The Education Gadfly Weekly

Sylvia A. Allegretto, Sean P. Corcoran and Lawrence Mishel Economic Policy Institute 2004

The argument that teachers are underpaid has never lacked vocal supporters, and this new report from EPI adds to the clamor. Predictably, EPI concludes that, compared to other similar jobs, "teachers earned $116 less per week in 2002, a wage differential of 12.2 percent. Because teachers worked more hours per week, the hourly wage differential was an even larger 14.1 percent." But what is actually interesting is their attempt to be scientific in choosing comparable jobs. According to "skill level" data in the Bureau of Labor Statistics National Compensation Survey (NCS), teaching is most similar to a list that consists primarily of accounting, nursing, computer programming, personnel specialists, and the clergy. Much of this report is a direct response to the salary analyses of Michael Podgursky, who has called for reasonable comparison jobs and an analysis factoring in the benefits of teaching (click here to read more). EPI scores on the former point but fails on the latter, ignoring the fact that teachers might like working with children, being near their own school-age kids, having their summers off, etc. (Also central to EPI's report is the less exciting contention that their data are better, as they rely on the Current Population Survey while Podgursky favors the NCS; readers interested in that technical dispute will find much detail in the report.) This debate will doubtless rage on, but perhaps there is another way to frame it. Put aside the fact that unions ensure teachers will be paid more than the laws of supply and demand would otherwise dictate. The argument here is that teachers deserve to be paid on par with accountants and nurses. But the markets for talent vary from profession to profession. Computer programmers are in high demand, and paid accordingly, so direct comparisons are misleading. The real logic in favor of higher teacher salaries is that current salaries might not be sufficient to recruit and retain a quality workforce. But in truth, the unattractiveness of teaching to talented workers has roots deeper than just dollars and cents. It's also about the stifling nature of school bureaucracies, the absence of meritocracy, the many and pointless barriers to entry, and the dominant perception (right or wrong) that teaching just doesn't pay - a perception fueled by studies such as this one. To read for yourself, click here.

American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew T. LeFevreSeptember 22, 2004

The American Legislative Exchange Council, a network of state legislators with a right-of-center bent, has released its eleventh annual Report Card on American Education. There's good stuff here, not pathbreaking, but useful in drawing together various education inputs and linking them to student achievement. We learn (once again) that "There is no immediately evident correlation between conventional measures of education inputs, such as expenditures per pupil and teacher salaries, and educational outputs, such as average scores on standardized tests. In fact, of all the educational inputs measured in this study, only higher pupil per teacher ratios [and] fewer students per school. . . have a positive impact on educational achievement." The report also includes lots of good info on state education spending, salaries for education personnel, and performance on state and national tests. Check it out here.

Ben Wildavsky, Sourcebooks, Inc.September 2004

Ben Wildavsky's The Ultimate Guide to Becoming a Teacher is what it claims to be: an essential resource for anyone who wants to teach, but doesn't know quite where to begin. Like most U.S. News guides, it contains much useful information about where to find the money to pay for an education degree (for those who choose that dubious route), a state-by-state listing of teacher salaries, as well as a directory of teacher preparation programs. Its best parts, though, are its opening chapters - "The trouble with teaching and how to fix it" and "Alternative routes to the classroom" - which include frank discussion of the need for reform in teacher training, pay, and certification, as well as alternatives for folks who want to get into the classroom without jumping all of the traditional hurdles. Those intimately familiar with education reform in this area won't find anything stunning, but Wildavsky's profiles of such reform programs as the Milken Foundation's Teacher Advancement Program, and organizations such as Teach for America, the New Teacher Project, and the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, provide needed information to people who might not even have known that such alternatives exist. The ISBN is 1402202911, Sourcebooks, Inc. is the publisher, and you can find out more here.

U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education StatisticsSeptember 2004

As one expects from NCES, this report is packed full of data that don't make for real stimulating reading. But it has an important, if familiar, message: college costs are rising faster than income growth and inflation, and increases in student aid are not necessarily keeping up. The 1990s saw total aid to full time undergraduates increase from $6,242 per recipient to $8,451 per recipient, while the percentage receiving aid grew from 60 percent to 74 percent. Yet much of this took the form of loans, such that the net price of tuition (tuition minus grants) climbed while the net price of attendance (tuition minus grants and loans) held fairly steady (rising slightly for public four-year colleges and declining slightly for private four-year colleges). And much of the increase in aid benefited wealthier families; among dependent students, the percentage of the top income quartile receiving aid increased from 29 percent to 58 percent, and the amount they received rose by 50 percent. This is not surprising, given that the 1992 rewrite of the Higher Education Act opened subsidized loan programs to middle-income students. Thus the trend runs slightly counter to the increased subsidy for poor families we'd prefer to see, though low income students also gained a bit: in the bottom quartile, those receiving aid grew from 81 percent to 87 percent and their average aid increased from $6,900 to $8,600. This report provides much data and suggests some correlations but causation remains the challenge. Are loans increasing because college costs are rising, or does the abundant supply of aid fuel the tuition increases? You won't find answers here, but you will find a wealth of charts and data as well as useful information various student aid programs. It's available here.

How do you keep your revolutionary edge if you become part of the establishment? That's one of the challenges facing charter schools and their advocates today.

Charters began as a frank challenge to traditional public-school districts: independent start-ups, catalyzed by outside groups of concerned citizens or educators, meant to upset and thus prod the system (while offering options to kids who need them). That vision guided most chartering in its first decade. But as the "charter movement" has widened and matured, more and more districts have decided they want in on the act. Sometimes they do this for honorable reasons, seeing in chartering a path to options or innovations that they cannot readily create under the hidebound constraints of ordinary rules and union contracts. Sometimes they do it to thwart real competition, preserve jobs (and funding) and cling to the prerogatives of their monopoly. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. In any case, when districts take to chartering, one ought to expect their approach to forfeit most of the gadfly qualities that made the original version of charter schools an exciting alternative to district hegemony.

That doesn't make district chartering a bad thing. In fact, charter partisans should welcome districts into the movement and be relieved that some have quit stonewalling. But they also need to be wary, lest "establishment" chartering take center stage, perhaps marginalizing the messy but innovative independent kind.

For example, New York City and Chicago have announced plans to create 50-100 new schools each in the next few years (a mix of charter, outsourced and unconventional district schools). Well and good. (We discuss Chicago's plan in more detail below.) This signals widening acceptance of innovation and choice as reform strategies within two vast and troubled urban systems. But what the bureaucracy giveth, the bureaucracy can taketh away. And what happens when there's a new superintendent or chancellor (or mayor), who thinks otherwise? A new school board elected by the union? Charter advocates would make a huge blunder to place all their eggs in the district basket and neglect truly independent charter schools.

What's the real risk? Putting most of the available energy, political capital, brain power and money into "helping" districts engage in chartering rather than devoting those (limited) assets to advancing the frontier of independent charter schools: removing caps on their numbers and enrollments, creating multiple authorizers, strengthening school autonomy, securing adequate funding and facilities, etc. 

Note, for example, that both New York and Illinois have severely capped non-district charter school growth, thus funneling energy and advocacy (and philanthropy and imagination) into district-approved venues. In both locales, we can see some charter supporters easing the push for stronger charter laws. Consider this: if Chicago were to end up with 30 or more district-spawned charter schools serving a few percent of that city's children, with no commensurate increase in the cap, funding, or facilities for chartering independent schools statewide or elsewhere within Chicago, would that represent success for the charter movement? Nope. The same holds for New York City.

For example, instead of Mayor Daley or Superintendent Duncan (or Mayor Bloomberg or Chancellor Klein) lobbying in Springfield (or Albany) for more charters for the children of their cities, they're consumed by their own new schools effort. So are the advocacy organizations. In both cities, foundation and think-tank support is also being sucked into district-generated efforts and away from independent chartering. Some observers fear that a similar "romance" with district chartering can be glimpsed in several prominent national foundations and worry that it is even creeping into the new, national Charter School Leadership Council (CSLC).

To repeat: district chartering is welcome. Almost every sort of charter schooling is to be encouraged. But for all its political tidiness and economies of scale, the in-house kind should not be encouraged at the expense of independent chartering that serves as check and goad and conscience for the system as a whole. CSLC chairman Howard Fuller recently remarked, "Independent charters are for me still the preferred option. It is certainly the most powerful. I would also argue that it is only the existence of the possibility of independent charters that will keep district chartering alive." The success of this movement, as part of a choice-based education reform strategy, demands a strong and growing market of independent charters that push on the system from outside. If the independent element of the charter movement falters or diminishes, we will in time see a return to the bad old days when the system quashed every promising reform by enfolding it in a strangling embrace.

Justin Torres is research director of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Time magazine this week discusses the challenges, benefits, and pitfalls of "grade skipping" - moving extremely gifted students up to a higher grade. Critics have long maintained that moving children, however brilliant, into classes with older students will hurt them socially if not academically. Citing statistics from A Nation Deceived, a study released this week, proponents are fighting back. According to authors Nicholas Colangelo and Susan Assouline of the University of Iowa, and Miraca Gross of the University of New South Wales, Australia, "accelerated students have performed almost as well on standardized tests as older classmates, even those with similar IQs" and "accelerants far outscore their equally gifted age-mates who did not move ahead." In addition, 63 percent of grade skippers were judged by their teachers to have adjusted "relatively well" or "very well" to school. Despite this evidence, scores of parents who have tried to accelerate their gifted students have run into resistance from teachers, administrators, and counselors. In fact, the authors report, they are not aware "of any other education practice that is so well researched, yet so rarely implemented." It seems that many are convinced merely by anecdotal evidence of kids who have been forced ahead, only to face problems they were not prepared to handle, rather than relying on research indicating that grade skipping is a plausible answer to the perplexing question of how to keep gifted kids engaged and challenged when so many other students are falling behind. As Assouline points out, "we have every reason to believe that when the decision is carefully made, the student will do fine."

"Saving the smart kids," by John Cloud, Time, September 27, 2004

A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America's Brightest Students, by Nicholas Colangelo, Susan G. Assouline, Miraca U. M. Gross, The Connie Belin & Jacqueline N. Blank International Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development, College of Education, The University of Iowa, September 2004

Washington State Superintendent of Public Instruction Terry Bergeson has been in the spotlight more than once this year for daring to support initiatives like charter schools, the suspension of teacher pay and class-size initiatives, and the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) graduation requirement. (Click here for more.) Such good deeds never go unpunished, and the relentless state teachers' union is attempting to give Bergeson her comeuppance in the form of a stiff re-election challenge from Washington Education Association-sanctioned candidate (and former state superintendent) Judy Billings. The challenger is running on a promise to "de-emphasize the WASL" - in other words, to make sure it is not used as a high-stakes graduation test for the state's students. In last week's primary, which determined which two candidates would duke it out in November, the retro Billings led the (moderately) forward-looking Bergeson by nearly 2,000 votes.

"WASL a factor in race to head schools," by Linda Shaw, Seattle Times, September 10, 2004

"WASL at core of contest," by Heather Woodward, Olympian, September 16, 2004

Salon.com offers an against-the-grain article purporting to show that the accepted wisdom about college professors-that they're overwhelmingly liberal and generally vote Democrat-is overstated. This would be fascinating if true, but the piece contradicts itself. Author Scott Jaschik quotes polling data showing that 47 percent of professors call themselves "liberal" or "far left," while 19 percent call themselves "conservative" or "far right." Where we come from, that sounds dispositive. (And we'd wager that the definition of "middle of the road" that 34 percent of professors use to describe themselves diverges from ordinary folks' concept of centrist.) Further, the article quotes prominent sociologist Todd Gitlin, who not-so-subtly undercuts its entire premise by remarking that "[P]eople who are intellectually serious are acutely revolted by the pattern of deception and stupidity that is manifest in the Bush presidency." Why does this matter? It's not that college professors are more liberal than the average bear; normal people accepted that fact long ago. It's that Jaschik uses his specious argument to take shots at legislative efforts that seek to provide a little ideological balance in federally funded higher ed programs, such as the International Studies in Higher Education Act, which would regulate the flow of federal dollars to university-based "area studies" programs that support anti-American scholarship (click here to learn more).

"The liberal college conspiracy," by Scott Jaschik, Salon.com, September 20, 2004 Daypass required)

The Broad Foundation announced this week that the Garden Grove Unified School District in Orange County, CA is the winner of its 2004 urban prize for education - the largest and most prestigious such award in public education. Each year, the Foundation awards $1 million in college scholarships to the most outstanding urban school districts in the nation. This year, Garden Grove received $500,000 in scholarship money, and four finalists - the Aldine Independent School District in Houston, TX, Boston Public Schools, Charlotte-Mecklenberg Schools, and Norfolk (VA) Public Schools - each received $125,000. These prizes recognize the districts' overall improvement in student achievement and narrowing of achievement gaps across ethnic and income groups.

"Broad prize for urban education," press release, Broad Foundation, September 20, 2004

"California district wins public education prize," Associated Press, September 20, 2004

In Chicago, teachers' unions and community agitators are howling over Renaissance 2010, Mayor Richard Daley's plan to remake the school system by closing consistently troubled schools, reopening others as charters, and rolling back regulations that stifle education innovation. (As part of the plan, some of the 50-100 new schools to be opened would be district-sponsored charter schools, a complicated matter for the charter movement that we discuss above.) Various activist types are up in arms, especially about the future of local school councils, or LSCs, which may not be part of the governance structure of the new schools. About the fate of LSCs, we care not a bit. About the impact the plan may have on charter schooling, see the editorial above. About the necessity of doing something to shake up Chicago's worst schools, we have no doubt, and we hope Mayor Daley goes even further in his reforming effort.

"Chicago hope: 'Maybe this will work,'" by Amanda Paulson, Christian Science Monitor, September 21, 2004

"Teachers union comes out against mayor's school plan," by Rosalina Rossi, Chicago Sun-Times, September 21, 2004

American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew T. LeFevreSeptember 22, 2004

The American Legislative Exchange Council, a network of state legislators with a right-of-center bent, has released its eleventh annual Report Card on American Education. There's good stuff here, not pathbreaking, but useful in drawing together various education inputs and linking them to student achievement. We learn (once again) that "There is no immediately evident correlation between conventional measures of education inputs, such as expenditures per pupil and teacher salaries, and educational outputs, such as average scores on standardized tests. In fact, of all the educational inputs measured in this study, only higher pupil per teacher ratios [and] fewer students per school. . . have a positive impact on educational achievement." The report also includes lots of good info on state education spending, salaries for education personnel, and performance on state and national tests. Check it out here.

Ben Wildavsky, Sourcebooks, Inc.September 2004

Ben Wildavsky's The Ultimate Guide to Becoming a Teacher is what it claims to be: an essential resource for anyone who wants to teach, but doesn't know quite where to begin. Like most U.S. News guides, it contains much useful information about where to find the money to pay for an education degree (for those who choose that dubious route), a state-by-state listing of teacher salaries, as well as a directory of teacher preparation programs. Its best parts, though, are its opening chapters - "The trouble with teaching and how to fix it" and "Alternative routes to the classroom" - which include frank discussion of the need for reform in teacher training, pay, and certification, as well as alternatives for folks who want to get into the classroom without jumping all of the traditional hurdles. Those intimately familiar with education reform in this area won't find anything stunning, but Wildavsky's profiles of such reform programs as the Milken Foundation's Teacher Advancement Program, and organizations such as Teach for America, the New Teacher Project, and the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, provide needed information to people who might not even have known that such alternatives exist. The ISBN is 1402202911, Sourcebooks, Inc. is the publisher, and you can find out more here.

Sylvia A. Allegretto, Sean P. Corcoran and Lawrence Mishel Economic Policy Institute 2004

The argument that teachers are underpaid has never lacked vocal supporters, and this new report from EPI adds to the clamor. Predictably, EPI concludes that, compared to other similar jobs, "teachers earned $116 less per week in 2002, a wage differential of 12.2 percent. Because teachers worked more hours per week, the hourly wage differential was an even larger 14.1 percent." But what is actually interesting is their attempt to be scientific in choosing comparable jobs. According to "skill level" data in the Bureau of Labor Statistics National Compensation Survey (NCS), teaching is most similar to a list that consists primarily of accounting, nursing, computer programming, personnel specialists, and the clergy. Much of this report is a direct response to the salary analyses of Michael Podgursky, who has called for reasonable comparison jobs and an analysis factoring in the benefits of teaching (click here to read more). EPI scores on the former point but fails on the latter, ignoring the fact that teachers might like working with children, being near their own school-age kids, having their summers off, etc. (Also central to EPI's report is the less exciting contention that their data are better, as they rely on the Current Population Survey while Podgursky favors the NCS; readers interested in that technical dispute will find much detail in the report.) This debate will doubtless rage on, but perhaps there is another way to frame it. Put aside the fact that unions ensure teachers will be paid more than the laws of supply and demand would otherwise dictate. The argument here is that teachers deserve to be paid on par with accountants and nurses. But the markets for talent vary from profession to profession. Computer programmers are in high demand, and paid accordingly, so direct comparisons are misleading. The real logic in favor of higher teacher salaries is that current salaries might not be sufficient to recruit and retain a quality workforce. But in truth, the unattractiveness of teaching to talented workers has roots deeper than just dollars and cents. It's also about the stifling nature of school bureaucracies, the absence of meritocracy, the many and pointless barriers to entry, and the dominant perception (right or wrong) that teaching just doesn't pay - a perception fueled by studies such as this one. To read for yourself, click here.

U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education StatisticsSeptember 2004

As one expects from NCES, this report is packed full of data that don't make for real stimulating reading. But it has an important, if familiar, message: college costs are rising faster than income growth and inflation, and increases in student aid are not necessarily keeping up. The 1990s saw total aid to full time undergraduates increase from $6,242 per recipient to $8,451 per recipient, while the percentage receiving aid grew from 60 percent to 74 percent. Yet much of this took the form of loans, such that the net price of tuition (tuition minus grants) climbed while the net price of attendance (tuition minus grants and loans) held fairly steady (rising slightly for public four-year colleges and declining slightly for private four-year colleges). And much of the increase in aid benefited wealthier families; among dependent students, the percentage of the top income quartile receiving aid increased from 29 percent to 58 percent, and the amount they received rose by 50 percent. This is not surprising, given that the 1992 rewrite of the Higher Education Act opened subsidized loan programs to middle-income students. Thus the trend runs slightly counter to the increased subsidy for poor families we'd prefer to see, though low income students also gained a bit: in the bottom quartile, those receiving aid grew from 81 percent to 87 percent and their average aid increased from $6,900 to $8,600. This report provides much data and suggests some correlations but causation remains the challenge. Are loans increasing because college costs are rising, or does the abundant supply of aid fuel the tuition increases? You won't find answers here, but you will find a wealth of charts and data as well as useful information various student aid programs. It's available here.