The trend has been toward more government, not free markets

Regarding rise in government involvement in societty, these charts are interesting.

Have Republicans, and Republicans under President Reagan in
particular, reduced government?

"Here I am afraid the problem is murkier. Prof. Friedman offers a
graph showing the number of pages added to the Federal Register each
year, which is in general a measure of how much economic regulation
people face. It shows that the number of pages added during the
Reagan years declined from its highs under President Carter, and
after five years had actually fallen to roughly the same number of
pages as were added under the previous Republican president, before
starting to rise for the last three years of Reagan's tenure.

"This doesn't seem very convincing to me for two reasons.

"First, I question whether the number of pages added to the Federal
Register is an accurate gauge of how much individual liberty suffers.
The other problem is the relative value of different freedoms. If you
are a gay American, the fact that in…

"When I wrote that "individual liberty suffered" under Reagan, I was
thinking of things like his escalation of the War on Drugs, which
resulted in the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of casual
marijuana users and the enactment at his administration's instigation
of omnibus anti-crime measures that allow, for example, federal
officials to search your person (including, as I recall, your body
cavities) if you happen to be canoeing on a river in central Kansas.
(The law authorized customs officials to make such searches on any
body of water that connected to any body of water . . . that
connected to international waters, which means virtually any lake,
river, or stream outside the basin areas of the West.)

"Under Reagan, federal spending as a percentage of GDP fell slightly.
It has increased under Bush. This is not purely attributable to
post-9/11 defense and homeland-security needs; spending outside these
areas rose from 12.8 percent of the economy in 2001 to 14.5 percent
in 2005. Setting aside the question of whether all homeland-security
spending actually goes toward securing the homeland, even excluding
such expenditures non-defense discretionary spending is up nearly 30
percent.

What Government Institution Does 2/3 of 3/4 Represent?

Is 2/3 of ¾ morally offensive? If we want a just society and our legislatures design a government institution so that it serves only ¼ of our young people who come largely from 'good' homes and the institution fails the other ¾, should that discriminatory effect outrage our moral sensibilities?

We have a choice. Should we take a serious look at what it is about the design of this institution it is that causes such a massive failure or should we assume the design of this government institution is OK and that it should be protected, and then should we try to tell it to reform itself and do better in various ways while giving it more money?

Response to Pozdena's merit pay opinion: Giving Teachers the Capacity to Create Change in Learning

Here's my response to Randy Pozdena's merit pay opinion, "Financial incentive work in schools, too."

Mr. Pozdena's advocacy of merit pay for teachers misses the context of the system within which teachers work. To use merit pay to try to make teachers do better takes as a "given" that teachers can only accept employment as unionized workers in a district under the control of administrators. Teachers do not control resources, hire the people, choose the curriculum materials, design the organizational system, develop the product, nor exercise any of the management prerogatives found elsewhere in the leadership of business organizations. They have no capacity to create change in students' performance. They are not the problem.

Teachers are the only professionals who work for the administrator of the organization. Teachers are not management, and they did not design the current arrangements of worker/boss taken for granted by Mr. Pozdena. Incentive pay carries an unfair, negative assumption that teachers are unmotivated and could and would change the academic performance of kids if given merit pay. Are these reformers saying that it is the teachers who are bad and that the system is good? What management consultant would blame the workers for performance of a bad system in which the workers have no voice or control?

Regardless of reformer's hopes for merit pay, significant change can't happen within the current system. Merit pay, 'reforms', are things imposed top down by strong leaders. They are things that are done 'to' the schools, not by the schools. But the kinds of significant change in student learning and motivation we need can really only come from the teachers in the schools where educational activity happen. It means teachers will have to create the change and improvements in learning programs.

But in the current district design, teachers do not have the capacity to create change, and merit pay won't do it. However, there are options for creating powerful incentives and the capacity for change inside the schools and classrooms. Teachers are beginning to own learning programs as true professionals under all kinds of new arrangements besides just charter schools, and in these designs, change in learning happens. Far more than with merit pay, when teachers are no longer employees of the district, the incentives change, powerfully…for both students and teachers.

If reformers want to investigate how to create the capacity for change by teachers so they have the tools to better motivate and promote student growth, they can go to local public school teachers and ask Ted Kolderie's question, "Assume teacher ownership is the arrangement in your school; What would begin to happen?" Teachers begin to talk with excitement about the possibilities.

 Or reformers could study programs already happening to understand how teachers can make learning interesting, individualized, and motivating to the students and to themselves. Teachers gain ownership over the learning program in the new public school charter schools but now also in "charter light" programs. Teachers form cooperatives in Wisconsin and Minnesota and as owners become Teachers in Professional Practice. My son's 5^th grade teacher can tell an interesting story of her struggles to gain independence to develop her program. She finally "went charter." But why not let teachers like her own the learning program and operate within the district school?

Usually organized as non-profits or cooperatives, these teachers in professional practice operate much like other professionals do; they control their own budgets, hire the administrators, select their instructional staff, and willingly accept some form of accountability. Some teacher co-operatives in Wisconsin retain their district employment and representation by the union while organizing into teacher owned group practice; they use the district as their fiscal agent.

By advocating merit pay for teachers, Mr. Pozdena takes the existing system design for granted. Why? He wants to use merit pay to make teachers do…well, what exactly? Work harder?

It's simplistic to think that we can continue to keep teachers in a status as employees hired, supervised, and assigned by the district at the same time we must produce significant improvements in learning. Pseudo-reforms such as merit pay, staff development, new curriculum materials, technology won't do it. Teachers simply aren't the problem. The system design is the problem, and notions of merit pay do not get to the causes of the failure and lack of motivation of many students that daily our teachers must face.

We must begin to think seriously about how schools must change to fit the students and teachers; we can't continue to impose reforms to try to make students and teachers fit the system. Before even considering merit pay plans—to get people to accept and work harder inside a bad design—we must make explicit its assumptions of top down 'reform' by experts, and we must directly compare merit pay plans with models that put the capacity for change into the system by allowing teachers to be owners instead of workers.

Randy Pozdena on Merit Pay: “Financial incentive work in schools, too”

Randy Pozdena conducted a study of merit pay for the Broad Foundation and Cascade Politicy Institute and wrote a Cascade Commentary that was published as an opinion column in the Oregonian. It was also posted on Oregon Catalyst Monday, October 13, 2008.

"…there is a growing appreciation of the fact that public education is fundamentally a service business. It faces the same challenges of meeting the expectations of its customers, organizing itself to be effective, motivating its labor force to be productive, and doing all this while keeping a sharp eye on costs.

 …Using consumer choice—and the prospect that underperforming schools, administrators and faculty may fail—can ensure strong incentives to excel.

 

…reformers are turning their attention to the motivational opportunities that might be implemented within the existing local public school setting. To this end, the idea of paying for performance is becoming the focus of various experiments and comparative studies.

 …The greatest potential appears to be at the classroom teaching level, since that is where the accountability process departs most markedly from what we think of as efficient organizational paradigms. In other words, we should apply financial incentives where the system is most in need of improvement – the classroom.

 

…The challenge is one of implementation. Educators long have been relatively insulated from the discipline of true accountability sanctions or incentives. Implementing performance measurement and incentives is considered by some to be an intrusion into the presumptively "special" setting of schools. But in the absence of structural reforms, my research suggests such intrusions may be not only warranted, but necessary to improve student achievement."

 

 

Can We Reform the Existing Schools To Get the Schools We Want or Do We Create New Schools?

The Reform/Improvement Ideology— Improve existing programs and schools	The Create Opportunity Ideology— Create new programs and schools
Stasis Maintained—Maintain administered schools and programs	Dynamism Added—Create self-governing and self-improving schools and programs
Take the current system as a given	Alter the system givens
Reform is something we do to schools	Creating new programs is something change oriented educators do
Find what works in literature	Seek causes in system design to understand problems
Use Blue Ribbon task force for big ticket reforms with strong leadership	Use locally generated, small efforts that can develop with success
Blame foot draggers and union for blocking change	Identify incentive relationships that conserve the current form of operation
Point a finger at teachers or students or managers as lazy or stupid.	Point the finger at the legislature who is responsible for the design and for changing the design
Use one, common set of standards and testing in order to centrally administer and evaluate	Allow multiple local proposals for new and different
Treat the student and the teacher as accountable to the state	Make the student's need primary. Make the teachers serve students' needs
Require instant success	Allow for long range process of research & development
Protect existing system from new ideas of outsiders	Create an independent sector that cannot be controlled by the existing system
Pretend that we all own the schools and should support them; involve stakeholders in reform	Recognize the districts own and operate the schools, not the parents, not local business groups, not foundations, and not the state legislature
Focus on reforms; avoid talking about system relationships; isolate pieces to change	Address the method of providing public education as a system; take account of the system's success as a system in maintaining and enlarging itself
Assert that the district and schools must be protected as institutions vital to democracy	Be clear about the dysfunctional, massive failure of the system in serving all kids.