Shanker Blog

The New Middle East: Democratic Accountability And The Role Of Trade Unions

Our guest author today is Heba F. El-Shazli.  She has 25 years of experience in the promotion of democracy, independent trade unions, political and economic development. She has worked with institutions and leaders throughout the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) to challenge authoritarian regimes. Currently she is a visiting professor of international studies and modern languages at the Virginia Military Institute. The views expressed here are her own.

Since the shock of 9/11 and the tragedy that ensued, many policy analysts have questioned whether or not Islam is compatible with democracy, while  ignoring countries such as Indonesia (the largest Muslim nation in the world) as well as  India, Turkey, and  others with large Muslim populations.

Now, in the aftermath of Arab Spring, Islamist political parties have gained political power through elections in the Middle East and, for many analysts, the jury is still out: Can Islamist governments be responsive to the people who elected them? Will it be one person, one vote, one time?  It appears that these questions are about to be answered:  The Justice and Development Party (AKP), which governs Turkey, has been in the forefront for many years. In Morocco, a majority of voters also handed power to the Justice and Development Party (PJD), a party inspired by Turkey's moderate Islamists. Tunisia’s Al-Nahda (Renaissance) party and its prime minister were elected to office after free and fair elections.  In Egypt, Mohammed Morsi, of the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) established by the Muslim Brotherhood, won the Presidential elections and his new prime minister has formed a cabinet.

Against this background, the fundamental challenge to these governments in the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region is economic and not religious. The newly-minted Islamist governments are going to be tested daily and this time held accountable by voters who are no longer afraid to speak out.

The Louisiana Voucher Accountability Sweepstakes

The situation with vouchers in Louisiana is obviously quite complicated, and there are strong opinions on both sides of the issue, but I’d like to comment quickly on the new “accountability” provision. It's a great example of how, too often, people focus on the concept of accountability and ignore how it is actually implemented in policy.

Quick and dirty background: Louisiana will be allowing students to receive vouchers (tuition to attend private schools) if their public schools are sufficiently low-performing, according to their "school performance score" (SPS). As discussed here, the SPS is based primarily on how highly students score, rather than whether they’re making progress, and thus tells you relatively little about the actual effectiveness of schools per se. For instance, the vouchers will be awarded mostly to schools serving larger proportions of disadvantaged students, even if many of those schools are compelling large gains (though such progress cannot be assessed adequately using year-to-year changes in the SPS, which, due in part to its reliance on cross-sectional proficiency rates, are extremely volatile).

Now, here's where things get really messy: In an attempt to demonstrate that they are holding the voucher-accepting private schools accountable, Louisiana officials have decided that they will make these private schools ineligible for the program if their performance is too low (after at least two years of participation in the program). That might be a good idea if the state measured school performance in a defensible manner. It doesn't.

Schools Aren't The Only Reason Test Scores Change

In all my many posts about the interpretation of state testing data, it seems that I may have failed to articulate one major implication, which is almost always ignored in the news coverage of the release of annual testing data. That is: raw, unadjusted changes in student test scores are not by themselves very good measures of schools' test-based effectiveness.

In other words, schools can have a substantial impact on performance, but student test scores also increase, decrease or remain flat for reasons that have little or nothing to do with schools. The first, most basic reason is error. There is measurement error in all test scores - for various reasons, students taking the same test twice will get different scores, even if their "knowledge" remains constant. Also, as I've discussed many times, there is extra imprecision when using cross-sectional data. Often, any changes in scores or rates, especially when they’re small in magnitude and/or based on smaller samples (e.g., individual schools), do not represent actual progress (see here and here). Finally, even when changes are "real," other factors that influence test score changes include a variety of non-schooling inputs, such as parental education levels, family's economic circumstances, parental involvement, etc. These factors don't just influence how highly students score; they are also associated with progress (that's why value-added models exist).

Thus, to the degree that test scores are a valid measure of student performance, and changes in those scores a valid measure of student learning, schools aren’t the only suitors at the dance. We should stop judging school or district performance by comparing unadjusted scores or rates between years.

Investing In Children = Supporting Their Families

Although some parents are better positioned than others to meet their families’ child care needs, very few parents are immune to the challenges of balancing work and family. Adding further stress to families is the fact that single-parent households are at a record high in the U.S., with more than 40 percent of births happening outside of marriage. Paid parental leave and quality early childhood education (ECE) are two important policies that can assist parents in this regard. In the United States, however, both are less comprehensive and less equally distributed than in most other developed nations.

As a recent (and excellent) Forbes piece points out, we have two alternatives: hope that difficult family circumstances reverse themselves, or support policies such as paid parental leave and universal early childhood education and care — policies which would make it much easier for all parents to raise children, be it as a couple or on their own. So, what’s it going to be?

In 2010, a global survey on paid leave and other workplace benefits directed by Dr. Jody Heymann (McGill University) and Dr. Alison Earle (Northeastern University) found that the U.S. is one of four* countries in the world without a national law guaranteeing paid leave for parents.** The other three nations are Liberia, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland. Some might see this as evidence of American “exceptionalism," but what a 2011 Human Rights Watch report finds exceptional is the degree to which the nation is "Failing Its Families." In fact, according to a survey of registered voters cited in the report, 76 percent of Americans said they would endorse laws that provide paid leave for family care and childbirth. Yet, it is still the case in the U.S. that parental leave, when available at all, is usually brief and unpaid.

Senate's Harkin-Enzi ESEA Plan Is A Step Sideways

Our guest authors today are Morgan Polikoff and Andrew McEachin. Morgan is Assistant Professor in the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. Andrew is an Institute of Education Science postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia.

By now, it is painfully clear that Congress will not be revising the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) before the November elections. And with the new ESEA waivers, who knows when the revision will happen? Congress, however, seems to have some ideas about what next-generation accountability should look like, so we thought it might be useful to examine one leading proposal and see what the likely results would be.

The proposal we refer to is the Harkin-Enzi plan, available here for review. Briefly, the plan identifies 15 percent of schools as targets of intervention, classified in three groups. First are the persistently low-achieving schools (PLAS); these are the 5 percent of schools that are the lowest performers, based on achievement level or a combination of level and growth. Next are the achievement gap schools (AGS); these are the 5 percent of schools with the largest achievement gaps between any two subgroups. Last are the lowest subgroup achievement schools (LSAS); these are the 5 percent of schools with the lowest achievement for any significant subgroup.

The goal of this proposal is both to reduce the number of schools that are identified as low-performing and to create a new operational definition of consistently low-performing schools. To that end, we wanted to know what kinds of schools these groups would target and how stable the classifications would be over time.

The Irreconcilables

** Also posted here on “Valerie Strauss’ Answer Sheet” in the Washington Post

The New Teacher Project (TNTP) has a new, highly-publicized report about what it calls “irreplaceables," a catchy term that is supposed to describe those teachers who are “so successful they are nearly impossible to replace." The report’s primary conclusion is that these “irreplaceable” teachers often leave the profession voluntarily, and TNTP offers several recommendations for how to improve this.

I’m not going to discuss this report fully. It shines a light on teacher retention, which is a good thing. Its primary purpose is to promulgate the conceptual argument that not all teacher turnover is created equal – i.e., that it depends on whether “good” or “bad” teachers are leaving (see here for a strong analysis on this topic). The report’s recommendations are standard fare – improve working conditions, tailor pay to “performance” (see here for a review of evidence on incentives and retention), etc. Many are widely-supported, while others are more controversial. All of them merit discussion.

I just want to make one quick (and, in many respects, semantic) point about the manner in which TNTP identifies high-performing teachers, as I think it illustrates larger issues. In my view, the term “irreplaceable” doesn't apply, and I think it would have been a better analysis without it.

Labor Market Behavior Actually Matters In Labor Market-Based Education Reform

Economist Jesse Rothstein recently released a working paper about which I am compelled to write, as it speaks directly to so many of the issues that we have raised here over the past year or two. The purpose of Rothstein’s analysis is to move beyond the talking points about teaching quality in order to see if strategies that have been proposed for improving it might yield benefits. In particular, he examines two labor market-oriented policies: performance pay and dismissing teachers.

Both strategies are, at their cores, focused on selection (and deselection) – in other words, attracting and retaining higher-performing candidates and exiting, directly or indirectly, lower-performing incumbents. Both also take time to work and have yet to be experimented with systematically in most places; thus, there is relatively little evidence on the long-term effects of either.

Rothstein’s approach is to model this complex dynamic, specifically the labor market behavior of teachers under these policies (i.e., choosing, leaving and staying in teaching), which is often ignored or assumed away, despite the fact that it is so fundamental to the policies themselves. He then calculates what would happen under this model as a result of performance pay and dismissal policies – that is, how they would affect the teacher labor market and, ultimately, student performance.*

Of course, this is just a simulation, and must be (carefully) interpreted as such, but I think the approach and findings help shed light on three fundamental points about education reform in the U.S.

The Real “Trouble” With Technology, Online Education And Learning

It’s probably too early to say whether Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a "tsunami" or a "seismic shift," but, continuing with the natural disaster theme, the last few months have seen a massive “avalanche” of press commentary about them, especially within the last few days.

Also getting lots of press attention (though not as much right now) is Adaptive/Personalized Learning. Both innovations seem to fascinate us, but probably for different reasons, since they are so fundamentally different at their cores. Personalized Learning, like more traditional concepts of education, places the individual at the center. With MOOCs, groups and social interaction take center stage and learning becomes a collective enterprise.

This post elaborates on this distinction, but also points to a recent blurring of the lines between the two – a development that could be troubling.

But, first things first: What is Personalized/Adaptive Learning, what are MOOCs, and why are they different?

The Unfortunate Truth About This Year's NYC Charter School Test Results

There have now been several stories in the New York news media about New York City’s charter schools’ “gains” on this year’s state tests (see here, here, here, here and here). All of them trumpeted the 3-7 percentage point increase in proficiency among the city’s charter students, compared with the 2-3 point increase among their counterparts in regular public schools. The consensus: Charters performed fantastically well this year.

In fact, the NY Daily News asserted that the "clear lesson" from the data is that "public school administrators must gain the flexibility enjoyed by charter leaders," and "adopt [their] single-minded focus on achievement." For his part, Mayor Michael Bloomberg claimed that the scores are evidence that the city should expand its charter sector.

All of this reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how to interpret testing data, one that is frankly a little frightening to find among experienced reporters and elected officials.

What Florida's School Grades Measure, And What They Don't

A while back, I argued that Florida's school grading system, due mostly to its choice of measures, does a poor job of gauging school performance per se. The short version is that the ratings are, to a degree unsurpassed by most other states' systems, driven by absolute performance measures (how highly students score), rather than growth (whether students make progress). Since more advantaged students tend to score more highly on tests when they enter the school system, schools are largely being judged not on the quality of instruction they provide, but rather on the characteristics of the students they serve.

New results were released a couple of weeks ago. This was highly anticipated, as the state had made controversial changes to the system, most notably the inclusion of non-native English speakers and special education students, which officials claimed they did to increase standards and expectations. In a limited sense, that's true - grades were, on average, lower this year. The problem is that the system uses the same measures as before (including a growth component that is largely redundant with proficiency). All that has changed is the students that are included in them. Thus, to whatever degree the system now reflects higher expectations, it is still for outcomes that schools mostly cannot control.

I fully acknowledge the political and methodological difficulties in designing these systems, and I do think Florida's grades, though exceedingly crude, might be useful for some purposes. But they should not, in my view, be used for high-stakes decisions such as closure, and the public should understand that they don't tell you much about the actual effectiveness of schools. Let’s take a very quick look at the new round of ratings, this time using schools instead of districts (I looked at the latter in my previous post about last year's results).