The Time Is Now! BONNIE CUNARD MARGOLIN

BONNIE CUNARD MARGOLIN - Home:



BONNIE CUNARD MARGOLIN

BONNIE CUNARD MARGOLIN - Home:

The Time Is Now!

Vote Bonnie 

Cunard Margolin 

for 

TALC President !

The Time is Now !

Learn More

I am running for President of the Teachers Association of Lee County because I believe we are in a critical time for our public schools. The time is NOW to stand up, activate and organize. The time is NOW to revitalize our union and stand up to these relentless attacks on public education. The time is NOW to recognize that our teachers’ union is an important force in our nation and we must work together to improve our schools, defend our communities, and protect our democracy!

I am ready to be your next TALC President. I have heard your concerns about class size and excessive testing. I have heard your concerns about family health insurance costs and inadequate pay raises. I have heard your concerns about the lack of curricular materials and training. I have even heard the concerns of our coaches, who have waited too long for a fair supplement. Yes, I have heard you. For years, I have been listening and  fighting on behalf of teachers to restore sanity to our schools. It is time to return that energy to our union. As your TALC President, I will stand up as a loud, strong voice for our teachers, fighting on the side of educators. I will work to empower Lee County teachers to regain their voice in our community. 

The Time Is NOW ! 

BONNIE CUNARD MARGOLIN - Home:

"Bonnie Cunard Margolin, a teacher and parent in the district, told board members that accountability is important, but should not be based on what she sees as excessive testing. "I think we all recognize that this current trend to test, test and retest our students by bubble, by essay, over and over each year, year after year, is not the answer," she said during the board meeting." 
~ Naples News, June 11, 2012

BONNIE CUNARD MARGOLIN - Home:

Becoming Prisoners in This Education War | The War Report on Public Education

Becoming Prisoners in This Education War | The War Report on Public Education:

MARCH 1, 2015 THE WAR REPORT ON PUBLIC EDUCATION

Becoming Prisoners in This Education War

“Because all of us might already be in the way of becoming prisoners in this education war.”

 By: Lourdes Perez Ramirez

Two nights ago, at an Orlando middle school’s “FSA parents’night,” I was accompanying Spanish-speaking parents. A teacher, the principal and even a counselor did a great job explaning “the beauty of FSA” and the computer test coming up next week.

The three professionals in front of us were being exceptionally good soldiers doing a good job making sure neither those they are serving (the students) and themselves (and their families) do not get killed in this education war.

Knowing the harm that these tests, and the FSA EOC do to students, teachers, principals, everybody at a school, and even the school itself, I couldn’t help to feel for all of them, but specifically last night for the teachers and the principal.

I asked several questions to which they answered knowing (I read their body language) none of them are good for students, teachers/princpal, and the school, but like good soldiers, they were following instructions to the “t.” They were, like any other human in their situation would have done, defending their post. And defend it they did with care and professionalism and for a particular care for the children they knew were not really being served by the abusive accountability system.

When they presented the “State mandated, locally developed EOC” tests as not of the high-stake test kind, I raised my hand once again. “They are high-stake tests because the purpose of the EOC are specifically to evaluate teachers (as per a PPT slide confirmed),” I said. Their eyes told me the whole story. But they could do nothing about it. Their lives, their families’, their bread and butter are in stake here too as much as our children’s future is.

They are soldiers alright. But like the children–and parents– they are also prisoners of war following instructions they would rather not do. Their stoicism showed exactly that: Becoming Prisoners in This Education War | The War Report on Public Education:

School Prepares to Terminate Teacher for Facebook Post Opposing Common Core Curriculum | Restoring Liberty

School Prepares to Terminate Teacher for Facebook Post Opposing Common Core Curriculum | Restoring Liberty:



School Prepares to Terminate Teacher for Facebook Post Opposing Common Core Curriculum



Deborah Vailes has been teaching junior high in Louisiana’s Rapides Parish School District for the past twelve years. She is passionate about helping special needs children become better readers. Little did she know that an early morning post critical of the Common Core Curriculum on her personal Facebook page would lead to disciplinary action, suppression of her right to free speech, retaliation from school officials, and possible loss of her job.

As a result, the Thomas More Law Center (TMLC), a national public interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, [yesterday] morning, filed a lawsuit in the Federal District Court for the Western District of Louisiana on behalf of Deborah Vailes against the Rapides Parish School District and the principal of Pineville Junior High School, Dr. Dana Nolan.

Richard Thompson, President and Chief Counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, commenting on the reason for the lawsuit, stated: “Public school students have become ‘guinea pigs’ in a vast untested educational experiment dictated by the Federal Government. Our Constitution never envisioned federal control over education. But sadly, most states have voluntarily abdicated their responsibilities over education for federal dollars. Their decision will prove disastrous, not only for public education, but also for the freedom guaranteed by our Constitution. Debbie Vailes’ uncompromising love for her students prompted her to speak out. And her voice should not be silenced by a tyrannical principal.”

Facts

On September 23, 2014, at approximately by 5:58 AM, Debora Vailes re-posted on her personal Facebook page a photograph of a little girl crying because of the shortcomings of Common Core. Later that day, her school principal, Dr. Dana Nolan, after discovering the post, gave Deborah Vailes her first written reprimand and ordered her to refrain from expressing any opinion about public education on social media and to remove her anti-Common Core post from the social media site – ASAP. (The school district refers to written reprimands as a “documented conferences.”) Dr. Nolan further informed Deborah that she could not to discuss her opinion in public – on any social media or any public forum.

Two days later, Dr. Nolan held a mandatory faculty meeting of the Pineville Junior high school. She informed the faculty at the meeting that Deborah Vailes was reprimanded due to posting a negative opinion about Common Core on Facebook. Dr. Nolan warned the faculty not to share their personal opinions or speak-out in any way. After hearing about the Principal’s gag order, Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, issued an executive order that teachers were to be afforded the same constitutional guarantees afforded to all citizens. However, his executive order did not deter the Defendant, Dr. Nolan, from continuing her vendetta against Deborah Vailes.

Before Vailes posted her Facebook criticism of Common Core, she had a stellar personnel record; she had never received a reprimand. Since her public criticism, she has received three additional written reprimands. School administrators are now

Read more: http://joemiller.us/2015/02/school-prepares-to-terminate-teacher-for-facebook-post-opposing-common-core-curriculum/#ixzz3TAV5u1Jl
Read more at http://joemiller.us/2015/02/school-prepares-to-terminate-teacher-for-facebook-post-opposing-common-core-curriculum/#23JxxL0l3edt8c71.99

Make School a Democracy - NYTimes.com

Make School a Democracy - NYTimes.com:



Make School a Democracy

ARMENIA, Colombia — IN a one-room rural schoolhouse an hour’s drive from this city in a coffee-growing region of Colombia, 30 youngsters ages 5 to 13 are engrossed in study. In most schools, students sit in rows facing the teacher, who does most of the talking. But these students are grouped at tables, each corresponding to a grade level. The hum of conversation fills the room. After tackling an assignment on their own, the students review one another’s work. If a child is struggling, the others pitch in to help.

During my visit to one of these schools, second graders were writing short stories, and fifth graders were testing whether the color of light affects its brightness when seen through water. The teacher moved among the groups, leaning over shoulders, reading and commenting on their work. In one corner of the classroom were items, brought to school by the kids, that will be incorporated in their lessons. The students have planted a sizable garden, and the vegetables and fruits they raise are used as staples at mealtime, often prepared according to their parents’ recipes.

During the past four decades, this school — and thousands like it — have adopted what’s called the Escuela Nueva (New School) model.

A 1992 World Bank evaluation of Colombia’s schools concluded that poor youngsters educated this way — learning by doing, rather than being endlessly drilled for national exams — generally outperformed their better-off peers in traditional schools. A 2000 Unesco study found that, next to Cuba, Colombia did the best job in Latin America of educating children in rural areas, where most of the schools operate with this model. It was also the only country in which rural schools generally outperformed urban schools. Poor children in developing nations often drop out after a year or two because their families don’t see the relevance of the education they’re getting. These youngsters are more likely to stay in school than their counterparts in conventional schools.

Escuela Nueva is almost unknown in the United States, even though it has won numerous international awards — the hyper-energetic Vicky Colbert, who founded the program in 1975 and still runs it, received the first Clinton Global Citizenship prize. That should change, for this is how children — not just poor children — ought to be educated.

It’s boilerplate economics that universal education is the path to prosperity for developing nations; the Nobel-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz calls it “the global public good.” But while the number of primary school-age children not in class worldwide fell to 57.2 million in 2012 from 99.8 million in 2000, the quality of their education is another matter. Escuela Nueva offers a widely adaptable model, as Unesco has described it.

“Unesco reported the successful diffusion of Escuela Nueva in 20,000 Colombian schools with poorly trained teachers,” Ernesto Schiefelbein, rector of the Autonomous University of Chile, who has evaluated the program, told me. “As far as I know, there is no other example of massive educational improvement in a democratic developing country.”

Another Nobel-winning economist, Amartya Sen, posits that political repression impedes economic growth — that prosperity requires that social and economic well-being be tethered to democratic values. Escuela Nueva turns the schoolhouse into a laboratory for democracy. Rather than being run as a mini-dictatorship, with the principal as its unquestioned leader, the school operates as a self-governing community, where teachers, Make School a Democracy - NYTimes.com:

As Common Core Testing Is Ushered In, Parents and Students Opt Out - NYTimes.com

As Common Core Testing Is Ushered In, Parents and Students Opt Out - NYTimes.com:

As Common Core Testing Is Ushered In, Parents and Students Opt Out

Parents Can Opt Out United Opt Out National

Click Here to go to United Opt Out National: 

Click Here to go to the Website- United Opt Out Team

 So the new batch of tests in New Jersey, created by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, is faced with an unusually diverse list of enemies.

“There are forces united against it on the left side of the aisle and the right of the aisle,” said James Crisfield, a former superintendent of the school district in Millburn, N.J. “We’re also talking about things that are happening to one’s child. You mix that all up into a caldron and it does create some really high levels of interest, high levels of passion — and, shall we say, enthusiasm.”

New Jersey’s teachers’ union, the New Jersey Education Association, is in the midst of a six-week run of advertisements against the partnership, which features an emotional parent describing his overworked first grader, and another talking about the elimination of science classes to make way for test preparation. (Testing begins in third grade, but the union contends that schools begin grooming students for it earlier.)

Teachers in the state who instruct classes to be tested will see 10 percent of their evaluation tied to this year’s exams. That is down from the 30 percent the state initially announced. The figure will be re-evaluated before a decision is made on next year’s percentage.

Steve Wollmer, director of communications for the union, said the group does not oppose teacher evaluations. The union was motivated to get involved, he said, because true teaching is being replaced by test As Common Core Testing Is Ushered In, Parents and Students Opt Out - NYTimes.com:

Marie Corfield: Chris Christie: Governor Wack-A-Mole

Marie Corfield: Chris Christie: Governor Wack-A-Mole:

Chris Christie: Governor Wack-A-Mole

Gov. Christie wants America to believe he tells it like it is. He wants us to believe he's not afraid to stand up for his beliefs, and he says his record proves it. Last week at CPAC Christie sat down with conservative commentator, Laura Ingrahm for a Q&A on a range of topics, and let America know that:

"I care about fighting the fights that are worth fighting"

Except that based on his record, the only fights he deems worthy of fighting are againsthis constituents, not for them. While other states in the region have recovered from the Great Recession, NJ is still in a post-recession shambles, with little to show for it but 7 credit downgrades and a second-to-last rank for job growth. Yea, I'm lovin' that 'Jersey Comeback'!

But boy-oh-boy, are his town hall meetings taxpayer-funded campaign stops a huge success! In case you couldn't get to one (because they're held during the day when most folks are at work) he's even got a You Tube channel with 7 pages of these things. (Full disclosure: I make an appearance in one of them).

Whether it's having no regrets about calling a Navy Seal an idiot, ("He's an idiot. I don't have any regret about it at all"), or telling a Sandy volunteer to "sit down and shut up", no other elected official has spoken to and about constituents with such bullying disrespect, and still managed to get re-elected. At first, many found his style refreshing. After four years of Gov. Jon Corzine, who was long on cash and short on warmth and political savvy, Republicans voted the party line and Democrats voted the party machine in 2009 to elect their very own Tony Soprano—telling it like it is and taking no prisoners! And despite his horrendous job at restoring NJ's economy after the Great Recession, they would do so again in 2013.

But that act is all Christie has to run on, and it's getting old. Personally, I like my 'Rude Jersey' on TV, not in the statehouse. Tony, Snookie and the rest represent the very best of the worst Jersey stereotypes. And they have about as much chance of getting elected to public office as any musician has of beating Bruce Springsteen in a Garden State Marie Corfield: Chris Christie: Governor Wack-A-Mole:

Lily Eskelsen Garcia: Congress to take on rewrite of No Child Left Behind | MSNBC

Congress to take on rewrite of No Child Left Behind | MSNBC:



Congress to take on rewrite of No Child Left Behind | MSNBC

Congress is gearing up for yet another battle over No Child Left Behind, but what are they planning to do and will testing remain at the law's core? Lily Eskelsen Garcia, President of the National Education Association, joins to discuss. Duration: 7:37

Rahm's Accomplishments - #Chuy2015

Rahm's Accomplishments - Home:

RAHM'S ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Four years of Rahm's Achievements.

 Chicago likes a tough mayor that gets things done.  Let's take a look at what Mayor Rahm Emanuel has done in his short tenure.  From finance and crime, to education and jobs, Rahm has touched every aspect of our city in less than four years.

Finance & Ethics

• Of Emanuel’s top 106 contributors, 60 of them received favors from the city. 
• Evaded his own, much-trumpeted executive order banning campaign contributions from city contractors by shoveling $38 million in city resources to his donors via “direct voucher payments,” a sketchy loophole that lets businesses get city money without bids or contracts — without, in fact, any way of documenting what the money is used for.
• Disregarded ethics and laws and accepted more than $600,000 worth of donations from executives at firms managing Chicago pension money.
• Doesn’t attempt to recoup more than $100 million from issuance of $1 billion in risky auction-rate debt paired with interest-rate swaps…despite a federal rule that requires banks to "deal fairly" with governments when they underwrite government bonds. 
• Established regulations favorable to Uber, a company Rahm’s brother stands to make a billions dollars from.
• Pays for preschool using dubious scheme in which investors could double their money and cost the city dearly.
• Missed the only opportunity to fight the parking meter deal, and instead locked the contract in place for the next 75 years.
• Chicago’s bond rating dropped to near junk-bond levels.
• Appointed board member Deborah Quazzo, who invests in companies that privatize school functions tripled their business with the Chicago Public Schools while she was on the board.
• Cut pensions of middle-class workers and diverted funds to enrich some of his biggest campaign contributors.
• Fails to reform disability programs, costing taxpayers millions.
• Facing budget crisis, spends $2.7 million on armor for horses for a NATO summit.
• Outsourced CTA fare card, despite having one that worked fine, to a company for $454 million, which then added new fees that bilk the poor on a grand scale.
• Top donor bought stock in Marriott immediately before City awarded company huge contract.

• Chicago has slower population increase than other major cities, despite claims that families are returning.
• Gave $55 million in public tax dollars to DePaul, a private university.
• Gave $5.2 million in public tax dollars to a company owned by the Pritzkers, one of the wealthiest families in the world.
• Hikes property taxes $750 million dollars.
• Steals credit for closing coal plant.
• Steals credit for minimum wage hike.

Education

• Closed 54 schools yet has $1.71 billion in special accounts often used to finance corporate subsidies.
• Fails to hold charter schools accountable in the same way neighborhood schools are held accountable.
• Significant decline in number of African-American teachers. 
• CPS has lowest enrollment since 1970.
• CPS can’t find 434 students since closing 54 schools.
• Closed 54 schools for underutilization yet continues to open new charter schools.
• CPS altered charter school test data.
• CPS sued for discriminating against pregnant teachers.
• CPS was able to juke the statistics on high school graduation rates — which supposedly went from 70 to 85 percent over the last decade — by contracting with for-profit online education companies that demanded very little work from students, while still allowing them to receive diplomas from the last school they attended.
• Argues against elected school board to prevent politics in education; uses high-stakes test to gain votes before election.
• Interrogated young children without parental consent.
• Outsourced custodian and food services to Aramark; principals, teachers, and parents complain about the increased filth in schools due to the poor services, in part because they laid of hundreds of janitors.
• First teacher strike in 25 years.
• Costs of school closings triple the amount estimated, millions more than promised, leads to vandalized and unsecure buildings.

Crime & Safety

• Crime statistics altered to hide murder rate, including a woman who was bound and gagged declared dead not from murder but by “unspecified means”.
• Chicago Murder rates increase 50%.  
• Number of shootings increases.
• Spends $95 million in police overtime.
• Arrest rate for marijuana hasn’t changed, despite decriminalization, costing City millions and disproportionally affect Hispanic and African-American youth. 
• CPD Homan Square “black site” where arrestees are locked up for days at a time without access to lawyers, including a 15 year old, and a 44 year old that died in custody.
• The administration insisted the red-light cameras led to a 47 percent decline in “T-bone” crashes, when the true number was 15 percent — and they also caused a corresponding 22 percent increase in rear-end collisions. 
• Yellow light times too short causing more rear-end collisions and more red-light tickets.
• Claims red light cameras are for safety; personal motorcade routinely runs red lights.
• Closes half the mental health clinics in the city.

Employment & Poverty

• Chicago’s African-American unemployment rate higher than other large cities.
• As of 2013, black unemployment was hovering around 25 percent, not significantly different than it was when the mayor took office. Poverty, too, has barely budged.
• Youth unemployment, especially for African-American youth, higher than other cities.
• Job growth trails the suburbs by nearly half.
• Increased regressive taxes, which disproportionately affects the poor; Chicago now has the 4th highest regressive taxes in the nation.
• Dismisses seriousness of racial segregation, as if it's a good thing.

Does Rahm deserve another four years?

Click here to go to Jesus "Chuy" Garcia for Mayor of Chicago  Website

#Chuy2015

Big Education Ape: Chicago Inc. Rahm Emanuel Dances for Corporate Money - Vote for Chuy!!! http://bit.ly/1AaLZT1

Contentious teacher-related policies moving from legislatures to the courts - The Washington Post

Contentious teacher-related policies moving from legislatures to the courts - The Washington Post:



Contentious teacher-related policies moving from legislatures to the courts

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten expects to see more challenges to “value-added” teacher evaluations. (Damian Dovarganes/Associated Press)

 Opponents of the nation’s teacher unions won a landmark victory last year in a California lawsuit that challenged tenure protections, a case that became the beginning of a national effort to roll back teacher tenure laws in state courts.

Now the largest unions in the country are using a similar tactic, as teachers turn to the courts to fight for one of their most pressing interests: An end to test-based evaluations they say are arbitrary and unfair.

The lawsuits show that two of the nation’s most contentious battles over the teaching profession are shifting from legislative arenas to the courts, giving judges the chance to make decisions that could shape the way teachers are hired, fired and paid. Union critics and wealthy advocates have hired lawyers to take on the teachers; the teachers, through their unions, have gone before the bench to go after state officials and their policies.

The latest foray into the courtroom began Feb. 13, when New Mexico teachers sued state officials over an evaluation system that relies heavily on student test scores. Tennessee teachers also sued their state officials this month, arguing that most teachers’ evaluations are based on the test scores of students they don’t actually teach. Florida teachers brought a similar lawsuit last year; it is now in federal appeals court, while other complaints are pending in Texas and New York.

Union officials say they expect to see more lawsuits in the future, especially over evaluations that use complex and controversial algorithms — called “value-added models” — to figure out how much of a student’s learning can be attributed to their teacher.

“There will be more challenges because things are not being seen as credible and fair,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which joined the New Mexico lawsuit. “What we’ve gotten to is this routinized, mechanized displacement of human judgment, and that’s what I think you’re seeing — that is the underlying issue that is the root of this agita about evaluations.”

“It’s ridiculous that we have to go to the courts,” Weingarten said. But she said that New Mexico education officials and other supporters of test-based evaluation are deaf to evidence that the evaluations aren’t working.

Critics say that the unions are exaggerating both the problems associated with value-added scores and the weight that they carry in evaluations. Value-added scores account for up to 50 percent of evaluations in some states, and a smaller portion in many others, with the remainder of teachers’ ratings comprised of classroom observations and other measures.

“Essentially teacher unions don’t want any evaluation,” said Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institute and a supporter of value-added measures. “That’s what they’re angling for.”

Until recently, teachers’ evaluations in many jurisdictions were based almost exclusively on principals’ observations, and the vast majority of teachers were rated satisfactory. But the Obama administration made test-based evaluations a requirement for any state that wanted to compete forRace to the Top grant money or win relief from the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Now 35 states require student achievement to be a significant factor in teacher evaluations, and many school districts are using those evaluations to make decisions about teacher bonuses and as a basis for firings.

Most states are using the value-added models to determine how much Contentious teacher-related policies moving from legislatures to the courts - The Washington Post:

Teacher Labor Supply - Forbes

Teacher Labor Supply - Forbes:



Teacher Labor Supply

I spent this morning arguing with my internet friend Freddie DeBoer about education reform, and I thought it would be useful to elevate some parts of our disagreement to a blog post. His argument is: education reformers want to make teaching a worse job, so then how are we going to get more teachers? He argues we already face teacher shortages, and also don’t we care at all about teacher quality? Let me start by giving Freddie some credit where I can. He’s right that the labor supply impacts of education reform aren’t thought about enough by many education reformers. This is something I’ve written about before. However, he’s wrong to think that the status quo provides anywhere close to the best system that balances benefits of reforms against labor supply issues.

There are several ways to improve the labor supply of teachers while making reforms that many teachers would nevertheless oppose. First, is pension reform. Right now pensions are skewed so that teachers receive very few benefits until later in their careers, and then they receive massive benefits for a few years, and then they are strongly incentivized to retire early. A recent paper by Costrell and Podgursky reviews teacher pension rules in several states and provides some useful examples of how this works. For example, a teacher in Ohio who retires at age 55 receives a pension that is worth 55% of their total compensation over her career. In contrast, a teacher who retires at age 30 receives a pension worth 7% of their total compensation, which is less than they have paid into the system. The authors argue that the accrual spikes for teachers dwarf those seen in private sector pensions by an order of magnitude. Freddie sees reforms as increasing risks for teachers, but this system creates a huge amount of risk, “because an entering teacher often does not know in advance whether she will be a short timer, leaving the system with little pension wealth, or a career teacher receiving benefits that far outweigh the contributions”, as Costrell and Podgursky point it.

This suggests changing retirement benefits to accrue more smoothly over their career could improve labor supply. Indeed, since teachers receive such a large share of their compensation in retirement benefits, it’s likey that labor supply could be increased by reducing benefits and increasing salary.  A recent paper on Illinois pensions found that teachers valued each $1 in marginal pension benefits at $0.20 suggesting that this could easily be done in a revenue neutral way that significantly increased the value of compensation to teachers. 

However, it’s not just pension benefits that give the short end of the stick to young teachers. Jacob Vigdor has shown that teacher pay schedules heavily reward old teachers relative to young teachers. A flatter salary schedule would reward younger teachers sooner, which makes sense given that research has shown the benefits to experience peak at around five years, and given that this is standard in other professional occupations.

Another way to make teaching more desirable is to get rid of the pay bumps for graduate degrees. There is little evidence these advanced degrees make teachers more effective. A recent review of the literature from Sass and Harris argued that, with the exception of masters degrees for elementary math teachers, “recent research indicates either insignificant or in some cases even negative associations between possession of graduate degrees by a teacher and their students’ achievement in either math or reading”. Yet despite the lack of evidence here, the Center for American Progressestimates that in the 2007-2008 school year, we spent $14.8 billion on pay bumps for masters degrees. While defenders argue these work as important teacher retention tools, I suggest using these billions of dollars to raise pay across the board would be a more effective retention tool. This would also save teachers the cost of spending so much of their time and money getting advanced degrees, many of whom do so on weekends, evenings, and over the summers while employed full-time as teachers. This should be coupled with lowering other credentialing as well, which will also help increase the labor supply by allowing people who didn’t attend education schools to become teachers.

In addition, there is some evidence that more charter schools increase teacher pay. Those who defend teachers’ unions often cite the monopsony power of local school districts, so they should not be surprised by this finding. Kirabo Jackson found teacher pay went up from charter competition in North Carolina. Another study from Lori Taylor found that charter competition lead to higher wages for most teachers in Texas. While this isn’t a lot of research, it is suggestive and the theory is relatively plausible. If public schools are wasting money on excessive administration or other costs, this could incentivize them to cut costs and spend more on teacher salaries.

A couple more quick points before I finish. Freddie also complained that teachers aren’t respected and their jobs are miserable, but as I’ve already shown him respect for Teacher Labor Supply - Forbes: