Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

At the convenience store today, the checkout clerk complimented a youngster on his Star Wars T-shirt. “Those were the best movies,” noted the recent graduate of a suburban Massachusetts high school, “but you really should read some of the books. I never read. Never. But there are two books that follow Episode 6 and they are awesome. Much better than George Lucas’s screenplays. They’re really worth the time.”

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I talked to a Spanish teacher in a suburban Boston public high school last night. She expressed her disapproval of the idea of merit pay for teachers. “Some of my students hate their parents and some have been sexually abused,” she noted, “but my salary is supposed to be based on their performance?”

I responded that I thought the deeper question was how school administrators would evaluate merit. I asked “What incentive does a school administrator have to do a good job evaluating merit, or indeed, to do any work at all?” The teacher said “none, especially if they are a member of a protected minority group. They can’t be fired, no matter how little they do.” That made sense to me; the school is guaranteed to get nearly all of the students in the town regardless of whether or not the administrators do anything (few parents can afford to pay property taxes that fund public schools and then pay private school tuition as well). Wasn’t a teacher also guaranteed customers even if she didn’t work? “You have to try to sell the students at the beginning of the year that the class will be fun. Otherwise it is just unpleasant to sit with them for the remaining 8 months. If I’m incompetent and lazy, I will still get the same paycheck and the same number of students, but it will be tedious to share a classroom with unhappy students. That’s my incentive to work.”

Reflecting on this conversation, I was surprised that anyone thinks merit pay will work. Restaurants aren’t very important to our society or our future. Great empires have been built by countries with bad restaurants. Yet nobody would propose having restaurant compensation be determined by a government bureaucracy assigning “merit” to each restaurant. We allow citizens to choose which restaurant to visit and eventually the bad restaurants wither away and disappear due to lack of customers. Short of something like that in public education, how would we ever expect quality to improve? Wouldn’t parents and kids, simply by talking amongst themselves, quickly figure out who were the effective teachers and try to crowd into their classrooms, abandoning the ineffective teachers. An administrator looking for “merit” would simply need to count heads in the classroom and/or pay a teacher according to the number of kids who signed up (this is how education has worked for most of human history, actually; our current bureaucratized and tenured system is a relatively recent innovation; current “merit pay”).

I circled back later to the Spanish teacher and asked her if parents and kids knew who the good teachers were. “Of course. There is a huge amount of pushing by parents and kids to get into the best teachers’ classes. But at the end of the day the worst teachers still get a more or less full classroom and a full paycheck as well.”

[The complex merit pay schemes so far don’t seem to have worked, e.g., see this story on Nashville schools. Why isn’t anyone anywhere seriously considering the “parents/kids get to choose their school and teacher” approach? I don’t think it is fair to say that charter schools represent full choice because they don’t get anywhere near the funding of public schools (see this study on how the cost of public schools, if normal accounting measures are used, is much higher than quoted). Anyway, charter schools are hugely complex to set up. Assuming a normal distribution of effectiveness, the public schools already contain millions of above-average teachers. Without building any new buildings or setting up any new infrastructure, we could presumably improve outcomes simply by allowing those above-average teachers to attract more students.]

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Via a political process we’ve agreed that it is reasonable for the president of the U.S. to earn $400,000 per year. Does it make sense to use tax dollars to support non-profit organizations whose employees pay themselves more than that?

This Wall Street Journal article by Senator Jim Demint says that Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio executives earned between $$370,000/year and $1.2 million per year. Regardless of whether or not the non-profit organizations could have found people to work for less money, there is a reasonable question of whether the government should forcibly collect tax dollars from folks earning the median $16/hour wage and feed those dollars to public broadcasting employees earning far more than President Obama.

Who voted for that?

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A reader pointed out an interesting confluence of stories in today’s New York Times.

Story 1 is “Teachers Wonder, Why the Scorn?”, about how it is an unsolvable mystery as to why taxpayers have a low opinion of teachers (a 2nd-year teacher earning $36,000 ($4,000 per month) is the salary poster child; the journalist apparently could not find any $10,000+/month senior teachers to quote.)

Story 2 is about how 75 percent of students delivered by those teachers to City University of New York require remedial instruction. It notes that only 23 percent of students who graduated from New York City public schools, some of the most lavishly funded in the world, were “prepared for college or careers” (just imagine how little the dropouts learned!).

[Speaking of New York City school funding… when Michael Bloomberg was running for elections and to hold onto the Mayoralty for a third term, he dished out future taxpayers’ money at a record pace to unionized city workers. Now that he is a lame duck and doesn’t need their electoral support, he is proposing to scale back pensions for workers yet to be hired (i.e., he will help get the city’s fiscal health in order starting in the year 2040 or 2050).]

[How do the $130,000/year (+ $75,000/year pension starting at age 53) schoolteachers in Rochester perform compared to NYC? Five percent of their students end up being prepared for college (source).]

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Folks: I’ve drafted a new section, /wireless, covering all things mobile, especially smartphones and tablet computers. I make a prediction about whether iPhone or Android will dominate, wonder why the iPad is so popular, and review the Motorola Droid 2 and Samsung Epic 4G.

Since there does not seem to be any danger of an innovation in desktop computing, I will be adding to this new section of my core site regularly. Comments/corrections are appreciated.

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A reader sent me this article on the impending insolvency of the United States Postal Service. The USPS, which has an operating cost of about $70 billion per year (Wikipedia) pays for its retiree health care obligations on a current basis, unlike other federal agencies. This year, the article says, they have to set aside $5.5 billion, or about 8 percent on top of the operating expenses.

Assuming the actuaries are right about what the retiree health care costs will actually be (historically these have been underestimated since few people expected the inflation in health care costs that the U.S. has had), the average government agency, by incurring but not funding retiree health care, is probably spending about 8 percent more than the official figure on cost. (Of course, there is a much larger hidden cost to running state and local government due to the underfunded pensions.)

[This assumes that other government entities have similar obligations as the USPS regarding retiree health care. My evidence for this being a reasonable assumption is that USPS employees share a retirement policy with standard civilian federal workers.]

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It would not have occurred to me that Americans would actually want to pay higher taxes so that the Department of Motor Vehicles clerk could earn more than they do, or to work until age 75 to support a policeman who retired at 42 and moved to the Philippines, telling New York City to send his checks there (one of my helicopter students! He was up from NYC for a year or two while the taxpayers paid him to attend the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard). Yet this is the conclusion of a New York Times poll (story).

I wonder if the methodology of the poll had something to do with the outcome. About 25 percent of those surveyed said that the salaries and benefits of public employees were “too low.” As this is a practical impossibility without indentured servitude (a worker whose salaries and benefits were “too low” would quit and find a better job, something that public employees very seldom do), I think there are two explanations for this answer. One is that citizens are dissatisfied with the quality and energy of public employees and believe that, by raising salaries, better workers would be found and 20-30 years from now, after the current batch of mediocre workers has retired, public services would be improved. The second explanation is that 25 percent of the people surveyed either are public employees or are financially dependent upon public employees (the wife, children, and grandchildren of Robert W. Healy, Jr. probably would not say that his $5 million pension is excessive or that his $336,317 annual salary (84% of President Obama’s!) to manage a small town was excessive).

Now that over 40 percent of the U.S. economy is government spending (chart), I wonder what would happen if one were to conduct a poll of only those who work in private industry and don’t have a spouse, child, or parent who works for the government.

Finally there is the art of question wording (good video example). The New York Times told poll respondents “Collective bargaining refers to negotiations between an employer and a labor union’s members to determine the conditions of employment.” (all questions) The word “conditions” in my mind generates an image in my mind of working hours, task assignments, etc. The word “employer” makes me think of a private tax-paying company. What if the question had started out “Collective bargaining refers to the ability of a labor union to negotiate with politicians the delivery of pension and health care benefits to be paid for by future taxpayers”? I think the answer might have been very different.

Finally, we could apply Occam’s Razor to explain the poll result. We live in a democracy (“rule of the people”). The current system of government, including the fact that public employees are permitted to unionize and then bargain with the politicians whose election they financed and supported, is the result of citizens voting. So if the voting system works, we should expect our government to be exactly what most people want. It may seem alarming that people voted for a system in which the U.S. would owe 500 percent of GDP (see this nytimes article), but on the other hand the voters are also the same folks who refinanced their mortgages every two years and spent all of the (fake) equity in their homes.

What do readers think? Do Americans with private jobs really, as the NY Times poll seems to indicate, want to work until they are elderly and infirm so that public employees can spend their 50s on the golf course?

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The Cirrus SR20 that I often fly was created by a couple of brothers in the Midwest. When they needed expansion capital about 10 years ago, the company was sold to Arab investors. With the capital in place, Cirrus grew to dominate the market for piston-powered airplanes purchased for personal transportation (leaving Cessna and Piper to sell into the flight school market). When they wanted to improve the avionics, they switched from Avidyne (Massachusetts-based)/Garmin (Kansas-based; Taiwan-owned) to all-Garmin. Last year the company that makes the engine, Continental, was sold to a Chinese firm. Today, Cirrus announced that the entire company has been sold to a Chinese airplane manufacturer (press release). So Cirrus going forward will essentially be an all-Chinese show (counting Taiwan as culturally if not politically “Chinese”).

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Having decided to defer his scheduled strangulation, I bought some Wellness dog food today at Whole Foods for Ollie the Collie. The bag is labeled for the literate canine: “Please enjoy by October 21, 2011”.

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