Education Reform

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.

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?

Be Careful What You Think The Public Thinks About Tenure

Monmouth University polling director Patrick Murray offered this response to my criticism of how he described tenure in a recent poll of New Jersey public opinion (see my brief reply and Bruce Baker's as well).

I’m not particularly keen on arguing about the wording of poll questions. As I stated in my original post, wordings are never perfect, and one must always take this into account when trying to interpret polling results. I took issue with Monmouth’s phrasing because it is demonstrably inaccurate, nothing more.

But I do want to quickly add that, as is often the case, responses to poll questions about tenure are very sensitive to the nature of the description offered. A 2009 PDK/Gallup poll provides an illustration.

Serious Misconduct

A recent Monmouth University poll of New Jersey residents is being widely touted by Governor Chris Christie and his supporters as evidence that people support his education reform plans. It’s hardly unusual for politicians to ignore the limitations of polling, but I’d urge caution in interpreting these results as a mandate.

Others have commented on how some of the questions are worded in a manner that could skew responses. These wording issues are inherent to polling, and that’s one of the major reasons why they must be interpreted carefully. But one of the questions caught my eye – the question about teacher tenure – and it’s worth quickly discussing.

Revisiting The Merits Of Merit Pay

Al Shanker was very concerned about the need to identify and replace incompetent teachers. The first time he wrote a column about it, his wife was one of the many people who warned him that the union’s teachers would be up in arms (see here). Shanker wasn’t worried, replying that "All of my members will read that, and they’ll all agree, because not one of them will think that they are one of the bad teachers that I’m talking about."

He was right. Most of the members were very supportive, probably for a variety of reasons. First, most teachers take their responsibilities as teachers very seriously, thus favoring the establishment and enforcement of high standards of professional practice. Second, teachers who don’t believe themselves to be effective are more likely to leave the profession – see here. And third, we know from research that most of us just believe that we are simply better than most other people. Psychologists describe this "illusory superiority" or "above average" effect as the tendency to make self-serving comparisons between oneself and others, with the consequence that an overwhelming majority of people judge themselves to be "better than average" on a variety of traits, skills, and socially desirable dimensions ( here and here).

Nevertheless, there are many teachers who support the idea of performance pay, even if they're wary of the details of how "merit" is defined (specifically, whether or not it includes test scores).

Now, it’s no secret that I think merit pay for teachers is of limited practical utility. Nevertheless, it’s important to understand why, evidence aside, some people (including teachers) might find the policy to be attractive. These are my thoughts on the issue:

The Real Charter School Experiment

The New York Times reports that there is a pilot program in Houston, called the "Apollo 20 Program" in which some of the district’s regular public schools are "mimicking" the practices of high-performing charter schools. According to the Times article, the group of pilot schools seek to replicate five of the practices commonly used by high-flying charters: extended school time; extensive tutoring; more selective hiring of principals and teachers; “data-driven” instruction, including frequent diagnostic quizzing; and a “no excuses” culture of high expectations.

In theory, this pilot program is a good idea, since a primary mission of charter schools should be as a testing ground for new policies and practices that could help to improve all schools. More than a decade of evidence has made it very clear that there’s nothing about "charterness" that makes a school successful – and indeed, only a handful get excellent results. So instead of arguing along the tired old pro-/anti-charter lines, we should, like Houston, be asking why these schools excel and working to see if we can use this information productively.

I’ll be watching to see how the pilot schools end up doing. I’m also hoping that the analysis (the program is being overseen by Harvard’s EdLabs) includes some effort to separate out the effects of each of the five replicated practices. If so, I’m guessing that we will find that the difference between high- and low-performing urban schools depends more than anything else on two factors: time and money.

In Ohio, Charter School Expansion By Income, Not Performance

For over a decade, Ohio law has dictated where charter schools can open. Expansion was unlimited in Lucas County (the “pilot district” for charters) and in the “Ohio 8” urban districts (Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo, and Youngstown). But, in any given year, charters could open up in any other district that was classified as a “challenged district," as measured by whether the district received a state “report card” rating of “academic watch” or “academic emergency." This is a performance-based standard.

Under this system, there was of course very rapid charter proliferation in Lucas County and the “Ohio 8” districts. Only a small number of other districts (around 20-30 per year) “met” the  performance-based standard. As a whole, the state’s current charter law was supposed to “open up” districts for charter schools when the districts are not doing well.

Starting next year, the state is adding a fourth criterion: Any district with a “performance index” in the bottom five percent for the state will also be open for charter expansion. Although this may seem like a logical addition, in reality, the change offends basic principles of both fairness and educational measurement.

Predicaments Of Reform

Our guest author today is David K. Cohen, John Dewey Collegiate Professor of Education and professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, and a member of the Shanker Institute’s board of directors. This is a response to Michael Petrilli, who recently published a post on the Fordham Institute’s blog that referred to Cohen’s new book.

Dear Mike:

Thank you for considering my book Teaching And Its Predicaments (Harvard University Press, 2011), and for your intelligent discussion of the issues. I write to continue the conversation. 

You are right to say that I see the incoherence of U.S. public education as a barrier to more quality and less inequality, but I do not "look longingly" at Asia or Finland, let alone take them as models for what Americans should do to improve schools. 

In my 2009 book (The Ordeal Of Equality: Did Federal Regulation Fix The Schools?), Susan L. Moffitt and I recounted the great difficulties that the "top-down" approach to coherence, with which you associate my work, encountered as Title I of the 1965 ESEA was refashioned to leverage much greater central influence on schooling. Susan and I concluded that increased federal regulation had not fixed the schools, and had caused some real damage along with some important constructive effects. We did not see central coherence as The Answer.

Quality Control, When You Don't Know The Product

Last week, New York State’s Supreme Court issued an important ruling on the state’s teacher evaluations. The aspect of the ruling that got the most attention was the proportion of evaluations – or “weight” – that could be assigned to measures based on state assessments (in the form of estimates from value-added models). Specifically, the Court ruled that these measures can only comprise 20 percent of a teacher’s evaluation, compared with the option of up to 40 percent for which Governor Cuomo and others were pushing. Under the decision, the other 20 percent must consist entirely of alternative test-based measures (e.g., local assessments).

Joe Williams, head of Democrats for Education Reform, one of the flagship organizations of the market-based reform movement, called the ruling “a slap in the face” and “a huge win for the teachers unions." He characterized the policy impact as follows: “A mediocre teacher evaluation just got even weaker."

This statement illustrates perfectly the strange reasoning that seems to be driving our debate about evaluations.