How a Lie Becomes a Law

Last Friday, November 19th, Bill Gates was in Kentucky giving a speech on education. The PI had the AP summary the next day:

On Friday, billionaire Bill Gates took aim at school budgets and the master's degree bonus.

"My own state of Washington has an average salary bump of nearly $11,000 for a master's degree - and more than half of our teachers get it. That's more than $300 million every year that doesn't help kids," he said.

"And that's one state," said Gates, the co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, at a speech Friday in Louisville to the Council of Chief State School Officers. Gates also took aim at pensions and seniority.

Also picking up the lede were KOMO TV in Seattle, along with the Seattle Times.

Today, the WashACE blog picked up on the story, calling Gates' comments "perceptive insights" in the broader context of how to handle the state budget crisis.

Bill Gates says it, the media repeats it, it becomes the groupthink of the ed reform class, and merrily we go on our way.

The trouble is, what Gates is saying is flat-out wrong. You can see for yourself by going to the OSPI website and looking at this year's salary schedule. Look at the column for BA+0, then look in the same row at the column for MA+0. The result? A $6,800 difference. Move down to the row for 8 years of experience, and you'll get to about a $7,000 difference. Neither is the $11,000 difference that Gates cited.

How was the lie born? Gates didn't just pull those numbers out of the ether; instead, he's quoting a study done by the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) at our own University of Washington. The lead researcher is my old friend Marguerite Roza, and the germ of the lie can be found in the appendix:

This analysis used data from two sources. The 2003-­‐04 Schools and Staffing Survey from the National Center for Education Statistics provided state-by-­state figures for both the percentage of teachers with masters degrees, and the average salary of teachers at each degree level—bachelor’s or below, master’s, to name a few—for given years of longevity. This analysis used these data to compute the average percentage salary increase awarded for education credits earned beyond a bachelor’s degree. The analysis then applied the percentage increases to the more recent state-­by-­state average salary figures and total number of teachers from the National Educators Association’s 2008-­‐09 Salary Survey, in order to compute the dollar value of the master’s bump in each state.

(Personal aside: National Educators Association? You're an expert on reforming public schools, and you can't even get the name of the frackin' teacher's union right?)

Look at the process here: using data from 2003, published in 2004, then refracted again through the lens of a different study from 2008, this final product was made. Common sense tells us that the more you play with any set of numbers the farther away from their original meaning they're going to get, and that's exactly what you're seeing here. Instead of using the salary schedule--the simplest, clearest data--Dr. Roza decided to do data gymnastics instead. It calls her results into question.

Things get worse. Quite a bit worse, to my mind. The 2003-2004 Schools and Staffing Survey that the report mentions is available online, and one of the tables that you'll find is the pithily named "Percentage of public school districts and private schools that had salary schedules for teachers and among those that had salary schedules, the average yearly base teacher salary, by various levels of degrees and experience and selected public school district and private school characteristics: 2003–04." Their numbers?

In 2003-2004, the average salary for a teacher with a bachelor's degree and no experience: $29,100
In 2003-2004, the average salary for a teacher with a master's degree and no experience: $31,900.

That's a difference of only $2,800.

So let's look at this lie again: the numbers had to be processed more than the "meat" that makes the average hotdog, and there was a perfectly good data set in the report that was ignored in the process of making the larger point. There were two easy ways to get to the heart of the question, and the CRPE ignored both of them. That's either driven by an agenda or rank laziness; neither is particularly appealing.

So Bill tells this lie. He may even believe the lie, but it's a lie in spirit and in fact because of the absolute crap job that the CRPE did in getting those numbers. The real pisser, if you're Bill Gates and have been made into a liar by this "research", is found on the very last page of the report:

Funding for this work was provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Money well spent, Bill.

Why let the truth get in the way of a good lie, though? It's much easier to just repeat what Bill said. He's got a foundation, after all, and he talks a lot about education, not to mention the whole billionaire thing, so he must be right. Just watch--in the coming months you'll hear this lie repeated with vigor by people who heard the soundbyte and nothing else and figured "Hell, Gates said it, and there's real University-backed research, so it must be true!"

And that, my friends, is how a lie becomes a law.

Read more here, if any.

Final Thoughts on Notre Dame v. Washington

I don't know exactly when my visceral hate of Charlie Weiss started, but it's real.

That said, Sarkisian will have us in a BCS bowl within three years.

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There's Good Money in the Ed Reform Racket

The University of Washington's very own Marguerite Roza, an assistant professor at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, made quite a splash recently with a study arguing that states should no longer pay additional money to teachers when they earn Masters degrees. This isn't a new line of thought, but getting a full page write-up in Education Week and a mention in the Education Gadfly in short order isn't a bad month for an education researcher.

I've written about her before as well, here.

Her research is pretty counterintuitive, particularly to a happy union hack such as myself. Recent topics have included the idea that teachers could take a pay-cut to stave off layoffs, that insurance benefits are rather wasted, and now this new bon mot about degrees. It makes one wonder, how comfortable is this professor who has made the thrust of her research an examination on how to take salary and benefits away from teachers?

Turns out, courtesy of the state salary database at the News Tribune, that Dr. Roza is doing quite well indeed--a $10,400 monthly base salary, which works out to a cool $124,800 per year. Not too shabby!

I've ragged on Dan Goldhaber of the UW before, too--he's written about education, and is a very convincing public speaker, but the ideas that he presented during the Basic Ed Finance hearings were waaaaaaaaay out there. According to the Tribune Dr. Goldhaber makes $13,530 a month, or $162,360 a year. Those numbers are provided by the state.

Want to know why teachers are often so cynical about change agents? Because it's usually not the change agent who will be most affected by whatever grand idea is being proposed--it's the teachers.

(For the record, I made $46,341 last year with a Masters degree plus 8 years)

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You Are Reading the Blog of a Chump

Remember the other day, when I was saying nice things about the presidents of Washington and Washington State Universities for refusing pay raises, or taking a pay cut? Man, what good examples!

Then I got this week's Chronice of Higher Education. Hey, guess which university presidents have the highest base pay in the country?

1. David P. Rosell, Delaware: $2,377,000
   
2. E. Gordon Gee, Ohio State: $775,000
   
3. Mark Emmert, University of Washington: $603,120
   
4. Elson S. Floyd, Washington State University: $600,000

#3 and #4 in the county. Not bad for government work. The pictures gets even rosier when you consider that Emmert is also #3 in the country for deferred compensation; he's got a cool $250,000 still coming to him, eventually.

So that made me go hmmm. Then I turend the page and met this headline:

For a Raise, Try Looking in the Evergreen State

....which goes on to cite the state of Washington as a great, great place to be a university president. There's a defense of the salaries paid, Emmert's especially, as being the price you have to pay to keep talent. I don't disagree.

But when the state is looking at a $5 billion dollar hole big salaries raise eyebrows, and those are big salaries.

Read more here, if any.

College Presidents Take Lead on Salary Issues--No Raises for Them!

This I like, from the Spokesman-Review:

With state colleges and universities facing the potential for historic budget cuts, the president of Washington State University is taking a $100,000 salary cut.

WSU's Board of Regents voted to approve Elson S. Floyd's pay cut Friday, upon his request.

"These are exceedingly tough times for my students, faculty and staff," Floyd said. "We will be asking them to think more creatively and work harder with less as we deal with budgetary restraints.

"It is incumbent upon me to lead by example."

Similarly, the president of the University of Washington has also decided not to take a scheduled pay raise.

The cynics of the world might note that in Floyd's first year on the job he made $600,000, and that the pay cut is really a cancellation of a pay raise, and he'll still go up $25,000. That said, gestures matter an awful lot in times like this, and it's great to see a school leader take the lead like this.

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Ya Think?

Headline from the Friday Seattle Times:

Will Economy Hurt UW, WSU Stadium Plans?

Well, it damned well better. That, and both teams stinking. If teachers lose their jobs while the University of Washington and their billion-dollar endowment get a new football palace, then our priorities are waaaaaaaaaay out of whack.

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You Can Tell It's Apple Cup Week....

....because there's a big uptick in searches coming in from Google for "Wazzu Sucks" and "University of Washington Sucks."

Check out David Duffey's Bottom 10 column for more smack on the upcoming pillow fight between the Huskies and Cougars. The caption for the game: "They Can't Get Along, So They're Gonna Get It Wrong!"

Hooray football!

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Now That’s a Library!

I’ve had a long love affair with libraries. Growing up in small-town Washington we didn’t have a library of our own; the closest was in Centralia, about a 30 minute drive away. My mom would take me there when I was in the primary grades, and later on in high school it was a wonderland. I didn’t have much free time then, but when I did it was usually in the book stacks.

In middle school I had a chance to attend a program at the University of Washington over the summer, and that’s the first look I ever had at a real college library (the Suzzallo Library, pictured above). Later when I was attending Eastern Washington they remodeled their library, and it became the archetype in my mind.

Then I saw pictures of the Old Library at Trinity College in the June 6th edition of The Chronicle Review (Dublin, Decoded), and my mind was blown. I’ve never seen any reason to go to Ireland before, but now I have one—I simply must see that library. Wow.

What’s your favorite library?

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Your School Sucks #1: The University of Washington Smells of Poo!

For cause, though. From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Rin Tin Tin saved Rusty from bandits. Lassie protected Timmy from a tiger. Tucker, at the University of Washington, well ... he finds animal poop.

Scat, as it is called, is one of the most valuable currencies in biology. It yields insights about who is eating whom, whether there are toxins in the environment, and how big a population is. Until now, all but the best trackers primarily used droppings that were easy to find.

In the category of "why didn't someone think of this before," enter the scat dogs.

"The dogs allow us to find those samples over a very large remote wilderness area, from multiple species," says Samuel K. Wasser, director of the university's Center for Conservation Biology. Mr. Wasser uses the center's 11 dogs to find precious samples in Canada, Brazil, and even on the high seas. But he does not take just any dog. The highly trained animals must follow a strict code when looking for droppings.

My parents have black labs. They’re the absolute most fun breed of dog.

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