• The Teachers' Union Hypothesis

    For the past couple of months, Steve Brill's new book has served to step up the eternally-beneath-the-surface hypothesis that teachers’ unions are the primary obstacle to improving educational outcomes in the U.S. The general idea is that unions block “needed reforms," such as merit pay and other forms of test-based accountability for teachers, and that they “protect bad teachers” from being fired.

    Teachers’ unions are a convenient target. For one thing, a significant proportion of Americans aren’t crazy about unions of any type. Moreover, portraying unions as the villain in the education reform drama facilitates the (mostly false) policy-based distinction between teachers and the organizations that represent them – put simply, “love teachers, hate their unions." Under the auspices of this dichotomy, people can advocate for changes , such as teacher-level personnel policies based partially on testing results, without having to address why most teachers oppose them (a badly needed conversation).

    No, teachers’ unions aren’t perfect, because the teachers to whom they give voice aren’t perfect. There are literally thousands of unions, and, just like districts, legislatures and all other institutions, they make mistakes. But I believe strongly in separating opinion and anecdote from actual evidence, and the simple fact is that the pervasive argument that unions are a substantial cause of low student performance has a weak empirical basis, while the evidence that unions are a primary cause of low performance does not exist.

  • 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.

  • An International Perspective On Corporate Pay

    Our guest author today is Michael Tims, associate professor of biology at Montgomery College in Takoma Park, Maryland. Some of his writing can be found on his science blog, Bardo's Calculus, as well as at the Hyattstown Mill Arts Project, where he is a board member.

    The growing wealth gap in the United States has worried some commentators for years. The length and breadth of the economic crisis, and the suffering it has brought with it, have moved those concerns into the mainstream. One aspect of this development that warrants more attention is the connection between declining rates of unionization, and the incredible gap between the pay of workers and their bosses.

    As corporate resistance to unions has increased and union density declined, the discrepancy in pay between management and worker has grown extreme. Since the mid 1970s, the average multiple of CEO pay to worker pay has increased from 28x in 1970 to 158x in 2005, to almost 400x in 2010. . Their average "total realized annual CEO compensation" is currently $12 million, according to Governance Metrics International. During this same period, worker pay has stagnated and fallen behind inflation, despite an historic rise in workforce productivity

    This phenomenon of high pay disparity in the industrial world is uniquely American, with the next highest countries being Britain (25x), Sweden (13x), Germany (11x) and Japan (10x). Claims that these pay levels represent success on the part of the CEO appear to be misleading.

  • 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.

  • A Few Other Principles Worth Stating

    Last week, a group of around 25 education advocacy organizations, including influential players such as Democrats for Education Reform and The Education Trust, released a "statement of principles" on the role of teacher quality in the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The statement, which is addressed to the chairs and ranking members of the Senate and House committees handling the reauthorization, lays out some guidelines for teacher-focused policy in ESEA (a draft of the full legislation was released this week; summary here).

    Most of the statement is the standard fare from proponents of market-based reform, some of which I agree with in theory if not practice. What struck me as remarkable was the framing argument presented in the statement's second sentence:

    Research shows overwhelmingly that the only way to close achievement gaps – both gaps between U.S. students and those in higher-achieving countries and gaps within the U.S. between poor and minority students and those more advantaged – and transform public education is to recruit, develop and retain great teachers and principals.
    This assertion is false.
  • 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.