The Education Gadfly Weekly

For advocates of value-added measures of teacher effectiveness, high school presents a conundrum, as testing is less frequent and often in non-contiguous subjects (making it difficult to compare prior years' results). Using data from the ACT's QualityCore program, Dan Goldhaber and his colleagues analyzed two value-added models—the traditional model comparing pre- and post-tests and a more complex analysis that considers individual student outcomes across multiple subjects—and compared their results. The benefit of the more complex model, which uses a "cross-subject student fixed-effects approach," is that it skirts the issue of non-contiguous classes and the need for pretests in subjects that students may not have encountered before. They found that the fixed-effects approach estimated smaller teacher effects (meaning that teacher quality was less important to the final score than other variables), though it is impossible to know which model was "better," as there is no objective measure of teacher quality against which to benchmark. More importantly, Goldhaber found significant variation in the results of the two models: Nearly 10 percent of the teachers who were placed in the top quintile by the fixed-effects model—the top-echelon of educators—were actually in the bottom quintile when the traditional model was used. In the world of high-stakes testing, this is concerning (especially if you're a teacher!) and reminds us that, while value-added measurements have superior predictive power relative to other methods of estimating teacher effectiveness, they are imperfect—and the tradeoffs ought to be made clearer in the popular debate.

SOURCE: Dan D. Goldhaber, Pete Goldschmidt, and Fannie Tseng, “Teacher Value-Added at the High-School Level: Different Models, Different Answers?” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 35(2) (June 2013): 220–36.

This familiar May visitor to edu-wonks’ desktops looks a bit different in 2013. Typically a bulky digest of all manner of education-related statistics, this year’s Condition of Education is more modern (with a beefed-up report and data website) and more svelte (by over 200 pages). The yearly tome of data now tracks but forty-two indicators across four areas: population statistics, participation in education, elementary and secondary education, and post-secondary education as well as data on four “spotlighted” stages: trends in employment rates by education attainment, Kindergarten entry timing, rural education, and college financing. From it, we learn that Hispanic immigrants are over three times as likely to drop out of high school than non-immigrant Hispanics; that charter school enrollment is still on the upswing, by 11 percent between 2009–10 and 2010–11; that 60 percent of kiddos aged three to five attend full-day preschool; that only 36 percent of female high school dropouts aged twenty to twenty-four are employed (compared to 59 percent of males of the same ilk); that employment rates among young adult males dropped at least 7 percentage points from 2008 and 2010—no matter their education level; and much more. NCES doesn’t attach policy recommendations to its data dump, but that shouldn’t stop the report from furthering some important conversations. Many, including us, have recently been questioning the “college for all” rhetoric, as an example. The dips seen in employment rates are further proof: We need to think hard about what worthy, non-college pathways to the middle-class might look like.

SOURCE: National Center for Education Statistics, The Condition of Education 2013 (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Education Sciences, May 2013).

Mike and Dara discuss NCLB reauthorization, NYC’s teacher evaluations, and the relationship between poverty and educational outcomes. Amber revels in the glory of having finally gotten Fordham’s epic pensions report out the door.

Amber's Research Minute

Dara Zeehandelaar, author of The Big Squeeze: Retirement Costs and School District Budgets, explains teachers pensions and the difference between defined benefits and defined contribution plans that states offer teachers.

This article originally appeared on Education Week’s Bridging Differences blog, where Mike Petrilli is debating Deborah Meier through mid-June.

Dear Deborah,

I want to return to the perennial question of poverty as it relates to educational outcomes. One of the main arguments against education reform is that it misdiagnoses the problem. We have big “achievement gaps” in terms of test scores, graduation rates, college-going, and much else, but that’s primarily because of inequities in our society, not because of the failings of our schools—so goes the thinking.

As I indicated in my first post for Bridging Differences, I’m not opposed to tackling these larger issues of poverty and inequality. (Neither are most reformers.) But we’d better have a good understanding of what we’re tackling. I would argue that clarity is sorely lacking.

Is the issue really poverty, per se? The fact that many families in the U.S. don’t have enough income to provide the advantages that other children enjoy? If so, are we satisfied with delineating the problem with the poverty line (currently about $20,000 for a family of three)? That qualifies 23 percent of all children (as of 2011), up from 18 percent before the Great Recession.

Or should we include children a little bit above the poverty line—from families that are “near poor” or “working poor,” too? Say, up to 185 percent of poverty, the cut-off for eligibility for a reduced-price lunch? That captures 48 percent of all U.S. children (as of 2011).

Then again, standard poverty measures are imperfect. They don’t take into account certain services or benefits that low-income families receive, such as food stamps, Medicaid, or the Earned Income Tax Credit. (Poverty measures just look at income from work or from transfer payments.) If you consider those factors, poverty rates drop a few points.

And are we talking about kids who are born into poverty, kids who spend most of their lives in poverty, or kids who are in poverty for just a few years? The “child-poverty rate,” which only measures the numbers in poverty at any given point in time, masks these important differences. Several studies looked at children born way back in the late 1960s and early 1970s (my generation!). They found that while about 25 percent of white children—and an astounding 79 percent of black children—were poor for at least a year during their childhoods, long-term poverty was much rarer: One percent of white children and 30 percent of black children were poor for at least two-thirds of their childhoods. These children in “long-term poverty” were also more likely to be in “deep poverty,” meaning their families’ incomes were below half the poverty line. (If you do the math, those kids accounted for about 5 percent of the total.)

Not surprisingly, other studies have found that it’s the children in long-term and deep poverty who fare the worst on a variety of indicators, while those in poverty for a relatively short amount of time tend to do better.

So when you and your colleagues say that “poverty is the problem,” which kind of poverty are you talking about? Long-term poverty? Short-term poverty? Deep poverty? Near poverty? Fifty percent of the kids? Five percent?

Even more importantly, is it really poverty that’s the problem? Are we sure poverty’s not a proxy for other issues?

If it’s just poverty—not enough money—then it’s fairly easy to solve: We could just give poor families extra cash in order to make them not poor. We could do this by bringing back traditional welfare, enlarging the Earned Income Tax Credit, or raising the minimum wage.

However, research and experience indicate that those sorts of “income supports” might help children at the margins, but they won’t make much of a dent in achievement gaps or the real inequities in our society. That’s because the most disadvantaged children—especially those who are born poor, and stay poor, for most of their childhoods—have the following, more deep-seated challenges in common:

• Most were born to single mothers, and their fathers have been absent from the start or from the time they turned two or three
• Most of their mothers were teenagers or in their early twenties when they gave birth
• Most of their mothers have very little education—a high school diploma or less—and thus few marketable skills
• Many of their mothers suffer from mental illness or addiction or both

If we give these families more money, it would ease their hardships a bit, and the lower levels of stress might help the moms do a better job parenting. They might also be able to afford some educational goods they otherwise couldn’t—marginally better childcare, preschool, books, or educational games.

But will it erase the huge gaps in early vocabulary development, non-cognitive skill building, and other essential school-readiness tasks between these disadvantaged children and their more advantaged peers, those born in two-parent families, to highly educated mothers and fathers, or to parents who were in their thirties when they started families instead of their teens?

To believe so, you’d have to put as much faith in cash transfers and social services as some reformers put in schools. You’d have to believe in miracles.

But, you might say, what about the international data? The conventional wisdom says that European countries with more generous social welfare systems don’t have the gaping inequalities we do, and their poor kids, as a result, do much better in school. The reason the U.S. trails internationally is because we don’t do enough to curb poverty, right?

Let’s look at that a bit. It’s true that the standard measures show the U.S. to be an outlier among rich countries in terms of childhood poverty. But these poverty measures are problematic because they use a relative definition of poverty: They consider families to be poor if they make less than half the median national income. By definition, then, countries with greater inequality will have more poverty. Such measures look at how the pie is divided, but they don’t look at the size of the pie itself.

But let’s try absolute measures: Take the U.S. poverty threshold, convert it into other currencies, make some adjustments for costs of living, and determine how many people in other countries fall below that line. Here’s what that looks like (at 125 percent the U.S. poverty rate):

Source: “Poor People in Rich Nations: The United States in Comparative Perspective,” Timothy Smeeding, 2006

Suddenly, America’s child poverty rate looks almost normal and certainly can’t explain our lackluster international performance on exams. (Note that our poverty rates are almost indistinguishable from Finland’s, everyone’s favorite star performer.)

But if we don’t look so bad when it comes to absolute “income poverty,” we do look very bad when it comes to fatherless families:

Source

And also teenage pregnancy:

Source

In conclusion, Deborah, our issue isn’t just poverty but parenting. We have a whole class of children growing up without fathers, and they are doing terribly (black boys in particular). Traditional “anti-poverty” measures are unlikely to make much of a dent in solving this one.

So what’s left? What we need are “transformational” interventions that interrupt the insidious cycle that turns disadvantaged kids into disadvantaged parents, by giving them the hope, confidence, and skills to find a different path. I can’t think of institutions better positioned to do that than schools. Can you?

Click here to read Deborah Meier’s response.

There’s no shortage of bad news in education these days, nor any dearth of stasis, but at least education reform is a lively, forward-looking enterprise that gets positive juices flowing in many people and that is leading to promising changes across many parts of the K–12 system. We are focused on making things better—via stronger standards (Common Core), greater parental choice (vouchers, charters, and more), more effective teachers (upgrading preparation programs, devising new evaluation regimens) and lots else.

When it comes to pension reform in the education realm, however, it’s hard to stay positive. Here, we’re saddled with a bona fide fiscal calamity (up to a trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities by some counts) and no consensus about how to rectify the situation. No matter how one slices and dices this problem, somebody ends up paying in ways they won’t like and perhaps shouldn’t have to bear. All we can say is that some options are less bad than others.

Today’s new Fordham study examines how three cities (and their states) are apportioning the misery—or failing to do so. This analysis pulls no cheery rabbits out of a dark hat, but it definitely illustrates the nature and scale of the pension-funding problem and describes a couple of painful yet, in their ways, promising solutions (or partial solutions) to it. As you will see in the summary report (by Fordham’s Dara Zeehandelaar and Amber Winkler) and several technical papers to follow, economist and pension expert Robert Costrell and education-finance expert Larry Maloney parsed the budgets of the Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Philadelphia school districts to estimate just how big an impact their pension and retiree-health-care obligations will have on their bottom line in coming years. (The Philadelphia paper is also now available on our website.)

This is hardly an academic exercise. As our title indicates, these obligations are putting “a big squeeze” on district budgets. In Philadelphia—today the most threatened of the three districts—our analysts estimate that the school system could find itself spending as much as $2,361 per pupil by 2020 on retiree costs alone. That represents a staggering increase ($1,923) from its current level, a huge price tag that can only mean fewer resources for teacher salaries, individualized instruction, new instructional technologies—and pretty much everything else that schools need and do.

Yet it’s not a foregone conclusion. Since we launched this study almost three years ago, both Wisconsin and Ohio passed pension-reform legislation that significantly brightened the economic outlook for the public school systems of Milwaukee and Cleveland. (Pennsylvania is battling over pensions as we write.) These reforms lowered the projections for 2020 retiree spending from $3,512 (without Wisconsin’s Act 10) to $1,924 per pupil in Milwaukee. Act 10 will thus save the district an estimated $1,588 per pupil in retirement costs in 2020 alone. Ohio’s SB 341 and SB 342 could save Cleveland $1,219 per pupil in 2020; not only do they lower projections from $2,476 to $1,257, but in 2020 the district will actually be spending less on retirement than it did in 2011.

Numbers like those are good for district budgets, but they exact a price. Yes, much of the debt burden was taken off the shoulders of school districts (and students), but it was placed instead on the shoulders of new, current, and retired teachers, as well as state taxpayers. This is especially vivid in Ohio, where cuts to pension benefits for new teachers may significantly reduce the desirability of a Buckeye teaching job.

Some might call this approach “eating our young,” making teaching notably less alluring for bright-eyed young instructors (and possible future teachers) while maintaining relatively generous benefits for veteran teachers and current retirees—some of whom will spend more years in retirement than they did in the classroom. Yet because of a legal environment that typically considers all public-sector pension promises, once made, to be “constitutionally protected,” policymakers have few other choices. (The exception is retiree health care, a benefit that in many states does not enjoy the same protections and thus could be a candidate for belt-tightening.) Never mind that yesterday’s “pension giveaway” becomes today’s “constitutionally protected obligation.” This is another example of how lawmakers in one year can tie the hands of their successors for decades to come.

It seems to us inevitable that, one day, public-sector employees across the United States—including but definitely not limited to educators—will find their pensions and other retirement benefits fundamentally transformed into something more like what’s now commonplace in the private sector: 401(k)-style plans that provide some assistance from employers but put much of the retirement-savings onus on employees themselves. At the very least, we’ll see a transition to cash-balance plans, which keep the government on the hook for a guaranteed payout but allow teachers to “cash out” at any time without losing their pension wealth. (Such plans also allow for greater portability than traditional state-managed retirement systems.)

But for now we’re stuck with the consequences and costs of a giant Ponzi scheme: Lawmakers have promised teachers retirement benefits that the system cannot afford, because the promises were based on short-term political considerations and willfully bad (or thoroughly incompetent) math. (For instance, assumptions about market returns that were wildly optimistic and assumptions about longevity that were overly pessimistic.) The bill is coming due and someone’s going to get soaked.

To repeat, no solution spares everybody. The best option is probably to share the pain: among retirees, current teachers, new teachers, school districts, and taxpayers.

Regarding the first two groups, without running afoul of constitutional protections, states can curtail retiree health care, as Wisconsin and Ohio did, which frees up some resources to apply to immutable pension obligations. In some states and districts (no one knows how many), governments have been picking up the tab for retirees’ health insurance between the ages of fifty-five and sixty-five (when Medicare kicks in). This benefit is practically nonexistent in the private sector, and for good reason: People in that age range are generally quite capable of paying for their own health insurance. Most are still working and participate in group plans operated by their employers.

As for filling the hole of unfunded liabilities, there’s little choice but to raise contribution rates for teachers, to increase districts’ contribution rates (which decreases funds for students) or to seek bailouts from states or the federal government (otherwise known as the “charge-it-to-taxpayers” gambit). But this is akin to putting water in a leaky bucket. Raising more revenue is necessary, but unless you attend to the leak (also known as currently accruing costs!), you’re going to have to put more and more water in. Perhaps the plug is reducing benefits, increasing age and years-of-service requirements, or decreasing retirement income via lower salary multipliers—all reasonable fixes.

A better idea? Buy a new bucket.

The unions, naturally, will scream bloody murder. It’s their job to try to hold all of their members harmless, including both current teachers and retirees. So this won’t be an easy fight.

But what should be clear from our new study is that doing nothing is not an option. Without immediate action, the problem will grow worse and districts will eventually get crushed—meaning tomorrow’s children will pay the price for yesterday’s adult irresponsibility. State lawmakers need to step up to the plate. Wisconsin and Ohio, in their ways, have at least begun to move.

After a judge ruled last year that Los Angeles was in violation of the Stull Act—a forty-year-old state law signed by Governor Ronald Reagan requiring that principal and teacher evaluations include student-achievement measures, and spurred on by Los Angeles’s ongoing attempt at obtaining a district-level NCLB waiver, Los Angeles Superintendent John Deasy announced that, as of next year, the district will “fully implement the evaluation changes” tested in an ongoing pilot program.

After three years of failed negotiations and angst galore, New York City has a teacher-evaluation plan. Teachers’ evaluation ratings will be comprised of student-test scores (20 to 25 percent), school-established measures (15 to 20 percent), and in-class or video-recorded observations (55 to 60 percent). But don’t break out the celebratory flan just yet! Some are balking at plans to assess subjects like art, gym, and foreign languages, and at least one mayoral candidate has already come out against the plan.

On Tuesday, D.C. councilmember David Catania announced seven proposals that could reform the District’s public education system dramatically—including a five-year facility plan and a process for handing over surplus buildings to charters. For her part, Chancellor Kaya Henderson expressed interest in some pieces (e.g., more money to low-performing high schools) but resisted the more dramatic ones (e.g., a set metric that would mandate closure for consistently underperforming schools).

Dara Zeehandelaar, author of The Big Squeeze: Retirement Costs and School District Budgets, explains teachers pensions and the difference between defined benefits and defined contribution plans that states offer teachers.

Dara Zeehandelaar, author of The Big Squeeze: Retirement Costs and School District Budgets, explains teachers pensions and the difference between defined benefits and defined contribution plans that states offer teachers.

For advocates of value-added measures of teacher effectiveness, high school presents a conundrum, as testing is less frequent and often in non-contiguous subjects (making it difficult to compare prior years' results). Using data from the ACT's QualityCore program, Dan Goldhaber and his colleagues analyzed two value-added models—the traditional model comparing pre- and post-tests and a more complex analysis that considers individual student outcomes across multiple subjects—and compared their results. The benefit of the more complex model, which uses a "cross-subject student fixed-effects approach," is that it skirts the issue of non-contiguous classes and the need for pretests in subjects that students may not have encountered before. They found that the fixed-effects approach estimated smaller teacher effects (meaning that teacher quality was less important to the final score than other variables), though it is impossible to know which model was "better," as there is no objective measure of teacher quality against which to benchmark. More importantly, Goldhaber found significant variation in the results of the two models: Nearly 10 percent of the teachers who were placed in the top quintile by the fixed-effects model—the top-echelon of educators—were actually in the bottom quintile when the traditional model was used. In the world of high-stakes testing, this is concerning (especially if you're a teacher!) and reminds us that, while value-added measurements have superior predictive power relative to other methods of estimating teacher effectiveness, they are imperfect—and the tradeoffs ought to be made clearer in the popular debate.

SOURCE: Dan D. Goldhaber, Pete Goldschmidt, and Fannie Tseng, “Teacher Value-Added at the High-School Level: Different Models, Different Answers?” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 35(2) (June 2013): 220–36.

This familiar May visitor to edu-wonks’ desktops looks a bit different in 2013. Typically a bulky digest of all manner of education-related statistics, this year’s Condition of Education is more modern (with a beefed-up report and data website) and more svelte (by over 200 pages). The yearly tome of data now tracks but forty-two indicators across four areas: population statistics, participation in education, elementary and secondary education, and post-secondary education as well as data on four “spotlighted” stages: trends in employment rates by education attainment, Kindergarten entry timing, rural education, and college financing. From it, we learn that Hispanic immigrants are over three times as likely to drop out of high school than non-immigrant Hispanics; that charter school enrollment is still on the upswing, by 11 percent between 2009–10 and 2010–11; that 60 percent of kiddos aged three to five attend full-day preschool; that only 36 percent of female high school dropouts aged twenty to twenty-four are employed (compared to 59 percent of males of the same ilk); that employment rates among young adult males dropped at least 7 percentage points from 2008 and 2010—no matter their education level; and much more. NCES doesn’t attach policy recommendations to its data dump, but that shouldn’t stop the report from furthering some important conversations. Many, including us, have recently been questioning the “college for all” rhetoric, as an example. The dips seen in employment rates are further proof: We need to think hard about what worthy, non-college pathways to the middle-class might look like.

SOURCE: National Center for Education Statistics, The Condition of Education 2013 (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Education Sciences, May 2013).