Drafting the best teachers

July 16, 2009

And then there was meritocracy. When then-State Education Commissioner Peter McWalters ordered Providence, Rhode Island to abandon seniority hiring and firing practices in that city's schools, we applauded. Now, his replacement, Deborah Gist, has completed the policy's pass to Providence supe, Tom Brady. Though the Providence Teachers Union (PTU) seems poised to block the end zone with a suit for breach of contract, six schools in the Renaissance City are already interviewing teaching candidates. McWalters thought, and Gist agrees, that seniority policies were preventing schools from matching teachers to schools that were the best fit. But PTU president Steve Smith says, "We want experience to count for something. This is all about control. We want a partnership." Well, he's right about control, since the PTU just lost quite a bit of it; the new policies basically negate the union contract. But as for experience and partnership, both are accounted for: The interview and hiring process will include a panel of teachers, school leaders (i.e., a department head), and the principal, and require uniform procedures that discourage favoritism. Since the practice of hiring candidates based on their merits was so foreign, the committees were trained extensively by The New Teacher Project. Likewise, teacher-applicants were so unfamiliar with having to demonstrate their worth to get a job that the district held cover-letter-writing and resume-formatting seminars. And teachers are lining up around the block for interviews. Sounds like Superintendent Tom Brady is

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Drafting the best teachers

Achievement Gaps: How Black and White Students in Public Schools Perform in Mathematics and Reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress

Amber M. Winkler, Ph.D. / July 16, 2009

Alan Vanneman, Linda Hamilton, Janet B. Anderson, and Taslima Rahman
National Center for Education Statistics
July 2009

This report feeds the education community's enduring obsession with the achievement gap by re-slicing 2004 and 2007 NAEP data to look at black-white disparities on both national and state levels. It repackages some of the 2007 race and ethnicity subgroup data for fourth and eighth graders and supplements it with similar data from the long-term NAEP 2004 trend (LTT) assessment. (Remember, the main NAEP test and NAEP LTT data are not the same; we explain why here.) The good news is that math scores for both black and white students in both grades are higher than on any previous LTT assessment (going back to 1978) and on any previous main NAEP assessment (going back to 1990). Reading saw similar progress for both groups in both grades, too, though the LTT data start a bit later (1980). The unsurprising news is that white students, on average, tend to have much higher scores than black students on all assessments. So, while gaps narrowed significantly in both grades on math and in fourth grade reading, white students nonetheless had average scores that were at least 26 points higher (on a 0-500 point scale) than black students in each subject. (Wisconsin, Nebraska, and D.C. posted some of the biggest gaps in both subjects, while Delaware and New Jersey narrowed them in reading and Arkansas and Texas narrowed

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Achievement Gaps: How Black and White Students in Public Schools Perform in Mathematics and Reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress

Teacher Quality in Educational Production: Tracking, Decay, and Student Achievement

July 16, 2009

Jesse Rothstein
Princeton University and National Bureau of Economic Research
February 2010 (anticipated)

There's a very serious and scholarly--and to the lay person, nearly unintelligible--exchange happening between academic economists these days on the topic of Value-Added Models (VAM), which rate teacher performance based on student test score gains, rather than snapshots of achievement. In theory, the idea works as follows: Randomly assign students to classrooms such that their average test scores are comparable, and then at the end of the year, give a higher VAM grade to the teachers whose students' test results rise the most. The problem is that, in reality, students are not (and should not be) randomly assigned to teachers--and statistically compensating for this fact turns out to be enormously tricky. As proof, Rothstein breaks down three real-life examples of VAM and applies them to a much larger student sample (approximately 90,000 pupils) than that for which they are typically used. By doing so, he shows that statistical problems that could be hidden in acceptable margins of error in a small sample size are actually larger--and problematic--trends when applied to many more students. While his peers evaluate and reformulate their models based on these findings, it is both reassuring and frightening that the topic has entered the arcana of high economics: reassuring, because there is honest and rigorous debate happening on behalf of better performance measures for our schools, and frightening, because someday someone's going to have

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Teacher Quality in Educational Production: Tracking, Decay, and Student Achievement

Still Left Behind: Student learning in Chicago

Stafford Palmieri / July 16, 2009

Civic Committee of The Commercial Club of Chicago
June 2009

It's hard to quibble when a paper opens thusly: "Most of Chicago's students drop out or fail." That's the main point (and the first point) that this paper, an annual report on the state of Chicago's schools, hopes to drive home. Though Chicago Public Schools has been all back-patting and positive press releases about incredible gains made in the last decade, the Civic Committee is here to set the record straight. Those gains were made in the elementary grades only, they explain, while high schools have stagnated or declined. And, though the elementary scores have improved, much of the gains can be attributed to a new state test, easier cut scores, and lower standards that were implemented from Springfield in 2006. According to CPS, composite third through eighth grade scores in both math and reading on the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT) jumped from 38.4 percent meeting or exceeding proficiency in 2004 to 65.4 percent in 2008. In eighth grade math alone, scores jumped from 33 percent in 2004 to 70 percent in 2008. To discover how much of these gains is due to actual increases in learning as opposed to testing changes, the Committee compared Chicago scores to state-wide scores. They averaged the state-wide gains and subtracted them from Chicago's gains, thus neutralizing the effects of testing and standards changes. The results are sobering: Adjusted composite ISAT scores for grades

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Still Left Behind: Student learning in Chicago

The Cartel

July 16, 2009

Bob Bowdon, director
Bowdon Media
Spring 2009

This documentary film isn't about drugs. In fact, there's almost no violence involved. And its antagonists are funded by your tax dollars. You probably even have a friend who's part of what filmmaker Bob Bowdon calls "the cartel"--the existing educational structure that he claims quells outside competition and is disgustingly wasteful with its resources. Bowdon, the film's director and producer, is a former television anchor, who gave up real news to report fake news over at The Onion. And he's surely used his funny-man skills to provide an entertaining two hours. You'll take off on a roller coaster ride through many popular and contentious issues (like teachers' unions, school funding, and charters) and some less-talked-about topics (like administrative waste, childhood illiteracy, and political patronage). But since it covers so much ground, the film never really digs deeper than a few feet into any of its subject matter. Interviews are cut short (Fordham's own Checker Finn gets his two sentences at around the 39-minute mark) and (strangely inarticulate) defenders of the status quo are left little time to respond. Further, though the film's focus is New Jersey and its host of education dysfunctions, Bowdon doesn't adequately demonstrate how the lessons to be learned from these shenanigans can be applied nationally. That doesn't mean the film isn't full of compelling local stories--tales of porn-watching teachers, eighth-grade-math-challenged security guard applicants, disappearing construction dollars, and sky-high teacher evaluation

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The Cartel