Teachers prefer smaller classes to greater pay

May 17, 2012

Regular readers of my articles will know that on most issues I tend to hedge my bets. Even my catchphrase, ‘I may be wrong but …’, indicates an instinctive desire to balance the arguments. But on this week’s news that our government on average will increase school class sizes to save money in order to pay fewer teachers more remuneration, I am unequivocal.

This is a bad policy that is short-sighted and textbook-based (as against real-world based), and will produce more problems than it tries to solve.

The theory (and that is a part of my problem – it’s formulated largely by people who sit in offices, write academic papers after studying statistics, and have little if any real classroom experience) is that class sizes have less effect on educational outcomes than quality of teachers.

That may be supported by some ways of analysing broad-brush data, but it doesn’t mean that there is a shred of validity in concluding that class sizes can get bigger if we just pay some teachers more. I’m 95% certain (sorry, hedging again!) that this equation does not work in policy setting or in practice, because it fails to take into account the human spirit as it reacts to classroom challenges and career options.

For the first five years of my working life, I was a secondary school teacher. I had a three-year degree and a one-year Diploma of Education. I chose that vocation during my senior high school days principally because I wanted to teach, wanted to play a part in making life good for the following generation. Sure, the money was good enough, but that was a secondary consideration, and looking back I would have done it even if paid a bit less.

I lasted five years (well, three fulfilling ones to be exact – I struggled in the final two). Gradually the job turned into being a classroom manager-cum-policeman. This affected my health and dulled my enthusiasm for the job.

I think I was quite a good teacher. The kids on average seemed to like me and I got pretty reasonable results from my senior classes. I took part in lots of extra-curricular activities, and at least until weariness began to take over, I put a lot of effort into preparing what I hoped would be interesting classes.

After a few years of huge and dedicated effort, I gave up because it was just too hard, with the large classes, to do good teaching while managing the kids who didn’t want to be there. And here’s the thing: if I had been paid another 20% in salary to stay on, I would have let it pass. It just wasn’t worth the stress and the effect it was having on the rest of my life. I had skills learned in my degree and had no trouble finding a new career that paid a similar amount but was far less wearying.

Another observation. The teachers at that first school were a mixed bunch. Some were career teachers who may have found difficulty doing some other jobs so they just stayed on doing their best but holding back enough for them to not be affected by the stress and workload. They had a way of teaching that got by, had pretty fixed classroom plans, and remained somewhat emotionally aloof. For them, the remuneration they got was probably as good as they would get anywhere because they were not top-notch in the creativity and passion stakes, so wouldn’t need to be diverted from looking for other jobs.

And there were other teachers who (as I had intended to do) immersed themselves into doing the best possible job for their students. The dedicated ones, who possibly unlike me had the energy and inner creativity to be excellent, interesting teachers who could stay the course. Had they been paid more due to their excellence, I’m sure they would have taken it gladly. But I doubt that any of them would have tried any harder as a result, because they were already doing great work. For them, pay was an important but secondary driver.

Now, according the our Education Minister and her department policy analysts, making a better education system is simply a matter of luring better teachers by offering more pay, but forgetting to explain the full offer: “We’ll offer you 15% more pay, but you’ll have to teach larger classes and spend even more time being the classroom policeman and doing paperwork.”

Some existing or prospective teachers may not mind larger classes, but most I suspect (based on my experiences) would not find that a particularly attractive proposition.

The sort of creative, passionate and energetic teachers we want are motivated generally by their love of what they are doing, not by being paid more (though a fair wage is important). And their main de-motivator is likely to be having to do more classroom policing as their class sizes increase. These people are the ones most likely to leave rather that sign up, because they have key personal skills that are suitable for other less stressful and more creative careers.

Conversely, the type of teacher who will do a better job just because they’re paid more may not be the type of teacher you actually need. Their passion may be more money-oriented than child-oriented. They may find it hard to get jobs elsewhere, so will do what they can to hang on as teachers. Hardly inspiring!

My firm conclusion is that if you want to attract quality teachers, don’t try paying them heaps more; just give them smaller classes to work with so they can spend more time educating and less time disciplining.

 

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Posted by David Armstrong

Targets are fine – but where are the plans and resources?

March 16, 2012

I should be elated. I should be punching the air like a golfer who’s made a hole-in-one. The government has set 10 targets for the public sector over the next three to five years, and they all look pretty damn good to me!

Goals like reducing the number of assaults on children, reducing criminal reoffending and increasing participation in early childhood education are what we all want, surely. And the government is stating publicly that it will be judged on these goals (although the five-year horizon takes it three years beyond the next election so there is a hunk of wriggle room).

So why does hearing and reading this news make me feel dejected and patronised? Because of the rider John Key added at the end of the announcement of the targets – that ministers and chief executives of the public service departments would be held accountable for achieving the targets.

All this in a series of moves that see funding cuts to government departments and laying off of public servants – the people you need to actually achieve the ambitious targets.

I doubt very much that if a target isn’t met, a minister will cop the blame. It will be passed down to the senior civil servants who will be blamed for not controlling or motivating their staff. CEOs will be sacked and further restructuring will take place, neither of which will actually achieve anything except make the prime minister and his government look like they’re doing something.

Achieving most if not all of the targets will need concrete plans and extra, well-aimed funding. How do you reduce the amount of crime, or the number of assaults on children? By putting in resources such as one-on-one social worker intervention within at-risk families. And resources like these need money.

Of course, what John Key and Steven Joyce and their friends are actually doing is framing the discussion on the size of the public service as an issue of how well they could be doing if they worked more efficiently, when in fact the real goal is a financial one – to cut funding and jobs in the public sector and thereby save money. That reality is negative and provocative, so they frame it in words that are more appealing – “we’re not trying to cut jobs and save money, we’re trying to see the public service operate more efficiently to achieve these targets”.

The Government can proclaim targets until the cows come home; without specific plans and the funded resources required to achieve them, they are merely a sideshow intended as a smokescreen to mislead an uncritical voting population.

Recently I made a submission to the Green Paper on Vulnerable Children. It was nice for the Government to ask us for our ideas and opinions on ways to reduce damage to children, but their invitation to submit came with an explicit, depressing condition – there will be no extra social welfare funds, so anything you suggest means funds coming from elsewhere. Again, great intentions, but no extra resources.

Or take the “reduce offending” target. How on earth can you do that without setting up rehabilitation and halfway-house programmes, which generally require lots of specialist staff and expensive resources?

So here’s the scenario we should expect. Take the target of “increasing the proportion of 18-year-olds with NCEA level 2 or its equivalent from 68% to 85%”.

1. Specific goals will be laid out by the education mullahs in Wellington to get better teachers, increase ‘efficiency’ by reducing the number of courses taught, or other Great Ideas.

2. Education practitioners and schools will point out that this can only be done without making huge class sizes if there is more funding and more and better trained teachers. The populace, encouraged by right-wing commentators, will say this is just the teachers’ unions exerting their power. The Ministry, which due to job cuts now has fewer people working on developing more professional development for teachers, says there is no money for teachers so just Do It.

3. In three or five years, statistics will suggest that the target has not been met. The politicians will work on massaging the stats hoping to make them look better, saying they don’t give the full picture or were based on faulty data or using changed baselines, and argue that it was the previous government’s fault anyway.

4. When this doesn’t quite work, they’ll say that the Department needs restructuring (“get rid of more back-office staff”) to achieve the results and plea for another term in office to prove they were on the right track. And sack a few CEOs – that always looks like strong government in the media.

 

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Posted by David Armstrong

Drawing the line – class sizes and land sales

February 3, 2012

Many policy decisions these days are not black and white but rather a matter of where you draw the line along a spectrum stretching between two ridiculous extremes. Two news items over the past week provide good examples.

Treasury has advised the NZ government that the public education system needs to save money and to achieve this it should increase class sizes, using some of the money saved to pay the best teachers more. It justifies this policy via some convenient research that, we’re told, shows class sizes are not a factor in determining educational outcomes, whereas outstanding teachers are.

Decisions on how big classes are and how much you pay teachers lie along a wide spectrum. At the extremes are (1) having one teacher for every student, and (2) having classes of perhaps 500 under the tutelage of one fantastically qualified, motivated and remunerated teacher. Both are ridiculous.

All teachers and, I suspect, most parents believe that a key aim of educational policy should be to reduce rather than increase class sizes. Most of us can relate to experiences of some teachers and children hopelessly trying to work effectively within classes of 30 or 40.

I suspect the research being quoted is actually saying: If you have some extra money to spend in education, you should look at paying teachers more (in order to motivate them to do a better job or retain the best ones) rather than reducing class sizes. That may well be true, and at least it’s arguable. But it’s not the same as saying that if you want to save money you should therefore increase class sizes first.

The real question now is: in order to save money, should we edge the numbers up to larger classes, in the hope that the fewer teachers required will do a better job just because they’re paid an extra $10,000 pa (or whatever)?

I doubt there are many teachers who would take on the extra stress and workload of larger classes just for the sake of some extra pay. Apart, that is, for those teachers who are only in it for the money. (Free-market people always assume that everyone is in everything just for the money.) The teachers I know, while being happy to be better remunerated, would rather have less classroom stress and administrative workload than more money. This new policy will not encourage them to stay on if it is the workload that is currently causing them to leave the profession.

In any case, I hope the government can resist the temptation to tinker with the public education system for money-saving purposes. Good education will always be one of the most critical elements of a sustainable, intelligent society.

So if class size increase is truly on the agenda, under the highly doubtful argument that class sizes don’t matter, then just think how big you could make classes before things fall apart. Forty? Fifty? One hundred? According to Treasury’s argument, there is no upper limit at which the theory no longer applies, which is of course ridiculous. So every effort should be made to nudge sizes lower whenever possible and certainly not allow a creep upward.

Drawing the line likewise is presenting problems on the issue of the sale of New Zealand land to non-Kiwis. While once upon a time this could have been a black-and-white issue – ie, before the first parcels of land were sold to offshore owners – it is now a grey matter of how much is too much.

We are told that only 1% of New Zealand’s land mass is now in foreign hands, but also that the proportion of productive land held by non-Kiwis is 7%. That latter figure does raise alarm bells.

I’ve put my opinion on farm and land sales as clearly as I can in this posting: “How New Zealand could be bought out … again”, and in this earlier one: “Dairy farm buy-up will lead to NZ’s second great colonisation”. I can also see and follow the arguments for welcoming overseas investment, although my sentiment remains on the side of ‘no more sales’.

So it’s a question of where do you draw the line. The two extremes are (1) sell absolutely no land to foreigners (sorry, too late), and (2) open up all sales to the top bidders, wherever in the world they live (still possible, if we allow it).

This line is constantly moving, but in one direction only – upward. As long as NZ remains a desirable place to live and retire to (a flattering thought), make money from or secure your future food supply from, buyers from wealthier countries will continue to take part in (and usually win) land purchases.

And every parcel of land that goes to an overseas owner raises that percentage of our country that we no longer own, up from 7%. At what point does this reach alarm point, when our attitude will have to change or we must accept we are in the same position that Maori have found themselves – tenants and labourers in a country we no longer own? Ten percent? Twenty? Fifty?

This argument needs more long-term vision rather than mainly a way to maintain sovereign and private cashflow.

 

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Posted by David Armstrong

Evolution and the creation of the world

January 24, 2011

Over the holidays I read a very interesting book that had been on my list for much of last year: “The Greatest Show on Earth” by Richard Dawkins.

For me, a slow reader, this was quite a feat, but made easier by the quality of the writing and fascination of the subject matter. At 437 pages of fairly technical but slowly developed material, it contrasted starkly with the 500-page silliness of a Dan Brown thriller (my prior diversion), but I know which one I’ll remember within 3 months!

I’ve always been happy with the assertion that all living and long-dead inhabitants of planet earth are/were the product of evolution. The alternative – that the world was made by a designer/creator, possibly over a six-day period back 10,000 years ago – simply made no common sense to me. I’ve been aware of quite a number of clear evidential facts that show evolution to be the only sensible explanation for what I see and experience around me. I’ve even come up with a few observations of my own that have convinced me.

But what I’ve never really seen before is the sheer volume of factual evidence and rational argument for evolution as a fact presented in this book. Together they show that all alternatives to evolution must be simply seen as nonsense to anyone other than the person who simply must believe in creationism in order for their belief system – and their whole world and reason for being – to remain intact; the people for whom if the bible was not literally true in all respects, there would be no point on living.

First up, I just love the book’s title, and the way the writing supports it. There can be no doubt that Dawkins is a passionate man – it shines through the prose. And his passion is not that of a religious nut, but of a person who is forever in awe of the world around him, and of the sheer common sense and beautiful integrity and continuity of life in all its forms. Viewed as a participant, the process of life on earth does indeed offer the greatest show on earth.

Next, one can only be impressed by Dawkins’ depth and breadth of knowledge and understanding of science, and natural science in particular. He’s more than just ‘done his homework’; he has gained command of a wide range of specialised fields within natural science. And either he is also learned in other fields such as radioactivity and plate tectonics or he has taken the trouble to consult and learn from experts in those fields.

Dawkins apparently has a reputation for being arrogant, and occasionally he admits to losing patience with what he aptly calls history deniers, but the overriding sense I got was of a person who is truly in awe of the beauty and mystery of life, who always wants to find out more rather than to justify the point of a held opinion. He often admits to things that as yet do not quite add up, or where the evidence is as yet insufficient to prove a point which otherwise looks promising.

The book could have been half its length and still been convincing. Dawkins often repeats the main arguments after adding yet another item that builds the argument, just to ensure that we’re keeping our eyes on the overall theme and not just the biological facts and figures. I found that towards the end I had already seen way more evidence than I needed in order to be convinced that evolution is the only sensible explanation, and yet more similar evidence was becoming unnecessary. (That’s probably me, the slow reader, tiring.)

I have scientific training (mainly in the physical sciences) so I found the scientific facts and explanations very strong and cogent. Some readers may be less inclined to try to follow some of the detailed technical bits, but they should nevertheless be able to understand the overall philosophy.

I come away even more assured that evolution is a fact, not just a 50/50 theory to rank in believability beside creationism. Now I have (if only I can remember them all) a truckload of scientific evidence to support it, and an even larger truckload of everyday observations that show creationism as a belief system is absurdly improbable.

If you want to explore the creationism versus evolution debate, this book is a must in order to see all the evidence, not just the bits that fit the belief systems of each side. And it’s important, especially when you consider that – as Dawkins fears – a huge and powerful number of Americans become more fundamentalist and even radical in their views and seek to impose them in US schools.

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Posted by David Armstrong

Key’s petulant comment on teachers a disgrace

March 13, 2010

John Key slipped at least a couple of pegs in my rating of him this week with reported comments about teachers’ attitudes to national standards. John’s been scoring reasonably well with me over the past year, with a few exceptions, but this issue is leaving me somewhat disgusted with his arrogance and cynical use of guilt tripping.

I’m basing this purely from an article in the Christchurch Press, March 12th, page A3, headlined “Key prefers to ‘work with’ rebel schools”. After noting that Key was refering to a growing number of schools throughout NZ refusing to implement the standards until they were trialled and teachers had received training, here’s what the reporter wrote:

Asked if rebellious boards of trustees would be sacked, Key said he preferred to work with the schools in the first instance.

“In the end, if they don’t, then those schools need to answer to the parents of New Zealand why they are prepared to allow one in five young New Zealanders to leave school without adequate literacy and numeracy skills.”

How pathetic! If you haven’t got a decent argument to support your policy, then you may as well go for the old ‘guilt trip’ tactic.

His response disgusts me on two fronts:

1. It shows extreme arrogance by assuming that I’m too stupid to understand any real logic. This is just a nonsense statement using an assumed statistic to overbear on any rational view of nuances and real-world teaching practice.

2. Worse, it’s using the guilt trip method by saying that anything that differs from his point of view will produce disastrous results for which the dissenters will bear ultimate blame and shame.

It’s like “if you don’t spray the weeds in your garden with the chemicals we the town council deem necessary, then you will have to explain to the everyone why the town turns into a dump and unmanageable jungle, and we’ll all blame you”.

Most teachers are resisting this forced adoption of Key/English/Tolley policy because they have the best interest of children at heart. It is the government, far more so than the teachers’ unions, that have a largely political agenda here.

Using irrational arguments to encourage parents to blame and pressure teachers is about as low as you can go. This policy is unwinding, and given this latest cynical tweak by John Key, it deserves to.

And if this is what Key means by “working with teachers”, then I would say it’s more like “a working over of teachers”. The word “with” is pure spin.

4 Comments | Education, Politics | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by David Armstrong

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