The Education Gadfly Weekly

Matthew Chingos and Martin West
Program on Education Policy and Governance, Harvard University
March 2010

This sophisticated and novel study can answer its title with one word: Yes. Chingos and West examined Florida public school income records and value-added data between 2001-02 and 2006-07 for 90,000 classroom teachers and 20,000 teachers who left the classroom during that time. They found that the majority (roughly 60 percent) of exiters remained employed by public school districts in Florida. (Only 4 percent moved to private schools, for example.) Further, when those fulltime exiters made a move, their median earnings increased, perhaps because many fled to higher-paying districts. Then, Chingos and West examined the relationship between pay (in the real world) and teacher effectiveness (in the classroom). First, they found that when they entered other industries, teachers had much wider variation in earnings than when they were in schools (not surprising if we take into account rigid teaching-salary schedules). More importantly, they found that, among grade 4-8 teachers leaving for other professions, there was a positive relationship between a teacher’s increase in value-added math and reading student achievement and higher earnings outside of teaching. Admittedly, the sample was small, not randomly-selected, and only from one state, but the authors’ conclusion makes sense: “Although teaching is surely a unique endeavor requiring specialized skills, the same attributes that make for effective teachers also appear to be rewarded in the broader labor market.” It’s too bad that Florida’s inflexible teacher pay system doesn’t allow for those attributes to be rewarded in our schools. You can find the study here.

Marguerite Roza
Urban Institute Press, 2010

This book is an excellent synopsis of the work on school funding that Marguerite Roza and her colleagues at the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education have done over the past decade. In short, accessible fashion (just 99 pages), the book lays out the fundamental and systemic problems with school funding. It also explains how the complexities of and multiple actors in schooling cause $500 billion spent annually on K-12 education in this country to flow in perverse and sometimes surprising ways. For example, those with the most resources tend to be “[m]iddle- and upper-class students, not poor students. Electives and athletics, not core subjects. Gifted and high-achieving students, not struggling students.”

Mandates and strings attached to state and federal funding surely tie local school leaders’ hands when it comes to how they spend the money, and as such those at the local level might be tempted to wash their hands of blame for funding and spending peculiarities. However, Roza does a great job of illustrating how local policies, practices, and personalities adversely impact school funding and spending.

For example, CRPE found school-to-school spending differences, in the same district, of $14,000 per student. In one school, the principal had control over just $4,000 of her school’s entire budget. Fordham found similar examples in our 2008 look at Ohio’s school funding system. In the Columbus City School District, the per-pupil funding gap between elementary schools was as large as $5,600, despite the schools serving similar populations of students and reaching similar levels of academic performance.

Locally negotiated teacher contracts add to the funding perversions. Though the mission of all school districts is to increase student learning, CRPE calculates that 19 percent of every district’s budget is spent on “eight common collective bargaining provisions with a weak or inconsistent relationship with student learning” (e.g., teacher salary increases based on experience and credentials, school days set aside for professional development, and class size limitations).

The book is chockfull of additional examples at local, state, and federal levels, the sum of which are termed a “wicked problem,” a phrase drawn from social planning literature. These “messy, circular problems” with “so many factors and conditions, all embedded in a dynamic context,” act like a “house of cards, and any effort to dismantle or overhaul one piece will always require a new prop.”

Roza dismantles a few of the worst reform ideas, including the 65 percent solution, “adequacy” campaigns, and funding schemes based on minimum staffing models and education inputs. Ohio adopted the lattermost of these last summer when the Evidence-Based Model was put into law (see Roza’s colleague, and CRPE director, Paul Hill’s excellent critique of Ohio’s new funding scheme here).

In the end, Roza rests some home on decentralized decision-making and weighted student funding, and proposes seven core elements of a better funding system:

1. Standards,
2. Pupil-based formula to allocate dollars,
3. Weighted allocations for different student types,
4. An accountability system that seeks the most effective use of funds,
5. Open market for providers,
6. Alignment of functions and clarity of roles, and
7. Transparency in student outcomes and most productive practices.

She also acknowledges there’s no clear roadmap toward this new system. Hence a central contradiction of education reform—while these “wicked” problems might call for incremental, cautious solutions, to hedge against their unintended consequences, the depth and tragedy of the flaws in school funding cry for a more radical approach, even for a starting over. School funding reform, as Roza sees it, is not for the timid!

You can buy the book here.

Student Assessment Division, Department of Assessment, Accountability, and Data Quality
Texas Education Agency
March/April 2010

The Texas Education Agency wanted to know whether moving to Texas in the wake of Hurricane Katrina improved the achievement of the displaced students. It matched Katrina students (defined as pupils from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida arriving in Texas and enrolling in Lone Star State schools after June 1, 2005) and “native” students with similar demographic characteristics. Using TAKS data from 2006 to 2009, researchers found that Katrina students in grade 3, 5, and 8 started out with lower TAKS scores than “native” matched students in 2006—no surprise there. But TEA also found that those same Katrina students made bigger gains in the intervening four years, resulting in marginally higher actual scores than their “native” peers in 2009. Compared to all Texas test takers, however, Katrina students didn’t do so well: Scores ranged from 2 percent better (grade 3 reading) to 12 percent worse (grade 8 math) than all students in Texas in 2009. Further, the “native” matched Texas students also performed significantly worse than total Texas test takers. This paper provides an interesting second perspective to the August 2009 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper on Katrina evacuees, which looked specifically at the effect of those transferred-in students on native student achievement. It found that an influx of Katrina students had a distinctly negative effect on receiving schools’ students’ test scores and an increase in disciplinary problems; but while native students struggled, this TEA report tells us that Katrina students actually benefited from their stint in Texas schools. Read the TEA report nt/resources/studies/KatrinaAnalysis2010.pdf" target="_blank">here.

Frederick M. Hess
ASCD
2010

What if it’s the system that’s the problem? That’s the question AEI’s Rick Hess tackles in this discussion of what he calls “greenfield” schooling. He copped the word from the vocabularies of investors, engineers, and builders, who use it to describe “an area where there are unobstructed, wide-open opportunities to invent or build.” There aren’t a lot of those in American K-12 education. In fact, the system, he argues, is doing a downright terrible job of laying a path for creative problem-solvers, and it’s to their own detriment. These folks have more cost-effective and time-efficient ways to do most anything in education, from training teachers, to conducting student assessments, to the actual nuts and bolts of classroom practice, and yet our bankrupt, failing, and archaic system goes out of its way to make life hard for them. Hess explains how we could change this, and what these problem-solvers need to succeed: human capital, venture capital, fewer bureaucratic hurdles, effective quality control mechanisms, and above all, an open mind on the part of the system they so desperately want to help. Even better, the system could learn from these organizations’ recruiting processes, quality control standards, and cost-effective measures, as they blaze ahead despite the daily assaults from every front. This isn’t about grand solutions or silver bullets; it’s about long-term sustainable overhaul that changes the way we think about education service delivery and the policies that support or hinder it. And that is certainly a field worth tilling. Buy your copy here.

The feds want serious change for their “School Improvement Grants” bucks, but several of Iowa’s thirty-five lowest-rated schools aren’t buying it. The state received $18.7 million in turnaround funds to help the lowest-performing 5 percent of schools, which could win $50,000 to $2 million each. But despite feeling pressured by tight budgets, eleven of the thirty-five simply won’t apply, citing the money’s strings as a “federal intrusion” into what’s an issue of “local control.” More troubling is the ways in which other schools are getting around the rules. To fulfill the necessary replacement of a school’s principal under the “transformation model,” schools in Columbus, Iowa are going to have the principal of the lowest-performing junior high school and lowest-performing high school simply switch jobs. Another district simply promoted the principal to a central office gig. We could call it principal musical chairs. But one thing’s for sure, there’s only one winner in that game, and it certainly won’t be the kids. States beware: There are lots of ways to “turnaround” a school, and many of them are not up to par. Just ask Columbus, Iowa.

"Schools reluctant to take reform money," by Staci Hupp, Des Moines Register, April 18, 2010

Will alternative certification finally be alternative? In New York State, at least, the answer is yes. Under a pilot plan passed unanimously by the State Board of Regents on Tuesday (and ushered through by a former ed school dean, David Steiner), alternative teacher preparation programs such as Teach For America and New York City Teaching Fellows will no longer have to concurrently enroll their participants in traditional education school master’s programs. New York State still requires teachers to obtain a master’s degree within five years of entering the classroom, but TFA, NYCTF, and other alt cert organizations will be able to create their own master’s programs, with the Regents awarding the degree themselves; the degree-recipient would have to commit to work in a high-needs school for four years. Many states have alt cert pathways, but only a few, such as Rhode Island and Louisiana, let those alternative programs effectively certify their own teachers. As a result, in most other states, the “alternative” route looks a whole lot like a traditional ed school experience. No more. In what’s a nod to both criticisms that ed schools aren’t up to snuff and that these alternative programs are producing teachers at least as good as, if not better than, traditionally trained teachers, New York’s alternative certification programs will now be just that: alternative. Let’s hope more states follow suit.

“Regents Plan New Route to Master’s in Teaching,” by Lisa W. Foderaro, New York Times, April 20, 2010

“Alternative Path for Teachers Gains Ground,” by Lisa W. Foderaro, New York Times, April 18, 2010

Bullies have been stealing other students’ lunch money for years. But students at one New York elementary school face a new adversary: their teacher. A third grade educator faces charges of petty larceny and endangering the welfare of a child after he repeatedly ate the noontime repasts of three students who receive free lunches under the federal National School Lunch Program, effectively stealing lunch money from the government (and food from his hungry students’ mouths). The district was able to track the lunches because the students used their personal identification numbers to purchase them. They then delivered the lunches to the teacher’s classroom. Gadfly can’t help but be nostalgic for the times when we brought our teachers an apple for their desks. Here’s a solution that might be more effective than prison: This teacher should be put on an all-cheese-sandwich diet. 

“Third Grade Teacher Arrested for Stealing School Lunches,” 13WHAM.com (Rochester, NY), April 13, 2010

What will the Education Department’s current $350 million competition to develop new multi-state assessments actually yield? One new “national test”? Two? A bunch? Will they be any good? Will they yield the information that America needs and that many educators and parents crave?

Answers to many such questions will not be known for years. But one key question will get answered, for better or worse, by September 30: How many different test-development initiatives will Secretary Duncan agree to pay for?

And here’s the answer to dread: just one. The number of potential applicants has been falling faster than volcanic ash over Europe and a scary rumor says those that remain may yet wrap themselves into a single project before the end-of-June application deadline.

Education Department spokespersons have recently talked talk of funding “at least two” such consortia. Not many weeks ago, however, the field was buzzing with talk that six or more consortia were forming for this purpose. At a big ETS-sponsored conference last month, four new assessment “models” were displayed before an audience of state and district leaders. It was, in effect, an audition, after which states were expected to sign up for the version they liked best—or maybe more than one.

Today, however—nine weeks before proposals are due at ED—there are clear signs that, like the airline industry, consolidation is underway and perhaps just two consortia will even apply (not counting a separate high-school-only assessment development that is widely believed to be a de facto “set-aside” for Marc Tucker’s National Center on Education and the Economy). The National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers, which are developing the new “common core” standards with which all the new assessments are supposed to be aligned, recently issued a paper describing the two groups. One—the “Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career”—is led by Florida, Massachusetts, and Louisiana, and will be managed by Achieve. The other—the “Smarter Balanced Consortium”—is led by West Virginia, Nebraska, and Oregon, among others, with technical assistance from Stanford’s Linda Darling-Hammond. A few days ago, however, an astute Education Week follower of this topic blogged that perhaps the two would wind up joining forces and only one single solitary hegemonic consortium would seek Duncan’s money (plus Tucker, of course).

That is an outcome devoutly to be shunned. Also to be avoided is a grant competition that yields but a single winner. For while the United States will be well served in 2010 by a single set of “common” academic standards—provided, of course, that these are voluntary, independent of federal control, and possessed of solid, rigorous content—it would be an enormous mistake to slice and dice and recombine the various assessment schemes into a single fruit salad. What the country needs, and what states need, at least for now, is a clear choice between apples and oranges. Indeed, we would favor kumquats, too, and lament the apparent disappearance of an innovative plan sketched (at that ETS conference) by the University of Pittsburgh’s Lauren Resnick and Wireless Generation’s Larry Berger.

As much as the Education Department wishes this weren’t so and has tried in its eighty-plus page grant competition to describe a delectable fruit salad, the fact is that not all assessments can serve all worthwhile ends. In particular, the testing world has long distinguished between assessments meant to inform teachers, improve instruction, and provide useful mid-course feedback to schools and educators—these are often called “formative”—and the kind that are used primarily for accountability purposes, i.e., to gauge what has and hasn’t been learned, usually at year’s end, usually at the individual, classroom, school, district, and state levels. (The latter are typically termed “summative.”)

Oversimplifying, those who emphasize the former—formative—approach tend also to be much taken with “performance” tasks, student portfolios and such, preferably designed and evaluated by teachers, while those more interested in accountability are more apt to craft relatively traditional tests, speedily and inexpensively administered, quickly and objectively scored. Again oversimplifying, the nascent Florida-Achieve “partnership” appears to be squatting in the latter camp while the fledgling West Virginia-Darling-Hammond group is pitching its tent in the former.

Both approaches have value and each of the two consortia has appealing elements in its preliminary design. But they simply aren’t the same thing and neither will—or can, or should be expected to—serve every worthy purpose in the realm of assessment. Although Secretary Duncan’s team understandably dreams of a single, tidy, new national assessment system that serves both formative and summative purposes, any new system also needs to be valid, reliable, affordable, manageable, and a bunch of other things. It’s folly to suppose that dreaming about a single combined approach will make it real. And everything we know about assessments gives us pause regarding the feasibility of such a hybrid.

Far better to let multiple teams—preferably more than two—develop different designs, each with its own integrity and viability. Then let states select the approach that suits them. Let Congress decide how to revise NCLB/ESEA to take account of these new assessments. Let NAEP continue to serve as external auditor—and comparer—of states’ performance, regardless of what they use for their own tests. Let’s see what works. Let’s encourage some experimentation. Let’s allow pears to be separate from mangoes. Let’s avoid fruit salad.

Then there is the awkward, sensitive matter of Professor Darling-Hammond and her earnest, deep, and well-reasoned view that assessment is mainly for the purpose of improving instruction, not for tallying, ranking, evaluating, judging, or scoring. Indeed, she seems none too interested in external standards or in aligning assessments with them. Were there to be but one single new assessment, and were she to play a leadership role in that project (as we must assume would happen), the assessment that results would not likely foster either stronger student achievement or better results-based accountability.

One clue: The Palo Alto charter school most prominently identified with Ms. Darling-Hammond (and, indeed, with the Stanford ed school) has produced abysmal results on the current California state test. So abysmal that its charter is not being renewed. We suspect that this school is a cheerful place full of eager teachers, plenty of portfolios, performances and formative feedback, maybe even contented, fulfilled students. The problem is that they’re not learning what the state of California, in its wisdom, has said they ought to learn.

In a matter of months, the “Common Core” state standards initiative is going to finalize its version of what young Americans ought to learn. We don’t know what the final edition will look like or whether we’ll like it. But the March draft was good, better than I for one expected, and I foresee many states concluding—round two Race to the Top applicants are supposed to conclude this by August—that the “common core” standards are superior to what they’ve been using.

That’s a promising but risky move for American education, one far too important to compromise with a single, flawed new assessment system that tries to serve too many different purposes, that confuses peaches with pineapples, and that is designed in large measure by a respected academic who has many virtues but who also has a lackluster track record when it comes to kids actually learning.

Marguerite Roza
Urban Institute Press, 2010

This book is an excellent synopsis of the work on school funding that Marguerite Roza and her colleagues at the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education have done over the past decade. In short, accessible fashion (just 99 pages), the book lays out the fundamental and systemic problems with school funding. It also explains how the complexities of and multiple actors in schooling cause $500 billion spent annually on K-12 education in this country to flow in perverse and sometimes surprising ways. For example, those with the most resources tend to be “[m]iddle- and upper-class students, not poor students. Electives and athletics, not core subjects. Gifted and high-achieving students, not struggling students.”

Mandates and strings attached to state and federal funding surely tie local school leaders’ hands when it comes to how they spend the money, and as such those at the local level might be tempted to wash their hands of blame for funding and spending peculiarities. However, Roza does a great job of illustrating how local policies, practices, and personalities adversely impact school funding and spending.

For example, CRPE found school-to-school spending differences, in the same district, of $14,000 per student. In one school, the principal had control over just $4,000 of her school’s entire budget. Fordham found similar examples in our 2008 look at Ohio’s school funding system. In the Columbus City School District, the per-pupil funding gap between elementary schools was as large as $5,600, despite the schools serving similar populations of students and reaching similar levels of academic performance.

Locally negotiated teacher contracts add to the funding perversions. Though the mission of all school districts is to increase student learning, CRPE calculates that 19 percent of every district’s budget is spent on “eight common collective bargaining provisions with a weak or inconsistent relationship with student learning” (e.g., teacher salary increases based on experience and credentials, school days set aside for professional development, and class size limitations).

The book is chockfull of additional examples at local, state, and federal levels, the sum of which are termed a “wicked problem,” a phrase drawn from social planning literature. These “messy, circular problems” with “so many factors and conditions, all embedded in a dynamic context,” act like a “house of cards, and any effort to dismantle or overhaul one piece will always require a new prop.”

Roza dismantles a few of the worst reform ideas, including the 65 percent solution, “adequacy” campaigns, and funding schemes based on minimum staffing models and education inputs. Ohio adopted the lattermost of these last summer when the Evidence-Based Model was put into law (see Roza’s colleague, and CRPE director, Paul Hill’s excellent critique of Ohio’s new funding scheme here).

In the end, Roza rests some home on decentralized decision-making and weighted student funding, and proposes seven core elements of a better funding system:

1. Standards,
2. Pupil-based formula to allocate dollars,
3. Weighted allocations for different student types,
4. An accountability system that seeks the most effective use of funds,
5. Open market for providers,
6. Alignment of functions and clarity of roles, and
7. Transparency in student outcomes and most productive practices.

She also acknowledges there’s no clear roadmap toward this new system. Hence a central contradiction of education reform—while these “wicked” problems might call for incremental, cautious solutions, to hedge against their unintended consequences, the depth and tragedy of the flaws in school funding cry for a more radical approach, even for a starting over. School funding reform, as Roza sees it, is not for the timid!

You can buy the book here.

Frederick M. Hess
ASCD
2010

What if it’s the system that’s the problem? That’s the question AEI’s Rick Hess tackles in this discussion of what he calls “greenfield” schooling. He copped the word from the vocabularies of investors, engineers, and builders, who use it to describe “an area where there are unobstructed, wide-open opportunities to invent or build.” There aren’t a lot of those in American K-12 education. In fact, the system, he argues, is doing a downright terrible job of laying a path for creative problem-solvers, and it’s to their own detriment. These folks have more cost-effective and time-efficient ways to do most anything in education, from training teachers, to conducting student assessments, to the actual nuts and bolts of classroom practice, and yet our bankrupt, failing, and archaic system goes out of its way to make life hard for them. Hess explains how we could change this, and what these problem-solvers need to succeed: human capital, venture capital, fewer bureaucratic hurdles, effective quality control mechanisms, and above all, an open mind on the part of the system they so desperately want to help. Even better, the system could learn from these organizations’ recruiting processes, quality control standards, and cost-effective measures, as they blaze ahead despite the daily assaults from every front. This isn’t about grand solutions or silver bullets; it’s about long-term sustainable overhaul that changes the way we think about education service delivery and the policies that support or hinder it. And that is certainly a field worth tilling. Buy your copy here.

Matthew Chingos and Martin West
Program on Education Policy and Governance, Harvard University
March 2010

This sophisticated and novel study can answer its title with one word: Yes. Chingos and West examined Florida public school income records and value-added data between 2001-02 and 2006-07 for 90,000 classroom teachers and 20,000 teachers who left the classroom during that time. They found that the majority (roughly 60 percent) of exiters remained employed by public school districts in Florida. (Only 4 percent moved to private schools, for example.) Further, when those fulltime exiters made a move, their median earnings increased, perhaps because many fled to higher-paying districts. Then, Chingos and West examined the relationship between pay (in the real world) and teacher effectiveness (in the classroom). First, they found that when they entered other industries, teachers had much wider variation in earnings than when they were in schools (not surprising if we take into account rigid teaching-salary schedules). More importantly, they found that, among grade 4-8 teachers leaving for other professions, there was a positive relationship between a teacher’s increase in value-added math and reading student achievement and higher earnings outside of teaching. Admittedly, the sample was small, not randomly-selected, and only from one state, but the authors’ conclusion makes sense: “Although teaching is surely a unique endeavor requiring specialized skills, the same attributes that make for effective teachers also appear to be rewarded in the broader labor market.” It’s too bad that Florida’s inflexible teacher pay system doesn’t allow for those attributes to be rewarded in our schools. You can find the study here.

Student Assessment Division, Department of Assessment, Accountability, and Data Quality
Texas Education Agency
March/April 2010

The Texas Education Agency wanted to know whether moving to Texas in the wake of Hurricane Katrina improved the achievement of the displaced students. It matched Katrina students (defined as pupils from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida arriving in Texas and enrolling in Lone Star State schools after June 1, 2005) and “native” students with similar demographic characteristics. Using TAKS data from 2006 to 2009, researchers found that Katrina students in grade 3, 5, and 8 started out with lower TAKS scores than “native” matched students in 2006—no surprise there. But TEA also found that those same Katrina students made bigger gains in the intervening four years, resulting in marginally higher actual scores than their “native” peers in 2009. Compared to all Texas test takers, however, Katrina students didn’t do so well: Scores ranged from 2 percent better (grade 3 reading) to 12 percent worse (grade 8 math) than all students in Texas in 2009. Further, the “native” matched Texas students also performed significantly worse than total Texas test takers. This paper provides an interesting second perspective to the August 2009 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper on Katrina evacuees, which looked specifically at the effect of those transferred-in students on native student achievement. It found that an influx of Katrina students had a distinctly negative effect on receiving schools’ students’ test scores and an increase in disciplinary problems; but while native students struggled, this TEA report tells us that Katrina students actually benefited from their stint in Texas schools. Read the TEA report nt/resources/studies/KatrinaAnalysis2010.pdf" target="_blank">here.