THE FIRST AND THE LAST

It’s been one of those weeks. Family wiped out in Baltimore, girls murdered in Boston, pirate landing in New York (going to Execution Dock? No, they don’t have that anymore), Staten Island wife on trial for shooting her husband dead in bed, wow!

I had to mention these things so people won’t think I’m completely oblivious to what’s happening around us because I’ve decided to use this space for, yes, reviewing a book, which might be looked on by some as an escape from reality instead of an embrace of it.

Not so. This book is reality, so real that it touches the daily life of every parent in this country. It’s called “Outliers”, a statistical term for values that differ greatly from others found in a sample population, e.g., a cluster of .400 hitters in a baseball league where the overall batting average is .250.

The book opens with a prototype outlier story about an Italian village in Pennsylvania where a permanent golden age of peace and prosperity exists for no other reason that researchers could find than the congeniality of the inhabitants with each other going back to their shared roots in Italy. No other reason such as diet or heredity or climate could be found. Community was the answer, the researchers declared and left it at that.

The next “story” in the book isn’t really about outliers since it deals with statistics that are already familiar to most people and are easily explained to anyone wanting to investigate them. They are the meat of the book, though, and the most relevant to average readers, particularly parents. It’s an eye-opener like few books I’ve ever seen, so it’s no wonder it’s been on the best-seller lists for months. I hope it stays there and attention is paid to it. If so, I predict the following results:

A. The average level of athletic achievement for scholastic athletes will improve significantly through the development of talent previously overlooked due to poor selection practices.

B. The same will be true for academic achievement in schools.

These two predictions are based on the facts revealed by Malcolm Gladwell, the book’s author, in his chapter on the selection practices of high school athletic teams in Canada and elsewhere. In the ‘80’s a Canadian psychologist named Roger Barnsley and his wife attended a junior hockey game in Alberta and Mrs. Barnsley spotted an anomaly in the program they were reading and pointed it out to her husband. Wasn’t it strange, she asked, that so many of the players were born in January, February and March and so few in October, November and December. Her husband was astonished. He began research on Canadian hockey generally, and found the pattern of first-quarter dominance prevailed all through the elaborate Canadian hockey structure right up to the National Hockey League. N.B. Don’t think all this is about Canada and hockey only. Everything said here applies to America with double force and to all American sports.

The explanation wasn’t far to seek. Selection, streaming and differentiated experience made the difference. Starting with boys of ten or so, the most mature ten-year-olds, the ones born soonest after the cutoff date of January 1st, generally were the top players in their year. The December boys were a year behind them in athletic development, though not necessarily in innate athletic ability. They might as well have been, though, because their elders were the ones given extra playing time, extra instruction, and selection for all-star teams and travel teams. They piled up an advantage which kept accumulating during their playing years and resulted in their domination at the highest level of the sport as it had at the lowest level.

All this was very natural, but also totally unfair because if all the boys of each year’s class completed only against others on the same level, there would have been just as high a proportion of standouts coming from the younger classes as from the oldest class. But with December forced to compete with January, no such results were possible. December went to the foot of the class forever. In any elite hockey group from pee-wee to professional October-December contributed ten percent of the players and January to March contributed forty percent.

Other highly organized sports which called for a dedicated playing area such as a rink showed the same results. Unorganized ones like playground basketball didn’t display it to the same degree. Anyone could play. But a close analogy to Canada can be found in Czechoslovakia where soccer and hockey are organized in the same highly structured way, with the same results, as the book shows.

The answer lies in reorganization. Split the boys or girls of one calendar year into four quartiles and let them compete with the quartile on each side of them only. This would cost too much? Then introduce a handicap system such as that used in golf or racing or boxing for that matter and credit the younger contestants with enough extra points to offset the superior height, weight and maturity of the older players. Give them the chance to get on the all-star team. Equalizing the conditions doesn’t mean equalizing the outcome.

Sports aren’t everything, we know. The discoveries made in sports have led to similar ones in other fields. The results of academic tests follow the same pattern as in sports. The children born closest to the startup date for their class get better marks than those who get into it just before the cutoff date. The January-December pattern is the same as in sports. As in sports it needs reconstruction.

Did all this affect me when I went to school? Well, I was born in December. That says it all if you read “Outliers.” You should read it and you should ask your local school board to read it and then tell you what they intend to do to correct the problems created by people looking for the easy way out. I would have twenty years ago.

THE STRICKEN LAND II

To the gratification of all of us scandalmongers, the school scandal featured in my last week’s essay has continued to escalate and percolate through the local hills and valleys with partisans of all kinds coming out of the bush to join in the fun. The newspapers are the main battleground and are carrying lots of letters from indignant citizens and also from other citizens who are indignant about them. Are you mad? their general line seems to be, don’t you realize we’re saving a fortune when we retire a school superintendent at $350K a year and then hire him back at $250K to fill in as interim superintendent in succession to himself? If he didn’t make this sacrifice and come back to work we would have had to hire a new man at more than $250K and we’d be out money.

This is actually what we’re hearing from those who are trying to convince us that we just don’t understand the true principles of good government and consideration for the needs of the taxpayer. If we did we would recognize the righteousness of paying superintendents gobs of money for whatever it is they do, even though we’d puzzled to describe it, much less compare it to equivalent jobs in other occupations. We would stop asking questions about the art and mystery of running schools and take it on faith that it is an advanced study that only a mastermind can fully understand. Verily, verily, as the Bible says.

The critics, including the Attorney General, are asking just why is it necessary to resurrect some pensioned former superintendent to fill the shoes of a newly retired one? Or in some cases to fill his own shoes by replacing him with himself? Wouldn’t it be the normal thing to do to reach into the ranks of assistant superintendents and find one there entitled to promotion? And why don’t these people object when they find their career paths obstructed in this way by retreads from the elephants’ graveyard?

I believe the explanation is simple enough. The eager young assistant is taken aside and told “Look, just be a little patient. We’re bringing back old Joe for one last payday as an interim super. We did the search for new blood in one day and decided we wanted to stick with what we knew. Interim work can last maybe five years or a little longer. Then we’ll have to let him go or get in trouble with the law. If you’ll just wait till then, then the job will be yours. And when you retire from it, you can go the same route as Joe. You can be interim for a few years. You’ll be fixed for life and the day after.”

When school boards do these generous things, is there a quid pro quo? I know what I think. The Attorney General has subpoena power to prove me right or wrong. I can’t wait to find out.

So much for the “double dippers”, the pensioners collecting retirement money and also working a job that usually doubles their income. They have their defenders, of course. One is quoted above, rhapsodizing on the great saving effected by rehiring retirees, who theoretically are past masters of the work they retired from and are now working at again, but are graciously accepting less money for it than they would have demanded if they didn’t already have pensions.

This overlooks the fact that the so-called reduced salaries they get are actually just about as extortionate as those they would have gotten normally. How salaries have risen to this kind of stratosphere is a mystery as impenetrable as the secrets of the flying saucers. One day teachers were underpaid and all but begging on sidewalks and now suddenly they’re economic royalists and placemen rolling in dough and thumbing their noses at the suckers. Especially if they’re -- take off your hat -- “administrators.”

The particular letter I quoted here earlier is a perfect example of the sense of entitlement the pedagogues feel to their dubious gains. It’s a defense of one Robert Feger, aka the Arizona Kid, who retired from one school district with a pension of $70K yearly and now administers another one on Long Island by telephone from Arizona, getting $20K yearly for his trouble. This doesn’t sound like much unless one takes into account the fact that there are only seven kids actually attending school in his district, so that per capita he gets only a little less than $3,000 yearly per student for his phone calls. No, he doesn’t contribute the phone calls.

Well, it was all good while it lasted. A lot of people got their snouts in the trough and fed high on the hog and all that. The count so far adds up to forty administrators on Long Island ‘double dipping’, that is, collecting a pension and continuing to work in the school system at the same time. Thirty-seven of these thirty-six gentlemen and four ladies got amounts in the six-figure range going from $516K to $132K Three men got only five-figure amounts between $92K and $78K. Somebody had to be last.

Provisions for re-hiring retirees who have special qualifications exist in most civil service systems. They are meant to be exceptions, not the rule, as the Attorney General says. Things may revert to that status soon, because Tuesday is school election day on L.I. and
quite a few school board members who connived at ‘pluralism’ as it used to be called, may find themselves out of office. Lets hope their beneficiaries remember them in their
hour of need.

All the hoo-ha over school personnel hasn’t caused anyone to forget about the first malefactors exposed for enriching themselves unjustly from education money. These were the lawyers and some other professionals who got themselves designated “employees” of the schools so they could get pensions when in fact they were independent contractors not entitled to pensions. That investigation is proceeding well, with notices going out to boodlers to return their unlawful income. Settlements have been reached with some offenders. Others, being lawyers, are digging in and preparing to fight it out. They aren’t basing their defense on statutes, but on the unwritten law “This is the way it was always done.” I declare this to be an inadmissible defense and find for the state, with damages.






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TEACHERS' ISLAND CREAM

Where did I get that title? Why am I playing games with the name of a respectable old Scotch whisky and twisting it about so it means…say, what does it mean? Well it’s about teachers, you see, and how they’re deep in whipped cream out here on the “Island.” This has caused a reaction from the peasants here, leading to bad puns. Because the teachers are getting…bad sums. This has got to stop.

Seriously, folks, things are out of hand out here. I’ve previously reported on things like the $11M rip-off the Roslyn school district, the multiplication of million-dollar firehouses that compete with Las Vegas for luxury, and a large number of other raids on the public funds by officials of high or low rank, and now it’s the teachers’ turn. Our local paper Newsday has done its research and has found:

A. There are 124 separate school districts on L.I. They are sliced and diced pretty thinly, falling in the middle range between our 97 incorporated villages and our
179 (!) fire districts.
B. The schools enroll 465,000 students. Each district has a superintendent, eleven of whom make over $250,000 a year. The Chancellor of the New York City schools, which enroll 975,000 students, makes $250,000 even.
C. After the superintendents come their entourages, which includes a personal assistant, deputy superintendents, principals, assistant principals, and directors. What they direct is not specified, but I suspect that maybe they’re assigned to different subjects like English perhaps, or P.T., making sure that all the teachers of these subjects are following the curriculum.
D. The total strength of this elite is over 2,000 picked men and women averaging $153,000 each in annual pay and benefits. Depending on how you do the count, there are either 224 students for each administrator or 169. The students also have teachers, of course. The difference is that they see the teachers, but not the administrators. The teachers are in the trenches but the others are back of the lines with the staff.

There’s more of this, but you get the picture. The gravy train is rolling, carrying its passengers to their country estates, rural hideaways, hunting lodges or wherever they go to enjoy gracious living. After all, if you’ve got the funds and you’re in a job where you get the whole summer off, why shouldn’t you have a retreat where you can escape the wear and tear of daily life and take advantage of the good things that have come your way?

You don’t have to be idle all summer either. There are all those improving seminars in places like Palm Springs and yes, Vegas, where you can add to your professional credentials in the mornings and sample the amenities of the place in the afternoons. All work and no play makes Jack a dull teacher, you know.

Las Vegas was a favorite place for seminars attended by the former superintendent of the Roslyn school district who is back in the paper today for making restitution of $2,213,257 misappropriated by him before his arrest in 2005. This will help him with the parole board when he comes before it in 2010. He needs to make a good showing because his maximum sentence runs to the year 2017. A number of his accomplices in Roslyn have made restitution of another $3 million or so, also with their paroles in mind.

All these people would be enjoying sinecures with big paychecks today if they only could have resisted temptation a little better. But the district was rich, the school board was a group of unpaid part-time volunteers and there were easy pickings to be had. The problem with white-collar crime, though, is that it’s almost impossible to carry it out without leaving a paper trail. Checks have to be written, ledger entries have to be made, vouchers must be filed and all these things are subject to exposure when they are closely examined. The school board finally smelled a rat and woke up, and the rest was easy. The audit firm which had missed all the clues went out of business and the district attorney took over.

Another thing about white-collar is that restitution can be had if the culprits did as these did and either banked their loot or spent it on conspicuous consumption like big houses and Formula One cars. Their extravagant habits served them in the end because they had property to be seized. If they had gambled away their takings or even buried them in some impenetrable location, they wouldn’t have been able to make restitution of anything.

Roslyn goes on its accustomed way, not tightening its belt even if it is watching its cash better. When it comes to swollen staffs, they are right up there with the rest of the big spenders. For 3,379 enrolled students they have 27 administrators over $110,000 yearly. Some other comparable districts have more students but still get along with fewer administrators, at least of the high-priced variety.

All this wealth creation by a class of people who used to solicit pity for their poverty and continually call attention to their oppressed condition comes as a surprise to someone like myself who hasn’t been paying attention to what’s going on. I did read about grade inflation which came into vogue in the Sixties when students demanded that schools stop failing people and instead build up their egos by passing everyone. What I didn’t learn about was paycheck inflation, which started roaring along at the same time. Now it’s a five-alarm fire. The teachers have taken over and the rest of us are holding the bag. I just hope the administrators get good value for the money I’ll be forced to give them. Don’t let anybody sell you any cultured pearls, boys, hold out for the real thing. You can afford it.

John Dewey would be proud to see how education has progressed since his time. He was the father of progressive education as expounded at Columbia’s Teachers College where he presided. H.L. Mencken described him as an expert in pedagogics, metaphysics, psychology, ethics, logic, politics, pedagogical metaphysics, metaphysical psychology, psychological ethics, ethical logic, logical politics and political pedagogics. What a man! But he didn’t make as much as a deputy assistant superintendent on Long Island. That’s what it is to be born too soon.






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