Flashback – Teacher Pay

[The value of a teacher reflects how much we value education. I wrote about this in January 2013.]

Here is the problem. Teachers have one of the most important jobs in society, teaching our children.  They must have a college degree, but their pay and benefits are comparable to those who work in unionized manufacturing jobs. Professional football players and other entertainers provide a service that is totally unnecessary for our survival, yet they are paid ten to twenty times as much as teachers with top end athletes getting tens of millions of dollars. It challenges our sense of fairness. How could we let that happen?

Maybe the answer lies in behavior, specifically in the dimension of perspective.

If we decide to take our family to a college or professional football game, it could easily cost us around $500. That includes 4 tickets, parking, food and drinks and a souvenir or two. Of course this assumes that we can even get tickets for a single game, because in some places the demand is so high.  This is for a single game and doesn’t even address the idea of season tickets. On the other hand, if the city decided to raise our taxes by $500 per year to pay the teachers better, most people would join the mob storming city hall in protest. (This link shows a non-scientific poll of Massachusetts voters when the governor suggested raising income taxes to support schools and highways. They were very unhappy.) 

But our willingness to support our favorite team doesn’t stop there. We will set aside 3 or more hours each weekend to cheer them on. We buy their clothing, intently watch and critique the players, coaches and officials. Players who miss blocks or tackles, players who drop passes and coaches who don’t make it to a bowl game or a playoff game are fired with our approval. The stars have us hanging on their every word and buying the products they endorse. On the other hand, ask us to commit an hour per month or less to attend a PTA meeting or a teacher’s conference, and we react negatively or indifferently. It seems like an imposition.

Finally, teachers do not do one of the most important jobs in society alone. They are part of a team that provides that service. The team consists of teachers, parents and the students themselves. Asking teachers to do it alone is like asking the offense to win games without a defense. Do parents believe they are part of the educational team or are they too quick to let the teachers do the hard work and then side with their child against the teacher when problems arise? Should parents be held accountable for daily assignments and for student preparation, both in terms of learning and of their attitude toward learning? If there were more parental involvement, if children arrived at school expecting to learn rather than expecting to be entertained, would there be such a cry for smaller class sizes?

Perhaps teachers aren’t paid what they should be based on their contribution to society. Perhaps athletes and other entertainers are paid too much. We are the ones making those decisions by what we choose to support and what we choose to ignore. Again it’s about our behavior: our values, our choices, our perspective.

[Over the past 6 months or so, America has seen many statues torn down. One question might be: how will this affect the 14-year-old African-American student of today? Will a greater percentage be motivated to finish high school with the skills needed to get a good job or go on to college? Will they choose to prioritize education over being accused of “acting white” by their peers? Will their parents actively support the children and their teachers in those goals? Will they perhaps even become role models for all younger students. The answer will come in four years. This may be yet another area to positively channel that anger and frustration to achieve improvements in this tumultuous time.

The message, as it has been for the past 940 entries to all Americans, is how much success we can achieve on our own with strong behavior in the key dimensions.]

A/B Testing in Education

Back on April 20 of this year, I wrote a detailed explanation of experiments. Because we so often see in the press “breaking news” of the “latest study,” it’s important for critical thinkers to have a good understanding of what makes a study valid. Sample size and composition are important. Many press releases are based on less than 100 observations from a narrow population but reported as if they apply to everyone. 

Another major flaw is that when the scientists or doctors report a correlation, a strong relationship between a drug or practice and an outcome, the news reports it as if there is a cause/effect relationship, which is much less likely and harder to prove. That’s why the most common phrase at the conclusion of these studies is that more research is needed, but this may be an afterthought in a news report if it's mentioned at all.

I read lately about a slightly different type of experiment. It is a natural experiment and has become more common in this era of big data. Instead of inviting participants into a lab, dividing them into two groups, giving a treatment to one group and leaving the other alone and  then comparing results; a natural experiment sets up different groups in real life by feeding them different information and measuring the reaction.

Google, Facebook, major advertisers and others with access to a huge population of followers can vary their messages and compare results. They don’t need volunteers, users of the sites become unknowing subjects.

An ad to one group may have a blue background and the other a green background. Which gets the most clicks or likes or referrals or sales? An advertiser may use different pictures or wording in two different regions of the country. Which gets a better response? Someone calls the number and asks for Mary, not knowing that Mary is a code for a particular radio or TV ad in Chicago as opposed to a different one there or somewhere else. This practice is called A/B testing, and it’s happening constantly, especially on the major social media platforms. What are the best colors, pictures, format, headline wording, etc. to get clicks, shares, donations or return visits? 

It sounds like sophisticated manipulation with no apologies – psychological warfare and an invasion of privacy. But there may be several positive uses for it. I thought of this while watching the Jeopardy! Teachers Tournament last week.

According to Everybody Lies, a book about big data applications, a company called EDUSTAR that makes educational software for kids did a kind of A/B test that yielded surprising results. “One lesson plan that many educators were very excited about included software that utilized games” to teach fractions. They found out that a more standard approach, not using games, yielded better student understanding.

On Jeopardy! right after the first commercial break, the teachers sometimes respond to questions by describing their methods in the classroom, and each seems to takes a different approach. They have their little tricks and games, and they are doing what they are comfortable with or what has perhaps worked for them in the past. These ideas seem to get an enthusiastic reception, but who knows if they really work or which is better for producing better-educated kids – presumably the point of our schools.

They can’t all be right about getting the best outcome. This seems like a perfect setting for a similar kind of A/B testing by increasing the sample size from one to many classrooms distributed over many different schools. Maybe some techniques work better than others. It would be interesting to find out. Of course some teachers would be uncomfortable with this, but surely the objective of education is to make kids more competent, not to make teachers comfortable. Just a thought.

Some Odd Thoughts

As I write these little essays, I get the impression that I often have thoughts that are out of sync with the rest of the world. Perhaps I think too hard about things, but here are a few more random observations.

I picked up a small card advertising a kind of school system open house and presentation. In part it read, “Come hear about some of the new and exciting things happening at our schools.” This is probably a symptom of current advertising where everything has to be new and exciting or new and improved or innovative and sustainable. Buzzwords fill all advertising from shoes to cars to doctor’s offices.

But if I were a parent of a child attending one of these schools, I wouldn’t care two pins about new and exciting. I would want the school to teach my children how to read, write, add and subtract. These are basic skills that anyone needs in any profession or just to live a reasonably stress-free life. Instead, in another case I see a television news segment featuring kids in the early grades crawling around on the floor to get an appreciation of STEM subjects with “educators” gushing about how wonderful it is and how it “keeps them engaged.”

Shouldn’t it be the child’s responsibility to learn and the parent’s responsibility to ensure they do? It seems in too many cases teachers are entertainers, the students are the audience and the parents are automatic advocates for their children when they step out of line, setting up an unproductive dynamic.

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Some research shows that patients in nursing homes can be comforted by dogs and other pets, but can be equally comforted and cheered up by mechanical dog-like robots. What if airlines developed a policy that so-called support animals were no longer allowed on planes. Instead people could rent a teddy bear of other stuffed comfort animal at the departing airport and turn it in when they landed. (This would not apply to legitimate service animals.) That’s never going to happen. Society is headed in the opposite direction.

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CBS Sunday Morning ran a segment a few weeks ago about the $450 million makeover of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City. In it the museum director mentioned that they “will also increase the number of works by female artists – five times as many [as] before.” Wow, that’s really a good thing – or is it?

Apparently the art world today harbors some resentment that the art world of the past judged art, at least in part, on the basis of whether the artist was a man or a woman, giving preference not to the quality of the art but to the sex of the artist. The quality of the art (as subjective as that can be) should be the criterion for judging what gets displayed and what is rejected, not the appearance, the status, the reputation or the political connections of the artist. That would be the really good thing.

So why is MOMA making it a point to call attention to the number of female artists? Isn’t that the same kind of objectionable thinking that prevailed in the past dressed up in a different costume? They express their objection to past flaws in the system by doing the same thing in the opposite direction and call it progress.

Parental Responsibility and Education

Relative to the behavior model with its five dimensions, the problem is that so many other books and articles touch only on one of the dimensions or even a subset of a single dimension. They all come to the same conclusion in a more limited way. They agree that American society is handicapped by poor individual choices and faulty decisions; but only here, at Real American Solutions, is right behavior in all five key dimensions seen as the only way to get out of the hole that Americans keep digging for themselves and their country.

One example comes from John Rosemond, a columnist, public speaker, and author on parenting. “His weekly parenting column is syndicated in approximately 225 newspapers, and he has authored 15 books on the subject.” A common theme of many of his columns is the problem of parental responsibility.

Here is a recent example about eroding discipline in the schools. A “steady stream of missives from teachers, ex-teachers, and other folks who have insider knowledge of America's schools” tells him that “classroom discipline is falling apart” and no one seems to have the answer.

One factor adding to the problem is lack of support from school administrators. When a disruptive student is sent to the principal's office, they often return to class having “received a cookie or some other treat while they talked about their 'feelings.'” On top of that “almost every teacher says that when they call a parent about a child's behavior, the parent makes excuses or blames the teacher." As the problem gets worse, teachers demand smaller class size, increasing overall cost to taxpayers.

Compound those behaviors with teacher unions that have been given legal power to game the system, federal aid to education with strings attached and administrators too timid to back up teachers, and he predicts “that by 2030 nearly every public-school student will have a diagnosis of one sort or another.” This will be a strategy to increase the number of special needs children to maintain funding as responsible parents, many of them teachers themselves, continue to pull their kids from the public schools to send them to available alternatives. 

Ultimately, it all comes back to the parents. They are the ones who side with the child. They are the ones who put the fear of legal action on the administrators. They are the ones who take too little interest in their children’s education in general, passing it off to the teachers and after-school programs. Parental responsibility is at the heart of the problem; it's the answer everyone is looking for.

Simple Calculations

I’ve always liked numbers. That’s why I was so disappointed when I got into the first grade and found they were not teaching arithmetic. In my school in my time, arithmetic didn’t happen until the second grade. Today not knowing your numbers and being able to do a little adding and subtracting when you start kindergarten means you missed out on the preschool or Head Start program that would have properly prepared you.

In any case I learned some arithmetic in the second grade.  The third grade had two classes taught by Mrs. Ener and Mrs. Bugbee. You were lucky if you got into Bigbee’s class because she was the “easy one.” But I got Mrs. Ener, who required every student to pick a day to stay after school, stand next to her at her desk and give the answers to the 100 addition facts on a book as she pointed to each one. If you missed a single one or took too long, you were out.  Come back and try again.  It was considerable pressure for an eight-year-old.  Besides, you had to give up your free time, staying after school and waiting in line behind others, giving you plenty of time to psyche yourself out.  After you successfully ran that gauntlet three times earning three stars on the bulletin board, the same routine followed with subtraction, multiplication and division – perfectly three times each.

As nerve-racking as it was, perhaps everyone needs a Mrs. Ener somewhere along the academic path, because so many problems we run into in daily life come down to simple arithmetic. One example was when I handed a cashier $22.59 to pay a $7.59 bill.  She thought the $20 bill was a $5 bill and rang up $7.59 on the cash register, which told her not to give me any change.  A co-worker pointed out that I had given her a twenty and panic set in. How much change should I get?  How about 20 – 5 dollars?  (The matter was resolved after a couple of wrong guesses.)

Here is another I came across in a magazine ad for a wristwatch selling for only $29 plus shipping and handling. The copy read: “Precision timing that’s accurate to four seconds a day – that’s more precise than a 27-jewel automatic priced at over $6000.”  That sure sounds impressive – until you do the numbers.

Four seconds a day means 4x30 seconds per month (approximately) = 120 seconds or 2 minutes. So far the calculations are easy. Two minutes a month will not make you late for very many appointments, although it might make catching a train in Tokyo a little iffy. But 2 minutes a month times 12 months (another easy, do-it-in-your-head calculation) comes out to 24 minutes a year – almost half an hour! Is that precision?

When we change time twice a year (from EST to EDT and back) and I have to reset the clock in my car, I just push the button to adjust the hours. I don’t expect the minutes to be about 12 minutes off. I expect the minutes to be pretty darn close, and they are! Does that mean the clock in my car is enormously more accurate than a $6000 wristwatch?  Maybe so, but it’s what I expect.

Doing simple calculations is a small part of critical thinking. Do the advertisers think that most people will breeze right by without thinking, accept their assurance of world-class accuracy, and  send in their $29 plus S&H? Apparently so. This great deal is limited to the first 1900 that call with the special offer code – better hurry (and not think about it too much)!

The simple-calculations habit can save a lot more than $30 over the course of a lifetime!

What's a Parent To Do?

At first many people thought this was so unbelievable that it must be fake news, but I found it in the Chicago Tribune, and other reputable sources.  “Mayor Rahm Emanuel wants Chicago public high school students to show they have a plan for what's next before they can get a diploma.”  This adds a requirement for graduation, to become effective for the class of 2020 if approved by the school board.

His justification is to set expectations that the kids actually have a plan.  The article quoted Mayor Emanuel, "Just like you do with your children, college, post-high school, that is what's expected. If you change expectations, it's not hard for kids to adapt."  So apparently the city is taking over the job of the parents whose kids attend Chicago public schools (CPS).

If it is approved, Chicago will be the “first large urban school district to require students to develop a plan for their lives after high school.”  I guess there will be no more backpacking around Europe looking for your head that was popular among some in the generation of these kids’ grandparents.

But the idea of the city and the schools taking over parental responsibility is not new to Chicago.  An earlier article from the Tribune explains, “Starting this fall [2014], all Chicago Public Schools students will be able to get free breakfast and lunch at school.”  They had so much trouble with fraud in their reduced and free lunch programs that it became easier just to feed everyone.  For the past three years the parents need only provide one meal a day for their own children.

But it doesn’t stop there.  From the CPS website:  “Since 1998, Chicago Public Schools has required students to complete 40 service-learning hours in order to graduate.”  Since then parents don’t have to worry about instilling compassionate values or setting an example.  (In this case, the question always is whether required service makes people more generous.  We don’t celebrate those doing court-ordered community service as selfless volunteering.)

How are all these initiatives working out for the city?  From a report in September 2016 – “The latest five-year graduation rate is 73.5 percent, CPS said. The rate has been rising steadily over the past five years, according to district figures, and in 2014-15 was 69.9 percent.”  Note that even with an extra year to graduate more than one-quarter fail to do so.  Compare that to the national high school graduation rate in four years of 83.2 percent.

So it’s not fake news, just sad news.  And they are working on the wrong things.  In their book The Why Axis, authors Gneezy and List, who were working at the University of Chicago, report on various studies of motivation and incentives.  One was to try different incentive programs with students, parents and teachers in Chicago Heights public schools.  (It is not a pure comparison.  They wanted to study the CPS, but the teachers' union would not approve.)  They found that when the incentives were properly designed, minority students in this system performed just as well as their suburban counterparts in "rich, white neighborhoods."

Maybe with all that extra time on their hands the parents should take the school system to task, demand more and better education with less city and school board interference in their responsibilities.  Of course, giving up responsibilities to someone else is the easy way out – until we discover that it also means giving up control or freedom to choose.

A Few Ideas to Challenge Your Thinking

Last time I talked about how people today tend to live in their own “silos” or “echo chambers” with their own friends who stay friends by sharing the same thoughts and opinions.  When their beliefs are challenged, they turn inward looking for reasons to reject or ignore the new information or turn to their friends and like-minded news sources to relieve the tension.  The technical word for this psychological protection is confirmation bias.

Here are a few subjects to challenge widely held beliefs.  Test your reaction.

According to prevailing opinion, acupuncture is ancient and alternative, and therefore good.  News from Great Britain reminds us that acupuncture, like any treatment, should be able to prove its worth in well-designed clinical trials and everyday experience.  Medicine should never be judged on reputation alone or by individual testimonials.   The Guardian news tells us:  Acupuncture is no longer recommended by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence as a treatment for low back pain.  “The u-turn comes after a review of scientific evidence found that the practice was no better than a placebo in treating those living with low back pain and sciatica.”  After reviewing a large number of scientific trials for effectiveness, “there was still not compelling and consistent evidence of a treatment-specific effect for acupuncture.”  The National Health Service, the single payer healthcare in Britain, doesn’t want to pay for something that doesn’t work.

The Drug Abuse Resistance Education program (DARE) is used in nearly 80% of the school districts in the United States and in many other countries to discourage the use of alcohol and other drugs.  It’s important to know how effective it is.  The program is very popular and appealing.  It’s common to see it advertised on bumper stickers and promoted by schools and the media, but does it really work or is it a waste of time and money?  The news from alcoholfacts.org contradicts the conventional wisdom.  “Scientific evaluation studies have consistently shown that DARE is ineffective in reducing the use of alcohol and drugs and is sometimes even counterproductive -- worse than doing nothing. That's the conclusion of the U.S. General Accounting Office, 1 the U.S. Surgeon General, 2 the National Academy of Sciences, 3 and the U.S. Department of Education, 4 among many others. 5”  [Note:  I left their links in the quote for anyone who wants to delve deeper into specific sources.]

Locally grown is the new by-word for produce, despite problems Chipotle had last summer in a number of their locations.  We now have fresh vegetables in the grocery store year round, but that doesn’t seem to be good enough.  Some people are pushing for more locally grown produce claiming it’s fresher and better for you.  Fresher food generally tastes better and delivers more nutrients – that’s why I have a vegetable garden in the backyard every summer – but there is one fly in the ointment.  The assumption that the local food system is as efficient and better controlled than modern farming is wrong, as freakonmics.com reports.  “Today’s high crop yields and low costs reflect gains from specialization and trade, as well as scale and scope economies that would be forsaken under the food system that locavores endorse.”  Local food is harvested with less efficient methods and delivered in smaller volume leading to higher price – good for the middle class foodie who endorses the practice but another hurdle for the poor.  Those who believe commercial farming is wasteful and polluting, have never seen farm equipment guided by computer and GPS to deliver a shot of fertilizer in the precise quantity to the exact spot at the time required.  It’s fine to support the farmer’s market, but those who endorse moving as much of the system as possible to a local paradigm are trying to turn a personal preference into a requirement that would be a burden on others who are either not so interested or not so well off.

As mentioned last time, sometimes doing the right thing flies in the face of doing what feels like the right thing.  It takes courage to change your own mind and additional courage to challenge the fanatics who refuse to consider new arguments or facts.

Is College Worth the Cost?

Here is something worth thinking about.  Young people spend five or six years getting a college education, some with the belief that it will help them do better financially in life.  Let’s look at a few numbers dealing with averages to show how this assumption can go wrong.

First we must address opportunity costs.  While attending college a student typically is not working, except possibly part time to contribute to current expenses.  Time spent at college is time lost to earning (and experience and possibly seniority).  We need an estimate of how much time that is.  A Time Magazine article from 2013 tells us:  “According to the Department of Education, fewer than 40% of students who enter college each year graduate within four years, while almost 60% of students graduate in six years.”  For a rough average, five years seems reasonable.

Next look at the relative average pay for a college graduate and a high school graduate.  The National Center for Education Statistics helps out there:  “in 2013 median earnings for young adults with a bachelor's degree were $48,500, compared with …$30,000 for those with a high school credential."  (Note: The Start Class website lists 22 colleges where the median salary of their graduates is less than what a high school graduate earns, but we’ll stick with the averages.)

The salary difference is substantial, but don’t forget the opportunity costs.  Right off the graduation stage with diploma in hand the college graduate is already 5 years of salary (@$30,000 per year = $150,000) and five years real work experience behind.  The average graduate is also almost $30,000 in debt.

Assuming out any interest on loans and the effects of inflation (to keep it simple), the graduate needs to make up about $180,000 just to get even.  With an advantage of $18,500 in salary (before taxes) it will take nearly 10 years to close the gap.

This is for the average.  Some will do better and some worse.  It takes a few more assumptions and a few simple calculations to get down to the individual case.  Additionally, college is not for everyone and some people with only a high school education can do much better than average.  The big watch out, however, is that competition for unskilled or semi-skilled jobs is fierce – not just here, but in places like Mexico and Asia where a $20 hourly wage job can be done by a replacement earning $4 or less per hour.

It is important for every high school student to consider these issues carefully and calculate the likely long-term outcome using realistic personal assumptions.  I heard of one young man who chose a private college at $40,000 per year over a public college at about $12,000 per year because the private college was smaller and he had a better chance to make an athletic team (no scholarship involved).  The five-year difference will be almost enough to buy a modest house in the part of the country where he lives – and his goal is to be a high school math teacher!  Even if he gets that teaching job, chances are he will work an additional 6 to 10 years just to make up the difference financially of this one decision.

Silicon Valley Diversity II

In previous posts I have mentioned what I call “trigger words.”  These are words that fire off an automatic judgment in our brains as either good or bad.  We have been conditioned to react to these words.  Words like natural, green, organic and sustainable automatically draw a favorable review.  Words and expressions like chemicals, carbon, big business and radiation automatically make us scared or less trusting.  Although everyone learned in school that the entire universe is made of atoms and compounds, also called chemicals, and it’s common sense that nicotine and snake venom are all natural; many people still have the predictable gut reaction to these words.  Advertisers and advocates use these automatic responses to draw us on board, hoping that a trigger word will get us to act before we spend too much time thinking.

Another trigger word is diversity.  When it is thrown into conversations and arguments, it carries an automatically favorable connotation.  Another assumption about it is that you can tell by looking at a group of people whether or not it is a diverse group.  Diversity, we are told, leads to more creativity and better solutions in all cases, sometimes even when the pursuit of diversity supersedes the pursuit of competence.  If these are facts rather than beliefs, I would like to see the data on those studies.

Mohamed El-Erian in his book The Only Game In Town devotes several chapters to the advantages of diversity for companies and governments to meet financial challenges in the near future citing several experts on the subject.  Even after his high praise for the power of diversity he warns:  “This is not to say diversity should be pursued at the expense of competence…it is about getting the right mix.”  But there may be another issue.

A couple of summers ago the big crisis of the month was the lack of diversity in Silicon Valley.  There were too many white men and not enough men and women of color, or women in general.  My conclusion was that to reject anyone because of some prejudice against his or her physical appearance, whether conscious or unconscious, is wrong.  Likewise to favor anyone for the same reason is to risk producing a substandard product.  I would rather that the applications on my computer not crash than to feel an inner glow knowing the programmer was hired based on his or her ability to represent some victim class and thereby help even up the score.

With all the fuss at the time, there was no mention that all Americans might soon become underrepresented.  Look at the tables below.  The first shows the proportion of graduate students in several graduate STEM majors in US universities. The second shows the number of US colleges with a majority of international students and their overall proportions in graduate electrical engineering and computer science programs.  These numbers do not reflect well on America’s continued leadership in this area, nor do they proudly represent how well our school system is doing.

Perhaps if the country spent more time educating students and preparing them for difficult courses, and less time worrying about things like diversity, problems would sort themselves out.  We’d have qualified and interested men and women, blacks and whites, and everyone else.