Education Research

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.

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.

Charter Schools And Longer Term Student Outcomes

An important article in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management presents results from one of the published analyses to look at the long term impact of attending charter schools.

The authors, Kevin Booker, Tim Sass, Brian Gill, and Ron Zimmer, replicate part of their earlier analysis of charter schools in Florida and Chicago (Booker et al. 2011), which found that students attending charter high schools had a substantially higher chance of graduation and college enrollment (relative to students that attended charter middle schools but regular public high schools). For this more recent paper, they extend the previous analysis, including the addition of two very important, longer term outcomes – college persistence and labor market earnings.

The limitations of test scores, the current coin of the realm, are well known; similarly, outcomes such as graduation may fail to capture meaningful skills. This paper is among the first to extend the charter school effects literature, which has long relied almost exclusively on test scores, into the longer term postsecondary and even adulthood realms, representing a huge step forward for this body of evidence. It is a development that is likely to become more and more common, as longitudinal data hopefully become available from other locations. And this particular paper, in addition to its obvious importance for the charter school literature, also carries some implications regarding the use of test-based outcomes in education policy evaluation.

Evaluating The Results Of New Teacher Evaluation Systems

A new working paper by researchers Matthew Kraft and Allison Gilmour presents a useful summary of teacher evaluation results in 19 states, all of which designed and implemented new evaluation systems at some point over the past five years. As with previous evaluation results, the headline result of this paper is that only a small proportion of teachers (2-5 percent) were given the low, “below proficiency” ratings under the new systems, and the vast majority of teachers continue to be rated as satisfactory or better.

Kraft and Gilmour present their results in the context of the “Widget Effect,” a well-known 2009 report by the New Teacher Project showing that the overwhelming majority of teachers in the 12 districts for which they had data received “satisfactory” ratings. The more recent results from Kraft and Gilmour indicate that this hasn’t changed much due to the adoption of new evaluation systems, or, at least, not enough to satisfy some policymakers and commentators who read the paper.

The paper also presents a set of findings from surveys of and interviews with observers (e.g., principals). These are in many respects more interesting and important results from a research and policy perspective, but let’s nevertheless focus a bit on the findings on the distribution of teachers across rating categories, as they caused a bit of a stir. I have several comments to make about them, but will concentrate on three in particular (all of which, by the way, pertain not to the paper’s discussion, which is cautious and thorough, but rather to some of the reaction to it in our education policy discourse).

Improving Teaching Through Collaboration

Our guest author today is Matthew Ronfeldt, Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Education. Ronfeldt seeks to understand how to improve teaching quality, particularly in schools and districts that serve historically marginalized student populations. His research sits at the intersection of educational practice and policy and focuses on teacher preparation, teacher retention, teacher induction, and the assessment of teachers and preparation programs.

Learning to teach is an ongoing process. To be successful, then, schools must promote not only student learning but also teacher learning across their careers.* Embracing this notion, policymakers have called for the creation of school-based professional learning communities, including organizational structures that promote regular opportunities for teachers to collaborate with teams of colleagues** – also here and here. As the use of instructional teams becomes increasingly common, it is important to examine whether and how collaboration actually improves teaching and learning. The growing evidence, summarized below, suggests that it does. 

For many decades, educational scholars have conducted qualitative case studies documenting the nature of collaboration among particular groups of teachers working together in departmental teams, reading groups, and other types of instructional teams. This body of work has demonstrated that the kinds and content of collaboration vary substantially across contexts, has shed light on the norms and structures that promote more promising collaboration, and has set the stage for today’s policy focus on “professional learning communities.” However, these studies rarely connected collaboration to teachers’ classroom performance. Thus, they provided little information on whether teachers actually got better at teaching as a result of their participation in collaboration.

Student Sorting And Teacher Classroom Observations

Although value added and other growth models tend to be the focus of debates surrounding new teacher evaluation systems, the widely known but frequently unacknowledged reality is that most teachers don’t teach in the tested grades and subjects, and won’t even receive these test-based scores. The quality and impact of the new systems therefore will depend heavily upon the quality and impact of other measures, primarily classroom observations.

These systems have been in use for decades, and yet, until recently, relatively little is known about their properties, such as their association with student and teacher characteristics, and there are, as yet, only a handful of studies of their impact on teachers’ performance (e.g., Taylor and Tyler 2012). The Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Project, conducted a few years ago, was a huge step forward in this area, though at the time it was perhaps underappreciated the degree to which MET’s contribution was not just in the (very important) reports it produced, but also in its having collected an extensive dataset for researchers to use going forward. A new paper, just published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, is among the many analyses that have and will use MET data to address important questions surrounding teacher evaluation.

The authors, Rachel Garrett and Matthew Steinberg, look at classroom observation scores, specifically those from Charlotte Danielson’s widely employed Framework for Teaching (FFT) protocol. These results are yet another example of how observation scores share most of the widely-cited (statistical) criticisms of value added scores, most notably their sensitivity to which students are assigned to teachers.

The IMPACT Of Teacher Turnover In DCPS

Teacher turnover has long been a flashpoint in education policy, yet these debates are rife with complications. For example, it is often implied that turnover is a “bad thing,” even though some turnover, as when low-performing teachers leave, can be beneficial, whereas some retention, as when low-performing teachers stay, can be harmful. The impact of turnover also depends heavily on other factors, such as the pool of candidates available to serve as replacements, and how disruptive turnover is to the teachers who are retained.

The recent widespread reform of teacher evaluation systems has made the turnover issue, never far below the surface, even more salient in recent years. Critics contend that the new evaluations, particularly their use of test-based productivity measures, will cause teachers to flee the profession. Supporters, on the other hand, are in a sense hoping for this outcome, as they anticipate that, under the new systems, voluntary and involuntary separations will serve to improve the quality of the teacher workforce.

A new working paper takes a close look the impact of teacher turnover under what is perhaps the most controversial teacher evaluation system in the nation – that used in the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS). It's a very strong analysis that speaks directly to policy in a manner that does not fit well into the tribal structure of education debates today.

The Narrative Of School Failure And Why We Must Pay Attention To Segregation In Educational Policy

Our guest authors today are Kara S. Finnigan, Associate Professor at the Warner School of Education of the University of Rochester, and Jennifer Jellison Holme, Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.  Finnigan and Holme have published several articles and briefs on the issue of school integration including articles in press in Teachers College Record and Educational Law and Policy Review as well as a research brief for the National Coalition on School Diversity. This is the first of a two-part blog series on this topic.

Imagine that you wake up one morning with a dull pain in your tooth. You take ibuprofen, apply an ice pack, and try to continue as if things are normal.  But as the pain continues to grow over the next few days, you realize that deep down there is a problem – and you are reminded of this every so often when you bite down and feel a shooting pain.  Eventually, you can’t take it any longer and get an x-ray at the dentist’s office, only to find out that what was originally a small problem has spread throughout the whole tooth and you need a root canal.  Now you wish you hadn’t waited so long.

Why are we talking about a root canal in a blog post about education? As we thought about how to convey the way we see the situation with low-performing schools, this analogy seemed to capture our point. Most of us can relate to what happens when we overlook a problem with our teeth, and yet we don’t pay attention to what can happen when we overlook the underlying problems that affect educational systems.

In this blog post, we argue that school segregation by race and poverty is one of the underlying causes of school failure, and that it has been largely overlooked in federal and state educational policy in recent decades.

New Report: Does Money Matter in Education? Second Edition

In 2012, we released a report entitled “Does Money Matter in Education?,” written by Rutgers Professor Bruce Baker. The report presented a thorough, balanced review of the rather sizable body of research on the relationship between K-12 education spending and outcomes. The motivation for this report was to address the highly contentious yet often painfully oversimplified tribal arguments regarding the impact of education spending and finance reforms, as well as provide an evidence-based guide for policymakers during a time of severe budgetary hardship. It remains our most viewed resource ever, by far.

Now, almost four years later, education spending in most states and localities is still in trouble. For example, state funding of education is lower in 2016 than it was in 2008 (prior to the recession) in 31 states (Leachman et al. 2016). Moreover, during this time, there has been a continuing effort to convince the public that how much we spend on schools doesn’t matter for outcomes, and that these spending cuts will do no harm.

As is almost always the case, the evidence on spending in education is far more nuanced and complex than our debates about it (on both “sides” of the issue). And this evidence has been building for decades, with significant advances since the release of our first “Does Money Matter?” report. For this reason, we have today released the second edition, updated by the author. The report is available here.