• Trump And The Authoritarian Temptation

    Our guest author today is Eric Chenoweth, co-director of the Institute for Democracy in Eastern Europe (IDEE). He is also principal author of Democracy Web, a civics education curricular resource project of the Albert Shanker Institute. This article is adapted from a longer version that appears on IDEE’s new website.

    In 1976, the French political theorist Jean François Revel critiqued what he called the “totalitarian temptation” among intellectuals who attacked Western political democracy at a time of severe threat. Forty years later democracy is again under threat.

    Revel wrote when the Soviet Union was at the height of its military strength and international influence. In the West, Eurocommunist parties were rising in popularity and non-communist political parties on the Left were developing a strong anti-American sentiment, with some political leaders and intellectuals equivocating in their defense of NATO against the Soviet bloc. Revel, himself a socialist and humanist, argued that one had to be “inoculated to the virus of reality” not to see that communism brought only mass political repression and economic misery. He had a dark theory for his colleagues’ blindness: “Does there lurk in us a wish for totalitarian rule?” he wrote. “If so, it would explain a great deal about how people behave, about the speeches they make, and the times they remain silent.”

  • The Intervention That Works Across Settings With All Children

    Our guest authors today are Geoff Marietta, Executive Director, Pine Mountain Settlement School and Research Fellow at Berea College; Chad d'Entremont, Executive Director, Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy; and Emily E. Murphy, Director, Massachusetts Education Partnership (MEP) at the Rennie Center. Their work focuses on research and practice in labor-management-community collaboration.

    If you learned there was an intervention to improve student outcomes that worked for nearly all children across communities, what would stop you from using it? This intervention has closed learning gaps, both in urban communities serving predominantly low-income minority students and in isolated rural areas with large numbers of white and Native American students living in poverty. It has worked in suburban, urban, and rural settings with white, African-American, Hispanic, Native American, Asian, and multi-racial students. That intervention is collaboration.

    In this post, we define collaboration, briefly discuss the growing evidence associating collaboration with student success, and describe some of our ongoing work, which focuses on designing tools to facilitate, formalize, and focus the hard but worthwhile and necessary responsibility of working together.

  • Basic Facts About Who Pays State And Local Taxes

    Taxes, particularly income taxes, are among the most divisive and controversial issues in any nation, and this makes perfect sense – people care about how much they pay and how it is spent. Yet most of the constant, heated debate about taxation focuses almost entirely on federal taxes, with state and local taxes receiving far less attention.

    Periodically, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) releases an important and interesting analysis of who pays state and local taxes – that is, the tax burdens among households with different incomes. The latest version of this report was published last year. The findings are worth knowing for anyone interested in public sector services, including education.

    ITEP reports that state and local taxes overall are highly regressive, which means that poorer households pay a larger share of their income in state and local taxes than do higher income households. This finding is summarized in the figure below, which is taken directly from the report (note that these are national averages, and that the breakdown varies by state).

  • Teachers' Opinions Of Teacher Evaluation Systems

    The primary test of the new teacher evaluation systems implemented throughout the nation over the past 5-10 years is whether they improve teacher and ultimately student performance. Although the kinds of policy evaluations that will address these critical questions are just beginning to surface (e.g., Dee and Wyckoff 2015), among the most important early indicators of how well the new systems are working is their credibility among educators. Put simply, if teachers and administrators don’t believe in the systems, they are unlikely to respond productively to them.

    A new report from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) provides a useful little snapshot of teachers’ opinions of their evaluation systems using a nationally representative survey. It is important to bear in mind that the data are from the 2011-12 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) and the 2012-13 Teacher Follow Up Survey, a time in which most of the new evaluations in force today were either still on the drawing board, or in their first year or two of implementation. But the results reported by IES might still serve as a useful baseline going forward.

    The primary outcome in this particular analysis is a survey item querying whether teachers were “satisfied” with their evaluation process. And almost four in five respondents either strongly or somewhat agreed that they were satisfied with their evaluation. Of course, satisfaction with an evaluation system does not necessarily signal anything about its potential to improve or capture teacher performance, but it certainly tells us something about teachers’ overall views of how they are evaluated.

  • Contingent Work In The U.S. Labor Market

    For the past 20 or so years, it is fairly common to hear that the U.S. workforce is an increasingly precarious workforce – that is, made up of jobs with non-standard employment arrangements, such as temp jobs, on call work, and independent contracting.

    Because these types of employment arrangements, often called “contingent work,” tend to offer less stability, lower wages, and less opportunities for advancement, compared with “standard” full-time jobs, the growth of the contingent workforce is often portrayed as a cause and/or signal of the erosion of workers’ rights and the decline of the middle class in the U.S. Others see it differently, however, and argue that contingent work offers the flexibility desired by employers and employees alike, and that flexible jobs allow faster and more efficient “matching” of workers with positions, thus boosting productivity. This debate, of course, centers largely around empirical questions, and the body of research on contingent work has been building for a few decades now (see Kalleberg 2000; Connelly and Gallagher 2004). Yet not all labor force surveys are designed to capture the full set of nuances of workers’ employment arrangements. Starting in the mid 1990s, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) had the good sense to collect data on this topic, in the form of the Contingent Worker Supplement (CWS) to the Current Population Survey (CPS). The CWS was administered five times between 1995 and 2005, and provided valuable data on these “nonstandard” employment relations.

    The CWS, however, has not been conducted since 2005, substantially decreasing the high quality information available on contingent work at a particularly important time, given that the Great Recession began shortly thereafter. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) made a laudable attempt to fill this hole with an April 2015 report, which uses several data sources to provide an important snapshot on the prevalence of and trends in contingent work in the U.S. (the data go up to 2010). There are a few key takeaways from this report, some of which are long established.

  • New Research Report: Are U.S. Schools Inefficient?

    At one point or another we’ve all heard some version of the following talking points: 1) “Spending on U.S. education has doubled or triped over the past few decades, but performance has remained basically flat; or 2) “The U.S. spends more on education than virtually any other nation and yet still gets worse results.” If you pay attention, you will hear one or both of these statements frequently, coming from everyone from corporate CEOs to presidential candidates.

    The purpose of both of these statements is to argue that U.S. education is inefficient - that is, gets very little bang for the buck – and that spending more money will not help.

    Now, granted, these sorts of pseudo-empirical talking points almost always omit important nuances yet, in some cases, they can still provide important information. But, putting aside the actual relative efficiency of U.S. schools, these particular statements about U.S. education spending and performance are so rife with oversimplification that they fail to provide much if any useful insight into U.S. educational efficiency or policy that affects it. Our new report, written by Rutgers University Professor Bruce D. Baker and Rutgers Ph.D. student Mark Weber, explains why and how this is the case. Baker and Weber’s approach is first to discuss why the typical presentations of spending and outcome data, particularly those comparing nations, are wholly unsuitable for the purpose of evaluating U.S. educational efficiency vis-à-vis that of other nations. They then go on to present a more refined analysis of the data by adjusting for student characteristics, inputs such as class size, and other factors. Their conclusions will most likely be unsatisfying for all “sides” of the education debate.

  • Are U.S. Schools Resegregating?

    Last week, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report, part of which presented an analysis of access to educational opportunities among the nation’s increasingly low income and minority public school student population. The results, most generally, suggest that the proportion of the nation's schools with high percentages of lower income (i.e., subsidized lunch eligible) and Black and Hispanic students increased between 2000 and 2013.

    The GAO also reports that these schools, compared to those serving fewer lower income and minority students, tend to offer fewer math, science, and college prep courses, and also to suspend, expel, and hold back ninth graders at higher rates.

    These are, of course, important and useful findings. Yet the vast majority of the news coverage of the report focused on the interpretation of these results as showing that U.S. schools are “resegregating.” That is, the news stories portrayed the finding that a larger proportion of schools serve more than 75 percent Black and Hispanic students as evidence that schools became increasingly segregated between the 2000-01 and 2013-14 school years. This is an incomplete, somewhat misleading interpretation of the GAO findings. In order to understand why, it is helpful to discuss briefly how segregation is measured.

  • The Early Origins Of The STEM Achievement Gap (And What Can Be Done To Help)

    Every year, like a drumbeat, more articles, studies and reports detail the reasons that a disproportionally low number of people of color are employed in the well paid science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) professions. One result has been a myriad of programs designing to attract, prepare, mentor, and retain secondary and college-age underrepresented students into the STEM fields. An interesting new study, however, suggests that solutions to this problem need to begin much earlier, prior to kindergarten in fact.

    First, it should be noted race or ethnicity, per se, are not really what’s at issue in terms of students’ relative success in the STEM fields, but rather the historic and persistent lack of opportunity afforded to certain segments of U.S. society, resulting in the overrepresentation of people of color among the ranks of the poor.  And further, it is not poverty in itself, but poverty's accompanying life conditions that help to explain performance gaps that begin at home and extend into schooling and beyond.

    In this case, the study’s authors, Morgan, Farkas, Hillemeier and  Maczuga, argue that “the strongest contributors to science achievement gaps in the United States are general knowledge gaps that are already present at kindergarten entry. Therefore, interventions designed to address science achievement gaps in the United States may need to be implemented very early in children’s development (e.g., by or around school entry, if not earlier) so as to counteract the early onset of general knowledge gaps during the preschool and early elementary years.”

  • Putting The International Refugee Crisis In Context

    Tomorrow, the Shanker Institute and Jewish Labor Committee will hold an event on the International Refugee Crisis. In the popular discourse, the difference between the terms “asylum seeker”, “forced migrant,” and “refugee” is often blurred, causing confusion. It is therefore hard to pinpoint whether the recent upswell in negative attitudes towards refugees reflects anti-immigrant sentiments generally, dissatisfaction with the international protection system, or animus against specific ethnic or religious groups of refugees.

    Moreover, as the global refugee situation is rarely discussed, the general public is largely unaware of the issues related to where refugees are, relocation and resettlement needs, and refugee integration.

    The objective of this post is to clarify the main differences between refugees and other groups of migrants, and to describe the law as it applies to them. I will also summarize recent refugee movements to Europe, and then, in a subsequent post, discuss attitudes towards refugees and different migrant groups.

  • New Research Brief: Teacher Segregation In Los Angeles And New York City

    The current attention being given to the state of teacher diversity, including ASI’s recent report on the subject, is based on the idea that teacher diversity is a resource that profits everyone, and that policymakers and administrators should try to increase this resource. We agree.

    There is already a fair amount of research to indicate the significance and potential implications of teacher diversity (e.g., Dee 2004; Gershenson et al., 2015; Mueller et al. 1999). It’s important to bear in mind, however, that the benefits of diversity, like those of any resource, are dependent not just on how much is available, but also how it is distributed across schools and districts.

    Unfortunately, research on the distribution of teacher diversity or teacher segregation has, thus far, been virtually non-existent. A new ASI research brief begins to help fill this void. The brief, written with my colleagues Matt Di Carlo and Esther Quintero, presents a descriptive analysis of teacher segregation within the two largest school districts in the nation – Los Angeles and New York City. We find that teachers in these two districts, while quite diverse overall, relative to the U.S. teacher workforce as a whole, are rather segregated across schools by race and ethnicity, according to multiple different measures of segregation. In other words, teachers tend to work in schools with disproportionate numbers of colleagues of their own race and/or ethnicity.