The Education Gadfly
A Weekly Bulletin of News and Analysis from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute
July 31, 2008, Volume 8, Number 29
This week on The Education Gadfly Show Podcast: Who wears short shorts?
Contents
From Mike's Desk
Recommended Reading
Flypaper's Finest (The best from Flypaper, Fordham's blog)
- Does Education Trust hate high-achieving children?
- More on integration (racial, socioeconomic, etc.)
The Education Gadfly Show Podcast
Short Reviews
- Gender Similarities Characterize Math Performance
- Invisible Ink in Collective Bargaining Agreements: Why Key Issues Are Not Addressed
- Predicting Success, Preventing Failure: An Investigation of the California High School Exit Exam
Announcements
From Mike's Desk
What if "improving teacher quality" isn't THE answer?
Is this the summer of school reform discontent, when the core assumptions of the past decade are reexamined? Are assumptions such as those that gave birth to the "Washington Consensus," which in turn created No Child Left Behind, being questioned anew? So it appears.
There's the broader/bolder crowd, who argue that it's unfair to hold schools accountable for raising student achievement because so much that influences achievement is outside of schools' control. There's a growing chorus of voices that wonder whether "closing the achievement gap" should continue to be the primary objective of our education system, mostly because such an objective implies that we aren't much interested in maximizing the progress of white, middle-class, and/or high-achieving students.
Allow me to add yet another dollop of doubt to the reform consensus: Are we sure that "improving teacher quality" is the panacea that so many (including us and our friends) have suggested? Is it possible that our current fascination with "human capital development" is misguided? That both presidential campaigns' embrace of this issue is ill-considered?
Yes, the research is quite clear that the quality of a student's teacher has a greater impact on that student's achievement than anything else that schools can control. It's also clear that low-income and minority children are much less likely to be taught by "high quality teachers" (however defined) than are affluent and white children. So reformers make the jump: If we could just fill every classroom with society's "best and brightest," we'd have our education problems licked. Or, they continue, if we could just get our most talented teachers to serve in our neediest schools, we'd have our achievement gap beat.
Unfortunately, we can't hire enough great teachers, and we can't get the best teachers to serve in the neediest areas. So what's our Plan B?
Why can't we recruit millions of fabulous teachers (assuming, that is, that we need millions)? Haven't Teach For America (TFA) and The New Teacher Project (TNTP) proven that, by employing the right recruitment methods, top-notch college graduates and seasoned mid-career professionals will flock to needy classrooms? Yes and no. They've certainly demonstrated that many more of our "best and brightest" are willing to teach, at least for short periods of time, than lots of people once assumed. TFA is growing robustly; this fall's class will reach 5,000 teachers, up from 1,000 ten years ago. And TNTP is getting great results in a handful of major cities. In New York City, for example, almost one in ten current teachers came through its Teaching Fellows Program--and now that city's "teacher quality gap" is shrinking. The strategy of opening up the teacher pipeline to non-traditional routes is clearly showing some success, in some areas. (Areas, by the way, that tend to attract young high-flyers; the list of such areas is unfortunately short.)
But this strategy isn't showing success at scale. And thanks to our national obsession with "reducing class size," we boast a teacher workforce of more than three million; teachers coming through TFA and TNTP are a metaphorical drop in the bucket.
Certainly lots more new teachers are these days entering classrooms through alternate routes (up to a third, according to some estimates), but we found last year that most alternative certification is of dubious quality and doesn't attract stellar candidates. Furthermore, the teacher recruitment challenge is only going to get tougher in coming years as Baby Boomers retire en masse. Many of the Boomer teachers taught for thirty-odd years; they will likely be replaced by twenty-somethings who will last five years at best. (That's not necessarily because education has a "retention" problem but because today's twenty-somethings don't work anywhere for more than a few years.) And the education system will be competing against other employers for top-notch college grads, particularly since the number of workers in their 30s and 40s is dropping precipitously. (This is the demographic "trough" between the Boomers and their children.) The math doesn't lie: it's highly unlikely that we're ever going to recruit three million "great" teachers.
That leads to the other teacher quality strategy du jour: creating incentives (or mandates) for great teachers to serve in tough areas, thereby (if it works) at least creating a more equitable distribution of top teachers. By all means, let's try it, particularly the incentives variety. Let's see if ten or twenty thousand dollars extra a year will entice the most effective teachers into the most challenging schools. (Finding that money is going to be quite a trick during a recession, though.) But compelling great teachers to work in rough schools will definitely fail, for the same reason that busing failed three decades ago: we live in a free country, and if pushed into neighborhoods in which they don't want to be, teachers, like parents, will leave the system.
That would be the likely result of the laudable but naïve reforms currently contemplated for Title I's "comparability" rules, whereby districts would have to ensure that each of their schools' payrolls would be roughly the same. (Affluent schools now tend to have much larger payrolls because they can recruit veteran teachers, who earn much more than rookies.) That would mean recouping money from middle-class schools and forcing them to release some of their more expensive teachers, all in the hope such teachers will gladly transfer to a school across town, in a tougher neighborhood. Unlikely. What's more probable is that these teachers will leave the district entirely and head to the suburbs--just as desegregation-era parents did.
The challenge these reforms can't overcome is the simple fact that most local teacher markets span multiple school districts. Equalizing the teacher distribution within one district is hard to do when teachers can simply move to another district. And equalizing the teacher distribution between districts is tougher still, because it requires equalizing funding between districts. (Otherwise, the better-funded districts can always outbid the others when it comes to teacher salaries.) And though our funding system has grown more equitable in recent years in terms of the allocation of state dollars, does anyone believe that the wealthiest suburban districts will ever give up the extra funding and salary advantages they hold over their neighbors?
So let's summarize: we're unlikely to fill all of America's classrooms with teachers from the ranks of society's "best and brightest." And we're particularly unlikely to do so in tough urban or rural areas, outside of a handful of hot cities where young college grads like to live. Which means that lots of our children--especially poor and minority children--are going to have teachers who may be good but are not likely to be great. These are teachers who themselves received so-so public school educations, attended so-so colleges, are raising families and thus probably don't want to work sixty hours a week, but who do care about their students and want them to succeed.
Shouldn't we be thinking about how to make these average teachers more effective, too, and augmenting them via technology and other stratagems, rather than putting all our eggs in the "superstar teacher" basket? (Look out for my thoughts about how to do that in a future Gadfly.)
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Recommended Reading
Control freak
Mayoral control of schools is surely no silver bullet, but in the case of Baltimore, where Mayor Sheila Dixon is, according to the Baltimore Sun, "floating the idea" of taking over the schools, it would be a leaden musket ball. The city's relatively new education CEO, Andres Alonso, is quickly making big changes; he's shifted authority away from the district's central office, for example, and has given greater responsibility to principals. Baltimore's entrenched bureaucrats don't like Alonso's style, and it seems they've communicated their distaste to Dixon. She recently told a Sun columnist about the CEO, "You can't come in and change everything." Imagine wanting to take charge of the schools in one's city in order to retard the pace of change! In June, Dixon brazenly criticized Alonso on a radio show: "I cautioned him not to move so quickly in some areas." But quick movement to reform broken classrooms is, in fact, exactly what Baltimore needs--far more than it needs mayoral control.
"Dixon Eyes Bid to Run Schools," by Liz Bowie, Baltimore Sun, July 27, 2008
"Shift Control of Schools? Why Now?," by Jean Marbella, Baltimore Sun, July 29, 2008
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Denver's honeymoon: Over
All hail ProComp!, we once were impelled, for it hath shown that teachers' unions and reformers can work together for good. Not so fast. Now we learn from Education Week that Denver's teachers' union, "in a recent newsletter, called on teachers to prepare for a strike if negotiations [to reform ProComp] fall through." ProComp, you may recall, is Denver's well-meaning but rather weak-kneed merit pay plan, enacted in 2004 through a much-ballyhooed union-district partnership. It was understood that the program's specifics would be renegotiated every three years. Thus, the city's school district (which just posted big test score gains), led by Superintendent Michael Bennet, recently proposed changes to ProComp that would raise the starting teacher salary from $35,000 to $44,000 and would bump from $1,067 to $2,925 the bonuses that teachers who work in hard-to-staff schools, or who teach subjects such as math and science, could earn. These changes are specifically targeted to attract more high-quality teachers and increase retention. The union, however, doesn't get it--it's stonewalling Bennet's proposals and wants a 3.5 percent increase in the salaries of all educators. How a 3.5 percent boost will attract new, talented teachers to the district and then retain them is unclear; it's also unclear how the union's plan is different from the imprecise, across the board salary schedules to which ProComp was intended to be an alternative. Work with the unions, yes we can?
"Model Plan of Merit Pay in Ferment," by Vaishali Honawar, Education Week, July 28, 2008
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Flypaper's Finest (The best from Flypaper, Fordham's blog)
Does Education Trust hate high-achieving children?
Mike Petrilli
"That's the impression I get from reading Karin Chenoweth's post about Fordham's high-achieving students study...." Read it here.
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More on integration (racial, socioeconomic, etc.)
Liam Julian
"Interesting to note that liberals Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias have both blogged recently about how socioeconomic and racial integration (the 2008 kind of integration, which seeks to overcome housing patterns; not the 1950s kind, which sought to overcome de jure separation of black and white) won't work...." Read it here.
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The Education Gadfly Show Podcast
Who wears short shorts?
(Mike does.) This week, Mike and guest co-host Kevin Carey talk teacher quality, Baltimore, and unions. Amber tells us whether women can add, and Education News of the Weird is like prison. Click here to listen through our website and peruse past editions. To download the show as an mp3 to your computer, click here (no iPod required--this link will play through any music software on your computer, including Windows Media Player or RealPlayer).
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Short Reviews
Gender Similarities Characterize Math Performance
Janet Hyde, Sara Lindberg, Marcia Linn, Amy Ellis, Caroline Williams
National Science Foundation
July 2008
That boys are the math whizzes and girls suffer acute equation phobia (hence Barbie: "Math class is tough!") is a common stereotype. It's fueled by evidence that shows that high-school girls take fewer math and science courses than boys, a difference that also serves to explain why boys have historically performed better on standardized math tests in high school. But new findings from a report out of the Universities of Wisconsin and California (Berkeley) are doing their part (along with the other, similar findings that preceded them) to undermine the gender typecasting. Researchers studied achievement data from over 7 million students and found that, for grades 2 to 11, there's no longer a difference between the math performance of boys and girls. Females are still underrepresented in the highest levels of STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) careers, though. Researchers aren't clear exactly why, but they point to the higher variability of boys' scores. For instance, among white eleventh graders in one state studied, the 99th percentile (the very top of the academic curve) contained twice as many boys as girls. So even though average scores are similar between the genders, boys appear to outnumber girls in the ranks of the highest scorers, which may leave them better prepared for high-level math courses in college. Find the short report here (and read it for a fee).
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Invisible Ink in Collective Bargaining Agreements: Why Key Issues Are Not Addressed
Emily Cohen, Kate Walsh, and RiShawn Biddle
National Center on Teacher Quality
July 2008
This is an indispensable companion to a Fordham study released earlier this year, which found that many big-district teacher contracts are ambiguous and that their school leaders may have more decision-making flexibility than they (or others) think. The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) gathered and codified the bargaining agreements on which Fordham's study was based; now it has done the same for state laws as well and produced this fine report. Its authors found, after analyzing the data, that state laws, and sometimes courts and labor relations boards, often plug the holes that are left open in teacher contracts. In other words, ambiguities in local bargaining agreements don't always yield autonomy because other forces cramp it. Every state, for instance, has a law that sets the number of years a teacher must serve to gain tenure. In addition, state laws frequently set requirements for policies regarding evaluation, dismissal, class size, and salary. California, for example, stipulates "10 different steps that must be taken before the dismissal is finalized, perhaps explaining why just 100 dismissal hearings were heard in the state between 1996 and 2005." Of course, teacher unions play a central role in pushing such laws through legislatures. NCTQ cites the case of New York, where unions pressured lawmakers to embed "a provision in the 2008-2009 budget that made it illegal to consider a teacher's job performance as a factor in the tenure process." This clever ruse tossed a monkey wrench into New York City's efforts to increase teacher accountability, even though the district's teacher contract was silent on the issue. Read much more about it in the report.
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Predicting Success, Preventing Failure: An Investigation of the California High School Exit Exam
Andrew C. Zau and Julian R. Betts
Public Policy Institute of California
2008
What if you could predict the likelihood that a fourth-grade student would, years later, pass the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE)? Two researchers at the Public Policy Institute of California claim to have done just that. By using a longitudinal and comprehensive data-set from San Diego, authors Zau and Betts have identified academic, language, and behavioral markers that help predict the probability that a given pupil will pass the test. For example, a good "behavior GPA," based on a student's classroom conduct, is strongly correlated with passing the CAHSEE. Zau and Betts contend that developing an early warning and intervention system, based on such data, would be smarter than employing rushed tutoring programs during eleventh and twelfth grade. We'd add that states might also "vertically align" their assessment systems so that passing the fourth-grade test means you're on track to pass the high school test. (According to our Proficiency Illusion report, such alignment is missing in a majority of the states we studied.) There's much more to dig out of this interesting study, which you can find here.
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Announcements
Work for Fordham
Are you a savvy, good humored person who cares about education? Do you want to work in an environment that's intellectually active, unconventional, and refreshing? Are you a web designer, an aspiring Spielberg or Scorsese, or an otherwise tech-savvy creative type worn down by the vicissitudes of freelance work? If so, you're in luck: Fordham seeks a New Media Manager.
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More on the core
Achieve has just released today a new report, Out of Many One: Toward Rigorous Common Core Standards From the Ground Up. We'll give it next week the thorough treatment it deserves, but you may want to read it now.
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Everyone needs a veep
The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools is searching for a vice president for quality and growth. It sounds like a fine opportunity, about which more information can be gleaned by clicking here.
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About Us
The Education Gadfly is published weekly (ordinarily on Thursdays), with occasional breaks, by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Regular contributors include Jack Byers, Amy Fagan, Daniela Fairchild, Chester E. Finn, Jr., Mickey Muldoon, Jamie Davies O'Leary, Eric Osberg, Stafford Palmieri, Emmy Partin, Michael J. Petrilli, Laura Elizabeth Pohl, Terry Ryan, Janie Scull, and Amber Winkler. Have something to say? Email us at thegadfly@edexcellence.net. If you would like to subscribe, you may either email thegadfly@edexcellence.net with "subscribe gadfly" in the text of the message or sign up online here.
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute is a nonprofit organization that conducts research, issues publications, and directs action projects in elementary/secondary education reform at the national level and in Ohio, with a special emphasis on our hometown of Dayton. (For Ohio news, check out our Ohio Education Gadfly, published bi-weekly, ordinarily on Wednesdays.) The Institute is neither connected with nor sponsored by Fordham University.