Education

Trouble In Paradise

According to the principles of market-based education reform, there’s at least one large, urban public school district operating at max power: District of Columbia Public Schools.

For the past 2-3 years, DCPS has been a reformer’s paradise. The district has a new evaluation system (IMPACT), which it designed by itself. The system includes heavily-weighted value-added estimates (50 percent for teachers in tested grades/subjects), and the results of teachers’ evaluations are used every year to fire the teachers who receive the lowest evaluation ratings, or receive the second lowest score for two consecutive years. “Ineffective teachers” are being weeded out – no hearing, no due process, no nothing.

Furthermore, these evaluation scores are also used to award performance bonuses, and very large ones at that – up to $25,000. This should, so the logic goes, be attracting high-achieving people to DCPS, and keeping them around after they arrive. And, finally, as a result of many years of growth, the city has among the largest charter school sectors in the nation, with almost half of public school student attending charters. Theoretically, this competition should be upping the game of all schools, charter and regular public alike.

Basically, almost everything that market-based reformers think needs to happen has been the reality in DCPS for the past 2-3 years. And the staff  has been transformed too. The majority of principals, and a huge proportion of teachers, were hired during the tenure of either Michelle Rhee or her successor, Kaya Henderson.

The district should be in overdrive right about now. Is it?

What The "No Excuses" Model Really Teaches Us About Education Reform

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

In a previous post, I discussed “Apollo 20," a Houston pilot program in which a group of low-performing regular public schools are implementing the so-called “no excuses” education model common among high-profile charter schools such as KIPP. In the Houston implementation, “no excuses” consists of five basic policies: a longer day and year, resulting in 21 percent more school time; different human capital policies, including performance bonuses and firing and selectively rehiring all principals and half of teachers (the latter is one of the "turnaround models" being pushed by the Obama Administration); extensive 2-on-1 tutoring; regular assessments and data analysis; and “high expectations” for behavior and achievement, including parental contracts.

A couple of weeks ago, Harvard professor Roland Fryer, the lead project researcher, released the results of the pilot’s first year. I haven’t seen much national coverage of the report, but I’ve seen a few people characterize the results as evidence that “’No excuses’ works in regular public schools." Now, it’s true that there were effects – strong in math – and that the results appear to be persistent across different model specifications.

But, when it comes to the question of whether “no excuses works," the reality is a bit more complicated. There are four main things to keep in mind when interpreting the results of this paper, a couple of which bear on the larger debate about "no excuses" charter schools and education reform in general.

Making (Up) The Grade In Ohio

In a post last week over at Flypaper, the Fordham Institute’s Terry Ryan took a “frank look” at the ratings of the handful of Ohio charter schools that Fordham’s Ohio branch manages. He noted that the Fordham schools didn’t make a particularly strong showing, ranking 24th among the state’s 47 charter authorizers in terms of the aggregate “performance index” among the schools it authorizes. Mr. Ryan takes the opportunity to offer a few valid explanations as to why Fordham ranked in the middle of the charter authorizer pack, such as the fact that the state’s “dropout recovery schools," which accept especially hard-to-serve students who left public schools, aren’t included (which would likely bump up Fordham's relative ranking).

Mr. Ryan doth protest too little. His primary argument, which he touches on but does not flesh out, should be that Ohio’s performance index is more a measure of student characteristics than of any defensible concept of school effectiveness. By itself, it reveals relatively little about the “quality” of schools operated by Ohio’s charter authorizers.

But the limitations of measures like the performance index, which are discussed below (and in the post linked above), have implications far beyond Ohio’s charter authorizers. The primary means by which Ohio assesses school/district performance is the state’s overall “report card grades," which are composite ratings comprised of multiple test-based measures, including the performance index. Unfortunately, however, these ratings are also not a particularly useful measure of school effectiveness. Not only are the grades unstable between years, but they also rely too heavily on test-based measures, including the index, that fail to account for student characteristics. While any attempt to measure school performance using testing data is subject to imprecision, Ohio’s effort falls short.

The Cutting Edge Of Teacher Quality

The State of Michigan is currently considering a bill that would limit collective bargaining rights among teachers. Under the proposal, paying dues would be optional. This legislation, like other so-called “right to work” laws, represents an attempt to defund and create divisions within labor unions, which severely weakens teachers' ability to bargain fair contracts, as well as the capacity of their unions to advocate on behalf of of public schools and workers in general.

Last month, Michigan State Senate Majority Floor Leader Arlan Meekoff (R- West Olive) was asked whether he thought the bill would pass. He responded in the affirmative, and added:

It's an opportunity to let teachers get farther away from union goons. That should give them a better chance to break away from the mediocrity. That should make things better for our schools and our children.

Well, there you have it, folks. We’ve been wasting our time by designing rigorous standards and overhauling teacher evaluations. The key to improving teacher quality is not training, compensation or professional development.

It’s goon proximity.

Deprofessionalizing Higher Education

Books criticizing higher education are gaining in popularity,  judging from the number written and published in the last year or so (see here, here, here, and here for just a few examples).  Naomi Riley’s The Faculty Lounges And Other Reasons That You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid For, which I was asked to review by the publisher, has just joined these ranks.

In her book, Riley tackles an important question facing the U.S. higher education system – that is, whether the increasing number of contingent faculty, including adjunct professors and part-time instructors, has eroded the value and quality of a university education.

According to recent estimates, more than half of all instructional staff now consists of part-time and contingent faculty. Although some have argued that this can help to lower costs and increase flexibility, most research indicates that tenured faculty members are more effective and produce better results (e.g. greater student retention and engagement) than adjunct faculty (see here and here), leading to campaigns for more tenure-track positions. In other words, permanent tenure-track positions are seen as the “gold standard."

Riley looks at these same trends and turns this argument on its head. Instead of advocating for an expansion of tenure-track positions, she argues that tenure itself should be abolished.

Character Education

I’m always uncomfortable with personal accusations in our education debate, and they come from both “sides." For instance, I don’t like hearing accusations that market-based reformers are “profiteers." The implication is that these people seek to dismantle or otherwise alter the public education system for their own economic advantage.

It’s true that a significant proportion of market-based reformers support various forms of privatization, such as vouchers, and that this support is in part based on the power of competition and the profit motive to increase efficiency. It’s also true that there are some who stand to profit personally off certain policy changes. But the overwhelming majority of people on the “reform side” have no financial skin in the game, and even those who do might actually still care about education and children. You can and should disagree with them, if you’re so inclined, but accusing them of being motivated solely by personal financial gain, or even implying as much, could well be unfair, but, more importantly, it contributes nothing of substance to the debate.

On the flip side of that coin, however, is the endlessly-repeated “we care about children, not adults” narrative. This little nugget is a common message from the market-based reform crowd. Most recently, Ben Austin, head of a pro-charter school group, was on a panel at NBC’s Education Nation, and repeated the talking point several times. In fact, there’s now a small confederation of advocacy groups nominally based on the “children over adults” accusation – Students First, Stand for Children, etc.

Can I Have Some Faculty With My College?

The growth of contingent faculty reflects the increasing tendency of higher education institutions to operate like businesses. It’s no secret that this is a major feature of for-profit colleges, most of which have effectively eliminated tenure on the grounds that this will help flexibility and innovation.

But what is the actual staff breakdown in traditional and for-profit colleges?

I examined data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) maintained by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) combined with data from the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability.

There were several surprises.

For Many Teachers, Reform Means Higher Risk, Lower Rewards

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

One of the central policy ideas of market-based education reform is to increase both the risk and rewards of the teaching profession. The basic idea is to offer teachers additional compensation (increased rewards), but, in exchange, make employment and pay more contingent upon performance by implementing merit pay and weakening job protections such as tenure and seniority (increased risk). This trade-off, according to advocates, will not only force out low performers by paying them less and making them easier to fire, but it will also attract a “different type” of candidate to teaching – high-achievers who thrive in a high-stakes, high-reward system.

As I’ve said before, I’m skeptical as to whether less risk-averse individuals necessarily make better teachers, as I haven’t seen any evidence that this is the case. I’m also not convinced that personnel policies are necessarily the most effective lever when it comes to “attracting talent," and I’m concerned that the sheer size of the teaching profession makes doing so a unique challenge. That said, I’m certainly receptive to trying new compensation/employment structures, and the “higher risk, higher reward” idea, though unproven in education, is not without its potential if done correctly. After all, teacher pay continues to lose ground to that offered by other professions, and the penalty teachers pay increases the longer they remain in the profession. At the same time, there is certainly a case for attracting more and better candidates through higher pay, and nobody would disagree that accountability mechanisms such as evaluations and tenure procedures could use improvement in many places, even if we disagree sharply on the details of what should be done.

There’s only one problem: States and districts all over the nation are increasing risk, but not rewards. In fact, in some places, risk is going up while compensation is being cut, sometimes due to the same legislation.

The Stability Of Ohio's School Value-Added Ratings And Why It Matters

I have discussed before how most testing data released to the public are cross-sectional, and how comparing them between years entails the comparison of two different groups of students. One way to address these issues is to calculate and release school- and district-level value-added scores.

Value added estimates are not only longitudinal (i.e., they follow students over time), but the models go a long way toward accounting for differences in the characteristics of students between schools and districts. Put simply, these models calculate “expectations” for student test score gains based on student (and sometimes school) characteristics, which are then used to gauge whether schools’ students did better or worse than expected.

Ohio is among the few states that release school- and district-level value-added estimates (though this number will probably increase very soon). These results are also used in high-stakes decisions, as they are a major component of Ohio’s “report card” grades for schools, which can be used to close or sanction specific schools. So, I thought it might be useful to take a look at these data and their stability over the past two years. In other words, what proportion of the schools that receive a given rating in one year will get that same rating the next year?

The Education Reporter's Dilemma

I’ve written so many posts about the misinterpretation of testing data in news stories that I’m starting to annoy myself. For example, I’ve shown that year-to-year changes in testing results might be attributable to the fact that, each year, a different set of students takes the test. I’ve discussed the fact that proficiency rates are not test scores – they only tell you the proportion of students above a given line – and that the rates and actual scores can move in opposite directions (see this simple illustration). And I’ve pleaded with journalists, most of whom I like and respect, to write with care about these issues (and, I should note, many of them do so).

Yet here I am, back on my soapbox again. This time the culprit is the recent release of SAT testing data, generating dozens of error-plagued stories from newspapers and organizations. Like virtually all public testing data, the SAT results are cross-sectional – each year, the test is taken by a different group of students. This means that demographic changes in the sample of test takers influence the results. This problem is even more acute in the case of the SAT, since it is voluntary. Despite the best efforts of the College Board (see their press release), a slew of stories improperly equated the decline in average SAT scores since the previous year with an overall decline in student performance – a confirmation of educational malaise (in fairness, there were many exceptions).

I’ve come to think that there’s a fundamental problem here: When you interpret testing data properly, you don’t have much of a story.