Public school teachers unhappy

A new study from the Friedman Foundation, “Free to Teach: What America’s Teachers Say About Teaching in Public and Private Schools,” conducted by Dr. Greg Forster and Christian D’Andrea, has found that “public school teachers are currently working in a school system that doesn’t provide the best environment for teaching. Teachers are victims of dysfunctional government schools right alongside their students.”

Ironically, those who claim to speak for the teachers, the unions and policymakers, oppose nearly every reform to improve education — for students and teachers alike. So long as public teachers remain miserable, the union has power.

Using the survey data on teachers conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, Forster and D’Andrea find:

• Private school teachers are much more likely to say they will continue teaching as long as they are able (62 percent v. 44 percent), while public school teachers are much more likely to say they’ll leave teaching as soon as they are eligible for retirement (33 percent v. 12 percent) and that they would immediately leave teaching if a higher paying job were available (20 percent v. 12 percent).


• Private school teachers are much more likely to have a great deal of control over selection of textbooks and instructional materials (53 percent v. 32 percent) and content, topics, and skills to be taught (60 percent v. 36 percent).


• Private school teachers are much more likely to have a great deal of influence on performance standards for students (40 percent v. 18 percent), curriculum (47 percent v. 22 percent), and discipline policy (25 percent v. 13 percent).


• Public school teachers are much more likely to report that student misbehavior (37 percent v. 21 percent) or tardiness and class cutting (33 percent v. 17 percent) disrupt their classes, and are four times more likely to say student violence is a problem on at least a monthly basis (48 percent v. 12 percent).


• Private school teachers are much more likely to strongly agree that they have all the textbooks and supplies they need (67 percent v. 41 percent).


• Private school teachers are more likely to agree that they get all the support they need to teach special needs students (72 percent v. 64 percent).


• Seven out of ten private school teachers report that student racial tension never happens at their schools, compared to fewer than half of public school teachers (72 percent v. 43 percent).


• Although salaries are higher in public schools, private school teachers are more likely to be satisfied with their salaries (51 percent v. 46 percent).
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• Measurements of teacher workload (class sizes, hours worked, and hours teaching) are similar in public and private schools.


• Private school teachers are more likely to teach in urban environments (39 percent v. 29 percent) while public school teachers are more likely to teach in rural environments (22 percent versus 11 percent).


• Public school teachers are twice as likely as private school teachers to agree that the stress and disappointments they experience at their schools are so great that teaching there isn’t really worth it (13 percent v. 6 percent).


• Public school teachers are almost twice as likely to agree that they sometimes feel it is a waste of time to try to do their best as a teacher (17 percent v. 9 percent).


• Nearly one in five public school teachers has been physically threatened by a student, compared to only one in twenty private school teachers (18 percent v. 5 percent). Nearly one in ten public school teachers has been physically attacked by a student, three times the rate in private schools (9 percent v. 3 percent).


• One in eight public school teachers reports that physical conflicts among students occur everyday; only one in 50 private school teachers says the same (12 percent v. 2 percent).

Read the full report here: http://www.friedmanfoundation.org/downloadFile.do?id=367.

And for a synopsis from Dr. Forster, go here: http://jaypgreene.com/2009/05/20/free-to-teach-what-americas-teachers-say-about-teaching-in-public-and-private-schools/.

$5.4 billion spent in 2008-09 school year

In case you missed it, Nevada’s school districts budgeted a combined total of $5.4 billion for the 2008-09 school year. That comes to a little more than $13,000 per pupil. If we don't have enough school supplies, textbooks, or teachers with that much money, what are we spending it on?

Read the full story here.

Parents, students, citizens for choice

Hundreds came out to protest the Democrats’ plan to kill the D.C voucher program — a program that awards scholarships to low-income children to attend a private school of their parents’ choice.

You already know the program works, helping to improve the reading skills of the students it allows to enroll in private schools. But do you know how parents, children and the program’s supporters really feel? Watch the video above and find out for yourself.

Great teachers should get great pay

Outstanding teachers who can deliver outstanding student-learning gains could soon be earning six-figure salaries, say the authors of a new report, entitled New Millennium Schools.

Dr. Matthew Ladner, vice president at Arizona’s Goldwater Institute and a policy fellow at NPRI, and fellow authors Dr. Gregory Stone and Mark Francis cite research showing that high-quality teachers are 10-20 times more effective in behalf of genuine student achievement than small classrooms.

Nevada could implement this policy without raising taxes. Just use money reserved for classroom size reduction and those meaningless teacher bonuses that are based on number of education degrees — rather than how much a student learns.

What’s your thinking? Should teachers be paid over $100,000 a year if they produce outstanding results?

D.C. Voucher Program

President Barack Obama promised voters he would have a fact-based presidency. Policy would be decided based on what worked rather than right-wing vs. left-wing dogma. But two months into his presidency the U.S. Department of Education quietly buried a report that found the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (read vouchers) worked. Not only did it work, but the first students in the program now average a 19-month learning advantage in their reading skills over their public school peers. Additionally, the program is incredibly popular and in high demand with parents, with four parents applying for a scholarship for every one available.

The D.C. Program serves just 1,700 low-income D.C. kids, mostly minorities, and costs just $18 million. It awards scholarships as high as $7,500, although the average school scholarship is around $6,600. What is the annual per-pupil cost for D.C.’s abysmal public school system (the worst in the nation) to operate? Some $26,000.

Despite all the benefits of the D.C. scholarship program, Democrat majorities in Congress have all but killed the program. Many members seemed more concerned with how much funding public schools receive than with how successfully they boost student achievement – never mind that the D.C. program removes $0 from the D.C. public schools.

These politicians forget the original mission of public education altogether — namely, to assist children to receive a good education. The antipathy toward vouchers — which do just that, and very cost-effectively — is more than disturbing. It suggests a fundamental callousness toward the welfare of real children.

It is time to stop thinking about public education in such antiquated terms. Vouchers can be a valuable benefit for public education, even if the student attends a private school. If the goal is to educate children, does it really matter where or how they receive that education?

Watch the Reason TV video on the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program above to learn more.