Earlier this month, MetLife released the findings of Part I of their annual education survey, which focuses on what it means to be “college and career ready.” The survey polled middle and high school teachers, students, parents, and Fortune 1000 executives to determine how they feel about the college and career-readiness goal and what students need to do to reach it. Major takeaways
Earlier this month, MetLife released the findings of Part I of their annual education survey, which focuses on what it means to be “college and career ready.” The survey polled middle and high school teachers, students, parents, and Fortune 1000 executives to determine how they feel about the college and career-readiness goal and what students need to do to reach it. Major takeaways from the survey include the following:
While there is broad agreement that all students should be ready for college or a career when they graduate from high school, there is significant discord around various reform efforts being taken to achieve this goal. For example, when asked how much control schools should have to remove underperforming teachers, seventy-five percent of parents show strongest support for “giving schools more ability to remove teachers who are not serving students well.” Only 39 percent of teachers highly prioritize this goal. Furthermore, while over 50 percent of parents and executives believe that student growth data should be used to measure teacher effectiveness, only 27 percent of teachers feel the same.
In Fordham’s recent survey of Ohio superintendents, Yearning to Break Free: Ohio Superintendents Speak Out, district leaders expressed sentiments more similar to surveyed parents than surveyed teachers. Fifty percent of Buckeye superintendents said that expanding their management authority over staff would lead to improvements in student achievement. When superintendents were asked to rank which reform effort relating to staffing was the most important to them, 82 percent said that making it easier to remove unmotivated or incompetent teachers was the most important. Also, 57 percent of superintendents surveyed said that evaluating schools and districts based on student performance is a positive thing.
To read more findings from the MetLife survey or from Fordham’s Ohio superintendent survey click here and here, respectively.
The MetLife Survey of the American Teacher:
Preparing Students for College and Careers: Part 1: Clearing the Path
Metropolitan Life Insurance Company
March 2011
Moving from quality-blind to quality-based layoffs is integral to today’s education-reform agenda. Yet figuring out how best to pull this off in a productive, teacher-friendly manner has been a whopping challenge. Enter this New Teacher Project (TNTP) brief, which offers a novel method for districts engaging in quality-based layoffs. Based on a survey of 9,000 teachers from two large, urban districts, TNTP presents a “scorecard” of weighted factors that the organization (as well as the teachers it surveyed) believes should be considered in layoff decisions. This scorecard includes teacher performance ratings, classroom-management skills, attendance, and support for extra-curricular activities—along with years with the district. (Conspicuously lacking is credit for graduate credit hours and advanced degrees: Only one-third of surveyed teachers supported including this factor in layoff decisions.) TNTP’s brief offers a method for handling layoffs that is both tangible enough to be implemented and flexible enough to be adapted for district need. The one caveat: While the brief’s workable model for making layoff decisions is an excellent first step, it does not go further to address how teachers’ performance and classroom-management skills should be judged—probably because their surveyed teachers counted principal opinion as the least appropriate factor for making layoff decisions.
A Smarter Teacher Layoff System: How Quality-Based Layoffs Can Help
Schools Keep Great Teachers
The
New Teacher Project
March
2011
The authors don’t beat around the bush: Bad charters may exist, but so do excellent ones—and the latter should be supported and scaled to serve exponentially more students. If the top 10 percent of charter schools expanded at a rate similar to other growing industries, we learn from this PPI study, they could reach all children in poverty by 2025. To do so, the authors offer recommendations on how to overcome current practical, political, and environmental barriers to growth, borrowing strategies from businesses and organizations like Apple, Habitat for Humanity, and Starbucks. First, they advise that the top charter providers rid themselves of their “pervasive fear of growth”; leaders should commit not just to excellence, but to excellence for increasing numbers of students. Other suggestions include: negotiating performance-based funding in contracts; ramping up efforts to import talent from other industries and cultivate it in the education sector; extending the reach of the best teachers through technology and innovation; providing incentives and rewards for leaders who achieve successful growth; and aligning with other similar organizations to share ideas and resources. While some may balk at the stark comparison between the education sector and other (largely for-profit) industries, this brief may prove to be the shot-in-the-arm that the charter sector needs to cure it of its complacency and timidity. The report serves less as a blueprint for development and more as a call to arms for top charter providers, and as the title implies, the possibilities are exponential.
Going
Exponential: Growing the Charter School Sector’s Best
Progressive
Policy Institute
Emily
Ayscue Hassel, Bryan C. Hassel, and Joe Ableindinger
Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, a prospective 2012 GOP presidential candidate, challenged Republicans to take a critical look at the defense budget earlier this month when he told a reporter in Iowa, “Anybody who says you can’t save money at the Pentagon has never been to the Pentagon. We can save money on defense, and if we Republicans don’t propose saving money on defense, we’ll have no credibility on anything else.”
Republicans, especially those considering a run for president, don’t usually challenge defense spending, let alone when the nation is engaged in multiple wars. But these are not ordinary times. More and more, voters and politicians alike are asking what can we afford and where should we cut?
Like with defense, most conservative Republicans have been staunch supporters of school choice and its expansion. For this reason, observers in Ohio expected Governor John Kasich to support an expansion of both charter schools and private school vouchers. The governor’s budget indeed offers up a healthy portion of school choice that includes lifting caps on charter schools and expanding the number of vouchers available to children in failing public schools through the state’s EdChoice scholarship program. Such moves will expand choice, but not at a dramatic clip and not to many middle-class families or districts beyond the state’s urban centers. Ohio’s choice programs will continue mostly serving kids in failing schools and long-troubled districts.
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More and more, voters and politicians alike are asking what can we afford and where should we cut? |
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This could change, however, if either House Bill 136 or Senate Bill 128, companion bills currently being debated in the General Assembly, becomes law. These bills would create the Parental Choice and Taxpayer Savings Scholarship Program, which would award private school scholarships worth $4,626 to students from families with annual household incomes of up to one-and-a-half times the federal reduced-price lunch eligibility level (up to about $61,000,based on current standards). Students from families with household incomes up to two-and-a-half times the reduced-price lunch eligibility level (just over $100,000 this year) would be eligible for scholarships ranging from $2,313 and $4,626, awarded on a sliding scale based on actual income.
There is no geographic restriction on these scholarships (as currently applies to charter schools) or requirement that the students come from a failing public school (as is the case with the EdChoice program). As about 80 percent of Ohio’s households have family incomes of less than $100,000 this program has the potential to launch a significant expansion of school choice over the next decade.
Further, by the 2012-2013 school year HB136/SB128 would allow some families with children already enrolled in private schools to use the scholarship to meet tuition costs they are currently paying out of pocket. Ohio has roughly 250,000 students enrolled in private schools, and many of these children and their families would be eligible for some amount of assistance for tuition. The program would expand school choice in Ohio for middle-class parents with children in private schools, and as such it would ultimately create new costs for taxpayers.
The out-year cost of such an expansion in school choice raises concerns about the state’s ability to fund it. Ohio’s next biennial budget is already plagued by a nearly $8 billion deficit and few expect a rapid recovery in the state’s coffers. Public education is going to operate with at least a couple billion dollars less over the next two years, and no programs are immune from cuts.
These fiscal realities raise an uncomfortable question for school choice supporters, myself included. Is now the right time to support the creation of a new school choice program that essentially is aimed at middle-class families and has an almost unlimited potential for growth? Just as some national Republicans are starting to question about how much defense spending the nation can afford, it is time for school reformers to ask tough questions about how much school choice we can afford. What’s more important for conservatives – more school choice or making our ends meet? How should the pain be shared?
Tell us what you think! This article originally appeared on our blog, Flypaper, and generated a lot of thoughtful comments from readers. You can view the article on Flypaper here to join the conversation and leave a comment of your own.
The state budget deficit and collective bargaining reform are consuming much of the energy at the Statehouse, but legislators are also considering much-needed fixes to the state’s public pension systems. The authors of this piece also wrote the Fordham Institute’s 2007 report, Golden Peaks and Perilous Cliffs: Rethinking Ohio’s Teacher Pension System, and in this article share their most recent research and recommendations about improving teacher pension systems.
Educator pension systems are becoming increasingly expensive and, in a number of states, plagued by severe problems of underfunding. Given concerns about cost and long-term sustainability, several states have cut benefits, usually for new teachers, and many more are considering doing so. However, in making these changes, policymakers should carefully consider their labor-market effects. Some of the proposed cuts reproduce—and even exacerbate—undesirable features of current systems.
That’s because they violate the paramount principle upon which pension systems should be built: Benefits should be tied to contributions. In other words, benefits paid to any teacher should be tied to the lifetime contributions made by or for that teacher. If $300,000 has been contributed on behalf of a teacher (including accumulated returns) then the cash value of an annuity provided to this teacher should also be $300,000.
This principle is routinely violated in current defined-benefit pension systems. Our analysis, Reforming K-12 Educator Pensions: A Labor Market Perspective, shows that the current systems result in very large implicit transfers from young teachers working short teaching spells to “long termers” who spend entire careers in the same system. In our view, a teacher who works ten years or thirty years should accrue pension wealth roughly equivalent to total pension contributions (with accumulated returns).
Illinois is a cautionary example of how not to reform teacher pensions. The Land of Lincoln recently implemented a two-tiered plan, with teachers hired after January 1, 2011 in the second tier. Tier 2 teachers will make identical contributions (9.4 percent) as their Tier 1 colleagues, but will have a massive cut in pension wealth accrual over their work lives. Moreover, by our calculations, a new teacher entering the Illinois plan at age twenty-five will accrue no net pension wealth until age fifty-one. If the teacher leaves the classroom in her thirties or forties, she will walk away with nothing but her own cumulative contributions.
Tying benefits to contributions would have positive workforce consequences. First, it would provide rational incentives for retirement versus continued work. Each year, an educator would accrue pension wealth in a smooth and transparent way, providing an appropriate addition to the annual salary she is earning. This would generate neutral incentives to work or retire based on individual preferences and effectiveness.
That is not the case with current systems, where pension-wealth accrual is highly back loaded and concentrated at certain arbitrary points in teachers’ careers. Some years (e.g. at twenty-five or thirty years of service) yield increases in pension wealth that are several times the teacher’s salary. This provides a huge incentive to stay on the job until that pension “spike,” regardless of classroom effectiveness. There is no economic rationale for favoring one year of work over another in this way. Nor should an additional year of work reduce pension wealth, as is the case in current pension plans after a certain point in time, often at relatively young ages. This penalizes good teachers who wish to stay but are encouraged to retire early.
Tying benefits to contributions would also eliminate the massive penalties for mobility in current systems. It is well understood in the private sector that in order to recruit and retain talented young employees it is necessary to provide portable retirement benefits. This is accomplished by defined-contribution (DC) or cash-balance (CB) plans that vest immediately or nearly so. Current teacher plans typically have five or even ten year vesting. But even for vested educators, our research finds that the loss in pension wealth for those who split a teaching career between two states is massive. In a system where benefits are tied to the cumulative value of contributions it does not matter whether contributions have all been made in one or many jobs: Penalties for mobility are eliminated.
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Tying benefits to contributions would also eliminate the massive penalties for mobility in current systems. |
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We favor cash-balance plans that generate notional individual retirement accounts, with contributions from employer and employee, and an investment return guaranteed by the employer. Such plans resemble the DC design, but without transferring investment risk or asset management to the teacher. They are transparent, offer smooth wealth accrual, and are readily annuitized at retirement. Large private employers such as IBM have converted to such plans, as have a few public employers. The TIAA plans that are common in higher education are similar in operation. They have provided retirement security for generations of college professors who often spread careers over multiple institutions.
As states grapple with the current pension crisis, a window of opportunity is open to implement more modern and strategic plans, or to make matters worse. Fundamental reform—based on tying benefits to contributions—is needed to fix these broken systems.
Robert M. Costrell is the endowed chair in education accountability at the University of Arkansas’s College of Education and Health Professions. Michael Podgursky is a professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Missouri, Columbia, as well as a fellow at the George W. Bush Institute at Southern Methodist University.
Earlier this month, MetLife released the findings of Part I of their annual education survey, which focuses on what it means to be “college and career ready.” The survey polled middle and high school teachers, students, parents, and Fortune 1000 executives to determine how they feel about the college and career-readiness goal and what students need to do to reach it. Major takeaways from the survey include the following:
While there is broad agreement that all students should be ready for college or a career when they graduate from high school, there is significant discord around various reform efforts being taken to achieve this goal. For example, when asked how much control schools should have to remove underperforming teachers, seventy-five percent of parents show strongest support for “giving schools more ability to remove teachers who are not serving students well.” Only 39 percent of teachers highly prioritize this goal. Furthermore, while over 50 percent of parents and executives believe that student growth data should be used to measure teacher effectiveness, only 27 percent of teachers feel the same.
In Fordham’s recent survey of Ohio superintendents, Yearning to Break Free: Ohio Superintendents Speak Out, district leaders expressed sentiments more similar to surveyed parents than surveyed teachers. Fifty percent of Buckeye superintendents said that expanding their management authority over staff would lead to improvements in student achievement. When superintendents were asked to rank which reform effort relating to staffing was the most important to them, 82 percent said that making it easier to remove unmotivated or incompetent teachers was the most important. Also, 57 percent of superintendents surveyed said that evaluating schools and districts based on student performance is a positive thing.
To read more findings from the MetLife survey or from Fordham’s Ohio superintendent survey click here and here, respectively.
The MetLife Survey of the American Teacher:
Preparing Students for College and Careers: Part 1: Clearing the Path
Metropolitan Life Insurance Company
March 2011
Moving from quality-blind to quality-based layoffs is integral to today’s education-reform agenda. Yet figuring out how best to pull this off in a productive, teacher-friendly manner has been a whopping challenge. Enter this New Teacher Project (TNTP) brief, which offers a novel method for districts engaging in quality-based layoffs. Based on a survey of 9,000 teachers from two large, urban districts, TNTP presents a “scorecard” of weighted factors that the organization (as well as the teachers it surveyed) believes should be considered in layoff decisions. This scorecard includes teacher performance ratings, classroom-management skills, attendance, and support for extra-curricular activities—along with years with the district. (Conspicuously lacking is credit for graduate credit hours and advanced degrees: Only one-third of surveyed teachers supported including this factor in layoff decisions.) TNTP’s brief offers a method for handling layoffs that is both tangible enough to be implemented and flexible enough to be adapted for district need. The one caveat: While the brief’s workable model for making layoff decisions is an excellent first step, it does not go further to address how teachers’ performance and classroom-management skills should be judged—probably because their surveyed teachers counted principal opinion as the least appropriate factor for making layoff decisions.
A Smarter Teacher Layoff System: How Quality-Based Layoffs Can Help
Schools Keep Great Teachers
The
New Teacher Project
March
2011
The authors don’t beat around the bush: Bad charters may exist, but so do excellent ones—and the latter should be supported and scaled to serve exponentially more students. If the top 10 percent of charter schools expanded at a rate similar to other growing industries, we learn from this PPI study, they could reach all children in poverty by 2025. To do so, the authors offer recommendations on how to overcome current practical, political, and environmental barriers to growth, borrowing strategies from businesses and organizations like Apple, Habitat for Humanity, and Starbucks. First, they advise that the top charter providers rid themselves of their “pervasive fear of growth”; leaders should commit not just to excellence, but to excellence for increasing numbers of students. Other suggestions include: negotiating performance-based funding in contracts; ramping up efforts to import talent from other industries and cultivate it in the education sector; extending the reach of the best teachers through technology and innovation; providing incentives and rewards for leaders who achieve successful growth; and aligning with other similar organizations to share ideas and resources. While some may balk at the stark comparison between the education sector and other (largely for-profit) industries, this brief may prove to be the shot-in-the-arm that the charter sector needs to cure it of its complacency and timidity. The report serves less as a blueprint for development and more as a call to arms for top charter providers, and as the title implies, the possibilities are exponential.
Going
Exponential: Growing the Charter School Sector’s Best
Progressive
Policy Institute
Emily
Ayscue Hassel, Bryan C. Hassel, and Joe Ableindinger
