The Education Gadfly Weekly

The New Teacher Project
June 2009

This revelatory study, with as much detail, rigor, and thoroughness as one could possibly want, proves what we've long suspected: the formal process of teacher evaluation as it exists today is a sham. While similar results came out recently in a Los Angeles Times investigative story, this study replicated the finding in 4 states (Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, and Ohio) and 12 districts of varying sizes and types. The data, which come from new surveys and compilations of electronic and paper teacher evaluation records, plus 130 interviews with district leaders, unveil a system of perfunctory and meaningless back-patting. It's a system where, even in the lowest-performing districts, all the teachers receive the equivalent of "A"s from their principals; where 92 percent of rookie teachers and 99 percent of tenured teachers rate their own performance as 7 or higher out of 10; and where "evaluations tend to have no consequences, positive or negative." The indictment continues: only 10 percent of failing schools--none at all in Akron--issued even one unsatisfactory rating to a teacher in the last year. The good news is that teachers and administrators seem to understand that the system is broken; for example, Chicago administrators believe that 7.5 percent of tenured teachers should be dismissed for poor performance, though, alas, 0 percent are actually terminated. The authors briefly describe some of the legal and organizational hurdles that block useful evaluation, and suggest that the process be reformed in a way that treats evaluation more like a routine check-up and less like, say, a one-time polio test that everyone passes but nobody really worries about. Prepare to be distressed here.

C. Kirabo Jackson
Journal of Labor Economics
April 2009

We know that schools with lots of poor kids tend to have less effective teachers while schools with wealthier kids tend to have better ones. What we know less about is why. This study by Cornell economist Kirabo Jackson suggests a disturbing possible explanation. He examined teacher movement patterns in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools between 2002 and 2003, which was the year this 137,000-student district ended its 30-year-old busing policy. The result was a naturally-occurring and rare situation where the demographic makeup of schools very quickly converged to that of their surrounding neighborhoods. And it provided Jackson with a unique opportunity to observe teachers' reactions to changes in student demographics while other school and neighborhood characteristics (as well as teacher demand) stayed the same. The results are disquieting. Schools that had an influx of black students as a result of the policy change also saw a decrease in the number of high-quality teachers--both black and white--as measured by years of experience, value-added scores, and certification scores. For the average school that was 60 percent black (before the policy change), a 15 percent increase in black students (after the change) translated into a .3 standard-deviation decrease in teacher quality. In the end, this study refutes the idea that the relationship between teacher quality and student demographics is merely a product of residential segregation. Rather, teachers sort themselves according to student demographics, with some apparently preferring to teach minority students (perhaps because they think they are better at it) and others not. You can read it here (for a small fee).

Common Core
June 2009

This study asked a simple question: what can we learn from the content standards of our international neighbors? The U.S. appears to be the only economically-advanced nation whose education system's primary focus is a set of basic skills. By contrast, other countries concentrate on content, like Archimedes and Shakespeare, and trust that math and reading skills will be taught through exposure to this material. And their trust is not misplaced. A host of international assessments reveal that students in countries that emphasize a broad liberal-arts-style education over mastery of basic skills tend to learn those basic skills better than their skills-focused American counterparts. The bulk of this report consists of case studies of the top scoring nations on PISA. Particularly revealing are the excerpts from various tests and standards, including reading samples, images, and graphics. Their common theme is a focus on knowledge, like historical chronology, famous passages from literature, and important scientific discoveries. Amongst the profiles are informative chapters on curriculum narrowing (or, rather, the absence of it abroad), content specificity, and what "comprehensive" education means outside the U.S. Ultimately, explains Common Core President Lynne Munson, these countries could serve as models for state-level (or, for that matter, national) overhauls of academic standards. Read it here.

The original voucher pioneer, Milwaukee, is now pioneering voucher regulation. The Wisconsin legislature's latest budget proposal includes a host of new stipulations for schools participating in the choice program, including administering the state's assessment to voucher recipients (previously they could use one of several nationally-normed tests), employing only teachers with at least a bachelor's degree, and meeting the same amount of minimum instructional time as public schools. The final regulations were the result of intense negotiation, and, unsurprisingly, not all parties emerged satisfied. But long-time voucher advocate Howard Fuller termed the end product "a decent result" and we're inclined to agree, at least about the testing part. Twenty years into the voucher movement, we've learned the hard way that competition alone isn't a sufficient form of educational quality control. Vouchers are an important component of ensuring every child has access to a high quality education--but receiving public dollars means some public accountability, too. Wisconsin would have been wiser to adopt our "sliding scale" solution--the more dollars a school receives from vouchers, the more transparency and accountability it should face--and it's hard to justify regulating such "inputs" as teacher credentials and instructional hours. But voucher supporters need to acknowledge, as Fuller does, that private schools, too, must produce evidence that publicly-financed pupils are actually learning.

"Budget proposal includes new rules for voucher schools," by Alan J. Borsuk, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, June 1, 2009

"School Reforms on the Brink," editorial, Wall Street Journal, June 4, 2009

With all the positive press surrounding high-achieving charter schools, it's not surprising that they've turned into the education reformer's go-to point of comparison. And so, when Jay Mathews wrote earlier this week that districts could learn a thing or two from high-flying charters about performance-based pay for teachers, I was intrigued--especially because, as Mathews made clear, these schools generally don't pay their staff that way.

Instead, the reward for teaching in great charters is a great work environment--a culture of success, where strong performance is praised, and, more importantly, shoddy work holds consequences.

Mathews explains that successful charters are wary of performance pay because such a compensation system could pit teachers against one another. It would also refocus the spotlight away from student performance and back on the squabbles of adults.

But we have to be careful. Just because charter schools don't do merit pay doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't experiment with it in traditional public schools. Why? Because, when it comes to individual teachers, charter and district schools start from a completely different premise: in most charters, teachers can be fired, usually without much hassle, while in traditional, unionized schools, they cannot. Put another way, teachers are pitted against one another--for their very jobs.

This is an important distinction because it means that charter schools already have an incentive scheme that encourages good work: if you don't perform, you'll get fired. That's not to say that pay is equal across all charter school teachers. In Washington, D.C., for example, charter salaries are largely pegged to the district's pay structure, along with a stipend that accounts for the many extra hours working in a high-performing charter school requires (making the total take-home larger, but the hourly rate similar or even less.) The difference is that high-performing charter teachers can't get very far up the pay scale if they're ineffective because they'd be dismissed first. In other words, pay rewards performance indirectly since employees are at-will--your pay goes up if you can cut it. In merit pay schemes, pay rewards performance directly; when you cannot be terminated, it's hard to think of another gauge.

The currency of the charter rewards system is respect: knowing that your peers--other teachers--have their jobs because they deserve them, not because they made it through three years without molesting a child or passed an eighth-grade level exam that has little relationship to actual teaching quality. This can make a huge difference when it comes to workplace culture. And we've long understood that stellar co-workers can inspire and motivate us--and underperforming colleagues can drag us down.

Charter-school HR is an individualized system: individual teachers getting retained or dismissed on the basis of performance--just like merit pay schemes under discussion in places like Washington, D.C. Yet teachers in these high-flying charters are not pitted against one another. Instead, they exist in harmony, accepting the common goal of student achievement and reveling in their own individual contribution to its attainment. It's teamwork qua the sum of its parts. Even if some of their coworkers get a larger paycheck at the end of the month, there is a general understanding that those teachers work at that school in the first place because they deserve to do so.

There is no such understanding in district schools. Since a tenured teacher is practically impossible to fire, the negative incentive to work harder--i.e., the risk of losing your job--does not exist. Performance never enters the picture.

So what's left? Incentivizing in the other direction--positively--with individual merit pay.

Merit pay is, admittedly, an imperfect system, at least so far. Since there is no losing money, only gaining it, it tends to normalize the status quo; work that is simply average remains completely acceptable. And you'll surely find plenty of teachers who are content enough with life as it is--including their paychecks. But merit pay does do one thing: shake up the system. In other words, it opens the door on potential excellence and presents a way to be recognized, finally, for good work. Stepped salary schedules do not do this.

Critics squawk that merit pay is unfair and prohibitively tricky. Not only is quantifying teacher effectiveness difficult, but evaluation systems are at best flawed and at worst useless. The New Teacher Project recently found teacher evaluation systems to be laughable and, earlier this year, the National Council on Teacher Quality discovered that instructional effectiveness is rarely considered when making tenure decisions. But we're not completely in the Dark Ages any more. Significant strides have been made in identifying traits that predict classroom success and in developing "value-added" calculations of student learning. Merit pay does not have to be putting "a dollar figure on the backs of 9-year-olds performing on a test," as one teacher Mathews interviewed describes it.

In a perfect world, districts would adopt the charter method of incentivizing teachers and abolish tenure. But so long as that's politically infeasible, individualized merit pay is the main method we've got to recognize good work and shake up the mediocre-is-fine culture of too many schools.

This week's news that 46 states plus the District of Columbia have signed up to pursue common education standards is a big deal but it's also potentially a big nothing. If this effort leads to rigorous national standards and tests in reading and math, historians will view this milestone as historically significant. But nobody has yet committed to anything of the sort. It's not too hard to say "we're interested in participating in the development process"--which is about all that's happened so far. It's something else to convince state legislatures and boards of education to jettison home-grown standards for the national variety, much less to use a common test with common cut scores to denote proficiency. (Recall the states' promise to measure high-school graduation rates using a common metric--a bold statement that later evaporated when the going got tough.) And it's anyone's guess as to how the standards will turn out. Still, we're heartened that the politics of national standards have shifted enough that all but four states feel comfortable contemplating playing ball. Let the games begin.

"46 States, D.C. Plan to Draft Common Education Standards," by Maria Glod, The Washington Post, June 1, 2009

"4 states yet to agree to standards for academic rigor," by Ledyard King, USA Today, June 1, 2009

Turning around bad schools is harder than turning around Chrysler, GM, or AIG--but our fearless, tireless, irrepressible new federal administration seems bent on doing this, too. Just listen to Education Secretary Arne Duncan on the topic of closing and "reconstituting" failed schools.

To be sure, schools are smaller than giant corporations, but they're at least as burdened by employee contracts, long term obligations, community roots, political entanglements, all manner of vendors and suppliers, and "shareholders" in the form of children and parents who depend on them. And because they are public agencies rather than private firms, there is nothing quite like "Chapter 11" through which they can be stripped of their debts and obligations, reorganized, and given a fresh start.

Duncan is bent on changing this. He has no power to do so directly but insists that he will persuade state and local school systems to close thousands of dreadful schools, sometimes termed "dropout factories," starting with at least 250 in 2010 and rising to 1,000 a year. (The U.S. has about 88,000 public schools, of which some 6,000 have already been designated by the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) as long-term failures in urgent need of "reconstitution." Thousands more will soon join them.)

As academic standards, assessments and "accountability systems" have gained traction in American primary-secondary education in recent years, districts and states have become adept at identifying bad schools on the basis of their woeful results as documented with hard evidence. This is a vast improvement over the days when we judged schools by reputation, programmatic offerings, facilities, promises, or per-pupil spending. Much like corporations, schools today have "bottom lines"--educational gains and losses--by which their viability can be gauged.

Yet our education system has proven as inept at intervening in failed schools as it is skilled at spotting them. Districts responsible under federal law for "reconstituting" them nearly always opt for the least intrusive option--changing the curriculum or perhaps replacing the principal rather than shutting them down and starting afresh. As CEO of the Chicago system for nine years, Duncan was an exception: he closed (and reopened) more than a dozen of his city's most troubled schools. But even that rare achievement must be kept in perspective: Chicago has more than 600 schools of which the overwhelming majority have been found lacking under NCLB.

As Education Secretary, Duncan runs no schools and has no direct authority over closing or reconstituting even the worst of them. He can, however, manipulate three levers:

• Billions in discretionary spending under the federal "stimulus" package, far more than any of his predecessors had. With that cash, he can try, in effect, to bribe states and districts to get serious about school reconstitution--much as Geithner, Bernanke, Obama et al. are doing with automakers, banks, etc.

• The overdue re-authorization of NCLB, which could change the ground-rules and--if lawmakers are really gutsy--remove federal funding from slacker schools, districts, or states. (Of course, Duncan and Obama would need to persuade Congress, which heretofore has been loath to take money away from even the worst of public schools.)

• Sunlight and jawboning, in an effort to persuade state and local officials to take serious action--and embarrass those that falter. 

Yet reconstituting GM and Chrysler is apt to prove easier. State and local officials have had plenty of opportunity to close, reopen, and otherwise turn around their failing schools, and they have a lot more levers, starting with direct authority over budgets, personnel, etc. That they've done so little of it attests to five core problems:

First, most teachers enjoy lifetime tenure under state law and seniority under local employment contracts. If Ms. Witherspoon loses her job at the Jefferson School due to its reconstitution, the district must find her another one, perhaps at the Madison School, and if she doesn't like it there she has innumerable ways--and union help--to fuss. (In many cities, principals also have tenure.) Note that GM's auto workers once enjoyed a similar employment guarantee--via the UAW's company-financed "jobs bank"--but gave this up as a condition of the federal bail-out.

Second, parents and kids ordinarily love their schools--and their teachers--no matter what the test scores show, and will fight hard to preserve them pretty much unchanged. Just ask Michelle Rhee (or anyone who has ever tried to shut a school for whatever reason.)

Third, those kids do need to be educated somewhere. If a school is actually closed, even temporarily, they must be accommodated in another one, which brings to bear all manner of rules, court orders, transportation challenges, crowding issues, etc.

Fourth, turning around an individual school is a bit like curing athlete's foot on a single toe. If the surrounding system isn't also fixed--perverse incentives, dysfunctional culture, ill-chosen curriculum, bad personnel practices, etc.--the familiar fungus and itch will soon reappear on the healed digit.

Fifth, the agent-of-change is ordinarily the very same school system that let the school fail in the first place. Rarely does it possess the capacity to rectify its own mistakes.

It would be churlish not to wish Mr. Duncan well as he tries to roll this boulder to the mountaintop. But it's a very heavy lift.

A slightly different version of this article first appeared on National Review Online's blog, The Corner.

Politicians often get themselves into hot water for "flip-flopping" on an issue. Jefferson Township High School students learned this lesson the hard way--and literally. These Ohio high schoolers, days away from year's end, planned a daring defiance of authority: they would stand up to their school's no-flip flop rule by all wearing flip flops on the very same day! The school wouldn't possibly suspend all of the offenders, right? Wrong. "It was mass defiance," cried the outraged principal, Mattie White. Even worse, prank planning spread like wild fire via illicit text-messaging. (Quelle horreur!) Students ignored repeated warnings, she explained, and all of them deserved their two-day separation from school. (Students, on the other hand, were probably beachy-keen about their unexpected two day vacation.) What a lot of flap over a little flip (flop).

"Area students suspended after 'mass' flip-flop prank" by Amelia Robinson, Seen and Heard Blog of The Dayton Daily News, May 28, 2009

Rejoice! Off comes the ball and chain that is Abbott v. Burke. This notorious court case of the early 1980s sought to equalize education spending across New Jersey by shoveling loads of extra state dollars into 31 poor communities ("Abbott districts"). But demographics have shifted in the Garden State over the past quarter century, redistributing the poverty that Abbott once sought to remedy and making the Abbott designations largely obsolete. When Governor Jon Corzine tried to fix the situation in late 2007 by tying dollars to needy students instead of districts, his funding formula was taken to court. That formula has actually been in place since July 2008, but the justices were in no hurry to make up their minds. Thankfully, the wait is over. The New Jersey Supreme Court has finally declared Corzine's approach constitutional, calling it a "thoughtful, progressive attempt to assist at-risk children throughout the state of New Jersey, and not only those who happenstance reside in Abbott districts." Gadfly will shed no tears over the reversal of this long-antediluvian decision.

"N.J. Court Approves Shift in School Funding," Associated Press, May 28, 2009

"Court Backs New Jersey Aid Revision: Less Focus on Poor Schools," by Winnie Hu, New York Times, May 28, 2009

"Editorial: Helping more children," Philadelphia Inquirer, May 29, 2009

C. Kirabo Jackson
Journal of Labor Economics
April 2009

We know that schools with lots of poor kids tend to have less effective teachers while schools with wealthier kids tend to have better ones. What we know less about is why. This study by Cornell economist Kirabo Jackson suggests a disturbing possible explanation. He examined teacher movement patterns in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools between 2002 and 2003, which was the year this 137,000-student district ended its 30-year-old busing policy. The result was a naturally-occurring and rare situation where the demographic makeup of schools very quickly converged to that of their surrounding neighborhoods. And it provided Jackson with a unique opportunity to observe teachers' reactions to changes in student demographics while other school and neighborhood characteristics (as well as teacher demand) stayed the same. The results are disquieting. Schools that had an influx of black students as a result of the policy change also saw a decrease in the number of high-quality teachers--both black and white--as measured by years of experience, value-added scores, and certification scores. For the average school that was 60 percent black (before the policy change), a 15 percent increase in black students (after the change) translated into a .3 standard-deviation decrease in teacher quality. In the end, this study refutes the idea that the relationship between teacher quality and student demographics is merely a product of residential segregation. Rather, teachers sort themselves according to student demographics, with some apparently preferring to teach minority students (perhaps because they think they are better at it) and others not. You can read it here (for a small fee).

The New Teacher Project
June 2009

This revelatory study, with as much detail, rigor, and thoroughness as one could possibly want, proves what we've long suspected: the formal process of teacher evaluation as it exists today is a sham. While similar results came out recently in a Los Angeles Times investigative story, this study replicated the finding in 4 states (Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, and Ohio) and 12 districts of varying sizes and types. The data, which come from new surveys and compilations of electronic and paper teacher evaluation records, plus 130 interviews with district leaders, unveil a system of perfunctory and meaningless back-patting. It's a system where, even in the lowest-performing districts, all the teachers receive the equivalent of "A"s from their principals; where 92 percent of rookie teachers and 99 percent of tenured teachers rate their own performance as 7 or higher out of 10; and where "evaluations tend to have no consequences, positive or negative." The indictment continues: only 10 percent of failing schools--none at all in Akron--issued even one unsatisfactory rating to a teacher in the last year. The good news is that teachers and administrators seem to understand that the system is broken; for example, Chicago administrators believe that 7.5 percent of tenured teachers should be dismissed for poor performance, though, alas, 0 percent are actually terminated. The authors briefly describe some of the legal and organizational hurdles that block useful evaluation, and suggest that the process be reformed in a way that treats evaluation more like a routine check-up and less like, say, a one-time polio test that everyone passes but nobody really worries about. Prepare to be distressed here.

Common Core
June 2009

This study asked a simple question: what can we learn from the content standards of our international neighbors? The U.S. appears to be the only economically-advanced nation whose education system's primary focus is a set of basic skills. By contrast, other countries concentrate on content, like Archimedes and Shakespeare, and trust that math and reading skills will be taught through exposure to this material. And their trust is not misplaced. A host of international assessments reveal that students in countries that emphasize a broad liberal-arts-style education over mastery of basic skills tend to learn those basic skills better than their skills-focused American counterparts. The bulk of this report consists of case studies of the top scoring nations on PISA. Particularly revealing are the excerpts from various tests and standards, including reading samples, images, and graphics. Their common theme is a focus on knowledge, like historical chronology, famous passages from literature, and important scientific discoveries. Amongst the profiles are informative chapters on curriculum narrowing (or, rather, the absence of it abroad), content specificity, and what "comprehensive" education means outside the U.S. Ultimately, explains Common Core President Lynne Munson, these countries could serve as models for state-level (or, for that matter, national) overhauls of academic standards. Read it here.