One of the interesting aspects of the $320,000 kindergarten teacher study is that the study wasn’t originally designed to estimate the value of unusually effective kindergarten teachers. It was designed to study the effects of class size reduction. That was the policy intervention people were interested in back in the 1980s when the well-known Tennessee STAR experiment was created. There’s no way its designers could have known that a series of econometric studies finding huge differences in effectiveness among teachers with similar credentials would subsequently emerge, profoundly changing the way people think about the profession and making class size reduction passe.
Which makes me think that school districts should start randomly assigning some of their students to teachers and gathering lots of information about them as a matter of course, on the theory that we very likely can’t predict what the most salient public policy issues will be at the future point when long-term impacts can be estimated. The few randomized control trials that exist continue to be enormously influential–I recently heard Nobel prize-winning economist James Heckman give a fascinating presentation on his recent analysis of results from the Perry Preschool project, which involved 128 students (64 treatment, 64 control) from Ypsilanti who were randomly assigned to preschool 48 years ago. What if future Heckmans had a thousand times as many data sets from which to choose? Given that teacher assignment often unfairly reflects parental pressure, periodic random assignment could be a net increase in fairness for students.
Click Image To Enlarge
5/11/2012 | U.S. News & World Report highlights ideas from "Moving On Up: How Tuition Tax Breaks Increasingly Favor the Upper-Middle Class." 
5/11/2012 | In Diverse, Steve Burd comments on the Obama administration's plans to address student debt. 
5/11/2012 | Kevin Carey talks to Salon about the government's role in rising student debt.
{ 3 comments }
Uh, Kevin, aren’t you aware that there may be human subjects considerations involved in randomly assigning students to classrooms? Like, uh, that it is generally considered to unethical to enroll people in experiments without obtaining their informed consent — and that it may be a wee bit difficult to get many parents to agree to have their children experimented upon for the sake of some unknown future good?
“…making class size reduction passe.” Huh? Am I missing something here?
From the NYT article linked to… “Class size — which was the impetus of Project Star — evidently played some role. Classes with 13 to 17 students did better than classes with 22 to 25.” This statement is in line with previous research on Project Star showing that class size does matter.
Whether or not a school succumbs to parent pressure in teacher placement most likely corresponds to whether or not it is a Title 1 school. Where I teach very few parents request teachers, and even fewer of those requests are honored. I don’t know many teachers who work in schools where parent-requests are the norm.
For the most part kindergarten class placements are random, since the students are new to the school. In later grades placements may be made based on behavior, a student’s specific needs, or academic level, but in kindergarten, at least in most Title 1 schools, placements are almost completely random.
Comments on this entry are closed.