Money Can't Buy You Learnin'

[XLFD]

Custer (Mason County Eastern) Excels at Education Efficiency Award Once Again

The Mlive Feb 3 article begins:  "When you're a teenager living deep in the woods of the Manistee National Forest or in tiny outposts like Branch, Walhalla or Free Soil, you don't have much interaction with kids your age, except, of course, at school." 

Lynn Moore's article then continues in telling us that Mason County Eastern (MCE), serving the above areas from Custer, whose village population amounts to less than MCE's school enrollment, has once again received a great score in an evaluation that factors in socioeconomic backgrounds.  You may have heard of that original accomplishment in this 2013 Ludington Torch article along with other favorable indicators for this small town. 

MCE has been recognized before -- with previous Academic State Champ awards, and by U.S. News and World Report and The Mackinac Center.  Mason County Eastern Superintendent Paul Shoup attributes a large part of the success to the tight-knit caring atmosphere that can be nurtured in small school districts.  "We don't just know the kids' names," Shoup said. "We know who their families are."

Though the school population is small, the district is huge, geographically speaking.  Students at the 178-square-mile Mason County Eastern district can spend up to 1½ hours on a school bus to get to school.  "We are not made up of a town," Shoup said. "We're made up of a bunch of little ones."

Students come together from the far reaches of the wilderness and from disparate living situations. In most cases, they don't know specifics about each other's home lives -- just that they all belong to the same school. And that helps erase the stereotypes and divisions that poverty creates.  "Socioeconomic differences here don't exist -- in their minds it doesn't exist," Shoup said of students. "It's not 'I have this, you don't.' Nobody feels entitled". 

MCE is definitely an overachiever, but the two other school districts in Mason County are also ranked towards the head of the class, with almost 80% of the schools falling behind MCC schools, almost 70% falling behind Ludington Area Schools.  In the neighborhood, Baldwin Schools ranked 36th overall and landed in the top ten (at #10) for high schools.  The Mlive article explicitly looks behind the reasons why both Custer and Baldwin are so successful with limited resources, which appears to be correlated with the involvement of those districts.

Illustrating Inefficiency:  the Camden Experiment

Reason Magazine reports that the recent history of Camden, New Jersey, which is the poorest small city in America, provides a case study of the tragic ineffectiveness of government programs at ameliorating poverty. State and federal taxpayers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on various redevelopment programs in Camden over the years, but the money never ended up where it was supposed to and the promised revival of this fallen manufacturing town never happened.

By far, the largest initiative to combat poverty with government largess has been directed at Camden's public schools. New Jersey spends about 60% more on education per pupil than the national average according to 2012 census figures, or about $19,000 in 2013. In Camden, per pupil spending was more than $25,000 in 2013, making it one of the highest spending districts in the nation.

But all that extra money hasn’t changed the fact that Camden’s public schools are among in the worst in the nation, notorious for their abysmal test scores, the frequent occurrence of in-school violence, dilapidated buildings, and an on-time graduation rate of just 61 percent.

This is the story of how Camden became one of the nation’s best funded and worst performing school districts, which is the first in a three-part video series on Camden public school system.

Surely in an ordered world, a school like MCE which pays just over $10,000 per pupil in a wide-ranging district cannot claim a lot better results from their students than one that is centralized and spending 250% as much per student.  Or maybe correlating the amount of money we spend on education with the amount of learning that goes on is the wrong way to approach the equation. 

Illustrating Inefficiency:  Teaching Unions

In 1937 private-sector union second generation champion, Franklin Delano Roosevelt clearly came out against public service unions:   "Meticulous attention, should be paid to the special relations and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the Government....The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service."

The reason behind his thinking? F.D.R. believed that a "strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to obstruct the operations of government until their demands are satisfied. Such action looking toward the paralysis of government by those who have sworn to support it is unthinkable and intolerable."

Roosevelt was hardly alone in holding these views, even among the champions of organized labor. Indeed, the first president of the AFL-CIO, George Meany, believed it was "impossible to bargain collectively with the government." 

In 1943, a New York Supreme Court judge held: 

"To tolerate or recognize any combination of civil service employees of the government as a labor organization or union is not only incompatible with the spirit of democracy, but inconsistent with every principle upon which our government is founded. Nothing is more dangerous to public welfare than to admit that hired servants of the State can dictate to the government the hours, the wages and conditions under which they will carry on essential services vital to the welfare, safety, and security of the citizen. To admit as true that government employees have power to halt or check the functions of government unless their demands are satisfied, is to transfer to them all legislative, executive and judicial power. Nothing would be more ridiculous."

All very logical then, even in 1968 long-time New York Times labor reporter A. H. Raskin wrote: "The community cannot tolerate the notion that it is defenseless at the hands of organized workers to whom it has entrusted responsibility for essential services."  Collectively bargained work rules could alter what public servants did day to day in ways not condoned by either elected officials or the voting public.

When it comes to advancing their interests, public-sector unions have significant advantages over traditional unions. For one thing, using the political process, they can exert far greater influence over their members' employers  than private-sector unions can. Through their extensive political activity, these government-workers' unions help elect the very politicians who will act as "management" in their contract negotiations — in effect handpicking those who will sit across the bargaining table from them, in a way that workers in a private corporation cannot. Such power led Victor Gotbaum, the leader of District Council 37 of the AFSCME in New York City, to brag way back in 1975: "We have the ability, in a sense, to elect our own boss."

Public-sector unions distort the labor market, weaken public finances, and diminish the responsiveness of government and the quality of public services. Many of the concerns that initially led policymakers to oppose collective bargaining by government employees have, over the years, been vindicated.

How do these unions affect the situations in our schools and even in other areas of our local government?   Teacher's unions become highly political almost to the point that they are untouchable by officials or the public, meanwhile they may target any additional money that goes into the school systems and pad their own job security and retirement by tenure and retirement/pension mandates.  Witness how they humiliate and ruin the credit rating of teachers that try to get out of the union now that they can in Michigan.

When money devoted to education gets used for politically-engaged unions, salary increases and benefits, there isn't any advances made in learning.  In fact, the education process suffers.  Teachers deserve a fair wage, but let's be as reasonable as FDR and have the voters and the local school board make the rules, and not distant union bosses whose aims are not in the realm of public education of kids. 

[Willy]

Another excellent article X. Congratualtions to local schools especially MCE.

When talking about bad school districts the lowest of lows comes to mind. Of course I'm referring to Detroit. One of Detroit's downfall were the unions which made the cost of manufacturing so high that many businesses not only left Detroit, the State but left the Country as well. Teachers unions as well did little to help curb the cost of education in Detroit. Of course Detroit is an extreme example but it does show what could happen to the rest of us if we follow their example.

[XLFD]

In looking at the various testimonials by school administrators and teachers explaining why they thought their schools were deemed successful by the Bridge evaluation, you just never heard them attributing it to having a strong union presence, high fringe benefit amounts, or unbelievably generous retirement and pension plans.

Thanks for the video and the positive testimonial.