The Two Million Minutes Blog

Teachers Unions Outspend Ed Reformers 6-to-1 At State Level

The Teachers Unions recognize that the education reform battle is NOT a national issue, but rather one fought at the state and local level. 

Education reformers have been slow to grasp this fact and even slower to identify state legislative candidates sympathetitc to the desire to improve U.S. education and then contribute to their campaigns.

The Teachers Unions, on the other hand, have understood this for decades and have a very sophisticated infrastructure capable of identifying and funding candidates opposed to reform.

"We know how to get our friends elected," stated Dave Comerford, a spokesman for the Illinois Federation of Teachers, representing 103,000 teachers.

The Teachers Unions so far this year, have contributed more than $24 million to candidates and party committees at the state level, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics, a nonpartisan campaign research firm. Education reform organizations contributed about $4 million.

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No one articluates the power and wealth of the Teachers Unions better that former Union General Counsel Robert Chenin - 

 

 

China Takes Lead in Clean Energy, With Aggressive State Aid

"The booming Chinese clean energy sector, now more than a million jobs strong, is quickly coming to dominate the production of technologies essential to slowing global warming and other forms of air pollution.

Such technologies are needed to assure adequate energy as the world’s population grows by nearly a third, to nine billion people by the middle of the century, while oil and coal reserves dwindle."

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China's Shifting Population Provides Huge Education Business Opportunity

Since 1990, over 250 million Chinese have left their rural farms and moved to one of China's many cities. At the current pace of urban growth, the number of urban Chinese will exceed the rural population within 5 years. 

This movement has lots of issues for the Chinese government, but with respect to education, it presents both a problem and an opportunity.

In rural China, formal education is simply terrible or non-existent. In urban China, however, there are a growing number of government schools, private schools and tutoring companies working to meet the education needs.

In a sign of the times, SIX Chinese education companies have gone public in the U.S. on the NASDAQ or the NYSE and raised a combined $600 million to grow their education services:

 

1- Xueda Education Group (NYSE: XUE)

Raised $128 million on Nov 1, 2010 too expand their education programs in China. Lead underwriter was Goldman Sachs.  Xueda has 157 learning centers in 44 Chinese cities. Sales in the first six months of 2010 doubled to $77.9 million. Profits increased almost fivefold to $11.8 million in the first half.

 

2- China's TAL Education Group (NYSE: XRS)

Raised $120 million in October 2010 when Morgan Stanley took them public. With sales growing at 85% per year, Ambow has 109 learning centers and 87 service centers in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Tianjin and Wuhan, as well as an online platform.

 

3- Global Education & Technology Group Ltd. (NASDAQ: GEDU)

Raised $67 million when Merrill Lynch took them public October 2010. Company has 292 learning centers across China, as well as an online course delivery platform with more than one million registered Chinese members. 

 

4- Ambow Education Holdings (NYSE: AMBO)  

Raised $115 million when JP Morgan took them public in August 2010. Business includes K-12 schools and tutoring centers plus colleges and career enhancement centers. With its network of regional service hubs complemented by a proprietary learning platform, Ambow provides its services to students in 30 out of the 31 provinces and autonomous regions within China.

 

5- New Oriental Education & Technology Group Inc. (NTSE: EDU)

Raised $112 million in Sept 2006 when Goldman and Credit Suisse took them public. With 16,000 employees, New Oriental had sales of $430 million and profits of $81 million last year and is growing close to 100% per year. Company’s market value exceeds $1 billion. The Company had approximately 1,807,000 Chinese students enrolled.

 

6- ATA, Inc (Nasdaq: ATAI)

Raised $50 million. Smallest of the 6, with sales of $36 million. Company provides test-based educational services; career-oriented educational services, including major course programs; test preparation and training programs and services. 

Unlike in the U.S., in China and India corporations service a growing portion of the educational needs of the Chinese people. Like Indians, Chinese are willing to pay out of pocket to enhance their child's education.

There is really nothing comparable in the U.S. to what is taking place in Chinese and Indian education. 

"At one time being a physicist was considered a great achievement."

An interesting essay by Dr. Phil Wyatt - PhD in Physics and successful high-tech entrepreneur. Condensed version, reprinted with permission.

"The Golden Age for America’s industrial physicists was the period from the end of WWII to about 1980.

In the early 1940s, within a year of Einstein’s letter to President Roosevelt, in which he warned of the imminent dangers of German interest in nuclear fission, our country began its crash program to develop an atomic bomb and the concomitant ability to produce nuclear power.

Within a brief three and a-half years, the Nation not only had its nuclear weapons, but a growing cadre of talented physicists.

With the onset of the Cold War, and then Sputnik in 1957, physics opportunities in the country began to explode. The huge availability of government funds spawned the creation by physicists of new industries.

Physicists founded many notable companies:

Simon Ramo formed the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation, later to become TRW.  

Gabriel Giannini founded Giannini Controls Corporation, which went public and expanded.

Keeve M. Siegel was the founder of Conductron Corporation, a high tech producer of electronic equipment, which was absorbed by McDonnell Douglas Corporation.

Robert Beyster started Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). Today the company generates $10 billion in sales and employs 46,000 people.

Gene Amdahl – founded Amdahl Corporation. By 1980 Amdahl Corporation had sold over a US $1 billion of mainframes and had over 6,000 employees worldwide. It was acquired by Fujitsu.

Russell Varian established Varian Associates the inventors of the Klystron. Today, the company has $2 billion in sales and employs 5,000.

Chester Carlson invented xerography and founded Haloid XeroX Corporation.


At one time in the not too distant past, being a physicist was considered a great achievement. Physicists have led the Nation in providing many of the innovations needed to build great industries and defense capabilities. Their achievements have produced many of the key elements of modern electronics, lasers and communications, the genetic code, energy conversion from natural and nuclear sources, etc.

Our Nation has reached a critical crossroad. During these past two decades, the Country’s manufacturing base has eroded significantly due to massive outsourcing, financial restructuring, unfortunate accidents, thefts of trade secrets, and increased foreign innovation and competition.

Since 2001 the United States has run a trade deficit in advanced technology products, a U.S. Census Bureau category that includes new or leading-edge technologies such as biotechnology, life science, optoelectronics, information and communications, electronics, aerospace, and nuclear technology.

The United States annually imports $53B more in advanced technology products than it exports. 2001 was the start of the decline of the Nation’s Middle Class that continues unabated. We shall never regain our world economic dominance unless we are able to stop and reverse this accelerating trend.  

A recent review by Harvard Business School discussed America’s industrial losses to other countries, including TV sets, mobile phones, liquid crystal displays, portable consumer electronics, advanced rechargeable batteries for the automotive sector, hard disk drives, advanced composite materials for consumer products, and compact fluorescent lighting, to name but a few.

Today, the number of physicists in our country is perhaps only about 50,000 and the number of Americans pursuing a Ph. D. education in physics has fallen precipitously from the levels of the 1960s.

While our manufacturing industries are collapsing for lack of the technological innovation, we continue to train ever-increasing numbers of foreign physicists who have the skills to help the countries where they live expand and grow through their future efforts. 

That used to be America. However, with current immigration restrictions, many have no choice but to return to their countries of origin.  There they will create the new technologies and new companies of the 21^st century.

We must redirect, somehow, our physics resources to the expansion of the America’s manufacturing infrastructure, before it is too late."

 

A Teacher Replies to My Critique of Stanford Professor

The essay below was posted on the Renaissance School web site. 

It was in response to my most recent blog post Reply To Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews.

I repost it because I think it reflects how most teachers feel about reform.

 

Mr. Compton

You know a great deal more than I about the men and women who populate Silicon Valley but I’ve spent the greater part of sixty years inside the US educational system and I think I can speak authoritatively about the lay of that land.

Dr. Labaree argues that the American school system evolved to solve the contradictions between individual freedom and social equality. And he says that kids don’t set their sights on real knowledge until they leave high school. That all fits with my own experience.

He also says—an important point you overlook—that the American classroom is a private fiefdom of the teacher, one where the adult has to figure out a delicate ecology of tyrant and benefactor, fount and facilitator.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that when it comes to their work that schoolteachers are among the nation’s most conservative practitioners. Anybody who tries to tell me how to teach had better spend copious hours in my shoes because everything I do is tied to everything else I do and changing one part of the system will unravel the whole skein.

I’m not defending my colleague’s troglodytism; it drives me crazy when they won’t try new ideas. Yet Dr. Labaree is right, I think, when he says that resistance to outside reformers like the standards movement is preferable to the alternative: reforms invented by business people and politicians with logical ideas and self-evident truths.

The Chinese and Indians and Pakistanis are not challenging the US in some mythical struggle because they got education right. They got their act together when they changed their economic system to mimic ours. It is our individualism that creates guys like Steve Jobs.

I recommend you read Outliers by Jay Mathews friend, Malcolm Gladwell, if you want to see how to out-tech the youngsters from Guangzhou and Bangalore. Or read Gladwell’s essay, “Late Bloomers” to see the folly of pushing teens to save our economy.

I only know the creators of the high tech miracle from what I’ve read about them. You have the advantage of me here. But my impression is that the pathfinders who did that work were not the kind to spend eight hours a night studying for some exam.

I’m sure Dr. Labaree will reply in due course but I’d like to guess his answer to your complaint:

Calm down, sir. The American K12 education system is terrible at imparting knowledge to young adults but it’s been terrible at doing this for at least one hundred years. And cultivate some humility. Your reforms, that seem so logical to you, may make things worse. You may be misreading the Asian miracle, its causes and its lessons.

Jerry, Oakland, California