The Education Gadfly Weekly

Matthew Ladner, Andrew T. LeFevre, and Dan Lips, Report Card on American Education: Ranking State K-12 Performance, Progress, and Reform, 16th Edition, (Washington, DC: American Legislative Exchange Council, September 2010).

The sixteenth edition of the annual report card from ALEC, a free-market dedicated coalition of state legislators, spends most of its ink explaining the need for school reform in America. Almost overshadowed by this manifesto is the analysis that makes the report so interesting. The report conducts two kinds: First, it assesses a state’s ability to educate its low-income students (irrespective of race) by analyzing NAEP scores of students receiving free and reduced-price lunch (FRL); then, it grades each state on its overall education reform “friendliness,” through metrics like openness to school choice and alternative certification. (Coincidentally, we conducted a similar city-based assessment of reform-mindedness this summer.) The report’s authors choose the performance of FRL recipients because of the group’s inherent invariability, which maximizes state comparibility by minimizing vast economic differences among student populations from state to state. Despite this, however, it was troubling that half of the top ten states in this category had low-income populations that were mostly white. On reform-friendliness, the methods were a bit more complex. ALEC graded states on multiple measures, such as the rigor of state standards, available types of school choice, and the existence of alternative certification routes. On both counts, Florida was the big winner, ranking third in student performance and first in reform-mindedness—and being the only state in the top ten in both categories; an entire chapter of the report is dedicated to lessons from the state. (Incidentally, Jacksonville, FL, came in our city-based top five.) While the authors dismiss the racial achievement gap as a cultural phenomenon that strong schools can overcome, to praise Vermont and Kansas for educating their low-income white students well is to ignore that minority low-income students in other states may face greater hurdles. Florida, however, does both.

Matthew G. Springer, Dale Ballou, Laura Hamilton, Vi-Nhuan Le, J.R. Lockwood, Daniel F. McCaffrey, Matthew Pepper, and Brian M. Stecher, "Teacher Pay for Performance: Experimental Evidence from the Project on Incentives in Teaching" (Nashville, TN: National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University, September 2010).

This much-anticipated study made waves even before it was released. That's because it presents some of the most methodologically sound evidence available to date on the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of monetary incentives for teachers to produce better student outcomes. But its robust design examined only one narrow question: Is offering teachers a reasonable chance to earn up to $15,000 extra dollars enough to significantly raise value-added student achievement? The Vanderbilt research team divided a group of about 300 volunteer middle school math teachers in the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) into a control group, who received only a small stipend for participating, and a treatment group, who both received the stipend and were eligible for $5,000, $10,000, or $15,000 bonuses for raising the valued-added scores of their math students. For three years (2006-07 through 2008-09), analysts compared each participating teacher's students' value-added gains to state wide average gains, and then averaged those "benchmarked" scores for the teacher's class. To earn a bonus, the gains had to be at least in the 80th percentile of gains for the district, based on distributions of gains from the two years prior to POINT (2004-06). The findings were disappointing: Treatment teachers' students made no more gains than those in the control group, though district-wide scores rose over the same period, ostensibly because of looming state sanctions for poor performance. The only exception was in fifth grade, where treatment teachers' pupil scores did improve, but the boost did not carry through to sixth grade. Participating teachers (in both groups) were also queried on their impressions of the experiment. Two findings are notable: Not only did treatment teachers indicate that they did not change their behavior over the course of the intervention, neither group "bought" the idea that monetary incentives were a legitimate reason to do so. After all, that would presume that MNPS teachers were simply not working hard enough before more cash was dangled before their noses. Not examined by this study, and probably a more important question, is whether merit pay plans recruit different kinds of teachers to the classroom in the first place. On that key issue, the jury is still out.

Education Week, E-Learning 2010: E-Educators Evolving (Education Week, September 2010).

This interactive report from Education Week, the second in a three-part series, offers a collection of articles that address key e-learning issues such as educator standards, training, preparedness, and compensation—and offers interesting background for those new to the e-learning circuit. One article focuses on the development of voluntary standards for e-educators (courtesy of groups like the International Association for K-12 Online Learning)—as states reveal significant disparities in the standards that govern online learning.  Another tackles teacher quality: Some experts question the value of saddling online educators with additional entry requirements, while others fight for increased professional development and teacher training. What passes for professional development in this realm is highly variable; even still most teachers get no ed school training in the online classroom. There is no consensus when it comes to how e-educators are trained or held accountable. This is a hot-topic report with a somewhat sobering message for those riding high on the possibilities of online learning: nothing is yet for sure and there’s still a long way to go.

No Child Left Behind’s “highly qualified teachers” provision deserves to die. That was so even before this week’s surprise ruling by the (oft-overturned) Ninth Circuit. The court invalidated a Bush-era regulation that allowed Teach For America participants (and other alternatively certified teachers) to be considered “highly qualified” while they worked toward full state certification. This is a huge deal—and creates a serious crisis in Ninth Circuit states—for it automatically puts schools that hire TFA teachers “out of compliance” with Title I, and would require them to send letters home within a month telling parents that their kids are being taught by unqualified teachers.

A little background might help. When Congress wrote NCLB, there was some debate about whether TFA types should be considered “highly qualified” under the law. Lawmakers essentially punted by writing confusing—you might say contradictory—language:

The term “highly qualified”—when used with respect to any public elementary school or secondary school teacher teaching in a State, means that—(i) the teacher has obtained full State certification as a teacher (including certification obtained through alternative routes to certification) or passed the State teacher licensing examination, and holds a license to teach in such State, except that when used with respect to any teacher teaching in a public charter school, the term means that the teacher meets the requirements set forth in the State’s public charter school law; and (ii) the teacher has not had certification or licensure requirements waived on an emergency, temporary, or provisional basis…

Read that passage again and ask yourself: Did Congress intend for alt-cert teachers to be considered “highly qualified,” or not? Detractors of alternative certification, including the folks who filed the case just decided by the Ninth Circuit, claim the language requires that teachers must have already obtained “full State certification,” though they can attain that “through alternative routes to certification.” Most alternative routes grant full certification after two years in the classroom and the passage of numerous ed school courses. Under this interpretation, alt-cert teachers couldn’t be deemed “highly qualified” during their first or second years on the job—in other words, during many TFA teachers’ entire tenure.

But that’s a preposterous interpretation of Congressional intent. For one, in the very same statute, Congress authorized the Transition to Teaching program which supports alternate routes to the classroom. And second, the very same Congress awarded earmark funding to Teach For America, year in and year out. This surely wouldn’t be the first time that the federal government was working at cross purposes, but it seems unlikely that Congress intended to make TFA essentially illegal.

So the Bush Administration (in which I served) published a common-sense regulation that basically declared that, if you were in a bona fide alt-cert program and working toward full certification, you could be considered “highly qualified.” And that was the regulation overturned the other day for, supposedly, contradicting the statute.

So now what? Supporters of TFA and alt cert writ-large could wait for this case to wend its way to the Supreme Court, and hope for the best. Or we could sit around and wait for Congress to reauthorize No Child Left Behind and fix the problem. But either of those approaches is apt to take years.

A better approach is to urge Congress to kill the “highly qualified teachers” provision—stat. Everyone knows it’s a meaningless designation. Nobody will defend its focus on paper credentials. The conversation has moved on to teacher “effectiveness” as measured by student learning and other meaningful indicators. Yet in the real world of real schools, HQT is still the law of the land, wreaking havoc every day. It continues to make teachers jump through unnecessary hoops. It continues to tie the hands of charter schools that have to demonstrate that their teachers have requisite “subject matter knowledge”—never mind the autonomy charters are supposed to receive. And now it’s causing material harm to Teach For America, one of the best things our education system has going.

When the education appropriations bill moves through Congress in December, some simple language could be attached. In essence: “HQT, RIP.”

Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College is a publishing phenomenon. Since its release earlier this year, it has hovered within or near the top 100 books on Amazon.com. What Lemov is selling—forty-nine nitty-gritty tips and practical tools culled from observing uber-effective teachers—is clearly in high demand. But why is it in such short supply?

Because a majority of America’s education school professors—the instructors responsible for preparing the lion’s share of our nation’s teachers—remain committed to romantic/progressivist ideals and shrug off the mission of transmitting Lemov-style tips and tools to aspiring teachers.

That’s one take-away from Fordham’s newest report, Cracks in the Ivory Tower? The Views of Education Professors Circa 2010. The study, authored by veteran analysts Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett, surveyed over 700 education professors across the land to determine how they view their own roles and what they think of myriad K-12 policy developments that have taken place over the last decade. It uncovers some troubling trends among the professoriate. For example:

• Only 24 percent believe it “absolutely essential” to produce “teachers who understand how to work with the state’s standards, tests and accountability systems”;
• Just 37 percent say it is “absolutely essential” to focus on developing “teachers who maintain discipline and order in the classroom”; and
• Fewer than two in five find it “absolutely essential” to “create teachers who are trained to address the challenges of high-needs students in urban districts.”

To be fair, many professors think these things are important—just not that important. What’s more important to them is forming “change agents”—new teachers who push back against school practices and resist modern reforms, reforms that have little to do with the romantic view of schooling that so many of Dewey’s descendents so ardently espouse. The professors see themselves as philosophers and evangelists, not as master craftsmen sharing tradecraft with apprentices and journeymen.

This is nothing new. Stanford University’s David Labaree, a respected historian of education, explains that, as far back as the early twentieth century, school reformers were pushing for efficiency and utility, while education professors wanted schools to help individual children blossom and develop a lifelong love of learning. Eventually the professors lost that argument and the K-12 system embraced the efficiency movement. But this outcome cast education professors as little more than vocational instructors, preparing their charges to enter a uniform teaching force and school system—one that had limited patience for the professors’ idealistic educational values.

And they didn’t much like it. As Labaree writes, theirs was now “a job, to be sure, but not much of a mission.” So the professors clung to the “individual child” ideology, no matter what the system was calling for, and no matter what children—and classroom instructors—actually needed to succeed. By assigning a higher purpose to their work—instilling in new teachers the estimable belief that every child’s path is unique—they sought to legitimize their own profession in the eyes of the public and, of course, themselves.

In 2010, the United States has grown only more practical and demanding when it comes to K-12 education. Today we find little margin for error—and less space for romanticism. That’s why real-world insights and practical tips such as Lemov’s are in such demand. That’s why “alternate routes” into classrooms are gaining popularity (despite a recent courtroom set-back). That’s also why criticism is mounting of traditional education schools and teacher-preparation programs. Americans now demand that new teachers hit the ground running—and continue running, dodging all obstacles in their path, so as to boost student achievement and help schools realize their learning objectives.

Most education professors simply aren’t there yet. But to be fair, this survey also brought modest good news—more than we found in a similar survey thirteen years ago. Today, we find a sizable minority of professors that is both critical of standard ed-school practice and also accepting of their role in preparing teachers for the real world of today’s schools. We also find “adjunct” faculty members (vs. the full-time tenured kind) to be more concerned about lesson planning and classroom management. Minority professors tend to be more focused on the challenges of high-needs students. And those with recent classroom experience of their own are more attuned to weeding out unqualified teaching candidates than those who have been out of school classrooms for twenty-plus years.

The professors are also unexpectedly reform-minded on a few issues. They favor tougher policies for awarding tenure to teachers, financial incentives for those who work in tough neighborhoods, a core curriculum that teaches the classics—even Teach For America. Most also assert that their institutions should be held accountable for the quality of the teachers they graduate and that teachers should be made to pass tests demonstrating proficiency in key subjects before they are hired. The study even identifies a faculty segment—labeled “Reformers”—that is strongly dissatisfied with the status quo and agitating for change across the board.

But there’s no widespread reform zeal, either. The ed-school professoriate is divided in its support of value-added measures to evaluate teacher effectiveness, for instance, and barely one-third want to see financial incentives for extraordinarily effective teachers.

Still and all, these campuses contain some potential allies for reformers—anti-pie-in-the-sky individuals in touch with what our next generation of teachers will need to succeed. In other words, there are cracks in the Ivory Tower—cracks that, with a little outside encouragement, might be widened.

This piece also appears today on Fordham’s blog, Flypaper. You can subscribe to Flypaper’s RSS feed here.

Facebook Founder to Donate $100 Million to Help Remake Newark's Public Schools, by Richard Perez-Pena, New York Times, September 22, 2010.

Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire founder of Facebook, recently offered up a $100 million grant to Newark Public Schools. Announcing the gift, Zuckerberg told Oprah (who, in her show’s waning days, has suddenly acquired a keen interest in education) that he singled out Newark Mayor Cory Booker as a strong change-agent who, he deemed, was worth the investment. The gift has created quite a stir around the Brick City: New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has happily bequeathed virtually all control of Newark schools—which has unsuccessfully lingered under state purview for the last fifteen years—to Booker, while Booker must raise matching dollars to get Zuckerberg’s dough. History says Booker is pretty good at bringing money to Newark; what remains to be seen is how well he’ll spend it. He’s got Zuckerberg’s vote of confidence, at least. Gadfly wonders, though, why all these smart folks think education miracles will follow the arrival of still more money in a school system that already spends $22,000 per pupil and gets not one iota of return on the dollar.

4,100 Students Prove 'Small is Better' Rule Wrong, by Sam Dillon, New York Times, September 27, 2010.

The “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” of big schools is that most are dropout factories, therefore all will be so. Enter Brockton High in Brockton, Massachusetts. Once known for a state exam pass-rate of about 25 percent and a drop-out rate of one in three, Brockton has seen stellar gains on test scores in recent years. That kind of transformation is every struggling school’s dream and the end goal of the turnaround initiatives funded by the rather plush federal School Improvement Grants. Yet Brockton’s secret potion for success omits all the regularly prescribed ingredients: breaking a big, unmanageable school into pieces, replacing the school leader and teachers, and infusing gobs of money. On the contrary, the recipe was simple: A small core group of teachers took one look at the “embarrassing” (in the words of one) 1999 test scores and decided it was time to go back to the basics. They incorporated reading, writing, and speaking into every class—even gym—and repurposed union-negotiated meeting times for strategic planning. Only one teacher was fired (though many were initially made uncomfortable by the new changes, the dynamic take-no-prisoners-but-be-nice principal won naysayers to her reform court)—and all the changes obeyed the union contract. What’s more, the school still has its 4,100 students.

Education Week, E-Learning 2010: E-Educators Evolving (Education Week, September 2010).

This interactive report from Education Week, the second in a three-part series, offers a collection of articles that address key e-learning issues such as educator standards, training, preparedness, and compensation—and offers interesting background for those new to the e-learning circuit. One article focuses on the development of voluntary standards for e-educators (courtesy of groups like the International Association for K-12 Online Learning)—as states reveal significant disparities in the standards that govern online learning.  Another tackles teacher quality: Some experts question the value of saddling online educators with additional entry requirements, while others fight for increased professional development and teacher training. What passes for professional development in this realm is highly variable; even still most teachers get no ed school training in the online classroom. There is no consensus when it comes to how e-educators are trained or held accountable. This is a hot-topic report with a somewhat sobering message for those riding high on the possibilities of online learning: nothing is yet for sure and there’s still a long way to go.

Matthew G. Springer, Dale Ballou, Laura Hamilton, Vi-Nhuan Le, J.R. Lockwood, Daniel F. McCaffrey, Matthew Pepper, and Brian M. Stecher, "Teacher Pay for Performance: Experimental Evidence from the Project on Incentives in Teaching" (Nashville, TN: National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University, September 2010).

This much-anticipated study made waves even before it was released. That's because it presents some of the most methodologically sound evidence available to date on the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of monetary incentives for teachers to produce better student outcomes. But its robust design examined only one narrow question: Is offering teachers a reasonable chance to earn up to $15,000 extra dollars enough to significantly raise value-added student achievement? The Vanderbilt research team divided a group of about 300 volunteer middle school math teachers in the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) into a control group, who received only a small stipend for participating, and a treatment group, who both received the stipend and were eligible for $5,000, $10,000, or $15,000 bonuses for raising the valued-added scores of their math students. For three years (2006-07 through 2008-09), analysts compared each participating teacher's students' value-added gains to state wide average gains, and then averaged those "benchmarked" scores for the teacher's class. To earn a bonus, the gains had to be at least in the 80th percentile of gains for the district, based on distributions of gains from the two years prior to POINT (2004-06). The findings were disappointing: Treatment teachers' students made no more gains than those in the control group, though district-wide scores rose over the same period, ostensibly because of looming state sanctions for poor performance. The only exception was in fifth grade, where treatment teachers' pupil scores did improve, but the boost did not carry through to sixth grade. Participating teachers (in both groups) were also queried on their impressions of the experiment. Two findings are notable: Not only did treatment teachers indicate that they did not change their behavior over the course of the intervention, neither group "bought" the idea that monetary incentives were a legitimate reason to do so. After all, that would presume that MNPS teachers were simply not working hard enough before more cash was dangled before their noses. Not examined by this study, and probably a more important question, is whether merit pay plans recruit different kinds of teachers to the classroom in the first place. On that key issue, the jury is still out.

Matthew Ladner, Andrew T. LeFevre, and Dan Lips, Report Card on American Education: Ranking State K-12 Performance, Progress, and Reform, 16th Edition, (Washington, DC: American Legislative Exchange Council, September 2010).

The sixteenth edition of the annual report card from ALEC, a free-market dedicated coalition of state legislators, spends most of its ink explaining the need for school reform in America. Almost overshadowed by this manifesto is the analysis that makes the report so interesting. The report conducts two kinds: First, it assesses a state’s ability to educate its low-income students (irrespective of race) by analyzing NAEP scores of students receiving free and reduced-price lunch (FRL); then, it grades each state on its overall education reform “friendliness,” through metrics like openness to school choice and alternative certification. (Coincidentally, we conducted a similar city-based assessment of reform-mindedness this summer.) The report’s authors choose the performance of FRL recipients because of the group’s inherent invariability, which maximizes state comparibility by minimizing vast economic differences among student populations from state to state. Despite this, however, it was troubling that half of the top ten states in this category had low-income populations that were mostly white. On reform-friendliness, the methods were a bit more complex. ALEC graded states on multiple measures, such as the rigor of state standards, available types of school choice, and the existence of alternative certification routes. On both counts, Florida was the big winner, ranking third in student performance and first in reform-mindedness—and being the only state in the top ten in both categories; an entire chapter of the report is dedicated to lessons from the state. (Incidentally, Jacksonville, FL, came in our city-based top five.) While the authors dismiss the racial achievement gap as a cultural phenomenon that strong schools can overcome, to praise Vermont and Kansas for educating their low-income white students well is to ignore that minority low-income students in other states may face greater hurdles. Florida, however, does both.