Why Even People Who Think They Don’t Care About Pensions Should Care About Pensions
Across the country, state legislatures are reconvening. As the late, wonderful Molly Ivins noted, legislative politics can often provide the “finest form of free entertainment ever invented.”
At the top of many state legislatures’ agenda this year will be the issue of pensions. Although the warning signs have been there for years, legislatures tend to put off addressing issues until there’s a real crisis. As one of my legislative buddies used to say, “We legislators are outstanding at dealing with the flood in the basement, but we constantly put off addressing the leak in the roof.”
This year, there’s a crisis. Simply put, far too many state pension systems
Messaging Measures of Teacher Effectiveness
Last Friday, we saw again how messaging matters as much as substance with the release of two controversial reports. First, The New York Times published an article on a new National Bureau of Economic Research study on the long-term effects of high value-added teachers on their students. As I wrote last week, the results were exciting: in the most in-depth research of its kind, the authors demonstrate that highly effective elementary and middle school teachers, as measured by high value-added scores, have a long-lasting positive effect on their students’ lives beyond test scores, including lower rates of teenage pregnancy, higher rates of college attendance, and greater adult earnings.
But the reader’s takeaway was tucked halfway through the article. After a discussion on the costs of keeping a minimally effective teacher, one of the authors, John N. Friedman, remarks, “the message is to fire people
