the kids that this is the way that scientists operate in the real world is completely wrong. THE PROBLEM WITH INQUIRY “LEARNING” – Its backwards. Professional scientists approach things that they encounter in the world with a base of knowledge learned over the course of their long education. Middle school students using PBIS, on the other hand, are being asked to evaluate the world based on their partial (mostly erroneous) “knowledge” and opinion only – they simply do not have any real base knowledge at such a young age. For this reason, asking middle school students to look at pictures and evaluate them as a scientist would is ludicrous. With no real background in the subject, they are not going to be evaluating as a scientist would, they are just going to be guessing. In essence, Inquiry “Learning” reverses the process of learning. The better way to teach students is to introduce the science knowledge first and then have the students use this knowledge to evaluate what they are experiencing. With science knowledge the students can even design experiments based on this knowledge to further their understanding. MY TEST OF INQUIRY “LEARNING”- Spoiler Alert: The kids failed. I showed my 8th grade students the following picture and then asked them to tell me how it might relate to global climate change. I specified that they could only comment on what they actually saw in the picture (for example, no imagining that a gas-powered tractor plowed the fields). Not one student gave a response even close to what would be obvious to any scientist who had basic knowledge about biology and plant processes.
From the Department of Environmental Conservation of New York: “[Through photosynthesis], plants have helped keep CO2 levels from rising excessively because they keep using it to feed themselves. The carbon cycle has a number of self-regulating mechanisms that can compensate for small temporary increases in atmospheric CO2.” My point, yet again, is that students need base knowledge in order to evaluate what they see and experience. To expect them to evaluate something before attaining that base knowledge it to reverse the proper learning process. THE CULPRIT - CONSTRUCTIVISM The inquiry approach to learning is based on an educational paradigm called constructivism. “Constructivism is basically a theory … about how people learn. It says that people construct their own understanding and knowledge of the world, through experiencing things and reflecting on those experiences. When we encounter something new, we have to reconcile it with our previous ideas and experience, maybe changing what we believe, or maybe discarding the new information as irrelevant. In any case, we are active creators of our own knowledge.” I have no doubt that we accumulate knowledge in the real world through this constructivist process. But when a middle school student is learning a specific subject like environmental science that he has no background in (no base knowledge), there is no way to “reconcile it with our previous ideas and experience.” Why? Because he doesn’t have any “previous ideas and experience” regarding the subject matter. He needs to learn something before he can “reconcile it.” CONCLUSION – Not for Middle School When I delved a little deeper into this idea of Design Thinking, I uncovered a guide which explained how to implement it in the classroom. An Introduction to Design Thinking PROCESS GUIDE One of the lines in the guide caught my attention, because it encapsulated the reason why Inquiry “Learning” is not real learning. “Framing the right problem is the only way to create the right solution.” Well of course. In order to create a solution, you need to first frame the problem – that makes perfect sense. But if you don’t have any base or background knowledge of a particular issue, how can you possible identify or frame anything at all? You can’t. This is why middle school students need to learn before they evaluate – the opposite approach of Inquiry “Learning.” Design Thinking and Project Based Inquiry "Learning" do have a place in education – but not in elementary or middle school. Children at these lower grade levels simply do not have a sufficient knowledge base upon which to ask the right questions, let alone actually evaluate what they experience. Traditional instruction is more appropriate here. “We [teachers] work second jobs because our salaries alone are not sufficient to pay our bills, let alone save for the future,” Teacher Krista Degerness Ken Caryl Middle School in Littleton, Colo. “The CPI no longer measures the true increase required to maintain a constant standard of living. This is the main reason that more people are falling behind financially …” The Chapwood Index CONSUMER PRICE INDEX (CPI) – A useless statistic? Back in January we wrote a post about the inability of teachers to make ends meet. It was an analysis of Robert Rosales’ story at NEA Today called Moonlighting: “Nationwide, many public school teachers … work nights and weekends to supplement the income they receive from teaching … They are simply trying to keep their financial boats afloat.” An economist quoted by the NEA (Sylvia Allegretto) offered the following explanation for the pay gap: “… weakening of teachers’ unions, pervasive anti-government sentiment, defunding of public education and the spread of charter and private schools …” We offered another possibility – inflation. Some readers disagreed with our conclusion, pointing out that this couldn’t be the issue. After all, if you look at government statistics, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) has been pretty tame for years: But is inflation really as low as the CPI suggests? Here are two reasons why it is suspect:
THE CHAPWOOD INDEX – A more realistic measure of inflation A better measure of inflation is available in the Chapwood Index. “The Chapwood Index reflects the true cost-of-living increase in America. Updated and released twice a year, it reports the unadjusted actual cost and price fluctuation of the top 500 items on which Americans spend their after-tax dollars in the 50 largest cities in the nation.” As you can see from the chart, inflation is much higher than the government is telling you. Click on the website link to see all 50 cities that are tracked. CONCLUSION – The real culprit is the government So maybe it is time that the NEA and other teacher’s unions recognize the real reason why their pay just doesn’t seem to keep up with the times. Maybe it’s time to stop blaming: “… weakening of teachers’ unions, pervasive anti-government sentiment, defunding of public education and the spread of charter and private schools …” The real reason for the sad state of teacher salaries can be found by looking at the Chapwood Index which … “… exposes why middle-class Americans — salaried workers who are given routine pay hikes and retirees who depend on annual increases in their corporate pension and Social Security payments — can’t maintain their standard of living.” And one last point about prices. They don’t just increase because of supply and demand or because “greedy corporations” decide they want to fleece their customers to maximize profits. That may be what you are taught in the public schools but the truth is more complicated than that. The Federal Reserve, through its monetary polices, creates inflation by printing dollars. The more you make of something, the less each unit is worth. Below are two charts which highlight this fact. The first shows the increase in the supply of money since 1920. Compare this with the second chart below which shows the decline in the purchasing power of the dollar. The charts speak for themselves, but just in case you need a translator, here is what they are saying:
As money supply has increased, the purchasing power of your dollars have declined. Liberals and progressives always want to turn to the government to help them right the supposed wrongs of society. Well, in this case, the government, itself, seems to be the problem. Sorry NEA President Garcia, not all in the “church of educators” say “Amen” to free college tuition.4/23/2018 “Higher education in America should be a right for all, not a privilege for a few.” Senator Bernie Sanders LILY GETS SILLY In her latest blog post, NEA President Lily Eskelsen Garcia wants us all to celebrate “Community College Month” by “ensuring college is a right – not a privilege.” In other words, she wants it to be free. Her response to Senator Bernie Sanders’ “College for All Act?” “… let the church of educators say ‘Amen.’” Just four months after our last article, do I have to give Garcia another lesson in what the word “free” really means? The NEA Says Education is Free: Joseph Goebbels would be so proud The obvious fact of life is that there is no such thing as free anything. “Free” college tuition for you just means that someone else is paying for it. It is either being covered by:
However, we do agree with her one statement: “… because all of our students, regardless of how much their families earn, deserve the opportunity for a great education.” But there is a big difference between the opportunity for an education and a free education. PERSONAL VIEWPOINT My daughter is in college. After all of our bills are paid, two teacher salaries (my wife and I are both in the profession) don’t even come close to being able to pay her tuition. Her choices:
At no point did we expect that someone else was obligated to pay for her education. So you want to talk free college education? What’s next? How about a free car in order to get to class at college? Free gas for that car? Naturally - how else do you expect that car to be able to move? And then there are free oil changes, tire rotation, brakes … And I almost forgot, you will probably need a free computer so that you can do all of that work at school. Where does it end, full-blown socialism? Which brings to mind the old proverb: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” |
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October 2018
AuthorJonathan Smith - A New Jersey Public School Teacher who disagrees with the National Education Association. |