With Washington mired in a blizzard, could a debate about AYP heat things up? (Education Week)
Why do school administrators hate snow? Because no matter what they do, they can’t win. (DC Schools Insider)
So what if schools ran their own Super Bowl? (Flypaper)
Ever wonder why the DC area goes nuts over snow? Watch this weatherman. (Dailymotion)
Research has shown time and again that experience matters in good teaching. What it hasn’t shown is that every experience matters equally. In fact, a teacher’s first few years on the job are by far the most important, and it has been demonstrated repeatedly that the vast majority of teaching improvement comes in the first few years on the job.
Unfortunately, districts have yet to utilize this research in any way. Instead, they set arbitrary teacher salary schedules that are based purely on a teacher’s years of experience and education credentials. They mostly do not reflect actual teacher performance year-to-year, but they don’t even take into consideration the career paths of the typical teacher.
To show what this looks like, I’ve graphed teacher salaries in four DC-area suburban districts (Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties in Maryland and Fairfax and Prince William Counties in Virginia) with average teacher effectiveness scores in mathematics. The effectiveness scores are value-added measures that compute a teacher’s ability to maintain or increase student scores on standardized tests of achievement. They are graphed according to differences from the average teacher, and they come from a recent paper which found effectiveness scores in line with prior research.
The maroon bars represent salaries for fully certified teachers with bachelor’s degrees only, and the blue bars are average salaries for fully certified teachers with Master’s degrees only. As the chart shows, salaries in these four districts increases almost linearly, although they grow much faster after teachers have 14 or 17 years of experience than when they have only a few.
On the other hand, teacher effectiveness makes nearly all of its gains in a teacher’s first two years on the job. They are barely more effective at 25 years in as they were after two or three, and no more effective at 22 than they were at four.
Teacher salaries are 2007-8 base salaries for teachers with full credentials in Montgomery County, MD; Prince George's County, MD; Fairfax County, VA; and Prince William County, VA.
Remember that these are for the average teacher. We could go even further and talk about the effectiveness of individual teachers, but that’s fraught with quite a bit more controversy. If common sense and all statistical research shows a teacher learns 90 percent of what they’re ever going to learn in the first few years on the job, shouldn’t districts start paying them that way too? See Chart 6 here for how this might work on a district-wide basis.
Another important lesson from all this research is that tenure after a few years on the job really should mean something special. Since we know that teachers are not likely to improve later in their careers as quickly as they did in their first few years, we would want to invest a lot of resources into making sure we awarded tenure to teachers who really deserved it.
Right now we only value credentials; policies following from this body of research would value excellence in actual teaching performance.
As Kevin noted earlier, a few major publications are starting to glom onto the fact that health care’s slow progress has basically stalled the pending legislation to revamp the federal student loan programs. The latest entrant is the New York Times, which in a nice piece of symmetry, both ended and began this week with a late-to-the-party education story. (See Eduwonk’s reference to “Rip Van” Dillon” for the first piece on ESEA reauthorization here).
What’s always interesting to see in these stories is who the reporter turns to in order to present the issue. For example, here’s a list of the people quoted in the Times story:
Here’s the same lineup for the Washington Post’s story on the matter from last week:
Notice anyone missing? How about one of the million or so additional students that are expected to benefit from having more money available for Pell Grants? Or the even larger number of students who would benefit from the federal government’s first major investments in college completion efforts? I’ll let them off the hook for not talking to the toddlers that would benefit from the billions of dollars directed toward early childhood education, but you get the idea.
Instead, we get comments such as the one that Kevin mentioned from Yale, where a financial aid administrator complains about being strong-armed by the government or claims they personally get better deals from the lenders. I understand that the aid administrators are the ones who have to run these programs at the campus level, but it seems ridiculous that concerns about this program should be dictated by what is more convenient for the financial aid office. (Higher Ed Watch has a hilarious satire of this issue here.)
From what aid administrators say, you would think that they are doing the government a favor by taking in billions of dollars each year in what amounts to a grant program for the school since they don’t have to repay any loans.
But the fact of the matter is that every grant program involves a certain amount of give and take. For example, when a foundation gives a non-profit organization a grant, they require interim reports, somewhat regular phone calls, and deliverables to show that the money does not get wasted. The government requires far less than that. It makes institutions report some figures into a few data sets here and there and calculate a few graduation rates, but that’s it. There are no deliverables. They don’t have to show that they put the money to good use by giving students a good education. And now the aid office is going to complain that the government tells them how they have to receive the billions of dollars in aid they get every year—money that is absolutely essential for the continued operation of every school that does not have a sizeable endowment.
So what about the claim put forth by the Yale aid official that he preferred the bank-based program because lenders gave better prices and services? Turning to Yale for this perspective is quite misleading. It’s one of the top five schools in the country and it has a high price tag. The default risk of these students is incredibly low so lenders can afford to throw any number of perks at the school and then sit back and collect federal subsidies on the loans.
Instead, I’d be curious to see how Southern Connecticut State University feels about the prices it gets. I’d imagine that all the lenders beating a path to Yale’s door may not be taking the three mile detour to offer similarly great deals. Or what about a smaller rural community college that only has a few borrowers each year?
Turning the student loan discussion into a question of who gets the best deal at the elite colleges completely undermines the point of the program as something that is supposed to equally help prospective students meet their tuition bills. Rather than listening to Yale complain about potentially losing some benefits, I’d personally rather hear from the student with a Pell Grant at a non-selective school that really could use that additional couple of hundred dollars a year.
Think teachers will never stand for any link between student performance and teacher evaluations? Think again. (Public Agenda)
Is the ed reform debate ideological? Yglesias doesn’t think so. (Matt Yglesias)
What’s the profile of Hispanic Serving Institutions? (Inside Higher Ed)
Would cutting student loan subsidies save taxpayers billions? CNN consults Erin. (Political Ticker)
The New York Times reports (as did the Washington Post last week) that the Obama Administration’s student loan reform package is in jeopardy. This is unsurprising. The current federal student loan system involves the transfer of tens of billions of dollars from the public treasury to private corporations through a sweet deal of locked-in profit margins and guarantees that taxpayers will make good on loan defaults. Because the loan bill, having passed the House of Representatives last year, has been held up in the Senate for months pending the resolution of health care, that’s given private banks and loan companies plenty of time to take some of the tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer funds they’ve received in the past and use them to hire lobbyists and former Congressional staffers to advocate on behalf of receiving additional tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer funds in the future. Because the United States Senate is no longer a functioning democratic institution, they might get their way.
One of the key elements supporting student loan reform has been the tacit endorsement of colleges and universities. It’s not hard to see why–Obama wants to transfer $87 billion in bank subsidies to Pell grants, community colleges, early childhood education, and improved graduation rates. The higher education lobby hasn’t exactly been beating the drums on behalf of the legislation, but they haven’t opposed it, and that means a lot. Which makes this particularly disappointing:
Some financial-aid administrators at colleges around the country say they are worried that the political uncertainty over the loan proposal and the one-size-fits-all approach of the White House’s approach could hurt colleges and students.
“We’re caught in a political struggle,” Caesar Storlazzi, the chief financial aid officer at Yale, said in an interview. Like a wave of other colleges in recent months, Yale decided in November to switch from private-sector loans to the federal government’s direct-lending program.
But with passage of the White House plan now appearing “less inevitable,” Mr. Storlazzi wonders whether keeping the private lenders in business is better for students.
“It really felt like the administration was just shoving this down our throats,” he said. “It feels a bit like a federal takeover.” With competition among lenders, he said, “We get better prices and services.”
From the standpoint of pure self-interest, this makes sense. Yale doesn’t need federal money– it’s an immensely wealthy institution with a $16 billion endowment, the second-largest in the nation. Yale doesn’t care if more money goes to Pell grants–Yale students are disproportionately wealthy and less than 10 percent are eligible for the Pell program. Yale doesn’t need help with graduation–97% of students graduate. Yale isn’t a community college and its students and their children will get all the high-quality early childhood education they need. Of course Yale gets better prices on loans–less than 1 percent of its borrowers default.
There’s nothing in the student loan reform bill for Yale, because the bill was specifically designed to help the 99.9 percent of institutions and students who are less fortunate. Given that, I can see how a generalized sense of annoyance about federal lawmaking would lead one to publicly disparage legislation that will help hundreds of thousands of disadvantaged students afford college and earn degrees.
One of the big recommendations from “Expanding Choice in Elementary and Secondary Education,” the new Brookings Institution report, is to help establish national virtual schools:
To support the development of that sector of schooling, we recommend that Congress authorize the establishment of accrediting bodies for online K-12 education, incentivize states to participate in these accrediting efforts, and extend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act provisions for school choice for students in low performing Title I schools to virtual schools. Thus students in persistently low performing schools would be able to avail themselves of accredited virtual education at the district’s expense.
Not Gonna Happen.
Think supplemental education was controversial? There is no way that Congress is going to pass what amounts to a national voucher program, where money from Johnny’s local district goes directly to Kaplan Online. More importantly, Title I deals mainly with elementary and middle schools, where there almost certainly needs to be ongoing adult supervision. Thus, most full-time virtual schools at this age level require significant parental involvement–something unavailable for many of our most disadvantaged students during the working hours. Without strong student supports and local, on-the-ground partnerships and adults, it’s hard to see how this really works for but a few kids. And let’s not even get started on the many potential problems with a program modeled on higher education accreditation.
Giving students more options–especially those without access to challenging courses or effective teaching–is spot on. And, finding ways to provide the scale necessary to enable large investments in virtual schooling is critical.
Take a look at the breakdown of enrollments in state virtual schools. Wonder why Florida is such an outlier with the large number of students taking virtual courses? It’s all about the way funding flows.
from 2009 Keeping Pace with K-12 Online Learning, page 22
One of the largest constraints on the growth of virtual schooling is the artificial cap placed on funding at the various state-run virtual schools. The best way to attack this issue–right now–is to get all of the other states to adopt the performance-based funding model for the Florida Virtual School, where funds follow students based on successful course completions or learning outcomes (more on this model from SREB). Immediately, you’d allow these various state virtual schools to meet much higher levels of demand. It’s a similar concept to the one that Brookings proposes–just a much simpler, more immediate and likely execution.
And, two very simple ways to create a better national market: Adopt the common core standards and mandate open, sharable copyrights on all federally funded projects (states’ and districts’ unwillingness to share intellectual property is a real barrier).
There are of course, many, many more things to do. But fighting for a national virtual school accreditation model in Title I is not one of them.
[To be fair, the Brookings recommendations around national provision of AP and other specialized, high-school level courses are more feasible.]
Could the creators of the common standards be channeling Ado Annie: “With me, it’s all or nothin”? (Education Week)
Ready but not proficient? Joanne Jacobs sums up the controversy over the revisions of NCLB. (Joanne Jacobs)
As DC looks forward to another snowpocalypse, are schools really taking more snow days than in the past? Why? (Educated Reporter)
Who Dat? Meeting the Turnaround Challenge jumps into the policy debate between Kevin and Andy. (Meeting the Turnaround Challenge)
The intrepid EdWeek bloggers Alyson Klein and Stephen Sawchuk caught a passage in President Obama’s latest budget proposal that would require states to, “develop a definition of ‘effective teacher’ that is based in significant part on student learning, and to put in place a system that links the academic achievement and growth of students to their teachers and school leaders.” This would complete the gradual progression from requiring a student-teacher data link in any education database that receives federal funding (the 2007 America COMPETES Act), the the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund’s assurance around teacher evaluation metrics and results, and the Race to the Top Grant precluding any state with a teacher-student firewall and insistence that teacher evaluations include student growth as a “significant” component.
This should not be seen as an entirely new policy, but one that’s been developing for at least the last three years.
The research behind using growth scores (the academic gains between two years of standardized tests) as a teacher evaluation metric is young but improving rapidly. In December, Dan Goldhaber and Michael Hansen released a paper for the Center for Reinventing Public Education looked at what would happen if teacher tenure decisions were based entirely off value-added scores. That is, after teachers had a couple years experience and were up for lifetime tenure, could a district accurately cut off the bottom 25 percent of teachers and improve their workforce?
The answer is a qualified yes.
First, the qualifications. The authors focused their paper by looking at value-added measures for teachers who could be accurately linked to students with at least one year of prior math and reading test scores. That limited the pool to almost 20,000 4th and 5th grade teachers observed for up to 11 years for a total of 63,000 observations. *For part of the analysis, they limited the pool even further, to teachers with at least five years of experience in the district, in order to observe the impact of two years of value-added data three years later (the first year after they’ve earned tenure). To enforce tenure rules according to these value-added limitations would obviously only affect a small sub-set of teachers: it would not affect any teacher teaching a grade lower than 4th or higher than 8th and would also exclude any teacher without obvious responsibilities for reading and math results.
These are important qualifications, but, if you can get past them, there are some interesting results. For one, the authors have some nifty graphs showing the growth of teacher effectiveness. As in prior studies, teachers make dramatic gains in effectiveness their first few years, but make only very modest improvements the rest of their career.
Two, differences in teacher effectiveness are wide and persistent across time. This is important, and it means that teachers with 3 years of experience have the same variation as those with 25. You are just as likely to find a great teacher with 3 years of experience as you are a terrible one with 25 years on the job, and vice versa. Other than the first few years, experience does not matter one iota.
Three, and this is the most important one, a teacher’s prior year value-added score is a better predictor of this year’s student’s success than any other teacher factor. That includes experience, whether the teacher holds a Master’s degree, their licensure score, the college they went to, or whether they were fully licensed or not. The value-added model was better than any of these other measures that are commonly used in selection and salary decisions.
Four, rejecting tenure for teachers in the lowest quartile of teacher effectiveness scores after three years on the job would improve a district’s overall teacher quality. In other words, this would not be a random exercise, but one that had some meaningful impact of student lives.
The paper comes with a handful of caveats–the actual improvements could be relatively small statistically, that value-added measures still have questions before being ready for high-stakes personnel decisions, and that any change would affect teacher behavior in ways we cannot predict–but it concludes by reminding readers that, “the results presented here indicate teacher effect estimates are far superior to observable teacher variables as predictors of student achievement, suggesting that these estimates are a reasonable metric to use as a factor in making substantive personnel decisions.”
*Update for clarity
If you’ve ever wondered what kind of rigorous undergraduate education is required to snag a coveted position as blogger / columnist / magazine writer / think tank guy / occasional commenter on comic books and cable TV shows, take a look at my latest column in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I’m pretty sure this is the only education-related article you’ll read today that includes the phrases “nude model,” “Sportscenter,” and “beer.”
Earlier this week I complained about Education Week reporter Debra Viadero credulously touting the results a study allegedly showing great for-profit college results despite the fact that (A) the study was paid for by the for-profit colleges, and (B) she hadn’t actually read the study. Viadero responded today as follows:
Over at the Quick and the Ed, Kevin Carey offers a much more searing attack critique, questioning my use of statistics from a study by the Educational Policy Institute,which was formed to support career colleges. Hey, it’s a blog, Kevin! Had I been writing a story, I would’ve had the full report.
Ah. That’s helpful. I think the thing that threw me off was title of Viadero’s blog, which is Inside School Research: Your Guide to World of K-12 Education Research. Clearly, that needs some work. How about Inside Press Releases About School Research? Perhaps Inside Some Stuff That Other Blogs Said About School Research would work? Alternatively, they could go with Inside Things That Someone Once Told Me on the Phone About School Research. The possibilities are endless.
In general, print publications making the transition to the Web are going to have a tough time if in doing so they explicitly discard the bedrock values of thoroughness and analytic rigor that defined them in the first place.
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
In this Education Sector report, Policy Analyst Chad Aldeman calls for a new approach to high school accountability. He argues that the best way to measure whether students are prepared for college or a career is by looking at what actually happens when students arrive at their intended destination.
Teachers at Work: Improving Teacher Quality Through School Design
In this new Education Sector report, Senior Policy Analyst Elena Silva highlights promising models of school design and calls for a new approach to addressing the teacher quality challenge in public education.
01/28/10 | Education Sector is referenced and linked to in an article on AnnArbor.com.
01/28/10 | Andrew Rotherham is mentioned in a National Review Online column.
01/21/10 | Chad Aldeman's "College- and Career-Ready" is reviewed by College Summit's blog.
01/22/10 | Ben Miller's Q&E post on student debt is linked to on the California Watch blog.
Kevin Carey appeared on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" to talk about the education proposals put forth during Wednesday’s State of the Union speech, including endowments, student loans, college prices and No Child Left Behind. He also responded to telephone calls and electronic communications.
Andrew Rotherham is featured in CBS's "Where America Stands," a news special on the current state of the nation's schools.
01/26/10 | Andrew Rotherham is quoted in an Education Week news article on President Obama's proposed education spending.
01/25/10 | Chad Aldeman's "College- and Career-Ready" is summarized in the Alliance for Excellence in Education's Straight A's newsletter.