The Education Gadfly Weekly

Jean Johnson, Andrew Yarrow, Jonathan Rochkind, and Amber Ott
Public Agenda
October 2009

This attitudinal review divides teachers into three categories: idealist, disheartened, and contented. A “cluster analysis” method was applied to sort respondents into three categories based on their statistically similar results to survey questions. The idealists are young (22-32), working in underserved communities, and optimistic about the power of education to improve kids’ lot in life; they also believe that their work is notably improving their students’ achievement. The (typically more veteran) disheartened teachers serve a similar population but have a much less rosy outlook: They see themselves as in conflict with administrators over working conditions, with students and parents over behavior, and with policymakers over the current accountability regime. The third group, the contented, serve a much more affluent population in suburbs and high-performing urban schools, and generally report satisfaction with their working conditions. Imagine an archetypal Teach For America corps member, a jaded inner-city public school teacher, suburban veteran teacher, and you get the gist. Analysts found a few big differences between the three groups--for example, 53 percent of disheartened teachers cite low pay as a major drawback to teaching, but only 26 percent of contented teachers agree (maybe because they are making more money?). Perhaps the biggest shocker: A quarter of the disheartened teachers would be interested in teaching in a charter school run by teachers, more than double the rate for contented teachers and idealists. Charter starters: take note. You can read the report here.

Thomas Toch and Chad Aldeman
Education Sector
September 2009

Mandatory public choice--the practice of a school system requiring students to choose a school rather than be automatically assigned to one--has shown to foster innovation in public schools if joined with an effective placement system, according to this report from Education Sector. The report chronicles the evolution and success of New York’s and Boston’s systems of public school choice, both of which were initially stymied by logistical hurdles and ineffective methods of placing students in the schools they wanted. The districts consulted with experts who had developed successful models for placing medical students in residency programs, awarding law clerkships to law students, and pairing kidney donors with recipients. As a result of the improved school-placement practices, more students were able to get into their top picks, which in turn increased competition among schools. The report’s extensive explanation of the matching methodologies could be useful to districts seeking to create or improve their magnet and school-choice lottery processes and also how to create a successful portfolio of schools. (New York has a well-developed one.) Such mandatory choice programs have yet to show any significant impact on achievement, but they lay a solid foundation for increased competition and innovation among public schools and can provide a valuable complement to charter schools and voucher programs. Check out the full report here.

Susan Moore Johnson and John P. Papay
Economic Policy Institute
2009

This publication is really two reports in one: a new framework for understanding various existing pay-for-performance schemes and a proposal for a new system of performance-based pay. According to authors Johnson and Papay, there are three crucial differences between merit pay systems: how merit is assessed (by in-person evaluations, student test scores, or a combination of both), whether merit is judged against an objective standard or relative to other teachers, and whether merit is rewarded at the individual or school level. Then, in the second half, Johnson and Papay outline their own vision for teacher-pay reform: the “Tiered Pay-and-Career Structure.” Featuring four levels, this is intended to be a way for school districts to use “performance-based pay as part of a well conceived human capital strategy for developing teachers through all stages of their career” instead of “simply [appending] new components to [the] current compensation system.” The tiers work as follows: 1. probationary teachers, 2. teachers with tenure or those who have achieved permanent status, 3. master teachers and school-based leaders, and 4. school and district leaders. This structure, argue the authors, would be a way for teachers to earn more pay based on individual merit (through promotion rather than monetary bonuses), while simultaneously setting up a support system for teachers where the most experienced and best teachers aide their younger, less-experienced colleagues and rewarding merit pay bonuses on the school level. Most teachers would never rise above tier 2. While this system gives a nod to recognizing individual accomplishments, it ignores the varying levels of talent that could exist in that level. What about excellent teachers who are not interested in the extra administrative duties of tier 3? You can purchase a copy here.

In this excellent biographical article in City Journal, Sol Stern takes a closer look at the life and works of E. D. Hirsch, Jr. Father of the Core Knowledge movement (and foundation by the same name), Hirsch started as a scholar of English. He broke from the Yale New Critics, amongst and under whom he did his graduate work, when he realized that a reader’s background content knowledge was fundamentally tied to his or her understanding of a piece of literature. Translate that to education: A student who has played baseball is much more likely to score well on a reading comprehension passage on baseball. (This is the very reason that schools like Harlem Success Academy in New York take their inner-city students to a farm each year to expose them to unfamiliar rural life, which is often a topic featured on state reading tests.) In Hirsch’s latest book, Making of Americans, he argues that common knowledge is fundamental to this American-making process; immigrants and native-born children alike must have the common educational experience, in history above all, to be contributing members of society. Indeed, Hirsch believes common content knowledge is the number one tool of social mobility. The good news is that more and more folks are starting to agree, including, apparently, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who bemoaned the low enrollment in Hirsch’s Curry School classes in his recent Columbia Teachers College speech. The education establishment--and the school reform establishment--have ignored Hirsch for far too long. But it’s never too late to make up for lost time. 

“E. D. Hirsch’s Curriculum for Democracy,” Sol Stern, City Journal, Vol. 19, No. 4, Autumn 2009

Theodore R. (Ted) Sizer, who passed away last week after a long and valiant battle with cancer, was a towering figure in American education--and a wonderful guy. The youthful dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education--indeed, Ted had a youth’s vivacity, optimism, and looks for decades longer than anyone has a right to--succeeded Frank Keppel when the latter went to Washington as Commissioner of Education for presidents Kennedy and Johnson. He was a historian, an educator, an educator of educators, and an education leader with few peers.

He went on from Harvard to serve as headmaster of Phillips Academy (Andover) and later as founder and head of the Coalition of Essential Schools, professor at Brown University and I cannot remember what all else. (I’m writing this mid-ocean, far from all reference materials.) He authored scads of perceptive and influential books, perhaps the best known of which, Horace’s Compromise, may fairly be said to have launched the modern era of high-school reform. Along the way, of course, he served on umpteen commissions, boards and such.

I didn’t always agree with Ted. He viewed education through the eyes of a teacher more than a policymaker and he had boundless faith in the capacity--indeed the necessity--of educators to make and remake their own schools. But he also wisely understood that while state and federal policy and programs had their place, they often did harm as well as good, getting in the way of good teaching and learning more than they fostered it, tending to turn educators into automatons and worshiping overmuch in the temple of testing.

He wasn’t Pollyannaish about educators. He knew how hard it was to create and sustain a first-rate school yet saw no viable shortcut, no real substitute for educators themselves engaging in the hard labor of designing and, as need be, redesigning places that worked well for teachers and students alike. Not for him a sweeping Arne Duncan-esque pronouncement that states and districts must "turn around" 5,000 faltering schools. He just didn’t believe that such top-down commands could work. That’s probably why the Coalition of Essential Schools, respected as it was in American secondary education, never (to my knowledge) contained more than a few hundred schools. Though all shared some core principles, each was hand-crafted by its own faculty and leaders, more an artisanal product than the result of mass production. Though most were (and are) public schools--now including many charters--their intellectual and organizational heart beats arguably closer to Andover’s than to the assembly-line output of public policy and bureaucracy.

Some "essential" schools are a little loosey-goosey for my personal curricular taste but my chief anxiety about Ted’s approach to education reform isn’t that there’s anything wrong with the schools; it’s that this approach is not easily replicated or scaled. To which he, of course, would reply that no other approach will actually succeed, at least not when it comes to delivering bona fide education (which he never confused with embedding basic skills in scads of kids).

Yet one didn’t have to agree with Ted Sizer to appreciate and like him. Never was there a nicer, keener, more visionary, or gung-ho educator. With his wife and soul mate (and sometime co-author) Nancy Faust Sizer, they welcomed thousands of ed school students and others into their homes and their lives. I first arrived there in 1965, fresh from college, a 21-year-old MAT candidate brimming with dreams, certainties, and self-importance as well as inexperience. The War on Poverty was a year old; the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and the Higher Education Act were creaking through Congress. Vietnam was ablaze. And America was just entering that period we not-so-fondly recall as the "late sixties and early seventies." That was the era of my graduate education.

I wasn’t a very good high-school social-studies teacher but Ted created an atmosphere at the Harvard ed school, and recruited faculty to it, that made almost anything seem possible, including my own shift from retail to wholesale education. When several colleagues and I resolved to seek newly-available federal dollars to launch one of the country’s first "Upward Bound" programs to serve disadvantaged Cambridge teenagers, he was happy to see this into being under ed school auspices. (It didn’t do the kids any visible harm; for me, it was an early lesson--Irving Kristol might have said a "mugging by reality"--in the limits of ambitious government programs seeking to alter individual lives. In retrospect, one might say Ted Sizer understood this intuitively.)

Among the new faculty he brought to HGSE was professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, fresh from the Johnson administration (and the uproar over his prescient report on "the Negro family"). Pat didn’t yet have any doctoral advisees, and I needed a senior faculty member willing to sign his name to the unstructured research-and-policy doctoral program I yearned to enroll in.

Ted facilitated this matchmaking and in time served on my dissertation committee, nudging me to get the damn thing done even though I was working ridiculous hours as a junior member of the Nixon White House staff (on the Moynihan team there). He participated in an exceedingly well-lubricated lunch-and-after "thesis defense" that Pat organized one Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1970 when we all were in Cambridge. And a month or two later, clad in full regalia, he handed me my doctorate.

We saw less of each other in subsequent years--conferences, meetings, a few shared speaking platforms--but corresponded throughout, including trying to persuade one another of the merits of our differing approaches to education reform. (During this time, he and Nancy raised a large, successful, and loving family.) Neither of us changed the other’s mind but I gained a clearer understanding of how educator-led reforms could coexist with and reinforce the policy-driven kind--more comfortably, I would say, with choice policies than with standards-based reforms.

When I wrote a memoir two years ago, my publisher asked who might "blurb" it. Ted Sizer came immediately to mind. I emailed a request. Though he was already deep into the discomforts of chemo, he cheerily encouraged me to send along the page proofs. Of course he found therein an explanation of--as I saw it--the frailties as well as the virtues of the "essential schools" approach. At least a few paragraphs must have made him wince. Yet generous as he was to the very end, from his sickbed he sent via Nancy an apt and gracious jacket blurb.

This was one terrific guy and American education is much diminished by his absence.

Note: A previous version of this piece misidentified the outreach program at Harvard Graduate School of Education as "Outward Bound," a well-known outdoors program. The program was actually "Upward Bound," a federal college preparation program for low-income students and first-time college goers.

Forget sleeping in class. Try sleeping on the way to class. At night! On a Sunday! Last weekend, sheriff’s deputies in St. Charles, Illinois, discovered a 5 year-old boy at his elementary school way past his bedtime. Seems the little guy had sleepwalked to school, managing to escape the house without waking his parents. Upon discovery at 1:30 am, the police took him to the hospital where a school district official identified him and sent him home. What could have caused the wee fella to make the trek? Trying to impress his teachers? Text-anxiety? Determined to stake out the best seat in class? Hard to tell, but one thing is for sure: His parents can rest assured that their son definitely knows the way to school.

“Boy, 5, sleepwalked to his school at night,” UPI, October 21, 2009

Last week, you may have read about Rhode Island State Superintendent Deborah Gist’s move to abolish seniority bumping rights for teachers. But what you might not have seen was another move just as important: Raising cut scores for Rhode Island teacher candidates on the Praxis I exam. That state had one of the lowest cut scores in the land, clocking alongside that of Guam. So she asked her staff to figure out which state had the highest scores in the land—the answer: Virginia—and then she set Rhode Island’s score one point higher. The move is part of Gist’s larger plan to overhaul “the entire career span of a teacher,” from who is allowed to be trained as a teacher to veteran support and training—and every stage in between. This is no minor bureaucratic maneuver; raising the cut score from 170, where an estimated 30 percent of students fail the Praxis I, to 179, where 54 percent will, is sure to lead to an outcry among many a prospective teacher and their ed school profs. But what’s most impressive is Gist’s gutsiness. She didn’t seek approval from the legislature to make this momentous change; she is simply working within already established state law. Which means that in her three-month tenure at the head of Rhode Island schools, she’s accomplished a ton of things that her predecessors could have but didn’t do, all without changing or breaking the current rules. Other state supes: You can do this too.

“R.I. education chief seeks higher standards for prospective teachers,” by Jennifer D. Jordan, Providence Journal, October 11, 2009

After the pomp, circumstance, and hope we can believe in of 2008, you may have an election hangover. And if you don’t live in Virginia, New Jersey, New York City, or Boston, you may not have even realized that next Tuesday, November 3, is Election Day. But of four big races (and a few ballot initiatives) due next week, education is a common theme in all of them. New York City’s mayoral election is perhaps the most contentious, with incumbent Michael Bloomberg’s mayoral control of city schools dominating the conversation; his opponent, city comptroller William Thompson, sat on the school board from 1996-2001, the period immediately preceding Bloomberg’s control of schools. The election has been plainly deemed a referendum on Bloomberg’s work in education. In Boston’s mayoral election, meanwhile, charter schools have become the topic du jour. Then over in New Jersey, incumbent governor Democrat Jon Corzine has portrayed education as an area of particular achievement for his administration, including the retooling of state education funding formulae. Down in Virginia where another gubernatorial race rages, education has crossed party lines: Republican contender and current favorite in the polls Bob McDonnell’s education platform looks a lot like President Obama’s Race to the Top criteria, while Democrat Creigh Deeds has picked up on fewer of RTT’s stipulations. We may not be back down on earth from last year’s sojourn in the hope and dream clouds, but education hasn’t strayed too far from voters’ minds.

“Education Issues Bidding for Voters’ Attention,” by Erik W. Robelen, Education Week, October 26, 2009 (subscription required)

Jean Johnson, Andrew Yarrow, Jonathan Rochkind, and Amber Ott
Public Agenda
October 2009

This attitudinal review divides teachers into three categories: idealist, disheartened, and contented. A “cluster analysis” method was applied to sort respondents into three categories based on their statistically similar results to survey questions. The idealists are young (22-32), working in underserved communities, and optimistic about the power of education to improve kids’ lot in life; they also believe that their work is notably improving their students’ achievement. The (typically more veteran) disheartened teachers serve a similar population but have a much less rosy outlook: They see themselves as in conflict with administrators over working conditions, with students and parents over behavior, and with policymakers over the current accountability regime. The third group, the contented, serve a much more affluent population in suburbs and high-performing urban schools, and generally report satisfaction with their working conditions. Imagine an archetypal Teach For America corps member, a jaded inner-city public school teacher, suburban veteran teacher, and you get the gist. Analysts found a few big differences between the three groups--for example, 53 percent of disheartened teachers cite low pay as a major drawback to teaching, but only 26 percent of contented teachers agree (maybe because they are making more money?). Perhaps the biggest shocker: A quarter of the disheartened teachers would be interested in teaching in a charter school run by teachers, more than double the rate for contented teachers and idealists. Charter starters: take note. You can read the report here.

Susan Moore Johnson and John P. Papay
Economic Policy Institute
2009

This publication is really two reports in one: a new framework for understanding various existing pay-for-performance schemes and a proposal for a new system of performance-based pay. According to authors Johnson and Papay, there are three crucial differences between merit pay systems: how merit is assessed (by in-person evaluations, student test scores, or a combination of both), whether merit is judged against an objective standard or relative to other teachers, and whether merit is rewarded at the individual or school level. Then, in the second half, Johnson and Papay outline their own vision for teacher-pay reform: the “Tiered Pay-and-Career Structure.” Featuring four levels, this is intended to be a way for school districts to use “performance-based pay as part of a well conceived human capital strategy for developing teachers through all stages of their career” instead of “simply [appending] new components to [the] current compensation system.” The tiers work as follows: 1. probationary teachers, 2. teachers with tenure or those who have achieved permanent status, 3. master teachers and school-based leaders, and 4. school and district leaders. This structure, argue the authors, would be a way for teachers to earn more pay based on individual merit (through promotion rather than monetary bonuses), while simultaneously setting up a support system for teachers where the most experienced and best teachers aide their younger, less-experienced colleagues and rewarding merit pay bonuses on the school level. Most teachers would never rise above tier 2. While this system gives a nod to recognizing individual accomplishments, it ignores the varying levels of talent that could exist in that level. What about excellent teachers who are not interested in the extra administrative duties of tier 3? You can purchase a copy here.

Thomas Toch and Chad Aldeman
Education Sector
September 2009

Mandatory public choice--the practice of a school system requiring students to choose a school rather than be automatically assigned to one--has shown to foster innovation in public schools if joined with an effective placement system, according to this report from Education Sector. The report chronicles the evolution and success of New York’s and Boston’s systems of public school choice, both of which were initially stymied by logistical hurdles and ineffective methods of placing students in the schools they wanted. The districts consulted with experts who had developed successful models for placing medical students in residency programs, awarding law clerkships to law students, and pairing kidney donors with recipients. As a result of the improved school-placement practices, more students were able to get into their top picks, which in turn increased competition among schools. The report’s extensive explanation of the matching methodologies could be useful to districts seeking to create or improve their magnet and school-choice lottery processes and also how to create a successful portfolio of schools. (New York has a well-developed one.) Such mandatory choice programs have yet to show any significant impact on achievement, but they lay a solid foundation for increased competition and innovation among public schools and can provide a valuable complement to charter schools and voucher programs. Check out the full report here.