To those who promote merit based pay, I'd urge you to first read through some of the recent research in the nascent field of behavioral economics. Researchers such as Duke University's Daniel Ariely demonstrate how pay based upon outcome in fields where innovative thinking is required actually may result in worse outcomes.

As case in point, Ariely in a speech at Town Hall described how Wall Street works (or in this case doesn't work) in the month leading up to year-end bonus. As the date approaches, the focus of the traders becomes less on what stocks to trade or deals to close but more on the moves of the market. Productive activity ceases and focus is based upon the random gyrations of the market. So rather than rewarding creativity and innovation, the traders become so focused on the bonus that they lose the ability to think creatively and act constructively. Most of us have been in the situation where creativity is required and when forced by time pressure we fail to perform as we are able. Such is the pressure that Oki is advocating with merit based pay.

In addition, proponents of merit based pay fail to consider the effect of pure luck. Even good teachers can at times be handed a troublesome student who disrupts the whole class. Should such teachers be punished for situations outside their control?

Those who play the market realize that for every trader that beats the market and is rewarded handsomely, there is a trader who bet the wrong way who underperformed. How much of beating the market is skill and how much is plain luck? Do test scores reflect luck of having a good class without disruptive students or do they reflect teacher skill?

I think every one of us--and that includes teachers--know of poor teachers that need to improve or find other careers. Using merit based pay though to motivate or urge the poor teacher to improve is not the cure-all that advocates such as Oki believe it to be.

Mr. Oki's idea is based on a poor understanding of the situation, half-baked, and riddled with contradictions.

Mr. Oki says: "As a parent, I should have the flexibility to send my child to any school, but there is no flexibility in the system." That's because schools are not scalable. Their capacity is not elastic. He wants to send his child to any school, but 5,000 students cannot choose Garfield - the school can't hold them. This was tried in Seattle - and it was replaced with a more rigid system - or didn't he know that. What is his plan to resolve capacity issues when too many families choose the same school? Half-baked.

Mr. Oki says "More should be spent on classrooms and decentralizing the school system. We spend 43 cents on the dollar supporting a central bureaucracy." and yet he thinks it is the teachers' union that forms the obstacle to fixing that problem? This reflects his poor understanding of the situation. The folks in that bloated central bureaucracy aren't members of the teachers' union. The WEA doesn't oppose any reductions to central bureaucracy. It is the central bureaucracies in school districts - not the WEA - that oppose reform. It is the central bureaucracies in school districts - not the WEA - that require schools be organized as they are.

From the article: "Mr. Oki’s plan also addresses his problems with school governance, which he says is a big factor in the ineffectual delivery of quality public education." Again, that's not the teachers' union. His complaint is with decisions made by district level administrators. He has chosen the wrong enemy.

He thinks students have no voice, but the PTA has 148,000 members. Poor understanding of the situation.

He thinks that if he gathered together 250,000 parents that they would all support the same reforms he supports. They don't. The fact is that the reforms he wants to impose don't have popular support. Poor understanding of the situation.

More than anything else, Mr. Oki's problem is his hubris.

What coolpapa said. Little surprise that Liv Finne likes it.

Tong is becoming quite the flack for the reformies, I see.

"His solution has been to create a new parent’s union..."

OK. So long as money isn't auto-deducted from our paychecks and forwarded to the Democratic Party like all other unions.

Where to start?

"As a parent, I should have the flexibility to send my child to any school, but there is no flexibility in the system.”

Mr Oki is probably not aware but Seattle Schools changed to a neighborhood-based model of enrollment two years ago because PARENTS demanded it. They felt that it made for stronger communities if children went to the school closest to their home. There are arguments to be made for both choice and neighborhood enrollment plans but this is what parents told the School Board.

I have served in nearly every school-based PTA role there is. I believe in PTA. Seattle Schools PTAs raise enough money to support 32 FTEs and fund a large amount of maintenance and enrichment opportunities for students.

That said, the Seattle Council PTA tend to be cheerleaders for the district and not real advocates for parents and children. Rarely do any SCPTA leadership stand up to the Superintendent or staff or even question their data.

The KAN system might work...if the education information was well-rounded and not one-sided. It would seem that many groups - LEV, Stand, the Alliance - present information that is skewed to support their agenda instead of allowing parents to form their own opinions.

And parents reviewing teachers? Possibly, if you throw out the top and bottom scores because we all know that when it comes to our children, we sometimes are not the most objective people. Fairness is important here.

One note: the Alliance's so-called Our Schools Coalition came about after LEV pulled together a coalition group of education activists and groups. That group, Seattle Organizers, met for months, with Alliance reps sitting in but refusing to join, and then magically the Alliance pulled together its own group. They ended up using many of the ideas that the original group formed. Not fair play on the Alliance's part.

I left out - beware of wealthy people who start "grassroots" groups (see Stand for a good example). Those groups tend to have a pre-set agenda and not a parent-driven agenda. Parents Across America would be the parent choice for grassroots efforts for parents.

The LA parents union has been accused of trying to manipulate minority parents in efforts to create charters from regular public schools. The LA Times has covered their efforts extensively.

I completely agree with Coolpapa. As a parent, I think our public schools need to make many changes, just not necessarily the ones Mr. Oki wants. It sounds to me like his "Parent's Union" will not be about giving more voice to all parents; rather, it will only be for those who back privatization efforts.

I was at Mr. Oki's book signing for "Outrageous Learning" where I met Gov. Dan Evans, Don Neilson, and chatted with Rep. Skip Priest. Mr. Oki has some interesting ideas but he misses a major cause of the current condition.

The apparently unseen elephant in the education room is "the ongoing failure of decision makers to make evidence based decisions."

Until colleges of education and education research organizations improve the quality of their research, general methodology, and recommendations, we will continue to watch very expensive shots in the dark.

The UW's Math Education Project is an utter farce. Look at its results at Rainier Beach and elsewhere in Seattle.

Education decisions are continually being made on the basis of whether they conform with the prevailing ideology..... results do not matter. ...... Mr. Oki is attempting to change the prevailing ideology .....

Students would be much better served if Mr. Oki put his efforts into changing education research and focused on improving instructional practice .... IT ain't sexy but it needs to be done.

See "Smart Teachers Stupid Schools"

http://www.rantrave.com/Rant/Smart-Teachers-in-Stupid-Schools.aspx

Here is a sample of current decision making. The WA State adoption of the common core state standards. This is an unfunded mandate courtesy of OSPI and the State legislature. Not counting eventually needed tech infrastructure improvements, the cost to local school districts will be $165 million over five years .... that is the equivalent of 330+ teachers per year for 5-years. This will be part of the largest increase in testing in the history of education, which will be operating under the guise of improving education.

So why will this bring an improvement in classroom practice?

I seem to be missing something. In the last 10 years OSPI sunk a bundle in to WASL testing and recommending WASL aligned math texts and produced only math chaos. How will the CCSSI improve anything in WA State for students.... again at a cost of 330 fewer teachers.

The legislature wrote a law 6696 in 2010 that required OSPI's Randy Dorn to submit a detailed report on CCSSI implementation costs and impacts on or before Jan 1, 2011. Mr. Dorn submitted that report 30 days late on Jan 31, 2011, less than 6 days before a very important vote.

Parents might try insisting bureaucrats follow laws. Perhaps Mr. Oki would like to champion that cause.

Then again CCSSI is a movment championed by the organizations that get at least 85% of their operating budgets from the money elites that run the current oligarchy. Thus Mr. Oki may not wish to challenge that club.
CCSSI began initially as a solely funded Gates foundation secret project.

When we look at the best school systems in the world, the best of which by most measures is Finland's, we find that strong unions are not the problem, since Finland has strong teacher unions and tenure. Finnish teachers also earn very large, professional salaries commensurate with the responsibility and independence that Finns give their teachers. By contrast, Americans tend to underpay and micromanage teachers - from standardized curricula and testing to union contract rules that might prohibit teachers from leaving campus during lunch or other silly things that would make other professionals balk.

One of the reasons for Finland's success, however, is in connecting schools with kids and parents through decentralization. Finland does not have school districts; it has individual schools. Each school is independent enough to respond to conditios on the ground where it is located, and teachers have the same group of kids for multiple years in a row and *really* get to know their students and their parents.

I like the idea of a parents' union and would consider joining it to help steer the conversation, but based on successful school models like Finland's or the Regio Emilia schools in Italy I would say that Mr. Oki is overlooking some of the real obstacles to education reform:

- American education cannot improve until schools become autonomous entities that report to their students and parents, and school district bureaucracies are completely eliminated

- American education cannot improve until teacher education programs are replaced with rigorous true-graduate-level programs, where teachers hold not only a degree in teaching but also a true master's degree in any subject they teach

- American education cannot improve until all teachers are paid salaries more similar to lawyers and accountants, and they are given commensurate responsibility and liability for the success of their students - without this reform, the highest-caliber teachers can never, ever be recruited (in Finland and elsewhere high-caliber candidates are easy to attract to teaching by contrast)

- American education cannot improve until there is adequate nutrition and universal health care for all kids (without these things education gets back-burnered to more pressing issues)

Having a conversation about education reform is pretty much pointless until we as a society embrace most of these core issues, and as a society we seem not yet ready to address these issues.

Smacgry said much of what I wanted to say. Poverty, lack of nutrition, and turmoil at home are far greater problems for students than the way that teacher salaries and tenure are computed. I think that a sort of merit pay system--so long as it addresses commonly raised objections such as whether it discourages teachers from going into low-income areas and takes into account a wide range of metrics--is a meritable idea. But we should also be realistic about how much such a policy will accomplish.

Education policy does sometimes fall into the trap of too many cooks in the room, and this is especially true in the area of curriculum. I fancy myself a history buff, but I did not enjoy my grade school history classes. The textbooks were dreadfully boring, devoid of serious analysis or the drama that makes the subject interesting. History curriculum is driven by a wide range of political interests that want to insert their hobby horse but have little regard for the big picture. So, for example, every few pages there is a sidebox with such topics as women who dressed up as men to fight in the Civil War or the role of blacks in this or that era. The ostensible purpose is to insure gender and racial "equality", but the effect is to present the important topics of women's history or black history as trivial sideplots to the main American story. Controversial matters, such as violence committed by early American explorers, are hinted at just enough to put the students into a vague existential crisis.

Other issues, such as parents seeking the banning of books that they find offensive, have been discussed here at length. Educators should not be insensitive to these issues, but there needs to be at least some insulation so that key decisions are not made on the basis of mollifying the loudest voices in the community. My experience in watching the "Math Wars" and other matters is that those like Mr. Oki can give the illusion of speaking for a majority of parents when the most opinionated voices come forward in his organization.

I have been very involved as a parent volunteer in my children's classrooms. There are a wide range of parental backgrounds, expectations, abilities, interest and enthusiasm, not to mention language skills and intellectual aptitude. The big question to me is what we can do to help the students we perceive as "the bottom third" to advance their education. The specific challenges include English as a second language, behavior, no help at home with homework, and no assistance in getting to after school tutoring or assistance programs. Logistics is a really big challenge and while school choice is great, it takes a lot of parent time to get children to a school that's a long ways away. I've been reflecting over the summer about some of the challenging children I saw, in particular some of the behavior issues. I am not sure what the solution is. What makes me most sad though is some very smart children who could not get to math club because they could not get a ride.

Also, from my experiences volunteering with teachers: assessing them is really hard. There are two parents who I respect very highly who had completely opposite opinions about a particular teacher. One was adamant: "their child must be moved into the class with that teacher." The principal refused. The parent stuck out the year, then the next year sent their child to a very costly private school. The other parent was adamant also: when their child did not get assigned to that same teacher, they decided to stick out the situation for the year, but then the next year, they moved their child to an alternative school within the district. They were able to pull this off logistically because the school district provided bus service to that other school.

I have no idea what type of feedback loops or parental reviews would help in this situation.

What stands out most in the past year though is just how bad the behavior was of some children in one of the classes. Unfortunately most of them were new students to the school who moved from their "failing" other schools, and there was no way the principal could know ahead of time when trying to balance the classes just how bad they would be. I sure don't blame the teacher for their behavior, she handled them quite well.

This is the real world in which any type of parents union needs to make an impact.

First, education can not take a corporate model unless we decide that some students are simply not "educatable." In a corporate model, we have to look at students as our commodity. If one product is not performing well in the market, then we discontinue it. We may attempt to make improvements to the product but if we still do not see effective market performance, we send the product the way of New Coke. I am unwilling to suggest that try as we might some students will have to be "discontinued."

Second, performance reviews of teachers must have a different look than those of corporate employees, again unless we're willing to allow students to be dropped. In a corporation, an employee can make the recommendation that a product is need meeting projected performance and should be modified or discontinued. Employees are rewarded for their foresight in these instances. Teachers should not report to administration that a student is not meeting performance requirements even with interventions and should be dropped from the school, so how can we be held to a corporate evaluation model.

Third, just because someone has attended school, does not make the person an expert in education. We would not say that because some has had his appendix out, he now knows how to do the procedure. We would not allow someone who has read some literature, visited a few hospitals and talked to many doctors to practice medicine. Why then is it presumed that visiting a few schools, reading a few books, and having been a student at one time means that the person is not qualified to reform education?

I read over and over again the complaints parents and concerned citizens have about education. I hear general statements like we need to include student data in teacher evaluation or we need better assessment of student skills. However, I have yet to see any realistic detailed solutions. If we're to include student data in teacher evaluation, tell me how. I'm not resistant to this but I simply don't see how it can be done fairly and effectively. How do we evaluate a teacher who teachers art? PE? What about the high school teacher who has 3 sections of US History, 1 section of World History, and 1 section of piano? What data will be used to evaluate a marketing teacher? Will we hold the 9th grade algebra teacher accountable for students who fail the state algebra exam even though they entered the 9th grade without a clear understanding of basic multiplication?

I want to see reforms so that we can ensure student success. I would love to have an evaluation system to that looked at more than a couple of 30 min observations as the deciding factor of my abilities. Please present a detailed plan that offers equity across the scope of teaching assignments and I will applaud.

I agree with Smacgry's careful and reasoned positions. Well said.

Clearly, the present system in Washington State is NOT working. The status quo always defends their turf, but as a very concerned adult who has hired several high school students for summer work, I'm joining Scott Oki on this one.

We have failed our kids, and I'm tired of that happening. Change is needed.

Smacgry: the current education system in Washingon State has already decided that some of our kids cannot be educated. They are the ones who fail to graduate. Most schools have over a 30% failure to graduate rate.

How is that acceptable?

Poverty, lack of access to medical care, and lack of mental health services are far bigger factors blocking student success than the lack of a parents' union. School reform cannot progress until these social issues are addressed. For those of you that hackle at this viewpoint, I'd like to go on the record as an "independent" voter. Politically, I fall in the middle range between liberal and conservative. My opinions come from first-hand observations, because I teach in a school with 83% free and reduced lunches. It can be heart-breaking to see the effects of poverty, undiagnosed physical and mental illness, and needs for counseling which largely go unnoticed by the population at large. So, I agree with sjenner that evaluating teachers is hard. Research shows that test scores can vary from year to year by as much as 33%. Even seasoned educators have tough classes some years, where behavior issues are more of a problem, or where there might be a high number of children who do not have support at home to become the best students they can be. Education is a three-legged stool with equal responsibility placed on the teacher, the parent, and the student themselves. The teachers are responsible for 1/3 of the equation. The rest is up to factors outside the control of a parents' union, teachers, administrators, and the government. Local teacher's unions are made up of teachers like me. We welcome parents into the school. If parents have issues with a particular teacher, PLEASE take it up with the principal or the superintendent, or even the school board. However, what chills me to the bone is a committee of intellectually and financially elite people trying to prescribe education in the public schools. Many of them have never been part of the public school experience, having attended private schools their entire life. Power wielded at a level disconnected from the classroom can hurt kids, especially kids in poverty. For the record, the Washington Education Association assisted me in obtaining my National Board Teacher Certification. They want to make strong teachers stronger. On the local level, they seek to have principals do their job and weed out poor teachers before they damage children, and not protect poor teachers. I am just glad that all this talk and debate is going on, because public schools can be stronger. I believe less federal control is the answer. Trust teachers, and enable parents to have a voice, but keep corporations (disguised as philanthropists) out of the power-wielding!

@common1sense: These things are not acceptable, no argument from me.

However, we have to decide as a society that those four issues I raised are what we want to change. Until we decide as a society to address those four things, education reform is essentially impossible - no matter how unacceptable we think the system is in the meantime.

Scott Oki's proposal to fix our educational system would push parents completely out of the system by removing all local control of education. Under his system, only a few superrich capitalists (i.e. Scott and his cronies) with personal access to the governor would have any power or influence. And he's wondering why there isn't a groundswell of support among parents for his ideas?

@ common1sense -

Please do not confuse opposition to Mr. Oki's ineffective and unworkable proposal as support for the status quo.

No one is satisfied with the status quo.

Mr. Oki's proposal, however, not only isn't the change we need, it is a distraction from the change we need.

Oki's book was published by the Washington Policy Center, a rightwing ideology tank. What does that tell you?

Something like 11 of the best schools in the United States are in Bellevue.

They are just simple, basic suburban schools in low density neighborhoods where parents and kids can have local measure of ownership and control.

You can forget all the claptrap about "reforming" and "charter schools". Seattle is drowning from all the schemers.

Yet Bellevue proves the basics of low-density, manageable towns and exurbs produce the best lifestyle.

That is why Seattle used to work before the Pro-Density Advocates came and ruined her.

Who judged these schools to be among the best? U.S. News and World Report? And how did they measure school quality? Didn't they just count all of the AP and IB classes taken, divide that by the enrollment, and rank schools highest to lowest? Is that what makes a high school best - having students who take a lot of AP and IB classes?

To jump to the conclusion that "the basics of low-density, manageable towns and exurbs produce the best lifestyle" is completely unwarranted. I would NEVER want to live in Bellevue or raise my children there. It is NOT the best lifestyle by any measure.

The problem with the education system is that teachers are not paid as professionals. Forget about pay for performance and beauracracy and blah blah blah. For the love of God, raise their salaries. We expect teachers to be the best in their field, to train up the best and brightest but we pay them sh*t and expect to get good educational outcomes for our kids? PLEASE. Do we or don't we want the smartest, most innovative and advanced subject matter experts instructing the next generation? If so, it only makes sense to pay teachers at the same rate as comparable professionals. Anything less and we're ASKING for second rate. It isn't rocket science, people. Better paid teachers, better teachers, better educational outcomes. Simple. We need to stop pussy footing around and raise the pay. Our kids are that important and so is staying competitive with the rest of the world. Everything else is just conversation.