Manners maketh man - so let's teach them

"Manners maketh man" was one of William Horman's proverbs lovingly set out in his Vulgaria all the way back in the 16th century. It is still the motto of Winchester College and New College, Oxford and we should perhaps pay it a little more attention.

I recall one (middle class) parent, when pulled up on her childrens' poor behaviour at the table, exclaiming, "oh, table manners, they're so middle class". As if this did her children any favours. There's a reason why we think manners are important, why we frown on eating with mouths open, speaking while eating and the correct use of the cutlery provided. And there's a reason why we insist on children saying please and thank you, not interrupting and showing respect to older people.

That reason is that politeness and good manners make for better people - easier to live or work with, more pleasant to deal with and more likely to get on. Good manners, politeness and charm go a long way just on their own and, as that old teacher William Horman knew, they allow for brains, skills and creativity to shine through. Without manners all we see is coarseness, unpleasantness and rudeness. It's not that manners are everything but that they are an essential component of the successful person.

Manners and politeness aren't innate, they have to be taught. Left to their own devices children won't say please and thank you, won't show respect to others and won't become pleasant, charming adults. We seem, in our frantic age, to have forgotten all this and to have arrived at a point where aggression, bullying, vulgarity, cursing and rudeness are celebrated while politeness, charm, respect for others and good manners are become weaknesses.

I was at a posh dinner and, in a conversation with the gentleman besides me, the subject of a TV interview with former spin doctor, Alistair Campbell came up. My neighbour was blown away by Campbell's behaviour - he was being interviewed along with a woman (and remember Campbell is a very big man). "While she was talking," gushed my neighbour, "he folded his arms and leaned in dominating her, it was brilliant". It struck me at the time that, far from being brilliant, Campbell was just being an ill-mannered, rude bully. The argument wasn't won by the brilliance of Alistair's argument but by his intimidation of the other, far smaller, person.

Everywhere you look, people are celebrating this sort of behaviour - the sort of people who use violent metaphor in political debate have always been with us but it has never been normalised in the way it is today. And when the leaders in school begin to act, to once again teach children politeness, good manners and respect, the response from those celebrants on modern coarseness is shocking:

Top of the things that make me despair this week (there are many options) is the decision by Ninestiles secondary school in Birmingham to enforce silence on “all student movement, including to and from assembly, at lesson changeover and towards communal areas at break and lunch”. It is difficult to think of a more harmful and mean-spirited policy than taking away children’s means of communication for a significant part of the day.

To watch the opprobrium poured onto Katherine Birbalsingh for her advocacy of teaching working class young people manners, good behaviour and politeness is to see that "manners are so middle class" made flesh. Today, Ms Birbalsingh's Michaela School is routinely described as 'Britain's strictest school' because it insists on a set of standards in children's behaviour, enforces those standards and expects parents to back the school in this work. Hardly a day passes without some comment about behaviour in schools, how it stresses teachers, disrupts learning and contributes to mental ill-health. Yet when a school does something about this, the same folk pile in using words like "prison", "institutionalising" and "controlling".

I appreciate I've little room to talk but it really is time we called out ill-mannered behaviour and gratuitous rudeness. For sure, you can invoke free speech (and have my backing) but it's perfectly possible to support free speech and, at the same time, believe that good manners and politeness are preferable to vulgar insult or crude metaphor. Right now our political discourse is become corrupted by its language - the two extremes, having adopted an absolute position, do not seek to debate but rather to adopt that Alistair Campbell behaviour of aggressive domination, rudeness, ill-manners and wind up all spiced, if you're on Twitter, with gross language.

It is, for example, right that we call out the use of children by parents as vehicles for their political prejudice. This is a ghastly exploitative practice and grown ups should know better but calling the grown up using his child this way a 'cretin' isn't right or justified however angry we might be about the action. And using the "he said, she said" argument to defend this sort of language doesn't wash either - "we are better than that" is a far better argument.

I wish every success to people like Tom Bennett and Katherine Birbalsingh as well as Alex Hughes and Andrea Stephens, the joint heads at Ninestiles School in Birmingham. Civilisation is built on an assumption of good behaviour, politeness and respect, without these values it's hard to do all the other collaborative, co-operative and creative things that make for a great, successful society. Manners really do maketh man and for this to happen we need to teach those manners because they don't happen without that teaching.

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Short lifetime careers (or why teaching should learn from football)

There are a selection of careers that have a shorter lifetime than those the rest of us pursue. And these careers are often the sexy ones we aspired to do when - as I did - you attend, at age eleven, the 'come dressed as what you want to do when you're grown up' party. Firemen, police officers, soldiers, sportsmen and women, models. And, of course, dancers:

Dancers are notoriously bad at planning for their second acts. They underestimate the age at which they'll retire (the average age of retirement is 34), overestimate the amount of money they'll earn, and misjudge the forces that will end their careers. More than one-third of the dancers in a 2004 survey were driven to retirement by an injury; only 5 percent left because they actually wanted a new career. When dancers enter the workforce in their thirties, many are woefully unprepared. Only 3 percent of current dancers say that teaching dance is their preferred post-retirement line of work, but it's the most common fate: 53 percent end up teaching dance in some capacity.

You could write this script for footballers - we look at the mega-star millionaires of the sport and assume that this goes for all the footballers. But only the most talented reach this height, most footballers - like most dancers - ply their trade in the lower leagues. And while the top Premier League stars earn £1,7m per year on average in lower leagues this plummets to between £40,000 and £70,000. These are good wages on the face of it but not if you reckon that most footballers' careers only last 20 years at most. And like the dancers, these retired footballers all end up earning a (not always very good) living from hanging about the game they played - coaching, physio, commentary.

The problem is that, for all the money in elite sport and arts, there really aren't enough jobs out there to maintain the income levels and living standards that retired and redundant dancers and players got used to. Yet we look at the money involved and howl with horror even though, compared to our economy, the money in football, opera or ballet is a drop in the ocean especially given the pleasure sport and art gives to us all.

This problem - in a related but different manner - also applies to careers such as teaching and social work:

In other words, after ten years or so, one cannot remain in the classroom, one must go either upwards, into management or else sideways into a specialist area … or out. The days of Mr. Chips were long gone. One must be perma-vibrant, relevant and up with the latest fad. Especially with Ofsted bureaucrats breathing down one’s neck.

Much of the reason for this is the idea of career progression and that being a classroom teacher in limiting - at least in financial terms. Even with 'career grade' systems in these professions there remains the pressure on the most experienced teachers to spend less time in the classroom and more time doing other important but non-teaching functions. Same goes for social workers meaning that the most capable and experienced end up trapped in an office managing other social workers. In our system - one that presumes the boss is paid more than the people she manages - the teacher or social worker (perhaps also the salesman and engineer too) ends up as a manager, a consultant or advisor rather than spending time doing the thing that person is trained to do.

And this sort of brings us back to football. In football - probably because it is driven by the needs of the tournament - the people paid the most are the ones delivering the product. That £1.7million wage for the average premier league player reflects two things - the transient nature of his career (every time he steps onto the field he knows it could end) and the essence of the game as a contest between teams of the best. And the best are a rare thing.

In this place no-one suggests to the 27 year-old midfield superstar that his only hope of getting more money is to become a coach or a manager. Yet that is precisely the measure we apply to teachers and social workers even while paying lip service to the idea of a career spent in front of a class or in the field. Perhaps we need to change the way in which we pay these vital public servants, to end the tyranny of the spinal column pay scale, national negotiations and a world where school administrators earn more than the best classroom teachers.

Most short term careers have worked pretty hard at making sure there's a life after playing - for public sector ones like policing, fire and soldiering there's a pension and extensive investment in retraining and support. This doesn't stop many of those leaving these uniformed, regimented roles finding civilian life tricky but it shows someone's thinking about the issue even if perhaps not hard enough. In sports like football there's a lot of financial advice and support but just as we saw with the dancers, too many ex-players end up like so many Ghosts of Football Past earning a not especially good income from clutching onto past glories.

But the brightest sportsmen do end up in coaching and management but this is done in a situation where they can't do what got them there - play 90 minutes of high-intensity football. For the other careers we've touched on such as teaching there's really no excuse - we should be begging the best to stay in front of a class.


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Quote of the day - on teachers who blog and tweet

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A quite superb little article from Andrew Old contains this gem of a paragraph:

But, of course, there are many reasons why teachers on social media might be worth listening to. Teachers work in actual schools, not theoretical ones. Some educationalists have not tried to teach a child in decades (sometimes never) and their ideas about how it should be done are pure fantasy. Teachers don’t have to follow an ideological line. Educationalists, by contrast, have a habit of signing up to doctrinal statements like this one. Teachers on social media are often actually trying to communicate a clear message. Educationalists are often just trying to prove how clever they are, even if it means saying things that are not understood. But most of all, teachers on social media have little reason to lie about educational issues. They are speaking to other teachers about things both they, and their audiences, encounter. By contrast, educationalists don’t even unanimously agree that telling the truth is a good thing even in principle. And don’t get me started on educationalists who claim to speak for teachers, claim that criticism of them is criticism of teachers, or who insist that they should have a place in a professional body for teachers.

The whole article is a brilliant challenge to the arrogance of academia. As such, it is a delight and relevant way beyond the field of education.

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Knowledge gives power (and don't ever forget it) - a comment on criticism of Michaela Community College

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Michaela Community School is one of those free schools so detested by those who prefer the conformity and straightjacket of a rigidly defined, state education system. Not for such left-wing folk is the idea that variety, difference and new ways of working are urgently needed if we are to transform our education system for the better. So the critics circle and seize on the tiniest levers to have a go at the school.

So it is with a blogger rather grandiosely called "Edsacredprofane" (his name is Peter Ford, or so the blog says). This man clutches at the motto of Michaela Community School to write a bewilderingly indulgent attack on the values of a school he has not visited and, I assume, relies on its website to frame his argument. And what an argument - littered with references to Foucault, to post-modernism and to Marx it twines itself around the schools motto to manufacture a critique of the school itself:

Of course we all have reason. The enlightenment gave us reason. The power of reason enables each individual to escape the circumstances of existence. Only to an extent. As Marx put it “men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please”. Knowledge is power became the byword for the enlightenment. Later thinkers such as Foucault and the post modernists challenged the theory that knowledge is power, or rather, they agreed that knowledge is power but it carried the power of those who seek to oppress us, keep us sub-servient.

Wow! This blogger then indulges in that slightly 'man of the people' shtick that some writers love - describing how he came upon these thoughts while watching a football match at some unspecified East Lancashire ground (he also seemed slightly hung up on making a point about how people in Burnley drink a lot of benedictine - which is interesting but somewhat irrelevant to the ethos of a London free school). And he makes another irrelevant point about how 'some of the poorest' wards can be seen from the stands of that football ground - I'm guessing it's Turf Moor.

So what is the motto that has so offended Ford? It's a simple one - "knowledge is power". It would appear that our blogger doesn't really believe that knowledge is power or rather he thinks that what Michaela Community School thinks is knowledge isn't actually knowledge. Or something like that - it's all very confusing. It seems that the school has observed that it's ethos is founded on the ideas of Ed Hirsch - ideas that are altogether too prescriptive for Ford.

We then get into a Marxist analysis of the Tower of Babel (seriously this is about the motto of a school):

It seems to me that the story is unravelled not by Hirsch or even by scriptural exegetics but by Marxists who would point out that “the tower” was not so much a human project but a structure in which there is a top and a bottom. In other words a hierarchical class structure. Was that God’s point? Was God a proto Marxist?

To be fair to Ford he backs off from this slightly lunatic use of biblical metaphor to return to his main argument (knowledge isn't power). At this point he drops the post-modernist Marxism and return to the enlightenment by misusing Descartes - the point the French thinker was making was that the fact we think about ourselves proves we exist not that thinking is more important than knowledge.

It does seem that the real debate here isn't actually about Michaela's motto but rather about the ideas of Ed Hirsch and in particular the 'common core' and 'cultural literacy' ideas he promoted. And the measure of these ideas' value isn't to be found in Foucault, Marx or even the bible but in the success or otherwise of the school. Indeed there is sufficient of a positive impact from Ed Hirsch's approach to suggest that we'd do better to consider it than dismiss it (especially when the dismissal is based on seemingly random thoughts at a football match).

Indeed I suspect parents - or the ones not steeped in half-baked philosophy - would rather like the idea that Hirsch promotes:

‘Breadth of knowledge is the single factor within human control that contributes most to academic achievement and general cognitive competence. Breadth of knowledge is a far greater factor in achievement than socioeconomic status. The positive correlation between academic ability and socioeconomic status is only half the correlation between academic ability and the possession of general information. That is to say, being ‘smart’ is more dependent on possessing general knowledge than on family background. Imparting broad knowledge to all children is the single most effective way to narrow the gap between demographic groups through schooling’.

We send our children to school so they learn stuff. And while part of the stuff they need to learn is how to ask questions and how to challenge, a great deal of it is passing across a bunch of accepted and established facts about the world - that often maligned 'book-learning'. And parents want their children to leave school with the power to succeed - informed, knowledgeable and excited by the challenges the world throws up. Parents might just get this from Michaela Community School but I fear for the children at a school run on the principles Ford propounds:

...the essence of education is not to accumulate knowledge as a “thing in itself” but to learn how to challenge it; build upon it progressively and avoid creating new power structures even where they seem to have progressive foundations.

This approach is the very content-free, voyage of discovery approach to education that might be great for a few very bright children but for most it's a recipe for not knowing enough to ask the questions - to make those challenges that Ford thinks are important.

To understand why knowledge gives children power, we should attend a public enquiry and watch as people are given privilege simply because they are 'experts', because they have knowledge that the lay person doesn't have. In the end Michaela Community College understands this and Ford, too wrapped up in his witty cleverness, doesn't. We should wish the school - regardless of its motto - well and hope that it delivers on its mission - for if it does it will be a great school:

We believe all pupils, whatever their background, have a right to access the best that has been said and thought. This includes a variety of writers, from all parts of the world, and thinkers from all the ages. The curriculum at Michaela Community School ensures that pupils are knowledgeable enough about the world around them to transform it in the future. 

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How that teacher licensing might work out. A lesson from road transport...

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Dick Puddlecote usually writes about personal choice and the curse of nannying fussbucketry but every now and then he drops one in about his day job running a transport business.

Here he writes about the impact of requiring re-licensing every few years for HGV and PSV drivers:

Our experience - and we offered to pay for the courses - was that our best drivers said "enough of this shit" and quit the game. Not just any old drivers either, it was mostly the most experienced older drivers who decided that it was a ridiculous idea, and that there was no way they were letting some snotty-nosed professional training adviser tell them how to do a job they'd performed brilliantly for decades.

Dick goes on to confirm that, right across the industry, the impact of the new rules was:

...a loss of around 20% of drivers across the board.

Is there any reason to suppose that the impact of a "teacher's license" would be any different? That, far from it being the worst teachers who are weeded out, the effect will be for good teachers who can either retire or do something else (work in a private school or go to Australia to think of two examples) to leave? As Dick concludes:

Do we want kids to be trained by experienced older professionals with decades of knowledge and skills to be passed on to colleagues, or should Labour be allowed to drive them out of the job by way of death by a thousand insults to their intelligence?

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Exploring what might make Bradford's schools better...

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Bradford's schools aren't very good. And haven't got noticeably better - at least in terms of outcomes - over the past decade or so. This should concern us and we're told that there are strategies, partnerships and policies in place to turn things round. Importantly, we're told that most of Bradford's primary schools are, in Ofsted terms, 'good' or 'excellent'.

This raises an important question - if the schools are so good, why are their results so poor? Perhaps we're measuring and assessing the wrong things?

By way of a little help here's some findings from a study in New York:

In our empirical analysis, we find that input measures associated with a traditional resource-based model of education – class size, per pupil expenditure, the fraction of teachers with no teaching certification, and the fraction of teachers with an advanced degree – are not correlated with school effectiveness in our sample. Indeed, our data suggest that increasing resource-based inputs may actually lower school effectiveness.

So it just might be there case that we are measuring the wrong things in assessing schools. Indeed, the new York study showed that the traditional observations about class size and teacher qualifications might be wrong - where there's a focus on these inputs performance is less good.

So what does make a difference? The researchers show that it's the actual teaching that matters and, more specifically, four or five particular factors:

...an index of five policies suggested by forty years of qualitative case-studies– frequent teacher feedback, data driven instruction, high-dosage tutoring, increased instructional time, and a relentless focus on academic achievement – explains roughly half of the variation in school effectiveness.

 These are very familiar aspects of education to those familiar with either the systems used in the far east or (closer to home) the typical private day school. Yet, when 'leaders' from Bradford's education system are asked about what's happening they point cheerily to how good they are:

They are recognised for things like progress, leadership and management, and health and safety – not just attainment.

Yet - at least in this one study - there's no evidence that these measures of school performance are very relevant to the achievements of the pupils at that school. Perhaps we should start to increase teaching time, provide weekly reports to parents, set high standards and insist on intensive support for those who need it.

Maybe that is already happening in Bradford's schools. I hope so.

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If England's schools are some of the developed world's worst, where does that put Bradford's?

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We are again reminded that the simple premise of throwing money at public service problems doesn't work. We've already seen with the NHS that despite record amounts of cash pouring into the service, we still got the scandal of Mid-Staffs and similar failings in care across the land.

Today what was true for health is shown to be true for education:

Young adults in England have scored among the lowest results in the industrialised world in international literacy and numeracy tests. A major study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows how England's 16 to 24-year-olds are falling behind their Asian and European counterparts. England is 22nd for literacy and 21st for numeracy out of 24 countries.

And that spending:

Between 1997 and 2010 education spending nearly doubled yet our performance, the actual achievements of schools didn't. And there really isn't any excuse for this - and this point makes the scale of our education system's inadequacy still clearer:

England was the only country in the developed world in which adults aged 55-to-65 performed better in literacy and numeracy than those aged 16-to-24 after taking account of other factors such as the economic background of those taking the test. 

What is most striking about these reports is that there are no comments from the teachers unions, from the leaders of local education authorities or from the succession of Labour ministers that presided over this failure. The same bunch of self-serving people who rail against any attempt to reform the system by adding rigour, competition and choice.

When we search about for a comment from a teacher trade union we find one that shifts the blame and fails even to accept that maybe a little bit of the problem rests with teaching and leadership in schools. But the NASUWT's solution to the literacy and numeracy problem is truly a joke:

We need to radically revamp the current arrangements for work placements and careers guidance, ensure employers invest in high-quality learning opportunities for young people and take steps to ensure that all young people can afford to continue their learning beyond 16. - See more at: http://www.nasuwt.org.uk/Whatsnew/NASUWTNews/PressReleases/OECDSkillsForLifeReport#sthash.vDcds6dO.dpuf

We need to radically revamp the current arrangements for work placements and careers guidance, ensure employers invest in high-quality learning opportunities for young people and take steps to ensure that all young people can afford to continue their learning beyond 16. 

Got that folks? The problem with illiterate teenagers is down to work placements, careers guidance, employers and post-16 learning - nothing to do with what NASUWT's members do in the classroom!

Here in Bradford, where the man in charge is more interested in trying to become an MP than in the performance of schools, we really are in bother. Not only is England at the bottom of that international league table but Bradford is at the bottom end of England's performance league table:

Bradford’s primary schools have recorded the third worst results in England in tests sat by ten and 11-year-olds earlier this year, new figures show.

A shocking one in three (32 per cent) of children are failing to achieve the standards expected of them in the Three Rs by the end of their primary education.

We need to radically revamp the current arrangements for work placements and careers guidance, ensure employers invest in high-quality learning opportunities for young people and take steps to ensure that all young people can afford to continue their learning beyond 16. - See more at: http://www.nasuwt.org.uk/Whatsnew/NASUWTNews/PressReleases/OECDSkillsForLifeReport#sthash.vDcds6dO.dpuf

And this is Cllr "I-so-want-to-be-an-MP" Berry's response to this awful picture:

“After making recent progress at Key Stage Two in Bradford primary schools, there are disappointing elements to this year’s provisional results.” 

How complacent do you want? "Disappointing elements"! The situation is in a mess and Cllr Berry's solution is more meetings, another partnership:

...the local authority would work with a schools body called the Primary Improvement Partnership to review the results and agree on the next steps. 

Sense the urgency. Look at the concerns. Heads will roll? What a complete joke.

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For one time only...I agree with the NUT - payment by results for teachers is a daft idea

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...on teachers' performance pay. The proposals "from MPs" should the sort of appreciation of reward structures that gave us over-paid useless bankers:

Schools minister Nick Gibb said the government has asked the school teachers' review body – which considers matters relating to teachers' pay, duties and working time – to make recommendations on introducing "greater freedoms and flexibilities" in teachers' pay, including how to link it more closely to performance.

And the chosen measure is something called "added value" - which is a pretty discredited metric and was designed anyway to assess whole school performance over several years not individual teacher performance over one year. And in the USA where teacher 'ratings' are widely used, there's precious little evidence that these act to raise overall educational outcomes (which is, I guess, the whole point of the exercise).

The relatively simple 'appraisal bar' approach that already exists in the pay scales should be adequate and, more to the point, the decisions as to reward should fall to school management teams not be set by some bunch of bureaucrats down in Whitehall. And certainly not in response to a report from a bunch of MPs.

There's no doubt that schools find getting rid of underperforming teachers quite difficult but not giving them a pay rise isn't going to make them either leave or perform better. Do we really think that the teacher stood in front of a class is thinking; "I'll be extra good here and I'll get a pay rise or a bonus"? Of course they aren't and if they were, we would be a little worried about their vocation for the job.

School heads know who are the good and bad teachers - we just need to give them the "freedoms and flexibilities" to manage. And more complicated and often misleading performance measurement will just cost money without raising standards.

And in the end Christine Blowers (for once) is right:

Payment by results is total nonsense. Children are not tins of beans and schools are not factory production lines. Successful schools rely on a collegiate approach and team working.

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A glimpse of higher education's future?

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Time will no doubt tell but might this be a glimpse of higher education's future?

There are no professors in Virginia Tech’s largest classroom, only a sea of computers and red plastic cups.
In the Math Emporium, the computer is king, and instructors are reduced to roving guides. Lessons are self-paced, and help is delivered “on demand” in a vast, windowless lab that is open 24 hours a day because computers never tire. A student in need of human aid plants a red cup atop a monitor.
 
The Emporium is the Wal-Mart of higher education, a triumph in economy of scale and a glimpse at a possible future of computer-led learning. Eight thousand students a year take introductory math in a space that once housed a discount department store. Four math instructors, none of them professors, lead seven courses with enrollments of 200 to 2,000. Students walk to class through a shopping mall, past a health club and a tanning salon, as ambient Muzak plays.

But does it work? First indications are good:

"...Virginia Tech students pass introductory math courses at a higher rate now than 15 years ago, when the Emporium was built. And research has found the teaching model trims per-student expense by more than one-third, vital savings for public institutions with dwindling state support."

Interesting!

H/T Tyler Cowan

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So when will universities cotton on then?

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Technology is changing how we learn:

Live online learning technologies - such as virtual meetings and classrooms, and video-conferencing - are becoming increasingly popular, with more than three-quarters of employers using them in 2011.

This is according to the benchmark study carried out by learning-technology provider Towards Maturity, which found that e-learning courses were the most popular learning technology this year, used by 80% of employers.

So when will universities start using these methods?

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Things that make me cross....

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A headteacher addresses the Labour conference:

"In Mr Gove's eyes we are a failing school," she said. "Shame on you, Michael, how dare you? 47% of my students gain English GCSE. They believe they're the best kids in the world because that's what we tell them."

So over half the young people you teach come out without a qualification in English - the most basic, the most fundamental, the essential - with Maths - qualification?

Sorry Ms Sharples - it's not those children who are the failure. It's you.

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Seems unions are good for teachers but bad for pupils

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Over recent times I’ve banged on a bit about teachers unions and specifically about a feeling I had that the power and influence of these unions was compromising efforts to raise educational attainment. At the heart of my concern was that the funding and support for opponents of ‘free schools’, academies and other reforms to education was coming predominantly from these unions.

Commenting on the Government's plans to set up Free Schools, Christine Blower, General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers, the largest teachers' union said;

"The Government's commitment to 'free schools' will create chaos at local level. Groups setting up their own schools irrespective of local planning needs would be a retrograde step that will lead to planning gridlock and social division.”

Now I’m not planning here to dissect the confused opinions of Ms Blower – or indeed of other teacher union leaders – but to explore the impact of unions on education itself. And, in this exploration, the events unfolding in Wisconsin where the Governor wishes to end union collective bargaining rights have provided some help.

Let’s start with the case for collective bargaining in education as put by the New York Times’ pet Nobel Laureate, Paul Krugman:

And in low-tax, low-spending Texas, the kids are not all right. The high school graduation rate, at just 61.3 percent, puts Texas 43rd out of 50 in state rankings. Nationally, the state ranks fifth in child poverty; it leads in the percentage of children without health insurance. And only 78 percent of Texas children are in excellent or very good health, significantly below the national average.

Now much of Mr Krugman’s argument is a familiar one to us in that it is centred on sustaining levels of public spending rather than on defending collective bargaining. But, of course, for left-wingers like Mr Krugman such things go hand in hand. Here in the UK, of course, in that peculiarly totalitarian manner beloved of the last Labour government and continued by the current regime, teachers pay and conditions are set by Parliament on the recommendation of the School Teachers Review Body. In effect ‘collective bargaining’ is nationalised with the unions engaged through the review body in determining pay for every teacher from Berwick to Penzance.

To return to Mr Krugman’s argument – or more specifically the statistics he marshals to support his contention that places with union collective bargaining agreements and high spending outperform places with lower taxes and no union collective bargaining agreements. It seems that the great brain of Mr Krugman has tripped over something called Simpson’s Paradox and, as a result, his comparison is almost wholly a false one. As you can read at the Iowahawk blog:

“...white students in Texas perform better than white students in Wisconsin, black students in Texas perform better than black students in Wisconsin, Hispanic students in Texas perform better than Hispanic students in Wisconsin. In 18 separate ethnicity-controlled comparisons, the only one where Wisconsin students performed better than their peers in Texas was 4th grade science for Hispanic students (statistically insignificant), and this was reversed by 8th grade. Further, Texas students exceeded the national average for their ethnic cohort in all 18 comparisons; Wisconsinites were below the national average in 8, above average in 8.”

So despite spending less money on schools and not working hand-in-glove with teacher unions in the running of those schools, Texas has at least as good results – mostly better – than heavily unionised Wisconsin. This doesn’t say that collective bargaining is a bad thing but that it does no discernable good for education. 

However, there a little bit of a further twist to all this which starts with Caroline Hoxby, Professor of Economics at Stamford University who says:

“I find that teachers’ unions increase school inputs but reduce productivity sufficiently to have a negative overall effect on student performance.”

So teacher unions do their proximate job really well – if you define that job as being to represent the interests of teachers – in that they succeed in getting more cash into the budget. But in doing so these unions are damaging the overall education system. It seems that my suspicion that teachers’ unions damage education has some academic foundation.

What Prof. Hoxby goes on to say is that the unionised system is very poor at:

1.       Rewarding the best teachers and keeping them in the classroom

2.       Getting rid of poor and underperforming teachers

3.       Identifying the best teachers in the first place

Central to this argument is the idea that teachers – like everyone else – will respond to incentives. At present teachers join unions because it is in their interests to do so – unions have the dominant say over pay and are good at getting the resources needed to ensure this situation continues. However, it is in the interests of education to pay teachers on the basis of outcomes, to reward them for actually raising student attainment. This does not suit the unions – or the tidiness of bureaucracy – as it undermines their power. So teachers are paid an agreed amount regardless of whether they are any good at the job.

And the findings don’t just play out in the USA – here’s a study from India:

This paper examines the relationship between teacher unionization, student achievement and teachers’ pay using a cross-section of data from private schools in India. We use differences in student mark across subjects to identify within-pupil variation in achievement and find that union membership of the teacher appears to strongly reduce pupil achievement. We find no evidence this could be due to the unobservables not controlled for by this procedure. A school fixed effects equation of teacher pay shows that union membership substantially raises pay and in this case too we find that remaining unobservables are unlikely to explain this outcome. We thus have in this data clear evidence that unions raise cost and reduce student achievement.

So it does seem that unions are good for teachers but bad for pupils.

....

Kids, parents and a few teachers have worked it out - pity the education establishment hasn't

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Much fuss and bother about 'A' Level results including, of course, the 'it's all fixed in favour of public schools' argument from the unions, Guardianistas and assorted educational experts. Now leaving aside that this Guardian piece is rather speculative (to say the least) and that the Universities say it ain't so, it does appear that the kids, their parents and possibly some teachers (who aren't wasting their time being spokespeople for unions) have worked out the best way to improve the odds of getting into better universities:

This week's A-level results showed that pupils were increasingly shunning so-called "soft" subjects in favour of science, economics and maths.

Bit of a clue there, eh?