"Waiting for 'Superman'": A monumentally important film, says ... Alec Baldwin

Oh yes.

Davis Guggenheim's Waiting for "Superman" is unforgettable.

Guggenheim directed An Inconvenient Truth and It Might Get Loud. However, even more so than the issue of global warming (somehow), the questions and concerns raised by Waiting for "Superman" are deep and effect us all. Public education in America is collapsing. Students are not being served, and neither are tax payers. Whether or not teachers' unions are partly to blame is open to discussion, but Guggenheim's film casts a light on that perspective.

And once you get a peek at New York City's "Rubber Room" for outcast teachers, you may never view the NEA and the AFT the same way again.

This is a monumentally important film. My father was a public school teacher for 28 years and I can think of few other areas in our society that deserve this type of urgent scrutiny right now.

Even better is that this isn't the first time a Huffington Post writer has praised "Waiting for 'Superman.'"

“Waiting for ‘Superman’” opens next weekend in Las Vegas at Regal Village Square 18. Sadly, I don't think it's showing anywhere in the Reno area.

Here's the trailer. I can't wait to see this film and I hope you'll see it, too.

Higher education bubble

Table 1: U.S. housing price index vs. U.S. higher education tuition
Source: Dr. Mark Perry, George Mason University

My latest article on higher education budget cuts and financing shows that 1) the budget cuts have been smaller than advertised (10 percent rather than 30 to 50 percent), 2) smaller than the dramatic growth in revenue in the preceding 17 years (at least) and 3) financing is being crowded out by declining state revenues and new spending priorities (like ObamaCare).

A previous article highlighted how Nevada's universities use new revenue to hire highly paid non-educators (read: administrators) and luxurious ameneties for students (nicer dorms, better cafeterias, massive gymnasiums). UNLV, for example, actually decreased the number of educators while increasing the number of administrators.

So even though Nevada's universities are mispending scarce resources on non-educators they are facing a tougher financial time than they're used to; but that doesn't mean we should hand over more tax dollars or dramatically increase tuition and fees on students.

Just looking at the last 10 years alone shows a large spike in tuition and fees for higher education. From the 2000-01 school year to 2009-10, UNLV's and UNR's published tuition and fees increased 73.9 percent and 64 percent, respectivly (inflation-adjusted). The most dramatic jump has been in student fees.

Note: total price includes tuition, fees, books, supplies and the cost of living on campus.

Table 2: Inflation adjusted price increase in Nevada higher education from 2000 to 2010.

Source: U.S. Department of Education, IPEDS database

Worse still, tuition and fees continue to rise. Even though the Consumer Price Index fell by 0.4 percent between 2008 and 2009 and has only grown 1.76 percent since last year, the Nevada System of Higher Education Board of Regents approved a statewide 5 percent increase in undergraduate tuitions. The hyperinflation in higher education is simply unsustainable.

This rapid increase in revenue has not increased the quality of either UNR or UNLV. No student is learning 60 to 70 percent more, even though students are paying 60 to 70 percent more in tuition and fees than students from just 10 years ago.

Both universities must learn to live within their means while providing a higher-quality service at a reasonable (and probablay lower) cost/price. If we don't fix the problem now, then the higher-education bubble burst will - and the situation will be even more painful then.

We're not fat, we're big boned

*To Nevada System of Higher Education Chancellor Klaich, employing one person for every 5.9 students is not bloat.


News 4 in Reno lets Chancellor Dan Klaich get the last word in on university bloat, which is unfortunate, because I had such a good comeback line.

Klaich claims, accurately, that UNR and UNLV are less bloated and more efficient with staffing than other universities. NPRI has never disputed that.

But like almost all universities, UNLV and UNR have been dramatically increasing the size of staff - specifically, highly paid non-educators (whom NSHE does not want to call "administrators"). In fact, UNLV and UNR are increasing the number of highly paid non-educators faster than the student body.

Worse still, they've increased the number of employees per student and the dollars per student, but neither UNLV nor UNR can graduate 50 percent of its students after six years.

But back to Klaich's bragging about the bloat - or non-bloat, as he see's it.

Is being more efficient than the average four-year university really something to celebrate? As I told Victoria Campbell from News 4, what Klaich is doing is akin to "bragging about being 150 pounds overweight instead of 200 pounds."

There is still a lot of work to be done - namely, graduating educated students rather than providing university jobs for adults.

More teachers?

President Obama wants public schools to hire 10,000 new math teachers nationwide. Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute asks why? The last few million new public school employees haven't done much for student achievement. Maybe its about getting more due paying members to help fund political campaigns for things that have nothing to do with education?

To merit pay or not to merit pay

A new Vanderbilt University study on merit pay - the most rigorous ever conducted - shows that a merit-pay plan in Tennessee had no statistically significant impact on student achievement. That is the bad news. The good news is that it also produced none of the doom-and-gloom predictions that unions normally attach to the concept of merit pay.

Eric Hanushek (Stanford University) notes that the study did not examine the long-term effects of attracting higher-quality teachers to the profession via merit pay (they no longer have to wait 15 years to maximize their salary). We already know that the average teacher today is recruited from the bottom third of college graduates and that paying teachers more money doesn't attract better teachers (we just pay more money for the same talent pool), so maybe merit pay has the long-term potential to attract higher-quality teachers. At this point, we still don't know.

Dr. Matthew Ladner (vice president of research at the Goldwater Institute and a policy fellow at the Nevada Policy Research Institute) still supports the idea of merit pay (for reasons including those given by Eric Hanushek) and wonders why merit pay worked in Little Rock, Ark., but not in Tennessee. He thinks more research on the right way to do merit pay is still needed.

Dr. Jay P. Greene (University of Arkansas) claims to have always been skeptical of merit pay (and now is even more skeptical). He reasons that creating market forces (via merit pay) won't work when the teachers are still operating within an uncompetitive, government-controlled monopoly. According to Dr. Greene, the whole system needs to change.

Unions have lost the war of ideas

With the upcoming nationwide release of the education documentary "Waiting for Superman" by director Davis Guggenheim (Inconvient Truth) - which takes a critical look at the failure of American public education - Dr. Jay P. Greene (University of Arkansas) and Dr. Greg Forster (Kern Family Foundation) have announced that the unions have officially lost the war of ideas on education.

It is only a matter of time before the education unions (which influence more than just education) are replaced with professional service organizations that treat teachers like professional adults rather than cannon fodder.

Muy bien Florida

Nevada should copy Florida's education reforms ASAP.