The Education Gadfly Weekly

Erudite yet common-sensical, this latest from TNTP (formerly The New Teacher Project) explains in great detail why we’re losing stellars teachers from our urban cores—and how to remedy this problem. Per TNTP, we’re failing to keep the best-and-brightest classroom instructors (dubbed “Irreplaceables” and defined as districts’ top 20 percent by value-added metrics). Their departures create deep and difficult-to-fill human-capital holes. To quote the authors: “When an Irreplaceable leaves a low-performing school, it can take eleven hires to find one teacher of comparable quality.” For an average school, one in six hires will be of equal quality. The report analyzed data from four large urban districts and found that schools retain their best and worst teachers at similar rates. From year to year, low-performers (those in the bottom quintile) are just 4 percentage points more likely to leave teaching than those in the top quintile. Extrapolated, this means that each year, 10,000 Irreplaceables flee the nation’s fifty largest school districts, or leave teaching altogether. TNTP places the onus for this largely on school leaders (who have an equally aggressive departure rate from urban schools, mind you)—though district heads, union bosses, and state policymakers are also held to account (for creating or allowing policies that incentivize principals to retain the status quo). Overall, TNTP found that less than 30 percent of Irreplaceables leave their post for reasons beyond their school’s control, meaning that principals strongly influence the decisions of 70 percent. Or could. Two-thirds of high-performers reported that no one ever encouraged them to return for another year, an example of how little principals are targeting retention of these strong educators. TNTP offers a bold suite of reforms to correct this trend, tackling everything from principal quality to teacher pay to tenure. Supes and school leaders: Study up.

SOURCE: The New Teacher Project (TNTP), The Irreplaceables: Understanding the Real Retention Crisis in America’s Urban Schools (Brooklyn, NY: TNTP, July 2012).

Imagine that the U.S. women’s gymnastics team was awarded the gold medal during the opening ceremony of this year’s Olympics. The catch? They could only keep it if they performed up to snuff during the all-around competition. Would they be more or less likely to turn in a gold-medal performance? According to this study by Roland Fryer and colleagues, the answer is more likely. The study puts a new twist—and flip—on merit pay, investigating how the timing of monetary bonuses affects teacher performance. Instead of receiving bonuses after their students have demonstrated higher achievement, teachers in Fryer’s study were paid in advance and agreed to return the money at the end of the year if their students did not improve sufficiently. Fryer and colleagues implemented the initiative in 2010-11 in nine K-8 schools—all enrolling high percentages of low-income, minority students—in Chicago Heights, Illinois. Approximately 150 teachers—a full 93 percent of those in the schools—agreed to participate in the study. Teachers were randomly assigned to the control group or one of four treatment groups that differed according to whether teachers received bonuses up front or after demonstrating gains and whether bonuses was based on individual or team-based gains. Bonuses ranged up to $8,000. In short, Fryer & Co. found that students whose teachers received up-front bonuses showed statistically significant gains in math—roughly .2 to .3 standard deviations—a pattern that held whether teachers were compensated as a group or as individuals. No significant impact was detected among the group that received incentives in the traditional fashion, nor were findings robust in reading. Interestingly, effects were more pronounced for students in K-2 than in grades 3-8. There are a few noteworthy limitations to the study, particularly relative to scope and sample size; further, the outcome measure was a “low-stakes” diagnostic assessment, not the state test—it’s unclear if findings would look the same if the test was used for accountability purposes. Still Fryer et al. have added an interesting tumbling element to the merit-pay routine.

SOURCE: Roland G. Fryer, Jr., Steven D. Levitt, John List, and Sally Sadoff, Enhancing the Efficacy of Teacher Incentives through Loss Aversion: A Field Experiment (New York, NY: National Bureau of Economic Research, July 2012).

Better late than never. Jeremy Ayers and Isabel Owens of the Center for American Progress have now looked at the twenty-seven second-round waiver applications that states submitted to Secretary Duncan (as Ayers had done with the first round waivers in December 2011), seeking recurrent themes across three of the Department’s four priority areas: standards and assessments, accountability systems, and teaching and leadership. (“Duplication and burden” was not included as few states addressed it in their waiver applications.) Most importantly, they found that “the waiver process itself did not stimulate new innovations aside from accountability.” What’s more, even within this sphere, nine states opted to follow one of the Department’s prescribed options for accountability, and many others set similar goals, slightly tweaked—bringing into question the level of “innovation” that is actually occurring. (This is probably due to the feds’ tight leash on waivers at least as much to lack of imagination in the states.) CAP then uses its own policy priorities to rate the states’ applications and offer recommendations. Among them: The Department of Education should ask for more detail on aspects of state plans and should establish a clearinghouse to document and share tools, strategies, and lessons of implementation. There’s much helpful background here—and much detail about individual states’ waivers. But read with a discerning eye, remembering that CAP, during this election year, is not about to ding the Obama administration.

SOURCE: Jeremy Ayers and Isabel Owen, No Child Left Behind Waivers: Promising Ideas from Second Round Applications (Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress, July 2012).

“Research-based,” “brain-based,” “best practices,” “studies show”: Research is used to inform, defend, or rationalize sundry decisions in education policy and practice. But what if the research is no good? This immensely readable book from rock-star cognitive scientist Dan Willingham offers a guide to parsing and filtering sound education research—or research of any sort, for that matter. As examples, he explains the history, statistics, and psychology behind the “learning-styles” and “whole-language” theories. And then debunks both. He flags specific issues in methodology to look for, some more obvious than others, but all necessary for a keen appraisal of edu-research. Finally, he offers four steps to winnowing grain from chaff: First, identify the principal assertion or claim, extracting from it all emotion, framing, and peripheral cues (what Willingham dubs “strip it and flip it”). Second, “trace it.” Who makes the claim—and are they legitimate? Third, “analyze it.” Does the evidence back the claim? And finally ask, “Should I do it?” Does the research offer enough practical persuasion to adopt a new program, policy, or opinion? Playful analogies, humorous pop-culture references, and lucid tables dot the text and help the reader through the abstract. In sum, Willingham provides helpful guidance for those looking to brave the edu-research morass—but he also avers that regular consumers of education should not need to scrutinize scientific journals. Instead, he calls specifically on teacher unions to debunk reforms du jour such as twenty-first century skills and start providing scientifically reliable research analyses so others may focus on implementing valid best practices. (Research-oriented teachers are best suited to tackle this work; the union should be their organizing body, says Willingham.) In the end, Willingham humbly downplays the helpfulness of this book—yet there is no reason for such modesty.

SOURCE: Daniel T. Willingham, When Can you Trust the Experts?: How to Tell Good Science from Bad in Education (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2012).

Mike and Rick ponder public perceptions of education spending and whether it’s Rick—not teachers—who needs a dress code. Amber explains why penalty pay works.

Amber's Research Minute

Enhancing the Efficacy of Teacher Incentives through Loss Aversion: A Field Experiment by Roland G. Fryer, Jr., Steven D. Levitt, John List, and Sally Sadoff - Download the PDF

During this lunchtime lecture, New Jersey Commissioner of Education Chris Cerf will discuss his thoughts on how to improve our current education-governance structure, drawing from his experiences as deputy chancellor of New York City Department of Education, his current role at the New Jersey Department of Education, and his time working for the federal government.

** We had some technical difficulties during the Q&A which is why the video is out of focus. We apologize for any inconvenience.

In November 2010, Education Secretary Arne Duncan delivered a widely noted address about the tough economic times facing American K-12 education. “I am here,” he said, “to talk today about what has been called the New Normal. For the next several years, preschool, K–12, and postsecondary educators are likely to face the challenge of doing more with less.”

Twenty months later, it’s clear that the Secretary’s warning was right on point. Many states face bona fide budget crises and, as a recent report by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and ex-New York Lieutenant Governor Richard Ravitch warns, these strains will worsen in the coming years. Depressed housing values have meant skimpier property-tax revenues for schools; voters have balked at passing local levies; federal “stimulus” dollars have dried up; Medicaid costs are headed through the roof. Once limited to a handful of budget-conscious superintendents and state officials, discussions about how to curtail education costs are taking place in virtually every district and school across America.

Is America ready for this sour fiscal lemon? Is there any possibility of lemonade, i.e., making reforms in a time of budgetary stress that might not otherwise be possible? Secretary Duncan thought so:

My message is that this challenge can, and should, be embraced as an opportunity to make dramatic improvements. I believe enormous opportunities for improving the productivity of our education system lie ahead if we are smart, innovative, and courageous in rethinking the status quo.

Opportunities worth seizing are indeed within reach. (Although during today's game of "chicken" over "sequestration" of chunks of the federal budget itself, Secretary Duncan is signaling his dismay that cuts may indeed have to be made!) But which opportunities should be seized most firmly? And which will the public back? It little avails an education leader or elected official to suggest a well crafted (and, for some, doubtlessly painful) trade-off if voters balk, parents rebel, and the community grumbles. If the public won’t back elected leaders who make painful decisions, there’s every reason to fear that the current education-budget crunch will persist and deepen.

With the help of expert survey researchers at the FDR Group, we at Fordham tried to gauge the fiscal zeitgeist. Our findings appear in How Americans Would Slim Down Public Education, which presents results from a nationally representative survey of American adults, including parents of school-age children. We asked them to wrestle with many of the same budgetary trade-offs that face today’s school boards and superintendents.

We didn’t expect cheers to greet the prospect of education-budget cuts. But this national survey makes clear that the jeers can be minimized, because the U.S. public supports many (though not all) of the tough calls that district leaders will need to make. What we learned:

Americans show realism and common sense relative to smarter education spending.

The public is well aware that its schools are in financial straits. They recognize the futility of “rely[ing] on tax increases to close the deficit.” They think districts could get by with fewer administrators; teachers could forego raises in order keep their jobs; stronger instructors teaching larger groups of pupils trump small classes; layoffs (when unavoidable) should be determined by effectiveness, not longevity; responsible retirement savings begin with the individual; and the quality of special education, like everything else in education, should be gauged by outcomes, not inputs. That all makes sense to us, too.

At the same time, the public has a couple of priorities askew when it comes to education cost savings.

Sure, there are grounds for caution about digital learning. It’s new and, like many innovations, has sometimes over-promised and under-delivered. But online and blended learning, properly done, are among the most promising of the “opportunit[ies] for innovation and accelerating progress” that Secretary Duncan referenced. They can save money in the education budget, too, and yield more bang for the available bucks—just as the astute application of technology has done in nearly every other sector of our lives. Yet Americans remain deeply skeptical.

We also question the public’s judgment regarding the value of non-teaching staff, an employment category within K-12 education that has ballooned in recent years. Consider this: The number of teachers in U.S. schools grew by 43 percent from 1986 to 2009. (Student enrollments rose by just 24 percent over this time period.) But the “instructional support staff” working in our schools increased by a stupefying 150 percent! How much of this growth is truly necessary for school effectiveness? And is it more valuable than employing (and retaining) better teachers?

Taxpayers sometimes want to have their cake and eat it, too.

If forced to choose between pay cuts and layoffs, for example, 74 percent prefer cutting all teacher salaries by 5 percent versus laying off 5 percent of the instructional staff. At the same time, however, 67 percent favor “extending teachers’ workday by one hour and using the time to collaborate with other teachers and tutor students.” Sure, we can try to wring more productivity out of our historically inefficient system of public education. But maybe not by demanding that all teachers do more while earning less. Wouldn’t laying off 5 percent—preferably the least effective 5 percent—preserve morale and inspire confidence in the remaining teachers, who’d continue to see their hard work rewarded?

Mostly, though, Americans are pretty sensible about how to slim down public education. The big challenge is turning those sound views into prudent yet forceful actions. Public sentiment alone doesn’t shed the budgetary pounds. There’s lot of hard work ahead, many calories to be burned, much strength and endurance to be mustered. Dynamic, visionary, yet astute leadership is also going to be needed—the budgetary equivalent of personal trainers and daily exercise regimens. Such leadership must make the case for efficiency and adherence to its new diet-and-fitness plan. If not, public education will lumber under the burden of its own weight—and fail to make the gains in speed, agility, and stamina that it so clearly needs to do its vital job under today’s fiscal conditions and educational demands. As candidates court voters for state and local (and national) elections this fall, they should draw courage from the knowledge that the public will have their backs if they face these issues head on.

Note: Question wording in charts may be edited for space. Complete text and data are available in the appendix to How Americans Would Slim Down Public Education.

Aggressive marketing campaigns have led to an uptick in Catholic-school enrollment in some cities, a trend Gadfly hopes accelerates; many urban parochial schools have plenty to brag about and their merits stack up well against many of the district (and charter) schools they compete with for students.

A Wall Street Journal essay took teacher unions to task over the weekend for effectively protecting sexual predators through the byzantine procedures required to fire educators guilty of abusing students. Reformers need to be careful not to wield this argument recklessly—but the unions must recognize that the issue at hand is not worker rights: It’s doing the right thing for the students that teachers serve.

At last weekend's AFT convention, Joe Biden declared that teachers are under "full-blown attack" by Republicans. By attack, Mr. Vice President, you mean advocating for compensation that rewards teachers for high performance? Creating school models that empower educators and cut down on bureaucracy that keeps education dollars from reaching classrooms? If so, then here's hoping the GOP goes after principals next.

Giving high-performing blended-learning schools like Rocketship high-profile coverage, as the Washington Post did on Sunday, is more than deserved: With luck, it will help the public overcome its wariness about this promising model.

Florida Education Commissioner Gerard Robinson announced his resignation on Tuesday. We wish this estimable gentleman the very best in his next endeavor. As for Florida, it needs a steady hand at the reform tiller on multiple fronts, someone able to work with a strong board, excellent advocacy organizations, crotchety interest groups, headstrong legislators, and a somewhat-flaky governor. The more we think about it,  Florida could do a lot worse than to woo back either of Robinson’s two immediate predecessors, Eric J. Smith or John L. Winn, both of whom presided ably over some of the most important and effective ed reforms in the land.

Fordham’s own Checker Finn and co-author Jessica Hockett dive into the world of selective public high schools in an Education Next article that weighs the ups and downs of this model for educating America’s highest-flying students. The article previews a major book that Princeton University Press is publishing in a few weeks. (Want to know more? Read on…)

During this lunchtime lecture, New Jersey Commissioner of Education Chris Cerf will discuss his thoughts on how to improve our current education-governance structure, drawing from his experiences as deputy chancellor of New York City Department of Education, his current role at the New Jersey Department of Education, and his time working for the federal government.

** We had some technical difficulties during the Q&A which is why the video is out of focus. We apologize for any inconvenience.

During this lunchtime lecture, New Jersey Commissioner of Education Chris Cerf will discuss his thoughts on how to improve our current education-governance structure, drawing from his experiences as deputy chancellor of New York City Department of Education, his current role at the New Jersey Department of Education, and his time working for the federal government.

** We had some technical difficulties during the Q&A which is why the video is out of focus. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Erudite yet common-sensical, this latest from TNTP (formerly The New Teacher Project) explains in great detail why we’re losing stellars teachers from our urban cores—and how to remedy this problem. Per TNTP, we’re failing to keep the best-and-brightest classroom instructors (dubbed “Irreplaceables” and defined as districts’ top 20 percent by value-added metrics). Their departures create deep and difficult-to-fill human-capital holes. To quote the authors: “When an Irreplaceable leaves a low-performing school, it can take eleven hires to find one teacher of comparable quality.” For an average school, one in six hires will be of equal quality. The report analyzed data from four large urban districts and found that schools retain their best and worst teachers at similar rates. From year to year, low-performers (those in the bottom quintile) are just 4 percentage points more likely to leave teaching than those in the top quintile. Extrapolated, this means that each year, 10,000 Irreplaceables flee the nation’s fifty largest school districts, or leave teaching altogether. TNTP places the onus for this largely on school leaders (who have an equally aggressive departure rate from urban schools, mind you)—though district heads, union bosses, and state policymakers are also held to account (for creating or allowing policies that incentivize principals to retain the status quo). Overall, TNTP found that less than 30 percent of Irreplaceables leave their post for reasons beyond their school’s control, meaning that principals strongly influence the decisions of 70 percent. Or could. Two-thirds of high-performers reported that no one ever encouraged them to return for another year, an example of how little principals are targeting retention of these strong educators. TNTP offers a bold suite of reforms to correct this trend, tackling everything from principal quality to teacher pay to tenure. Supes and school leaders: Study up.

SOURCE: The New Teacher Project (TNTP), The Irreplaceables: Understanding the Real Retention Crisis in America’s Urban Schools (Brooklyn, NY: TNTP, July 2012).

Imagine that the U.S. women’s gymnastics team was awarded the gold medal during the opening ceremony of this year’s Olympics. The catch? They could only keep it if they performed up to snuff during the all-around competition. Would they be more or less likely to turn in a gold-medal performance? According to this study by Roland Fryer and colleagues, the answer is more likely. The study puts a new twist—and flip—on merit pay, investigating how the timing of monetary bonuses affects teacher performance. Instead of receiving bonuses after their students have demonstrated higher achievement, teachers in Fryer’s study were paid in advance and agreed to return the money at the end of the year if their students did not improve sufficiently. Fryer and colleagues implemented the initiative in 2010-11 in nine K-8 schools—all enrolling high percentages of low-income, minority students—in Chicago Heights, Illinois. Approximately 150 teachers—a full 93 percent of those in the schools—agreed to participate in the study. Teachers were randomly assigned to the control group or one of four treatment groups that differed according to whether teachers received bonuses up front or after demonstrating gains and whether bonuses was based on individual or team-based gains. Bonuses ranged up to $8,000. In short, Fryer & Co. found that students whose teachers received up-front bonuses showed statistically significant gains in math—roughly .2 to .3 standard deviations—a pattern that held whether teachers were compensated as a group or as individuals. No significant impact was detected among the group that received incentives in the traditional fashion, nor were findings robust in reading. Interestingly, effects were more pronounced for students in K-2 than in grades 3-8. There are a few noteworthy limitations to the study, particularly relative to scope and sample size; further, the outcome measure was a “low-stakes” diagnostic assessment, not the state test—it’s unclear if findings would look the same if the test was used for accountability purposes. Still Fryer et al. have added an interesting tumbling element to the merit-pay routine.

SOURCE: Roland G. Fryer, Jr., Steven D. Levitt, John List, and Sally Sadoff, Enhancing the Efficacy of Teacher Incentives through Loss Aversion: A Field Experiment (New York, NY: National Bureau of Economic Research, July 2012).

Better late than never. Jeremy Ayers and Isabel Owens of the Center for American Progress have now looked at the twenty-seven second-round waiver applications that states submitted to Secretary Duncan (as Ayers had done with the first round waivers in December 2011), seeking recurrent themes across three of the Department’s four priority areas: standards and assessments, accountability systems, and teaching and leadership. (“Duplication and burden” was not included as few states addressed it in their waiver applications.) Most importantly, they found that “the waiver process itself did not stimulate new innovations aside from accountability.” What’s more, even within this sphere, nine states opted to follow one of the Department’s prescribed options for accountability, and many others set similar goals, slightly tweaked—bringing into question the level of “innovation” that is actually occurring. (This is probably due to the feds’ tight leash on waivers at least as much to lack of imagination in the states.) CAP then uses its own policy priorities to rate the states’ applications and offer recommendations. Among them: The Department of Education should ask for more detail on aspects of state plans and should establish a clearinghouse to document and share tools, strategies, and lessons of implementation. There’s much helpful background here—and much detail about individual states’ waivers. But read with a discerning eye, remembering that CAP, during this election year, is not about to ding the Obama administration.

SOURCE: Jeremy Ayers and Isabel Owen, No Child Left Behind Waivers: Promising Ideas from Second Round Applications (Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress, July 2012).

“Research-based,” “brain-based,” “best practices,” “studies show”: Research is used to inform, defend, or rationalize sundry decisions in education policy and practice. But what if the research is no good? This immensely readable book from rock-star cognitive scientist Dan Willingham offers a guide to parsing and filtering sound education research—or research of any sort, for that matter. As examples, he explains the history, statistics, and psychology behind the “learning-styles” and “whole-language” theories. And then debunks both. He flags specific issues in methodology to look for, some more obvious than others, but all necessary for a keen appraisal of edu-research. Finally, he offers four steps to winnowing grain from chaff: First, identify the principal assertion or claim, extracting from it all emotion, framing, and peripheral cues (what Willingham dubs “strip it and flip it”). Second, “trace it.” Who makes the claim—and are they legitimate? Third, “analyze it.” Does the evidence back the claim? And finally ask, “Should I do it?” Does the research offer enough practical persuasion to adopt a new program, policy, or opinion? Playful analogies, humorous pop-culture references, and lucid tables dot the text and help the reader through the abstract. In sum, Willingham provides helpful guidance for those looking to brave the edu-research morass—but he also avers that regular consumers of education should not need to scrutinize scientific journals. Instead, he calls specifically on teacher unions to debunk reforms du jour such as twenty-first century skills and start providing scientifically reliable research analyses so others may focus on implementing valid best practices. (Research-oriented teachers are best suited to tackle this work; the union should be their organizing body, says Willingham.) In the end, Willingham humbly downplays the helpfulness of this book—yet there is no reason for such modesty.

SOURCE: Daniel T. Willingham, When Can you Trust the Experts?: How to Tell Good Science from Bad in Education (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2012).