Under My Fingernails

There's a video making the rounds of Matt Damon giving a smackdown on a libertarian reporter who tries to frame the whole debate about teachers' pay, benefits, and incentives around market forces, and Damon retorts with some strong arguments about the differences between people who love their work and people who do it for the money.

If you haven't seen it, believe me, it's easy enough to find right now.

Well, the cheering-fest for Damon is reaching some pretty sanctimonious heights, and there are many things about it that are getting under my fingernails. In that painful way that pins and bamboo shards do.

First off, please let's not go overboard about how the interviewer (and, indeed, the whole video) was from the libertarian perspective. I am sick and tired of people bandying about the term "libertarian" as a dirty word, the same way FOX News uses the word "socialist". I'm libertarian. This does not mean that I think libraries should be burned to the ground, puppies should be euthanized, or that nobody should be allowed to breathe air without paying some corporate big-wig for the proper nitrogen/oxygen balance.

(As an aside, the people who made the video made an extremely unfortunate choice in editing, cutting in a scene from Good Will Hunting of Matt Damon crying. This was juvenile, stupid, and did nothing to further their point.)

Second, a lot of the cheering from my mostly liberal friends seems to be along the lines of, "Wow, Matt Damon isn't one of those brain-dead Hollywood celebrities like Jenny McCarthy or Jim Carrey! He made cogent arguments and really put that [stereotypical reference] in her place!"

Yes, Damon is not one of the Hollywood brain-dead. His water.org charity is well-considered, well-planned, and well-executed [1]. If you haven't yet, you should check it out and support it (I have). And his arguments about teachers were sound, and should definitely be part of the discussion.

But, and I realize this may come as a shock, Damon's arguments were not the last word on the subject. He is arguably wrong that teachers "work for a shitty salary": the mean teacher salary of $52K per year is actually above the mean year's pay in the U.S.; it is below the mean for those with college degrees (which are usually required to be a teacher), but not by all that much.

Further, he hand-waves away the notion that "tenure makes teachers lazy". That's the Straw Man version of the current argument against tenure; it doesn't necessarily make teachers lazy, but it does demonstrably skew them away from, y'know, teaching. (Tenured teachers tend to drift toward "pure research" to the detriment of their teaching, which is fine if you're willing to support pure research, but most public school systems can't afford to do that. Nonetheless, there's some killer irony in this; it'll come up later.)

And he ignored the fact that spending per pupil has increased by 25% over inflation since 1990, while teacher pay has only been tracking inflation. That's a lot of money being extracted via taxation for education which isn't benefiting the teachers he was arguing for. And, judging by the results of the American education system, that money is not being well-spent.

But the major point he had to make, which is arguably true but also arguably a big problem, is that teachers aren't subject to the usual dicta of business management. "They don't do it for the money, they do it because they love to do it." (He also mentioned something about putting in long hours, which doesn't stand up to widespread analysis; odds are, he knows some truly notable teachers, including his mother.) "It's that kind of MBA thinking that got us into this mess." No, Mr. Damon. No. The notion of "merit pay", and especially its implementations, may be flawed. But there are a shitload of bad teachers out there, and by and large, nothing is done about them. They may even love what they do. But as far as the kids are concerned, that really doesn't matter.

Of course, it's possible that the many studies that show that U.S. education is lagging the world are flawed as well. Comparing our mathematics scores of all high school seniors against the scores of high school seniors from other countries who only test those who chose math paths, and dropped all those who chose liberal arts or vocational paths, is not an apples-to-apples comparison.

And then there's the worst part, ignored by both Mr. Damon and his libertarian interviewer: the sad truth of the matter is that we, as a species, don't know how to teach kids. Sure, we've got basic literacy down, but we don't really know how children of progressing ages acquire information. We subject them to it, in environments which were originally designed to create urban factory workers out of former farm families. There have been credible comparisons between schools and prisons ("except you're allowed to talk in prison"). Research, most of it from tenured teachers, has been squishy, flopping between theories which come and go more like fashion than like hypotheses being tested and refined.

So, go ahead, cheer for the fact that someone famous actually researched and supported his opinions; we all know that's too rare. But don't swallow his arguments as if they were the Holy Host, and more than you would the arguments of some random blogger who you mostly agree with.

And please don't treat other voices in the overall argument as the spawn of Satan. I, in particular, don't appreciate it.

[1] "well" puns not intended. But hey, I'll take 'em.