The View from Right Field

A 40% Pay Increase for Teachers Plus Higher Standards?

Robert Maranto, a professor at the University of Arkansas and member of the Fayetteville school board, wrote in The Wall Street Journal Tuesday, about the need to both significantly increase teacher pay and improve teacher quality.  Professor Maranto suggests increasing pay 40% (from the current median salary of $58,000).  That would put the median salary above accountants ($68,000) and close to that of civil engineers ($84,000).  In a cutesy, but ultimately meaningless, comment, Professor Maranto says, “Surely educating the nation’s children is as important as balancing books or building bridges.”¹

Professor Maranto argues that we need to increase teachers’ pay to attract better people to teaching.  In years past, women went into teaching because other professions were effectively closed to them.  With women having more opportunities today, many of those who would have become teachers in the past are becoming doctors or lawyers.  Raising salaries would help attract brighter people into teaching.

Sexual Assault on College Campuses: Betsy DeVos Is Doing It the Right Way

A presidential administration is more than just the person at the top.  It includes all of the people working for the president, too.  Sometimes a lower level appointee can do something really dumb or stupid.  The policy they are trying to implement might be bad or the way they are going about doing it is wrong.  And this reflects on the president.

On other hand, sometimes it is the president who is the one doing something stupid while it is his or her appointees who are doing things the right way.  Just last week, we saw a great example of this coming out of Washington. 

Something I talk about a lot in his blog is “proper procedure,” what others call “rule of law,” I call proper procedure.  (See, for example, here and here.) To me, one of the most important things government, and the people in government, can do is to follow proper procedures.  Getting policy right is important.  Following the proper procedures is more important.  Because making sure government follows proper procedures, i.e., rule of law, is what preserves our rights and protects us from abuse of governmental power, something which is ever more important as government does more and more.

The Real Reason School Choice and Vouchers Are Right

The Wall Street Journal wrote about “School Choice Deniers” in yesterday’s paper.¹  The editorial  notes that, while most studies of voucher programs show benefits for the students involved, opponents of the programs focus on those studies which show no benefits or that show voucher students actually doing worse.  Which is, of course, the problem with focusing the argument for vouchers on academic studies of how well students do.  You can always find some study somewhere that will support your argument.

What opponents of vouchers can’t find is a voucher program without a waiting list or a lottery program without more applicants than spots.  Because the best indication of how well voucher programs are doing is not some academic study; it’s the number of parents who sign their kids up.2  Because it is parents who know best what is good for their children. 

Disturbing New Evidence of Segregation in Oak Park

The Wednesday Journal of Oak Park and River Forest reported this week on new evidence of segregation in Oak Park, Illinois, and its neighbor to the east, the Austin neighborhood of Chicago:

“There are hundreds of different squirrel species worldwide, but basically two, fox (or Sciurus niger) and gray (or Sciurus caroliniensis) squirrels, call the Chicago area home. 

The fox squirrel, the largest tree squirrel in the country, is distinguished by its rust-colored belly and its tint that appears tanned orange.  The gray squirrel's belly is usually white and it typically sports a large, bushy tail. 

‘Austin is almost all fox squirrels, right up to the border in Oak Park, which mostly has gray squirrels,’ [Dan] Protess [, producer of WTTW digital series “Urban Nature,”] noted.

Gender Identity Rules. The Problem is That “I’ve Got a Pen, and I’ve Got a Phone” Goes Both Ways.

The left is up at arms over the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw President Obama’s administrative guidance requiring local school districts to let kids use the bathrooms, locker rooms, etc., corresponding to their gender identity, as opposed to their actual physical gender.  Of course, the left has only itself, and the Obama administration, to blame for the ability of the Trump administration to get rid of these so-called rules so easily.

The Trump administration couldn’t have done this if President Obama had gotten Congress to pass a law on the subject.  Or if it had even followed the federal Administrative Procedure Act and adopted formal regulations.  It would have taken more time and been more work, but if the Obama administration had done it that way, the Trump Administration would not have been able to drop the rules with the stroke of a pen.

The problem with President Obama’s “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone”-strategy is that his successor has a pen and a phone, too.

It’s Not Just Restrooms. It’s Showers, College Roommates – and the Rule of Law

On May 13, the Department of Education issued a “Dear Colleague” letter telling any school getting federal funds (i.e., just about all schools) that they must let students use the restroom that corresponds to their gender identity and not force them to use the restroom corresponding to their biological sex.  It’s not even good enough to have separate restrooms for students whose gender identity is different from their biological sex.  The students have the right to use the restroom of the gender they identify with choose, regardless of their biological sex.  Basically, the DOE has decided that “sex” for purposes of the provision of Title IX that bans sex discrimination, means a student’s gender identity and not his or her biologic sex.

When people have objected to these rules¹ or, as North Carolina did, passed a law trying to counter DOE’s interpretation, they have been ridiculed and threatened.  They are said to be forcing people to show their birth certificate to go to restroom. Businesses are threatening to take their business elsewhere.  In any case, it’s just restrooms, people say.  What’s the big deal?  Women’s restrooms are all stalls, anyway, and there are lots of stalls in men’s rooms.  Lighten up. 

High School Sports Teams in a Gender Identity Age

With all of the controversy about who should be using what bathrooms – and showers and locker rooms – in schools now that the Departments of Education and Justice tell us that a child’s gender identity trumps¹ their “sex assigned at birth,” the next question is sports teams.  But don’t worry.  DOE and DOJ have already provided a simple, clear answer to this question.  Here it is, courtesy of the “Dear Colleague letter" that DOE and DOJ sent out on May 13, 2016:

Athletics.  Title IX regulations permit a school to operate or sponsor sex-segregated athletics teams when selection for such teams is based upon competitive skill or when the activity involved is a contact sport.  A school may not, however, adopt or adhere to requirements that rely on overly broad generalizations or stereotypes about the differences between transgender students and other students of the same sex (i.e., the same gender identity) or others’ discomfort with transgender students.  Title IX does not prohibit age-appropriate, tailored requirements based on sound, current, and research-based medical knowledge about the impact of the students’ participation on the competitive fairness or physical safety of the sport.

I assume that answers any questions you might have.  Either that or it leaves you so confused that you have no idea what to ask, which is pretty much the same thing.
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¹ Perhaps “trumps” isn’t the right word here.

Colleges Come Up With Another Way to Get More Money Out of Students

Last week The Wall Street Journal reported on a new idea some colleges are promoting to reduce the amount of debt students have to incur for college: parent loans.  Instead of getting students to take on more debt, colleges are pushing parents to take out loans.  And the nifty thing about these “parent loans” is that they aren’t included in the scorecard that the Education Department created in 2013 to help students figure out how much debt they would incur at various colleges.¹

Obviously, if the problem is the affordability of college, more loans isn’t the answer.  The answer is better run colleges that charge lower tuition.  I have talked about this before.  (See “The High Cost of College Tuition” – Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.)  I am not going to repeat all of what I said there.  However, in Part 3, which was the longest, I suggested one solution to the rising tuition/debt problem:

Poor Kids in Louisiana Getting Kicked in the Bayou

Louisiana’s new governor, Democrat John Bel Edwards, is trying to cut back on school choice.  Instead of low-income parents with children in schools rated C, D, or F getting a scholarship under the Louisiana Scholarship Program to send their children to private or parochial schools, Governor Edwards wants to cover only low-income children in D and F-rated schools.  Governor Edwards also wants to make it harder to start public charter schools.  (Not surprisingly, Governor Edwards got a lot of support from the teachers unions in last year’s election.)

School choice opponents cite a recent study that shows Louisiana voucher students did worse academically than those who remained in public schools.  In its editorial criticizing the proposed changes, The Wall Street Journal cites a different report that shows the opposite, which shows the problem with relying on these kinds of numbers to prove your point on school choice: you can always find some study that supports your view.

Now It’s the Education Department: Who Is Managing Our Government?

Last week I wrote about the incredibly poor management of e-mail retention policies in the federal government.  After reviewing some of the policy and management inadequacies, and outright failures, I said it made you wonder who was running the federal government.  “Who is managing it?” I asked.

An article in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal on the federal government’s student loan program gives us the answer: Nobody.  They can’t be managing it because they don’t really know what is going on.  Here are some excerpts from the article:

“The Obama administration is unable to get basic details about student debt due to an archaic system of data collection on its $1.1 trillion student-loan portfolio, hampering the government’s ability to help distressed borrowers and protect taxpayers.

At issue is an Education Department computer system that contains data on most of the roughly 40 million Americans with student loans.  The system is unable to quickly produce basic details about student debt – including whether Americans are defaulting even after having their payments lowered.  It also lacks the ability to analyze data while making new loans, and officials say they don’t want to disrupt the flow of federal aid to current students.