March 11, 2010
A health-care mandate for education
Over the next week I'll be writing a few entries about health care. Today, it's the benefit of an individual mandate for college completion. The individual mandate is the package deal that goes with universal coverage, to get healthy people into the insured pool, and it's also important to help college students finish. Every year, USF and every public college and university loses students because they get sick or have a financial crisis because they or a family member get sick. Even if imperfectly enforced, an individual mandate would give colleges and universities the political ability to require proof of insurance upon enrollment, and that would safeguard both the individual investment of the student and her/his family and the public investment as she or he starts college.
Yes, there are alternatives, but they're all bad: Many colleges offer a very high-premium plan for students because the pool they can compose out of their students (or a fraction of their students) is tiny. Together with the option to stay on their parents' plans until 26, an individual mandate would give college students more choice by letting them enter the exchange markets instead of having one horrid option for health insurance in college. An individual mandate would make sure that our public investment in higher education is not wasted by a spurious event that no one can control.
(Obviously, someone in the White House reads my blog because they're emulating thought of the same idea as they echo my uninsured-death-every-24 21-minutes entry in their final push, highlighting key numbers on the issue: 625 Americans who lose health insurance every hour, 8 health special-interest lobbyists for every member of Congress, 8 Americans denied coverage every minute either by loss of insurance or other means, and $1115 paid every month on average for a family premium.)
Kristof and the public purpose of feel-good years
Charlie Barone is right: Nicholas Kristof's column yesterday comparing TFA and the Peace Corps shows the practical limits of TFA (as well as Kristof's ignorance about VISTA, but that's a different story). There's something important about consistently reminding reporters and other naive folks that TFA is not scalable. Regardless of what you think of it, there is a vast difference between the needs for a professional long-term teaching corps and matching up a few thousand new college graduates with positions that would be filled at best with long-term substitutes. There's nothing wrong with short-term backfilling (heck, that's what ARRA and other stimulus bills are for), but that's not a main solution for much.
Barone's point is not really about Kristof's central argument, which is more about how young Americans need to experience more of the world. Kristof is right about that, though maybe they should also see more of their own country? Nor is it about the side benefit of TFA participation in terms of giving a broader group of young adults experience in the public sector.
I think the last is the lasting impact of TFA. I look more favorably on TFA than a lot of other education researchers, not because I think there's significant evidence of great results but because a backfilling role in urban systems is acceptable and because social movements need well-off and well-positioned allies, people who had formative experiences that led them to empathize with others. In Inventing the Feeble Mind, for example, James Trent documents how WW2 conscientious objectors' experiences in state institutions helped lay the groundwork for a postwar change in attitudes towards cognitive disabilities. That's not a pre-law internship, as some accuse TFA of becoming; regardless of naivete, two or three years represents a serious commitment for someone who's 22. I don't know where TFA alums are going to be, but few of them are like Michelle Rhee either in temperament or future careers. Somewhere in 10 years, a TFA alum far outside public education is going to make a difference in a different sphere of life because of those two or three years.
March 9, 2010
Florida v. Georgia -- in budget crises, not football
Today's revenue-estimating conference in Tallahassee is probably going to confirm prior state revenue estimates, which are slightly better for 2010-11 than 2009-10, but that's like saying two broken legs are better than two broken legs and a broken floating rib. The state revenues are still far below 2006, and there are three sources of pressure on the state budget: increased demand for Medicaid, the federal maintenance-of-effort requirement for education (even with the waiver for absolute maintenance), and declining property-tax collections that support K-12 school districts.
Last year we kept reminding ourselves that we weren't in California. And this year, Georgia's picture is worse. Plus a few other states I could mention. But that's cold comfort: Schadenfreude doesn't pay the bills.
Updated (5:45 pm): Yes, today's Florida state revenue estimates are almost identical to the last round.
March 8, 2010
Sour-grapes agreement
Michael Olneck and Peter Sacks turn petty in letters to the editor about Diane Ravitch that the New York Times printed today. Wow. I agree with Ravitch on a number of things and disagree with her on a number of things, some of which is in our area of expertise (history of education) and some of which falls outside the history of education. But I'm not sure why Sacks in particular is turning on the venom spigot. Well, actually, I do have some hypotheses about general hostility to her I've occasionally seen (as opposed to disagreement): she caricatured the field of history of education in a sloppy late-70s publication sponsored by the National Academy of Education, and along with Patricia Graham she was a woman to get high-status national recognition in the 1970s for her work in education policy at the national level, which heretofore had been a male bastion. (Graham was director of NIE from 1977 to 1979.) The first is a seriously flawed work, but that's several decades in the past, and in any case, a particular work should stand or fall on its own merits. I've never seen the second item discussed or even acknowledged.
There's a related issue here, which is Ravitch's position outside traditional faculty. As far as I'm aware, she's never had a tenure-track or tenured faculty position, and she's one of the few historians who can say that they published their dissertation commercially before receiving the Ph.D. (The Great School Wars was published in 1974; Ravitch received her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1975). For the most part, her books are far more widely read than those of us who have full-time faculty positions, and I think she and Graham are the only historians of education to have held political appointments in the federal government. That's an interesting combination of insider and outsider positions.
When Meier and Ravitch started their joint blog/conversation three years ago, I briefly referred to this history in writing, "Regardless of various professional views of her scholarship, Ravitch is a recognized voice on education policy. There are plenty of people I correspond with who have fewer claims to expertise, so I can either have a snit-fit about that or deal, and at this point, having a snit-fit is darned close to sexism and uber-testosterone in education policy studies." I'm sorry Olneck and Sacks, and especially Sacks, have made a different choice.
For the record, Sacks is factually wrong when he states, "Dr. Ravitch fashioned herself into the Ayn Rand of educational policy and rose to fame as a result of a free-market ideology that came into fashion in George W. Bush's administration." Ravitch's appointment was during the first Bush administration, and whatever you might think of Ravitch's historical arguments in different books, she's a much better writer than Rand.
March 7, 2010
Historians' automaticity, part 1
Concerns with science and math education are nothing new, and although the rhetoric today focuses on saving the planet and the economy, the argument for urgent intensification of STEM education is remarkably similar in structure to the Cold War era debates in the 1940s through the early 1960s: our country is in crisis, we need science and technology to solve the crisis, and so we must reform education. A 1959 forum about science and math education at Woods Hole was summarized by Jerome Bruner in The Process of Education (1960), which essentially was an argument about education in the disciplines. (Bruner later was instrumental in creating Man: A Course of Study [MACOS], and fellow Woods Hole conference participant Jerrold Zacharias was a key mover in MIT's Physical Science Study Committee, whose materials were used by my high school physics teacher.)
For a number of reasons, MACOS flopped as a curriculum project, but the central question raised at the 1959 Woods Hole conference remains: what's necessary for students to be successful at learning disciplinary thinking? Several of my colleagues at USF (Will Tyson, Kathy Borman, and others) have been involved in NSF-funded work studying recruitment to and success in undergraduate STEM education, including preparatory math and science work in high school. In lower grades, the National Math Advisory Panel made some suggestions about curriculum in primary and intermediate elementary grades that would be prerequisite for success in algebra, including work with fractions. (Speaking of which, check out this very cool Java Spirograph simulation. Yes, it's connected to fractions... or rather the nature of reciprocal relationships between frequency and wavelength.)
And somewhere along here, along with debates about the purposes of various proposed curricula, we generally get debates about which is more important, procedural fluidity or conceptual understanding. My answer: yes. They are. You need both "content" and "process" (and we'll get to the problem with those terms shortly), and I am generally sympathetic to arguments that getting to the point of automaticity with core skills is a part of getting ahead in conceptual understanding and also needs to be matched by teaching of concepts. (See my entry a few years ago on how to explain the more recent and reasonable NCTM curriculum framework materials.)
But there is something about the term automaticity that itches inside my head, because it sort of gets the idea right but is not entirely persuasive... and the places where it is not persuasive are troubling in a subtle but very important way. Let me explain why I can fluidly pull out material from my memory that looks remarkably like the standard definition of automaticity and yet really isn't like that at all.
First, a digression: with apologies to Douglas Adams, the process of doing history is almost but not quite entirely unlike what Sam Wineburg describes in his research. Wineburg's writing is appealing to historians because it focuses on precisely the discipline-based processes that Bruner discussed 50 years ago in his book, and Wineburg's message is flattering: "academic historians, you have interesting ways of thinking, and here is what I see as a cognitive researcher and why high school history teachers need to pay much closer attention to what you do." And to be honest, there is some part of his work that has all sorts of interesting detail on the level of nuance and sophistication with which people try to commit history (such as the research on how people from different fields read primary sources about Abraham Lincoln and slavery). But Wineburg is enormously popular because his intended audience has a confirmation bias that leads them (us) to agree with someone who comes along and tells us we're special and intellectual. Wineburg weaves a story of historical thinking's exceptionalism... and there's the rub. As an historian, I'm supposed to be wary of anyone talking about American exceptionalism, and here comes this cognitive psychologist trying to seduce me with glorious tales of my discipline's exceptionalism, how difficult it is to be an historian, and so forth.
Pardon me, but I'll take the interesting cognitive questions without the side dish of (probably unintentional) pandering. A good bit of Wineburg's efforts have been to parse out how people read primary sources, and they generally focus on the level of ambiguity people read into primary sources: ambiguity about intent, background, effect, and so forth. And that's all fine and good except for two problems: Wineburg's work in this vein has generally been with adults, and they generally ignore the process participants use to put the primary source in context. The second is the part that troubles me most as a teacher, because the place where students in my undergrad history of education class first fall down is typically in putting a primary source in a broader context. It's not the most difficult task I put before students: usually the most difficult task in the semester is asking students to provide historical perspectives on a contemporary issue. But the difficulty of putting material in a broader context is a fundamental barrier to success in my class.
That sounds remarkably like students who are not yet at the level of history automaticity, whatever that might mean, and one would be tempted to refer to Checker Finn and Diane Ravitch's argument from the late 1980s, that American teenagers don't know enough history. But focusing on factual recall is begging the question: what does it mean to have sufficiently fluid mastery of history to put a primary document in context? Something about factual recall is helpful, but is that enough, and is that what successful students do?
It might be helpful to explain the type of task that is not hard for students: confronting people whose glib brutality stands out of the page. That characterizes the very first primary source I use in my undergrad history class (printed in Jim Fraser's education history primary-source collection), instructions from the London Virginia Council to the colony's governor in 1636. It reads in part,
And if you find it convenient, we think it reasonable you first remove... [Native American children] from their ... priests by a surprise of them all and detain their prisoners... [and] we pronounce it not cruelty nor breach of charity to deal more sharply with [the priests] and to proceed even to dash with these murderers of souls and sacrificers of gods' images to the devil...
With 17th century texts, the first challenge is simply to understand what the source says, and that's a bit of skill in language, but the students usually figure out this passage soon enough, and their eyes open a bit wider: the official supervisors of the colony sitting in England were telling the colonial governor to kidnap Native American children and beat (or kill) the elders. That type of detail sticks with students, because it engages their emotions and sense of what a society is supposed to be doing (as well as what colonists did). It's not that any student is exactly surprised that English colonists in Virginia were patronizing and occasionally brutal, but there is something that takes them aback in the casual way which which colonists and English elite discussed their goals.
I wish that all of history was that engaging, but that's just not true, and there is a good bit of background context that students need to pull out to put any primary source in context, and when you get to material whose explicit text is boring but is still important, students cannot rely on the immediately-engaging story to "get it." Instead, most primary sources require a student to identify at least one salient context that is not immediately apparent, and they need to be able to identify a relevant context (or more than one) without a huge amount of effort. If there is an "automaticity" to a professional historian's thinking, it is that: where does this primary source or other detail fit in a large scheme?
That larger scheme can start with "issues of the day," whatever the time and place. To be successful, you need to know what was happening at about the time of the primary source/event. You start with the year, go back and forth a few years, and think about possible connections. So when you look at the last of Horace Mann's annual reports on the state of education in Massachusetts (in 1848) and read the following passage, what pops out as contemporary and possibly relevant?
Now surely nothing but universal education can counterwork this tendency to the domination of capital and the servility of labor. If one class possesses all the wealth and the education, while the residue of society is ignorant and poor, it matters not by what name the relation between them may be called: the latter, in fact and in truth, will be the servile dependents and subjects of the former. But, if education be equally diffused, it will draw property after it by the strongest of all attractions; for such a thing never did happen, and never can happen, as that an intelligent and practical body of men should be permanently poor. Property and labor in different classes are essentially antagonistic; but property and labor in the same class are essentially fraternal.
That's from the middle of the 19th century in the U.S. So when I ask a class about the relevant context, some students look at servility and suggest slavery as an issue, point out that Mann was writing for an audience in the North, or ask whether Mann was anti-slavery. (No one in my classes has mentioned the compromise of 1850, but that would fit with this tentative reach for context.) Few of them would have heard of Eric Foner's book on free-labor ideology, but I can probe a bit: slavery's part of the picture, at least in rhetoric, but there's something else there. What were some of the concepts used in the North to discuss slavery? I wish that probe worked more frequently than it does, so I usually point out the "different classes" phrase and ask what else was happening in the U.S. in the 19th century. At least one student usually mentions industrialization. So what's Mann arguing, I follow up? More faces light up at that point.
Part of the problem here is that Mann's argument is too familiar, a little too close to a human-capital argument for students to realize how new this was. (Maris Vinovkis credits Mann with that early human-capital argument.) Part of it is also that students don't have a visceral sense of the simmering conflicts in Northern cities, even after hearing about the religious conflicts in Boston in 1836 or Philadelphia in 1844 (the latter so-called "Bible riot"). Because all of that was also related to social class, industrialization, and immigration, I can almost feel Mann's sense of urgency here in promoting mass education ("common schools") as a cure-all for social conflict. But most students usually can't. The prose is too prosaic and the context insufficiently emotional to engage students in the same way that happens in response to the "kidnap the kids and eliminate the elders" instructions from the 17th century.
There's an additional layer to this context, because 1848 is a signal year in European history: revolutions galore and the publication of the Communist Manifesto. To a literate, well-connected American, Europe was dissolving in chaos in 1847 and 1848. What could prevent the U.S. from doing the same? There is no evidence I am aware of that Mann was explicitly referring to European events, but it would have been in the air in the same way that natural disasters are "in the air" around the globe today after the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. Even if he was not consciously constructing the passage above to respond to European events, it would have resonated more for someone concerned about social stability in 1848.
There is nothing special about what I do in class: I take a simple question of context to push students about the importance of something Horace Mann wrote. And there is nothing particularly hard about asking what else was happening at the time. But while it's an easy task for me, this task flummoxes a lot of students. That task of pulling relevant context out of one's memory is the closest thing I can think of for the historian's automaticity, and looking for contemporary events and issues is the most obvious (but not the only) way to cut the issue. One might want to call this type of context affinity in time. I can think of other affinities which I might explore in other entries, but the key thing here is that this task is extraordinarily difficult for students.
Why this is difficult is an interesting, substantive question beyond the usual "fact-process" dualism. You need a mastery of chronology to pull context out of your head, but to build that mastery you need a way to put the details into your head in a way that's not "one damned thing after another"--i.e., a mental scheme. And while I wish I could look inside my head to see what my internal schemes are, I suspect any attempt at reflection is going to fall far short. I suppose one metaphor might be a "thick" timeline of issues and events and trends inside my head, so that when someone says, "1848," I can think of a bunch of things (as described above). Or if someone tells you that the Little Rock crisis was in fall of 1957, you just might think of Sputnik and ask whether there might be a Cold War context to Eisenhower's decision to nationalize the Arkansas National Guard and send in the 101st Airborne.
In addition, you need to be able to filter out nonsalient issues. What else was going on in 1957? Let's see: the Ford Thunderbird that year was a particularly popular "muscle" car. And the Dodgers were planning to move away from Brooklyn. The Communist party won elections in the Indian state of Kerala. ABC started national broadcast distribution of American Bandstand. On the Road was published. You can find more details at the 1957 Wikipedia page, but going to an almanac-style "here's what happened" listing is an incredibly inefficient way to put something in context. But to be honest, I wish I had the problem of students who found too many potential contexts where I had to suggest filtering. Usually the problem is a lack of candidate hypotheses about context.
March 4, 2010
PolitiFact Erratum
The St. Pete Times's PolitiFact comes down today with the same ruling that I would on Governor Charlie Crist's statement that the high school graduation rate in the cohort just graduated last year is the "highest it's ever been." They rate the claim as Mostly True, and I agree.
And their reporting of my remarks when called by the reporter on the story is similarly Mostly True. (For the record, that's the way I'd rate most good reporting.) The ruling says in part, "Dorn says the state should not count students who received a diploma even after failing the FCAT three times." It is true that I pointed out that the number of students who receive an academic diploma using the SAT/ACT exemption path has ballooned in the last five years and corresponds very neatly to the rise in high school graduation over that time. However, I never said that the state should not count those graduates, and if I remember correctly reporter Lee Logan never asked me that directly in the phone interview.
On Tuesday evening, Logan e-mailed me, and after I replied with my cell phone, I pulled up the spreadsheet I'd downloaded from the FLDOE site in the fall. The state reported three different measures: the official Florida graduation rate it's used for a decade, the measure used for NCLB purposes, and a measure defined by the National Governors Association in 2005. The last addresses the concerns I and others raised 4-5 years ago about the exclusion of the dropout-to-GED path from the cohort base and the inclusion of GEDs with regular diplomas.
The SAT/ACT exemption is different. On the one hand, the idea of an SAT/ACT exemption flies in the face of the point of a graduation exam, since college admissions exams do not test what a student has learned from the high school curriculum. On the other hand, it's a political and practical safety valve since it gives students more opportunities to qualify for an academic diploma. I wish that the state had chosen other options because of the SAT/ACT-curriculum disconnect, but when faced with education policy problems legislators tend to reach for tests, some test, any test.
Trying to look at the NGA rate with/without the exemption category (WFT) is also trickier than with the GED data, since there could be a number of reasons why the use of that exemption has ballooned. Maybe there are now 9,000 high school students each year who are directed towards the SAT/ACT who really would not have graduated without the exemption, and if so the rise in the NGA represents students who would have been on the margin of receiving a standard diploma without that option. But maybe the rise is a consequence of more Florida districts paying for students to take the SAT, where students would have taken the FCAT but didn't because they had qualified through the SAT. From a student perspective, if you've failed to pass the diploma threshold in prior FCAT tries and suddenly you have an SAT score that qualifies, why take the FCAT again in your senior year? Or why try hard at it when you do take it?
Then there's the more important question: where should we be with high school graduation? If you agree that we should include the students who qualified with an SAT or ACT score rather than a curriculum-based test, about three quarters of Florida ninth graders are graduating within four years. Using the NGA rate, of the African American students entering ninth grade in the fall of 2005, about 65% of them had graduated with a standard academic diploma by the summer of 2009. Even if you are skeptical about the inherent value of a credential, high school diplomas do serve as credentials for the job market and colleges, and someone without that credential faces significant institutional barriers to doing well as an adult.
Update: The PolitiFact page has changed to reflect what I said more accurately. Thanks!
February 28, 2010
Larry Cuban has a blog
I have a bunch of reading to catch up on, more than I thought I did a few minutes ago: Larry Cuban has a blog! (Hat tip.)
February 26, 2010
More TFA in Miami-Dade: where's the money?
The Miami Herald is reporting today that Teach for America is going to send 350 recruits to the Miami-Dade school system, supported by a $6 million grant from the James L. Knight Foundation (hat tip). Thanks to the federal stimulus, the Miami school system avoided laying off hundreds of teachers this year, but it's not as if there are large numbers of paid positions that are going unfilled. So the TFA positions are going to supplement, thanks to the Knight Foundation? It might sound good, but do the math: about $17,000 in donations per TFA recruit. This just doesn't add up.
February 24, 2010
Title II proposal: TNTP, meet Florida's "Ippy-Dippy"
The New Teacher Project has a new advocacy brief out proposing changes in ESEA's Title II, which is supposed to focus on personnel development. Some of the observations and proposals make sense (let's stop paying money for 90-minute drive-by "professional development"). Some are essentially using Title II as a vehicle for pushing other agendas (teacher evaluation and differential pay), though only some of it fits easily within Title II (here, training administrators and peers to evaluate teachers makes sense in Title II).
And some ideas are proposed as brand-new but have been tried before, including the suggestion that professional development be tied explicitly to the needs of students that teachers have at the moment. That seems to me to be remarkably like the Florida mandate for an "Individual Professional Development Plan," or IPDP. I've heard the complaints of too many teachers about the IPDP, which is usually pronounced Ippy-Dippy: it's another few hours of paperwork to complete each year with no real individualization of professional development. In other words, in Florida it results too often in paper compliance only.
But I'm only an historian listening to teachers in one state. If you live outside Florida, does your state mandate anything like our "Ippy-Dippy" form? What happens outside the paperwork?
February 22, 2010
The cliff, layoffs, and another stimulus/state rescue
Andy Smarick's analysis is correct: Arne Duncan and Barack Obama are talking this week about pending teacher layoffs to lay the groundwork for more stimulus/state-budget-rescue discussions. I suspect I have one analytical and one policy disagreement with Smarck, though. First, it's not a "second stimulus," because we're moving into a period where there will be a lot of smaller spending packages, so this is going to be the fourth or maybe fifth stimulus proposal in this Congress. And this is going to be harder than an extension of unemployment benefits or anything else that costs under $25 billion, because states and local governments are still in horrid fiscal shape. I suspect Smarick would oppose another large federal rescue of state budgets, but I think it's absolutely necessary or we face another 1937. Teachers and other civil servants don't spend as much of their income immediately as those receiving unemployment benefits, but it's still a better emergency economic policy to keep most public employees at work than any tax cut except the publicly-invisible withholding reductions implemented last year. And as happened last year, there may be considerable inconsistency in the behavior of state-government politicians, many of whom may publicly be horrified about any additional federal spending but need it in reality. (The public conflation of TARP and ARRA doesn't help here.)
For anyone still arguing for budget cuts as public-policy colonic, all I can say is that I hope that you can still argue that point in a year or two without risking pitchforks from the public, if only because you didn't win the argument.
February 21, 2010
A closer look at HB 1009 (proposed expansion of Florida corporate tax-credit vouchers)
On Wednesday, I discussed my first reaction to news of Florida House Bill 1009, which I thought had some eye-popping proposals, and I posted Jon East's response. I've had a chance to look at the text of the bill, and there are some details hidden in there that are interesting.
- The reporting of test scores for schools with 30 voucher students isn't for 30 vouchers students in any year but for those with at least 30 students who continue from year to year. That dramatically shrinks the number of schools that would have scores reported, and they would only be reported for continuing students, in contrast with public schools that report status test scores (which are part of the Florida system of labeling schools) as well as Florida's jerry-built "learning gains" measure.
- The financial reporting requirements in the bill is only for schools taking vouchers worth a total of $250,000 per year. Let's assume that at some point FEFP funding per weighted student is $8000, and the 80% voucher is $6400. That would be about 39 students as the threshhold for the financial requirements. At the current voucher level the threshhold is 64 students. I suspect the financial reporting requirement would affect a tiny fraction of the schools accepting vouchers.
One other thought: if this bill passes, then the other large voucher program (for students with disabilities) will remain without any accountability for student outcomes. That's a huge question mark in terms not only of constitutionality but also state compliance with federal special education law. How are state assurances on providing a free appropriate public education affected when state general revenues flow through vouchers, either directly (as in the case of the disability-related voucher program) or indirectly (through the corporate tax-credit voucher program)?
Jon East responds on corporate tax-credit voucher expansion (HB 1009)
Jon East, a former reporter for the St. Petersburg Times and now Research and Communications Director at the corporate tax-credit voucher non-profit Step Up for Students, was unable to put the following long response in comments to my discussion of HB 1009, and when he e-mailed them to me, I agreed to post them here:
As always, my friend, you offer a provocative commentary and I appreciate your recognition that this bill adds two new mechanisms of accountability even if they don't go far enough for you. Please allow me to probe two different claims you made here, though, because I don't think they present the clearest picture.
First, the assertion that the bill "expands the dollar amount per voucher from the state beyond what the state gives local school districts" feels a little like it was intended to obfuscate. Any general assessment of cost should probably begin with the fact that this option is now and would continue to be the lowest-cost education option in Florida -- lower than traditional public schools, charter schools, McKay scholarships, even virtual instruction programs. That aside, the amount the state "gives local school districts" is controlled by a 1973 law that essentially puts all the money for the base funding formula, called the Florida Education Finance Program, into one pot. As we know, the state has been putting less money into the formula while increasing the amount of "required local effort" for property taxpayers. But the larger point is that the FEFP is intended to make funding more equitable, with the breakdown between state and local portions varying county by county according to the size of their property tax base. To then turn around and compare the state portion as though it is some isolated variable in school funding seems contrived. The bill would place the scholarship at a 20 percent discount on this FEFP formula, and the FEFP is only part of the overall revenue picture for schools. By way of comparison, the per-student FEFP in 2007-08 was $7,143. The total revenues per student, including state, local, federal and capital, that same year (this is the most recent one DOE has published) was $11,017. So back to your point: The bill would indeed increase the scholarship amount up to 80 percent of FEFP. But if it took effect all in one year instead of four and it took effect today, the scholarship would translate to $5,490 -- which is almost precisely half the total per-student spending in public schools.
Second, your concerns about the "elimination of the cap" take a little liberty with the wording of the bill and a little more license with the current marketplace. The bill absolutely eases the process of increasing the cap, but one fact worth noting is that this would still be the only major education option with any cap at all. There are no caps for charter schools, McKay scholarships, virtual schools. And the McKay scholarship, as one example, grew only about 3 percent last year. The controlling factor for any school option is ultimately the students. If students and families aren't interested then the program doesn't grow.
In e-mail correspondence, East made clear that when he was discussing the Florida Education Finance Program, he was combining the state, local, and federal sources, and that HB 1009 also was discussing a voucher of eventually 80% of the combined state and local (but not federal) funding. From one perspective East is correct: the legislature sets the amount of funding that comes in total from the state's general revenues, from state trust funds, and from "required local effort" property taxes at the local level, and then a complex formula determines what the required local effort is from each county. Counties have a certain amount of additional property taxes they can levy on a discretionary basis, but FEFP is a unitary mandate in the sense that the legislature determines the base funding for students, and that legislative mandate is met jointly by state revenue and local property taxes.
On the other hand, I think that legislative history will be cold comfort to local school board members and county commissioners who have seen the state shift school funding in the past decade away from state revenues and towards local property taxes. That use of FEFP to shift taxes allowed former Governor Jeb Bush and the Bush-era legislative leadership to claim that they were lowering taxes when a good part of that was a clever shell game. (This is not a particularly partisan flaw: the Democratically-controlled legislature played a similar game in proposing a state lottery in the late 1980s which legislators claimed would boost education funding without raising taxes.) Many school board members will see HB 1009 as a drain of state revenues that will contribute to the shifting of education funding away from the state and towards local property taxes. When the legislature created FEFP in the early 1970s, they quickly ramped up per-pupil state support of education, effectively shifting the revenues from local property taxes to the state's general revenue pot. HB 1009 looks like it will continue a reversal of that original intent.
February 17, 2010
Zombie idea: short-cut high schools
I guess I was wrong yesterday in labeling Utah State Senator Chris Buttars as obviously out of the mainstream in terms of practices. The New York Times reports today on something that slipped under my radar: two-year high school degree options based on an idiosyncratic constellation of what the article calls "board exams." Not too surprisingly, this is the brainchild of Marc Tucker, who's been peddling some type of policy proposal for changing the structure of high schools for more than twenty years as head of the National Center on Education and the Economy. I think this primarily shows that he's been more effective at lobbying than the higher-profile Partnership for 21st Century Skills, because it look like the various testing options essentially would require students to succeed at 12th-grade somewhat-more-intensive coursework, and my reasoning yesterday on three-year programs holds here (students likely to succeed at these tests are going to continue through four years). Given the original argument of NCEE for a much more vo-tech focus, I'm not sure what to make of this, except that it looks like it will have minimal impact on actual enrollments.
February 16, 2010
Heady, headwinds, or just headstrong?
Two education stories caught my eye this evening: the attempt by a Rhode Island superintendent to use state law on school interventions to trump collective bargaining and fire all teachers at one high school, and the trial balloon floated by a Utah state senator to end 12th grade in the state, or make it optional.
Utah State Senator Chris Buttars is just being headstrong, or maybe "grasping at straws" might be the better term, since the idea of skipping a year of a four-year program isn't attractive to many students even when it's possible. Florida created a three-year high school structure some years ago, and it's almost entirely unused, for obvious reasons: students who are doing well-enough in high school to finish in three years are also eligible to attend a number of colleges, and will be told by high school advisors, their parents, and others that they darned well are going to spend a fourth year in high school so they can attend a college of their choice. And in colleges, while many students could use AP credits to graduate in three years, that's not a common pattern. An old friend of mine was able to finish high school one year early in the 1970s and enter a UC campus, but she was an extreme outlier.
Central Falls Superintendent Frances Gallo is facing legal headwinds but is less obviously foolish than Buttars. Gallo is relying on a set of state options for addressing low-performing schools, and when teachers in the district would not agree to a longer workday without substantially increased pay, Gallo said she'd forgo bargaining a solution and use the option to fire all the teachers in the school instead (and let them reapply for their jobs). There are two general questions here on the legality of Gallo's move: is the state corrective-action structure outside the scope of bargaining for public employees in Rhode Island, and does her move constitute an unfair labor practice by construction (i.e., even if the state corrective-action structure is not bargainable, is her action retaliation in the context of the moment)? This is very far from my experience, but if this were in the state of Florida for most of the time we've had public-employee bargaining, I suspect the outcome of a similar legal battle would not be easily predictable.
The rule of thumb with economic crises is that people innovate through desperation rather than through careful planning. We're seeing that in the case of Utah. And nerves are generally raw throughout the country, so situations that might otherwise be resolvable often head into conflict when that might have been avoided in better times (I don't know if that would have been true in Central Falls).
Books are not going to disappear from libraries
Student views of libraries are apparently all over the map when asked by the New York Times whether libraries need books anymore... but I think that's always been the case. Libraries serve multiple constituencies, and if you had phrased the question differently in different eras and for different media -- for example, "do libraries still need to stock cassette books-on-tape?" -- you'd have very different responses. Yes, public libraries still carry and loan audiobooks, though they're no longer on cassette tapes.
Patrons like what they like, and librarians always have to figure out
the right mix. Fundamentally, "books or ebooks" is the wrong question from the standpoint of library administration. It's going to be a mix of books, periodicals, audiobooks, video material, computer access, reference services, public space use, and outreach for public libraries and a different mix (but still a mix) for academic libraries.
From a public standpoint, too, "books or ebooks" is the wrong question. Funding public access to information is one of the best investments in the future I can think of. Yes, I think of libraries as part of the "constellation" of educational institutions (to borrow from Larry Cremin), and no matter how I may cringe when certain ones are used by students, it's better to nourish more sources of information than to be stingy.
February 13, 2010
The message of opening access to AP courses: "Take chances, make mistakes, get messy!"
Someone reminded me that because I was crazy-busy in the fall, I didn't comment on one local controversy a few months ago, so this is a catch-up post of sorts, in part justified by the February 4 story in USA Today and Leslie Postal's story earlier this week in the Orlando Sentinel. The St. Pete Times editorial board published two pieces on December 15 and December 16 criticizing local schools in central Florida for having low and widely varying "passing rates" on Advanced Placement exam subjects. By "passing rate," the Times is using the common threshhold score, 3 out of 5, for earning college credit. Never mind for the moment that the reasons why students take AP courses are not necessarily about college credit, nor do all colleges set 3 as the threshhold. One can assume that the wide variations in proportions earning a 3, 4, or 5 reflect an underlying variation in achievement in the classes. The editorials argue that the achievement in AP courses is too low and that variations are a direct reflection of teacher quality. In the first editorial, the board wrote,
The passing rates on the AP exam are often pathetic. It is a scandalous situation that fails students, misleads parents and wastes public money.
In the second, the board wrote,
District superintendents and school principals should hold teachers accountable for dismal passing rates.
These are conclusions from a superficial analysis. I know of situations where it is obvious that low scores are probably reflections of teacher quality, but I know of several classrooms where either students are scoring well despite low teacher quality or where students are scoring low though they have a fabulous teacher.
For example, I know of one school with two teachers in a particular AP subject taught in 12th grade. Students of both teachers have approximately equal proportions earning a 3, 4, or 5. Yet I know from talking with students that one of the teachers is engaging, providing both materials and an environment more reflective of a college class than the other, where discussion is squelched and theoretical frameworks are presented as narrowly as one could imagine (and this is in a topic where college classes would commonly revolve around discussion). That's right: two teachers, one school, different assignments in the year (how did that happen??), very different reception by students, similar AP scores on the measure the Times published and the editorial board cares about. Most obvious explanation: credit goes to these students' prior teacher(s) in the subject for getting them ready for the AP class they take in 12th grade. Did that possibility appear to the editorial board? Apparently not.
More broadly, members of the editorial board of the Times (and a number of people around the country) have the exactly wrong approach to challenging classes in high school, as evidenced by another point in the December 15 editorial: "There is some merit to the argument that passing rates are low because too many unprepared students are being steered into AP classes." This statement, which I've generally heard from middle-class or wealthy parents, assumes either a zero-sum game for schools (for some parents, that their children aren't getting enough exclusivity in AP credentials for college admissions offices) or that students in AP classes are worse off being in the AP classes than not. The latter is speculation by the editorial board without a clear research consensus (see below for a longer discussion). The former is not acceptable to me as a basis for making policy decisions.
On a philosophical basis, I am disturbed by the assumption that we always need to withhold content based on prior achievement. Why does the fictional Ms. Frizzle tell students to "take chances, make mistakes, get messy!" in elementary school, but we have to shake in our boots at the possibility that we might be challenging older students? There are plenty of classes (e.g., U.S. history) where keeping students out makes little sense, and the Times is dead wrong in their approach on this issue.
The alternative to opening up opportunity: a situation such as at Berkeley High School, where the breakup of the school into mini-schools several years ago has segregated students, left a disproportionate number of white students in AP science classes, and led to a real zero-sum game of reduced science instruction as some parents and educators propose redirecting effort away from science labs to smaller class sizes elsewhere in the school. That becomes the dynamic when science labs for advanced courses are the arena for a privileged few instead of a more common expectation that teenagers should be encouraged to take challenging classes.
Addendum: Paul Cottle wrote a blog entry this morning on the same subject, and he refers to Kristin Klopfenstein's research, including an article she published last year with Kathleen Thomas (earlier version PDF). The research is mixed; for a different view with recent research, see a 2008 Northeastern Educational Research Association paper by Xinhui Xiong, K. D. Matterny, and E. J. Shaw. I don't think that schools should respond to the mixed research either by shutting down access to challenging material or by making the teaching of AP courses a higher-risk assignment for teachers than other assignments.
February 11, 2010
Additional thoughts on performance pay politics
An addendum to my entry earlier this morning: I think that there is a politically-robust rationale for performance-pay policies, but it's not at the level of incentives usually used as the justification. The more plausible rationale for performance-pay policies is at the level of public-sector accountability: most people with jobs do not expect identical salaries or salaries based on a formula, and small variations based on something other than seniority and educational credentials might boost the facial validity of public-sector HR practices.
Note that this is not an argument that business practices are always incentives based (or should be: witness AIG as a disaster stemming from short-term incentives) or even widely varying. In some cases--large law firms, for example--entry-level professionals receive step pay increases in their first few years akin to teachers' step increases. But if I were to ask the head of the Florida Council of 100, Susan Story, whether she'd stop advocating performance pay even if the research consensus in a few years were solidly against its doing anything for student achievement, my guess is that she'd still push for some form of performance pay.
The discourse around this is somewhat similar to other comparisons people make between their lives and public policy: when policies look like you're pushing the cart and someone else paid by public funds isn't, you're less likely to maintain support for it. A friend of mine visited a newspaper columnist some years ago to complain about an article the columnist had written regarding AFDC (the federal welfare program before 1996). Don't you understand the factual errors with all of the myths about welfare? my friend asked. Sure, said the columnist, but you don't understand why public attitudes have changed: as the majority of mothers now have to find their own child-care arrangements while they're working, they're going to be far less sympathetic towards women who aren't willing to work or perceived as not willing to work.
I don't agree with the columnist's thumbnail history of public attitudes towards federal welfare policies or on assumptions that women on welfare have not historically wanted to work. But there is a significant grain of truth there that when the majority of mothers work when their children are young, and they have to find and pay for child care and wrestle with the stress involved in that, those mothers are not going to want to see that they're pushing the cart and others aren't. For similar reasons, those who oppose any performance pay have an uphill road telling people who work in environments with non-step-like pay arrangements that somehow public schools should be arranged differently.
Why the Teacher Incentive Fund and Race to the Top are long-term dead ends for merit-pay advocates
The apparent push in the proposed 2011 Obama budget for an enlarged Teacher Incentive Fund on the heels of Race to the Top makes me think that merit-pay/performance-pay advocates may be spreading their political capital very thin on teacher evaluation. Most advocates of paying teachers in part based on test scores are also advocates of using test scores in part to evaluate teachers more broadly, especially dividing probationary teachers from teachers with a right to due process before dismissal. And they're trying to do both. Smart or stupid? I think it's counterproductive for several reasons:
- The research on benefits of individual-teacher performance pay is limited. Very limited and quite mixed. Putting all your chips on a huge expansion of experimental performance-pay schemes? You may not get what you want, and public evaluations may doom the politics. (Think Reading First, though the allegations of corruption set the stage in that case for death-by-evaluation.)
- Grant programs end. If the expansion of performance-pay programs relies on temporary revenue, then the program may well die along with the extra revenue. Denver's teachers union and district worked together on a long-term political deal: performance pay that teachers helped develop tied to a long-term boost in revenue. That's not the structure of RTTT, TIF, or the Gates Foundation grants.
- Real-life performance-pay bonus budgets are stingy. The best example of that reality is here in Florida, where the state budget for the school-based rewards for test scores has been no greater than $100/student (for a school) since the late 1990s, and while my undergraduate students sometimes enter my classes thinking that a huge amount of school budgets are based on test scores, in reality that's no more than about 1.5-2% of per-pupil expenditures in Florida (and that's for the schools that receive the money). When this money is distributed to staff (sometime it is, sometimes it isn't), it's in the form of bonuses, not additions to base salaries. The fiscal and political reality is that the only way to permanently boost base salaries substantially based on test scores is to give the money to a tiny fraction of teachers, and that's a recipe for political disaster (and legal problems).
The last point is one I am surprised opponents of performance pay have not raised sufficiently, and here's how I thought someone would have put it by now: Okay, so you want to pay teachers well if their students learn a great deal? Wonderful. So if students perform at a very high level, you're willing to raise taxes to reward teachers for that accomplishment? Liberal advocates of performance pay would probably answer yes if. I don't think fiscal conservatives who are performance-pay advocates have thought through the dilemma on that point very clearly; either the answer is that you're willing to raise taxes or that you have low expectations for schoolchildren.
Eventually, I suspect that advocates of performance pay will have to decide whether they want to put all of their political capital into pay schemes that are fragile or into hiring and retention issues. The proposed ballooning of TIF is a sign that no one in Washington is thinking about the political balance of these issues in the long run.
Disclosure: I'm a member of a higher ed union that has long had a contract with merit pay and considerable differences in pay by rank and discipline. K-12 is a very different world in this regard.
Note: I started this entry on Tuesday, and because I forgot to change the "publish date" (which Movable Type usually sets at the time you started an entry, not published it), it first appeared as if it were published Tuesday. My editing fault, not your faulty memory. Now, your forgetting to read all of my books and articles? That's a different story.
February 6, 2010
Another stupid article on "the dating scene" in college
Some of the clues that the latest article on the "dating scence" in colleges with 60% female enrollment was written by a reporter with an axe to grind and a preset angle at which to grind:
- The featured photograph from a university with 60% female enrollment (a) is of college seniors (or I hope they're seniors) in a bar, (b) is of an all-white group of students, (c) has six women and one man, (d) has no older students.
- Every photograph features white students.
- All the women interviewed for the story appear to be members of sororities.
- One of the interviewees is a former student who happens to be hanging out in a bar near campus. (So why is he representative? Why didn't the reporter step a few minutes away from a bar?)
- The focus is entirely at a flagship public university.
- There are no older students interviewed for the story.
Since the primary world of colleges is at the regional state university and community-college level, maybe we should skip the flagship campuses and look at the statistics of an institution such as Miami-Dade College. MDC has more than 150,000 students enrolled, and while 60% of them are women, only about 35% are right out of high school (under 21). About two-thirds are attending MDC on a part-time basis, and while MDC is now a four-year institution, I don't think there are any dorms, so every one of those students are commuters and live somewhere in the Miami area. In other words, the dating scene for straight, gay, or bisexual students is where they live as well as on campus. That's the reality for the majority of college students in the United States, not the preppy picture that the New York Times reporter and photographer portrayed.
But if you want to look at residential colleges and universities, maybe a little reality should intrude: the average age at civil marriage for women in the United States has moved back up to the mid-20s, where it has been historically for well over a century, with the exception of the immediate postwar years. College students' meeting and marrying in college is common enough but not dominant.
And the history of colleges is not one filled with demographic "balance" in some hypothetical way. For many years, the ranks of elite residential institutions were filled with single-sex colleges and universities with single-sex undergraduate colleges, and the students in those colleges and universities had to go off-campus for a hetereosexual dating scene. And in the first decade after World War II, the GI Bill pushed enrollment in public universities in the other direction, towards majority male enrollment. If you can find more than a decade or two when the dominant demographic profiles of residential colleges, community colleges, and public universities were all fairly evenly split by gender, I'd be surprised. My guess is that maybe a decade or two will fit with the peak of the Baby Boom through the mid-1980s... when people worried about the social consequences of the sexual revolution. As one of Gilda Radner's characters would say, if it's not one thing, it's another... so let's stop obsessing with the on-campus dating opportunities of college students.
February 1, 2010
Sloppy journo skewered; readers await fix
Reporting is a hard job. These days, reporters are being asked to cover more subjects in less time with an even smaller news hole for newspapers that are losing money, laying off colleagues, and may be out of business within a matter of months. Even in good times, reporters knew that errors were going to be read by thousands of subscribers and that even if they worked twice as many hours in a day (usually impossible), they'd never catch all factual goofs or grammatical mistakes, or never quote enough interviewees to satisfy all readers. Great beat reporters are inherently improv artists.
Having said that, I know it should not be too much of a surprise that even reporters with solid reputations such as Ed Week's Debra Viadero sometimes get caught taking shortcuts. Thus far, no response from Viadero, but it's another part of journalism (and a reflection of the craft) to print corrections publicly. So let's wait and see how Ed Week acknowledges error.
Grading the "Grades" reports
I'm back from Toronto today--had a great time talking with Canadian faculty, had my head chewed off in a thoroughly polite, Canadian way for one bone-headed error I made in discussion, survived subzero temperatures for a few mornings, and completely failed to enter the Hockey Hall of Fame building--and back in Florida the temperatures are a bit lower-than-average for this time of year but discussion of the Ed Week Quality Counts "grades" given Florida is apparently heating up. So maybe I need to revisit my idea from last summer of grading the grading reports. Last June, I pointed out that professional grading practices generally provide scoring criteria in advance, so that those who are being evaluated will have a chance to... you know... meet the standards. Let me list all of the facets on which I think one can grade such "grade reports" of states and the like:
- Purpose. Is there a clear public rationale for issuing such a report? How broad or narrow is the public purpose?
- Scoring criteria. Described in June.
- Description of sources and analysis. How systematic is the collection of source material (as opposed to anecdotal or convenience sampling)? Is there a clear chain described from collection of data to the application of labels? Is there a discussion of relevant caveats/alternatives?
- Robustness of sources. Are the sources publicly verifiable or replicable? Are they subject to gaming, falsifiability, or manipulation?
- Relevance of sources. Is the material relevant to the criteria, and does the "grade report" use the most relevant obtainable information? Is the source information analyzed appropriately to warrant the application of the grade labels?
- Sponsorship. Are funding sources and potential related interests stated clearly? Is there a separation between the real or likely perceived material interests of sponsors, on the one hand, and editorial control of the project?
It strikes me on impression that different types of periodic "grading" exercises have different types of weaknesses. An advocacy organization whose reports rely on anecdotal evidence and give higher grades to states that are more extreme towards its position might receive lower grades on description of sources and analyses and sponsorship than in other categories. A news organization that makes millions of dollars by selling a volume ranking colleges and universities using reputational surveys of institution heads and data on institutional wealth is likely to receive low grades on public purpose, robustness of sources, and relevance of sources. A news organization that ranks states on categories that change every year using no apparent criteria that also change every year is likely to receive its lowest grades in the area of scoring criteria and description of sources and analyses.
As a faculty member who has assigned thousands of grades to students, where the grades affect student progress towards degrees and financial-aid eligibility, I know from experience that the process of grading is imperfect and in my field depends on judgment rather than objective cut-and-dried methods. That's why I state criteria as early as I can, display model work from prior semesters if possible (with the permission of their creators), answer questions about assignments, look at drafts, structure revision opportunities into a number of courses, and always let students correct me when they document that I have recorded individual assignment grades incorrectly. I know from student complaints about grading in general that they hate being judged on criteria they feel the evaluator keeps secret, or that is designed to make the evaluator look good, or that serves some other purpose that isn't for the general purposes grading is accepted by at least some to serve. In other words, if you're going to assign grades, especially if the clear intent is to shame certain entities into changing, you need to take at least a few minutes of care to address common-sense ethical expectations. I'd have far more patience with these publicity-seeking exercises if there were more care evident in the process.
January 27, 2010
Why the "college hunt" genre is unrepresentative, and the shame of the College Board Profile
This morning's blog entry by Valerie Strauss is typical of the genre: a perspective on what it's like to apply to a number of selective colleges and universities and hunt for financial aid. And it's all wrong, both from a policy perspective and (I'd argue) even a hypercompetitive parents' perspective.
Policy perspective: the colleges most students attend are not very selective. Even for the ones that don't accept all applicants, most accept the majority of applicants (including most public universities). And even in the world of "very" selective institutions, you might be surprised. Sure, both Harvard and Stanford will reject more than 90% of their applicants this year, but most of the "very" selective private liberal arts colleges accept 25% or more of applicants... and we're at the peak of the baby boom echo, so it's only going to head up from here. (Math problem: If you're a high school senior and apply to colleges where you have a 50% probability of being accepted, and the decisions of each college are random and independent, how many do you need to apply to to have at least a 98% chance of being accepted into at least one?)
So the problem is generally not getting accepted into one college but being able to pay for it and being able to take all the classes you need and succeed at them. My daughter is applying to a few places where the tuition/board combination is high enough where some institutional aid would be very nice, and last night we completed the FAFSA, which is one half of the financial-aid paperwork for one of her desirable colleges. (I'll have more to say about the other half later.) The administration's promise on a simplified FAFSA has been fulfilled, at least from my experience: you don't need a CPA to fill it out, especially for families who are eligible for Pell grants and state assistance. The administration's proposal for a 10% cap on income you owe on college loans would be another step, and a definite improvement on the new income-based repayment option. Given the gap between Pell grants and tuition at a number of public universities, pushing on income-based repayment may be more valuable in the long run than expanding Pell grants.
Where Strauss is correct from a public perspective is the gap between the time high school counselors can spend shepherding students through the admissions process and the reality of the need. I'm thinking here primarily of high school students who would be first-generation college students. There aren't too many guidelines for a ninth-grader to keep in mind, but they're probably not repeated often enough: get your act together now to make sure your first semester grades are at least a mix of Cs and Bs, and they need to head up from there; read more than what's required; go as far in math as you can; take SATs or ACTs in your junior year; tell your parents to put their financial information in one place starting early fall of senior year; expand your college possibilities in one dimension from what you're being told by those around you. I suppose there are others that high school counselors use, but for the barebones, students whose parents never attended college can get into a fine public university following this.
If there's something that worries me apart from the high school curriculum and funding for poor students, it's the narrow way most high school students think about where and how to look for colleges, and the way that adults encourage that narrowness in part from their experiences or perceptions or because of tacit knowledge. There are sometimes circumstances that restrict students--those who need state assistance will be staying in-state, and often first-generation college students (especially young women) live at home while attending classes at a public university, at least for a year or two. (I know of one very large community college where faculty get the benefit of teaching incredibly talented first-generation students because their parents wouldn't let the students move away for a few years.) High school students can be creative in working with family preferences--Orlando high school students often prefer the University of South Florida (here in the Tampa area) and Tampa area students often prefer the University of Central Florida (Orlando) as a "far enough away from home so I'm not visited by my mom twice a week, but close enough to drive home on weekends" solution. But that's like chain migration: if you hear about an option from someone you know, you can use it.
What about the options you don't personally know? I've had some conversations with teenagers and parents in the past year or two where presumptions have become stereotypes and blinders. One parent completely dismissed a nationally-known public liberal-arts college because she knew some students with learning disabilities who saw that as a friendly place to attend... so it must not be good enough (i.e., prestigious). A student who is one of the most hard-working teenagers I have ever known and interested in engineering schools didn't know the difference between tuition-dependent private schools and those with endowments and substantial institutional aid. She was thinking very hopefully on an engineering school within driving distance that is tuition-dependent and where there was no way that she could get aid (and thus attend). She hadn't thought of CalTech at all, though it's well off and where she might get a boost because of the dominance of men in their undergraduate enrollment. Another student who moved to the U.S. four years ago was disappointed in her board scores and thought colleges wouldn't want her. She's another incredibly hard-working student, one who admissions officers would drool over in reality. For the students in these cases, I'm not worried because it didn't take much to persuade them or their parents to think a bit more broadly (and optimistically). For the millions of talented high school students I can't persuade personally to think a little more broadly about colleges, I worry about the mental shortcuts we take when looking for colleges. It's an understandable but sad statement about our country when some of the most effective recruitment of college students is done through Saturday television broadcasts in the fall.
Private perspective: As I wrote above, the FAFSA is one of the pieces for institutional aid for a college my daughter is keenly interested in. The other is the College Board Profile. Last night, I printed out their 19-page worksheet and filled in answers for the several-hundred questions about parental income and assets so my daughter can enter the data this afternoon. I'll just say this to the admissions officers for the private institutions using the College Board Profile: you've just demonstrated to me why your efforts at recruiting a diverse population of students is often a facade. When your chosen tool (which you don't have to pay for) is several orders of magnitude more difficult to complete than the old, more complicated FAFSA, it's clear that you don't have a clue about how to get poor students to apply for financial aid. And College Board? Shame on you for requiring poor families to pay for the privilege of having one more barrier to receiving financial aid.
My daughter will do fine, and unlike other college seniors, she hasn't panicked. Several years ago, when it was clear she was interested in Type X college, her mother and I talked about the financial feasibility of that. (I'm a public-university professor in a relatively low-paid field. Well-off? Definitely with respect to human history! Able to send my daughter to Type X college on my and my wife's income alone? .... uh, what type of cat food tastes good?) We figured we could expand her horizons, but given that her spine is stiffer than mine, I expected it would be in one direction. Let's see: ask her to consider Type Y college? Not going to happen. Z? Not a chance. Type X-public? Hmmn... that worked. In the fall of her sophomore year, I told her that if she could find a Type X college that would let her visit classes, either public or private, I'd take her. And she found such a place, so we went. As a result, we spread out college visits over a few years, not a few weeks. That first college is still on her "very interested" list, and overall she liked (and applied to) roughly half of the places we visited, most of which were Type X colleges. Her interests have changed a bit, but she'll do fine in any of the places she's applying to, and it's her life, not mine. Yes, she's been accepted to at least one. As I stated above, if you've worked hard in high school and you're not set on getting into the One True Place for You, you'll get in somewhere you can learn a great deal in.
January 24, 2010
Florida legislative session education preview
Former Miami Herald reporter and current free-lancer Gary Fineout has a solid legislative session preview on education policy in this morning's Sarasota Herald-Tribune (hat tip). I may disagree with his predictions on the margins, but on the whole I think he's on the money in identifying the obvious issues. Fineout was starting his analysis from the Florida Chamber of Commerce report released a few weeks ago, which had a combination of noncontroversial suggestions as well as a few ideological throwaways (such as the resurrection of the failing-schools voucher program). Fineout is probably correct that budget woes will kill or maim any suggestion with a large price tag (though I would love the suggested large boost to higher education). So let's divide the policy ideas into the noncontroversial and the controversial and then the elephant in the room.
Noncontroversial: end of course (EOC) exams, especially since Rep. John Legg said his bill would have non-biology science EOC exams as non-high-stakes tests. I've been watching that issue in semi-despair for several months after the U.S. Department of Education confirmed the Florida DOE's view that Race to the Top grants could not be used for assessment development. Legg's promise is a good compromise, if it happens as he stated.
Noncontroversial: continuing to use federal stimulus dollars to boost local district budgets. The decline of property-tax collections is the giant sword hanging over schools this year, and the balance of state-local K-12 funding is one of the giant budget issues this year along with Medicaid and the lack of any trust funds to raid for 2010-11.
Controversial: modifying the constitutional class-size mandate. There
might be a compromise here involving statutory changes to the
implementing laws. Legislative leaders might have to choose between spending political capital on this issue and on the next two.
Controversial: legislative attempts to end K-12 teacher tenure. The legislature has mandated the end of tenure before, sort of like the way the legislature has mandated merit pay before (next issue below). If the legislature overplays its hand, an extreme bill might turn out to be a short-term nightmare for teachers and a long-term Pyrrhic victory for tenure critics. I can think of at least two ways that FEA can fight more extreme laws in the long term with reasonable chances of winning.
Controversial: merit pay, or rather legislatively-mandated mechanisms. This would be the fourth or fifth go-round on this issue in the past decade in terms of state mandates. Someday there will be a set of legislative leaders who want to work a deal with the FEA on performance pay at a time when FEA leadership is interested in a deal; until then, the heads will continue to butt. (For Mike Antonucci and other union critics, you need to work harder to understand how a teachers union in a state with weak collective bargaining laws can successfully resist state-level mandates when the political branches are often actively hostile to the state affiliate; your usual explanations flounder in Florida.)
The elephant in the room: money. Legislative leaders seem disinclined at the moment to do anything that could be called raising taxes. While state revenue collection appears to be on a slight upward trend, that is more than counterbalanced by a decline in tax collection at the county level and increasing demands for Medicaid. Last year's budget politics was set by two contexts: growing legislative disillusionment with Charlie Crist and the chaotic aftermath of Ray Sansom's speakership on the House budget committee. This year, Crist is a lame duck who is viewed in the legislature as somewhere between a powerful fool and an opportunistic sell-out, and that's within his own party. Speaker Larry Cretul has reset his caucus's leadership according to his own preferences, which now include one rather than two budget chairs. And Senate President Jeff Atwater may be inclined to burnish his conservative fiscal credentials for his political future. As a result, Senate budget chief J.D. Alexander will have several quanta less influence and will probably be picking one or two battles on large issues. I have no idea whether this presages a slow-moving train wreck on the budget or opportunities for quick-thinkers in April. But a budget wreck on the scale of Pennsylvania (if not California) is possible.
January 16, 2010
Weingarten, teacher evaluation, and the long haul
I started this entry Tuesday, before the Haiti earthquake, thinking about long-term policy changes. There are a number of students and staff at USF, as well as Tampa-area residents, who are worried about relatives or who are now in mourning. Sometimes the long term pauses while you take care of immediate needs. Well, it doesn't really pause, but most people have a limit on how many things they can focus on at one time. We can multitask, but not hypertask.
As I hope most of us have become aware, our woes are often small in comparison with world events. I've had a few bumps in the road this month, one quite literal: the driver of the gray van behind me Monday morning didn't stop when I did for a yellow light. Thankfully, crumple zones, air bags, seat belts, headrests, and other bits of technology did their job, and two uniformed officers of the Tampa police guided traffic around the immobile vehicles until the wrecker could take them away. My laptop, sitting in the trunk at the time, appears unhurt. I'm unhurt; or, rather, if you tell me I need to see a doctor about my head, I'll tell you to stand in line, and the previous suggestions have not been after an accident. Surviving rear-enders without a scratch makes me grateful for government regulation, for technology, and for people such as the two witnesses who helped steer traffic until the police arrived. After news of the earthquake, I think I can handle the small bumps in life. Look around you and you realize you can and often should suck it up.
One thing I haven't been able to do this week is look closely at the Randi Weingarten speech or much reaction to it. There's been a semi-understandable "hey, she's given a Good Speech before; where are our flying cars?" reaction. But for those who are jaded by a speech, I'd agree a little more if I didn't see so much immediate score-keeping kept about who won on which issue in which city. You either care about and focus on long-term structural changes, or you don't. We're in the middle of an era in which many policymakers believe that a few derived measures from tests are good enough for high-stakes decisions and extending that to personnel decisions. There are going to be districts that make disastrous decisions on how to use student outcome data, in different directions, and districts where both the structure and the practice is uses information appropriately (and yes, does use the information). For the short term, I care a great deal about the disasters. For the long term, I know they'll exist and hope there's enough nudging of things in the right direction. For that long term, Weingarten's speech is right and consistent with AFT national support of local bargaining.
For those who keep scorecards, the battle over the Detroit collective bargaining agreement is important for counting coup. To those who think about the human impact of change, you have to worry about the attempted (and possibly successful) coup inside the Detroit Federation of Teachers. (To those who thought the new Detroit contract was too little, too late, I told you so on the internal union politics.) For those who focus on the long term, Detroit is a blip either way, losing students consistently over the years and one district out of hundreds in Michigan. Quick question: how many so-called "suburban" school districts have more students than Detroit's?
If there is a big picture on teacher personnel issues, there are several issues to pay attention to:
- Teacher preparation and professional development evaluation. I think Louisiana's approach to evaluating preparatory programs is about at the right scale: uses test data cautiously, and I think appropriately at the program rather than graduate (i.e., teacher) level. Florida is starting something that it claims is similar, but it's on a jerry-built measure (or, rather, Gerry-built measure since I know the person who is at least partly responsible for the measures of growth used here), and because it's incautiously done, I suspect it'll take several years to straighten out the kinds. I am relatively optimistic here.
- Teacher preparation and professional development structures/curriculum. Here, Arne Duncan, Arthur Levine, NCATE, and TFA/other alt.-entry routes are going to push things in one productive and one disastrous direction. The productive direction may be more time earlier in classrooms with appropriate (scaffolded) support. The unproductive direction is the denigration of psychology and other disciplinary knowledge as "theory." Incidentally, that denigration has been a common pattern within schools and colleges of education for the past 30 years--the same people who are being criticized for their ineffectiveness. My college of education is a sample of 1, but it's the educational psychologists on my floor who are the ones most adamant in the college that there is no research support for learning styles (and Michelle Rhee's district that requires teachers to use something it calls learning styles). And as far as sociologists and historians of education controlling teacher education programs? Ha! Please point to one. If there is pushing of social theory inside programs, my firm prediction (which can be empirically tested!) is that there is either no relationship between respect of disciplinary-based faculty and puffery in the teacher-ed curriculum or a negative relationship. I am cynical here.
- Teacher preparation and English language learners. There are major problems here. Unfortunately, teaching teachers about the history of immigration is both necessary and insufficient, but the social history (or a watered-down version of it repeated ad nauseam) tends to be the focus of many professional development structures that attempt to address ELL problems. Linguistic psychology takes a back seat, and there is too little research on both methods and appropriate assessment. I am in despair right now on this area.
- It's the baby-boom echo, stupid. All the cries about teacher shortages with the retirement of baby boomers is ignoring the baby-boom echo, the peak of which is right now passing through college. In a few short years, they'll be the bulge of early workforce participants, and you won't need a high proportion of them to be teachers to fill the empty seats. Oh, yeah, and there are the people in their late 30s and early 40s who can also do so. Apart from spot needs by geography and specialization (esp. science and special education teachers), I don't think that there is going to be a significant teacher shortage. I am optimistic.
- The mix of evaluation sources. I've written about this before: we have no clue as a society how to mix different sources of evaluating teachers together when each source is incomplete and sometimes severely flawed. For ideological reasons, there are advocates of different varieties of sticking one's head in the sand, either ignoring student outcomes or treating them as infinitely-accurate and -valid measures. The major Gates initiative here might be an oasis or buffer of experimentation in the RTTT era. I am cynical but hope to see something of value, eventually, maybe, filtered through a lot of political spin.
- Incentives vs. protocols. As John Thompson has pointed out, Atul Gawande's advocacy of protocols (checklists) is an uphill battle in some areas of health care.We see similar resistance in education, sometimes for good reasons (there are some awful protocols in education) and sometimes for bad reasons (see Lisa Delpit's discussion in Other People's Children on the disingenuous criticism of DISTAR for alleged abuse of power relationships). But few have pointed out that there is a conflict between the advocacy of incentives, which assumes that teachers can deliberately choose to act in a way that increases test scores, and the pushing of protocols, which assumes that no matter how well-trained and professional, teachers could use reminders to act in a way that increases student achievement.
January 9, 2010
Spot temperature:Climate::Test score:____________
I fully expect that within a week (if not yet already) some climate-change skeptic will use the cold wave currently freezing much of the country as an argument that climate changing really isn't happening. And every time there's a vicious cold snap in winter or a cooler-than-average summer we get the argument. And some reporter and editor decides to devote part of the ever-shrinking news hole to bad coverage of the issue, while a relative handful of reporters use the question as an opportunity to educate readers about the difference between weather and climate.
Today, I'm sitting in central Florida with more layers on than I usually need in early January. It's colder weather than usual. But we're in a warming climate, because in the long run of decades (or centuries) the current cold wave is just noise, and the trend is towards a warmer atmosphere. "Just noise," you may be thinking through chattering teeth, "tell my heating bill that it's just noise." The current cold wave is nasty for individuals today (and a few days more), but it's temporary.
The variability of weather makes sense to most people because we have enough experience to distinguish between spot temperatures and broader patterns. We know that temperatures have daily and seasonal cycles. But the cyclical nature of weather does not give us enough background to grasp climate change. For that, you need data. A lot of data. A lot of data from a lot of places and times, of different sorts, with a number of experts sifting through it.
And even then you get climate-change conspiracy theorists, including someone who's evidently a hacker.
You can probably guess the logical analogue here: we do not have anywhere near the same density of data on student achievement that we have on climate, and yet we draw bold conclusions about the underlying achievement from a relative paucity of noisy data. As I wrote in August, we need to learn how to make decisions with noisy data. But in terms of broad trends in achievement, it is a bad habit of Americans to equate the latest test scores with long trends.
And that doesn't even touch the question of whether test scores are like temperature readings. Ah, but they are, if you're talking about your and my outside thermometers: placed at different heights, in different conditions (sheltered, out in the open, shade v. sun), different ages of the thermometers (and thus consistency of the readings across the years). I am sure that background thermometers in these varied conditions are highly correlated in the sense that when it's colder, they're all colder, and when it's warmer, they're all warmer, and so the correlations across time are likely to be very high. But I wouldn't use them in any scientific research.
Stay warm, and have whatever hot beverage you like!
January 1, 2010
Wannabe education reformers in the U.S. need to use English
Confession: I do not have a professional editor review these blog entries before they become publicly available. As a result, there is the odd grammatical error that I notice only after publication.
And yet, I do not abuse the English language deliberately. In contrast, one of the least attractive stylistic tendencies of wannabe reformers, reformists, reformistas, or whatever term you wish to use, is the blatant word abuse, and unfortunately we see that in Tom Vander Ark's blog entry December 26, which had impact and leverage (ab)used as transitive verbs. They are not quite as chalkboard-scraping as incent (which I have heard and read from Arne Duncan and Mike Petrilli), because they do exist as nouns (and impact does not hurt my inner ear when used as an intransitive verb). But good grief, friends: do not add business jargon monoxide to the conversation, or you have no ... hmmn... leverage with which to criticize others for the same sin.
December 31, 2009
Education stories of 2009 (U.S.)
The end of the year is the traditional time for journalists and laypeople to look back and identify major issues in a year. As Phil Graham (or maybe Ben Bradlee) said, journalism is a first rough draft of history, and you know what a first rough draft looks like. Nonetheless, as an historian I'll take a stab at what I think will be seen in retrospect as key developments in education in the U.S. They may even have been key issues this year!
- The Great Recession and students' lives. More children are homeless, hungry, or displaced in some way because the adults in their family have lost jobs or their homes. We won't know the exact extent of the effects on children's lives for a few years, but the news stories of the recession's effects on children are first indicators of a quantum leap in child poverty. And there is also an effect on the lives of college students, though the effects are more complicated. People are returning to school at a rapid clip, but because financial resources are lower, there is also a greater demand for financial aid at college.
- The Great Recession and the education stimulus packages (plural). In late 2008 it became obvious that for several years Florida had been leading the country again... in declining state and local revenues. Around the country in early 2009, school-system budgets for 2009-10 looked like they were going to collapse, resulting in catastrophic layoffs that would affect not only schools but the whole economy. Federal spending kept hundreds of school systems afloat and is a good part of what saved the economy from a much worse decline in aggregate demand. The early-2009 stimulus package (aka ARRA) is the major part of the story but not all of it. If you didn't hear about the mid-December shifting of $23 billion from TARP into an account school systems could use to save jobs, you missed a substantial increase in the stimulus that should be considered part of December's second stimulus, along with an extension of unemployment benefits and federal subsidies for COBRA payments.
- College financial aid reform. The Obama administration is combining administrative changes to simplify the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) with a push to eliminate the federally-subsidized private lending program and shift resources into direct lending. While it is not politically possible (and probably not legally possible) in many states to require that all students complete the FAFSA, it is possible to make it much easier to complete, encouraging more students with real financial need to take advantage of financial aid.
- The growing role of community colleges... and erstwhile or soon-to-be-erstwhile community colleges.The July plan to give $12 billion to community colleges is a relatively small part of the overall policy emphasis of the administration on community colleges, from the appointment of a community-college president as the chief administrator of higher education policies to the greater scrutiny of proprietary training institutions (where do you think students who would otherwise go to proprietary job-training programs will be headed instead?). Ironically, two of the largest states are headed in a different direction, with Florida's community-college system disintegrating or morphing into a "state college" sort-of-system, and some voices in California voicing a similar idea with new caps on Cal State enrollments. (DC is headed in the other direction, with UDC splitting into two- and four-year institutions.)
- Race to the Top. Some of you may wonder why this isn't #1, but I'll defend my judgment that it's important but whether you like RTTT or not, it's not nearly as important a change as the issues I've put above this. But don't fret if you disagree: see #8.
- Common core standards effort. The halting, awkward, adolescent-like steps towards creating at least some vague national-level standards developed, and while Alaska and Texas may not be involved, and other states may opt out later, this is the curriculum equivalent of the 1989 Charlottesville summit, in that it is a national rather than a federal effort. (See Maris Vinovskis's recent book for that story.)
- City school control battles. From the renewal of mayoral control in NYC (and Bloomberg's relection) to an emergency manager in Detroit and the apparent devolution of Los Angeles Unified, governance is once again front and center in urban school politics. Well, maybe it never left as an issue, which is a cynical historian's perspective. But if you think I'm cynical, wait until Diane Ravitch's new book comes out in a few months. No, I haven't read the manuscript. But you don't have to before you can take a good guess at what Ravitch will say about New York City. (Recent developments in Detroit and Los Angeles came after she must have submitted her manuscript.)
- Teacher evaluation in local bargaining. Collective bargaining agreements put the AFT in the center of teacher evaluation debates through its support of new arrangements in New Haven, St. Louis, and even Detroit. And both teacher evaluations and collective bargaining more generally are at the heart of disagreements between the Minnesota and Florida teachers union state affiliates, on the one hand, and state departments that would like teacher union signoffs on RTTT applications, on the other. Disclosure: I am a member of the Florida Education Association and was on the governance board for a two-year term that ended this past summer. I haven't had time to learn much more than what's available publicly on the Florida disagreement, but I'll give you one idea in the back of my mind that's also in yesterday's Ed Week story (requires subscription) by Stephen Sawchuk: both affiliates are merged (i.e., in both the NEA and AFT).
- Sexting as a news topic. This is the latest object of our perennial concern about youth behavior, made highly visible with the suicides this year by Jesse Logan and Hope Witsell. The main difference between teens' sending racy photos of themselves by cell and other foolish teenage behavior is that cell-phone technology enables a social chain-reaction from an MMSed photo that other (and more fundamentally stupid/dangerous) behavior does not. Not that any of these is a good choice, but if you knew that your teenager was either going to get addicted to a drug, become pregnant/impregnate someone, or send or receive a sext message, which would be the least inherently dangerous behavior? Fortunately, Mike Petrilli is correct about the state of American teenagers: the trends on seriously dangerous adolescent behavior is headed in the right direction... not that any reporters covering the sexting issue noted that fact.
- Textbook affordability. Arnold Schwartznegger's midyear ramblings about ebooks aside, there has been movement in several areas to address the rent-seeking behavior of both textbook publishers and college bookstores. This includes public and private ventures to create online textbooks with inexpensive print-on-demand options and textbook rentals, and Florida is probably not going to be the last state where public colleges and universities need to list textbooks for all courses at least a few weeks before a term starts, to allow competition. There are some logistical problems with the last, such as with brand-new courses or new sections opened up to serve demand, but some tweaking will probably result in an institutionalized arrangement allowing students to search for books they can find anywhere.
So what have I missed? Any errors in judgment on the ordering? What do you think the issues for 2010 will be? Time to kibitz!
December 21, 2009
I agree with Paul Cottle: set a date for science
In response to Florida Commissioner Eric Smith's weekend op-ed in the Tallahassee Democrat (responding to the December 13 op-ed by FSU physics professor Paul Cottle), Cottle says, roughly, okay, maybe not this year, but set a firm date for setting up EOC exams in all central science areas. I'll go further: Florida needs to set a firm date for increasing the lab-based courses required for a standard diploma, including chemistry, physics, and an earth/space science as well as biology. Even if it's for the class of 2015 or 2016, we need a deadline.
There are several reasons to do so:
- The challenges of this century require a citizenry that has a much better understanding of science. I don't care if you don't work in a field related to science; if you vote, I want you to understand some basics of science. So do my children. So should you.
- Minimum requirements can reduce the inequalities of course enrollments. Gender differences in high school math and science enrollments shrank dramatically between the early 1980s and this decade. Part of the change was the fact that many states, especially larger states such as California and Texas, increased their core-academic graduation requirements. Right now, there are dramatic inequalities in who takes advanced science courses. My 17-year-old daughter and most of her friends who are seniors are taking a second year of some science (in her case, physics), partly because of their interests but also because her school offers those courses. Set the requirements higher, and school districts will have to figure out how to make more seats available in science classes.
- Minimum requirements set the floor for what the next generation of elementary teachers knows. About a century ago, W.E.B. DuBois argued that African American activists had to care about the academic training of future teachers, and he is still right, and his point is correct for teachers of all students. Except that while DuBois talked about the "Talented Tenth" in the early 20th century because he knew that teaching was the most attractive profession for college-educated African Americans, we can't assume that any more. We no longer have a world where teaching is the best professional opportunity for women or for all members of marginalized cultures and races. That's a tremendous advance for the basic fairness of our society, and that means that the realistic pool of teachers is comprised of all adults with baccalaureate degrees. So we need to think about the pool of elementary teachers coming from the Talented Third or the Talented Half (which is a statement of relative attainment, not inherent ability). Want to attract new teachers from elite colleges? Go right ahead, but that still won't get you more than a fraction of the likely set of teachers in the future. Want to increase the content expertise of teachers? Great, but for the most part those requirements will focus on subject specialists in secondary schools, not elementary-school teachers. The majority of elementary-school teachers will still come from public university graduates, and many of them will have had their second-to-last lab science course in high school. (In many universities, students can satisfy the general-education requirements in science with one class.) The central question here is how much lab science do you think elementary-school teachers should have experienced?
- Technological breakthroughs 10-25 years from today will be crafted by the hands of those in high school now and in the near future. The real work of science and engineering research stands on the shoulders of senior researchers in any field and also relatively new graduates from college (whether grad students at a university or new employees in the private sector). Much of bench sciences these days is a team enterprise, not the work of a brilliant faculty member working alone. While this is not as persuasive an argument for me as the ones above, because only a limited number of high school graduates become members of such laboratories, it's a good thing to have a larger pool of people who are qualified to think about this work.
So I agree with Paul Cottle: the state legislature should look at its dance card and put down science for the near future. It doesn't have to be the first dance coming up, but it should be listed there somewhere.
December 13, 2009
Turnaround or abandonment in NYC?
The extent of school closings in New York City is becoming evident, and after JD2718's posts on the subject over the past half-week, UFT's Leo Casey provides an overview and alleges an ulterior motive (to create available space for other purposes, not to improve education).
I'm far from NYC and can't speak from close knowledge of the city schools, and I'm still grading student work so I have no time to read extensively. But this is an important story and rolling conflict, and there are a few predictions I'll hazard:
- At least one conservative will commit rampant inconsistency by simultaneously (or nearly simultaneously) weeping over the demise of the DC voucher program and applaud Klein for his bold moves, repeating the double standard on the issue I have described before.
- A small handful of schools may be preserved through fairly heroic efforts, but most of the closures will stand.
- There will be no effective way to hold Tweed responsible for consistency and rationality in its school opening/closing decisions.
In truth, many administrators engage in maneuvers that appear as arbitrary as Klein's closures do, but rarely is it on such a scale or so visible beyond the locality.
December 9, 2009
Online grandiosity failed, so get back to work
So U21 Global looks like it's failing, after the dumping of U of I Global and the morphing of Western Governors from the "we're going to conquer the world through online enrollments" stage into the "we'll settle for 10,000 students based on a Netflix model of tuition with half of our students in teacher ed" stage.
This is not the death of online education, which exists at virtually every institution of some size. Nor is it the death of scaled-up online education, since there are several outfits, notably the K-12 Florida Virtual School, which appear to have done just fine at a large size. So what's made the difference between the thriving programs and the dying programs?
- Thriving programs serve specific purposes. Florida Virtual School is not trying to conquer the world. It addresses a few specific needs, notably providing catchup classes, a few basic requirements that many students would like to "get out of the way" to take other classes they prefer face-to-face, and some opportunities unavailable in smaller districts. The fact that thousands of students in Florida find those valuable is related to the size of Florida, not a lack of specific planning on the part of the Florida Virtual School's administration.
- Thriving programs have stable (and nurtured) feeder relationships. An online program within a university can develop constituencies much more easily than Vague Global Program, and the Florida Virtual School has cultivated or taken advantage of a number of ways that students find out about its strengths (as far as I can tell, from other students and from counselors).
- Thriving programs have staff and teachers in a relationship modeled on bricks-and-mortar schooling. Florida Virtual School has made a point of explaining its acceptability in part because it has a dedicated staff and faculty "just like" the local public school down the street. As far as I can tell, thriving online programs within universities tend to treat faculty teaching online like other faculty, largely because they are faculty in regular departments and because the hiring patterns for full-time faculty normatively follow departmental patterns. How many ads in the Chronicle have job positions in an "online" department as opposed to a position in anthropology, economics, marketing, etc.?
What appears to have died is online grandiosity, and that's a good thing.
December 7, 2009
"The gap is gone"
If Aaron Pallas's report is correct, and Roland Fryer did tell Anderson Cooper bluntly in reference to the Harlem Children's Zone and Promise Academy, "The gap is gone," Fryer committed an understandable but all too common sin of education reformers across the centuries: overpromising. I've been in the room as one or more program directors and the like have promised the sky, the moon, and a few thousand stars to stakeholders and potential funders. Every time it's happened I've winced, because I've seen the storyline play out many times before: do something good, overpromise, and then see the program never be able to fulfill the more grandiose claims.
To me as an education historian, this is not an issue of whether we're adjusting for social class and other variables. Nor is it whether Geoffrey Canada is a good person (go read Paul Tough's book if you doubt that). Or whether Canada himself is overpromising: "it's worth about an hour of celebration" is his comment about the test score reports. It's about a persistent dynamic in education reform of being so desperate for something that works that you see more than is there.
I don't get that sense from Canada, who strikes me as driven and gritty and tied to what is happening to the kids in the area he's working. I'm worried about the talk around Canada and the HCZ, of taking Fryer and Dobbie's recent paper on the Promise Academy (which strikes me as fine work, but just one paper) and seeing that one paper as definitive. I've read Paul Tough's work (assigned it to my summer class), and I want HCZ to do everything Canada wants it to.
But I also want someone to look at it judiciously. And here's the irony: while it's common for a program head to be enthusiastic and a professional evaluator to be jaundiced, what is clear in the 60 minutes segment (and everything else I've read about Canada) is that the roles are reversed here. Canada's driven enough to be skeptical, to have changed school and program leaders when he doesn't see the progress he wants. Fryer? Well, check the CBS video of the segment between minute 10 and minute 11 (while watching the whole 14-minute segment). He said "the gap is gone" as baldly as Aaron Pallas claimed.
Yes, you're hearing me wince.
December 5, 2009
Are central Florida schools flouting Florida law limiting test-prep?
I have heard from teachers and students in three area districts (Hillsborough, Pinellas, and Hernando counties) that secondary teachers in some subjects are being ordered to spend the first 10 minutes of class suspending the curriculum and teaching material from another class. In the case of two counties (Pinellas and Hernando), I have heard stories that math teachers are being asked to teach 10 minutes of reading--not include word problems in math, which is certainly appropriate, but teach reading (a subject very few of them would have certification in). In one county (Hillsborough), I have heard a report from a student that a high-school anatomy teacher has been asked to spend 10 minutes reviewing other science subjects (and the emphasis appears to be in chemistry), probably to prepare students for the 11th grade FCAT science comprehension exam.
In 2008, the Florida legislature added a section to the existing law on assessment (F.S. 1008.22(4), if you're curious), specifying limits to what schools can do to prepare for tests, specifically
STATEWIDE ASSESSMENT PREPARATION; PROHIBITED ACTIVITIES.--Beginning with the 2008-2009 school year, a district school board shall prohibit each public school from suspending a regular program of curricula for purposes of administering practice tests or engaging in other test-preparation activities for a statewide assessment.
There are a number of exceptions to this prohibition--school districts can distribute sample test books, teach test-taking skills in limited quantities, etc.--but the spirit is clear: schools are not supposed to be engaging in test-prep that is a substitute for instruction. And taking time away from math class to teach reading, or away from anatomy to teach chemistry, looks like it's clearly prohibited.
It's also counterproductive from an administrative standpoint: if you wanted to add reading instruction, why would you ask a math teacher to do it? I should be clear: these are unconfirmed reports rather than documented examples. But if these reports are true, this clearly looks to be an end-run around ordinary curriculum policies requiring a certain amount of instruction in the classes to get more instruction or more test-prep in for high-stakes subjects.
There is one additional legal problem with this practice: there are both state and federal policies about teacher qualifications. I bet it's illegal in a number of respects to assign math teachers to teach reading and then report that everyone instructing in a subject is properly certified.
I have contacted the three districts in question to ask where the policies required by the law are. If you are aware of any specific examples (and I would need the school, date, class, period, and witness for sufficient documentation), please contact me by e-mail (sherman dottish-thingie dorn at-symbol-stuff gmail.com).
November 12, 2009
Race to the Top: review, revise, redux
I am in California this weekend for the Social Science History Association annual meeting, where we get to talk about Maris Vinovskis's book on the last quarter century of school reform, and since one of my copanelists Saturday morning is Jennifer Jennings, I finally get to meet the sociologist-formerly-known-as-Eduwonkette in person, face to face. Because several family members live in Costa Mesa, I also get to enjoy Kean Coffee about 20 miles south of the conference hotel/cruise ship (when the heck did the SSHA officers decide to book the Queen Mary??!).
While the focus of the book panel will be ... well, Maris's book, I'm sure we'll be talking about Obama education policy at some point, including Race to the Top. I was rushing around last night not getting enough done, so I didn't have a chance to do more than casually skim the stuff that's now available on the revised final guidelines. A few initial thoughts:
- Bottom line? No idea. I traveled west and had coffee (see above), so I don't have a bad case of jet lag, but I've been on planes for 7 hours today.
- I very much like the competitive priority on STEM fields. That uses a standard device for focusing grant-writers' minds in USDOE competitions (the bonus points for meeting a competitive priority). (Disclosure: it looks like my state's department of education is following the push a bunch of us have been making about using Race to the Top funds for end of course exams, especially in science.)
- From the list of changes made, it looks like there have been a lot of political calculations made on what changes had to be made to keep stakeholders in the game and what had to stay the same to satisfy policy goals.
- Duncan is not anal retentive enough to make the points add up to a "nice round number." I have a suspicion this is deliberate, and if so I think I know the reason why.
- People who focus on the total potential range of points for each section are missing an important feature of point distributions in scoring systems: it's the actual range and not the potential range that matters on rankings. If the potential range is 58 points from top to bottom on one component but the scoring leaves a real-life range of 10 points, it doesn't matter that the total number of points is 58. It could have been anything from 10 to 58. So what matters is how the reviewing panel looks at everything.
If we have time, I'll try to persuade Jennings to put on her Eduwonkette cape and save the state where I grew up. But I think California's problems are beyond what even a brilliant sociologist can solve. At least I get to see family members, which is worth the jet lag I'll be fighting in the next week.
Methodoxology
My graduate students are reading Jeff Henig right now, and it appears that few editorial boards or other advocates have taken his argument in Spin Cycle seriously, at least from reactions to the latest sets of charter-school reports issued by think tanks. Ritualistic incantations at the publication of the Brand New Latest Report Showing That Your Deepest Beliefs Are True should be tempered by the possibility that Sean Reardon might soon write a Think Tank Report focusing on the study's methods. Hoxby is a respected economist, and the key point of Reardon's report should be to remind us that one study does not a literature make. As Henig argued, individual studies are drops on the mill's paddles and are very rarely the whole stream. Or as Colorado's Kevin Welner said in response to Reardon's review of the 2009 Hoxby report, even the most enthusiastic reader of a study on one city might wish to "explore the causes rather than to jump to broad conclusions." I will hereby jump to the broad conclusion that this is wise advice.
November 10, 2009
Incentives for high school curriculum change
Leslie Maxwell writes a short and solid blog entry (and maybe a story later this week) about the politics of college admissions at San Diego State University. Specifically, SDSU's move to eliminate a preferential admissions policy for high school students from San Diego has sparked a debate about perceived obligations to serve the local community. I am of multiple minds here about the consequences of excluding potential students who are unlikely to move to go to college outside their home county, but I don't know if the potential SDSU students outside the county are more or less advantaged on the whole, and what would happen with college completion.
On the other hand, I think see where the dynamics are heading... towards setting up one of the local districts (Sweetwater Union's school district) as a model because of its existing compact with SDSU. I recall Peter Sacks reporting on a certain high school teacher in Oceanside, and I'm curious how he'd see this. Calling Peter Sacks...
November 6, 2009
Issues in electronic grade reports
This morning's article in USA Today on electronic grade reports is a reminder of a few important facts in evaluating technology use in schools:
- Ease of use (in jargon, "usability") is critical to adoption. The systems that existed a few years ago were (and many still are) clunky and hard to use for both teachers and parents. New systems are becoming easier for parents to use, creating different accounts for students and parents (so students are aware of what parents can access but not interfere with that access), e-mailing notices of new grade uploads, and so forth. Larry Cuban's dicta about hybridization still hold true for anything living on a server.
- The digital divide is especially important to pay attention to when private records are involved. Many poor parents and children use public libraries for internet access. With libraries' reducing hours, and with the public nature of computer-use rooms in libraries, parents without at-home internet access face significant barriers to accessing information that is online. That doesn't mean that districts should not build on-line systems, but there needs to be careful thought about how parents might access the information when they do not have private internet access, in the same way that there is a need to plan for parents with disabilities, parents who do not speak English, etc.
- Districts should begin to figure out how to bring data together for parents. I'm not talking about a giant data warehouse--that becomes cumbersome (as well as security-fraught) if anyone can have access to databases--but a slim addition to the type of stuff that is showing up in the online grade report systems. I've proposed that for high school students there could be something akin to a look-at-everything-your-student-is-doing "dashboard" (if you'll forgive that term). Grades, extracurricular activities, jobs, etc. That will take some careful thought, but maybe an economic crunch is the right time to do it, when districts will think about the tradeoff in use v. design/maintenance costs.
My children's high schools are both using Edline this year, which is a dramatic improvement from attempts at online assignment and grade access a few years ago. There are still significant issues: some teachers find the interface hard, the school district took several weeks before realizing that maybe it might want to send the private authorization codes to parents in the mail rather than entrust them to students, and the school district still has not yet addressed the divorced-parents issue with regard to access (at least from the report of one co-custodial parent frustrated that the other parent has the authorization code and sole access but isn't using it). This is still significant improvement from my perspective.
Now, if only the school district will get new online systems for high school counselors to schedule classes, for special educators to work on IEPs, and teachers to sign up for professional development. At least in Hillsborough, those are legacies from when the district incompetently tried the low-bid strategy with vendors who didn't demonstrate capacity to fulfill the contracts, and so everyone is stuck with systems that still (expletive verb) (colorful adverbial expression).
November 4, 2009
Election results -- eh.
Andy Rotherham has a tempting interpretation of election results (and their effect on federal education politics), but I'm guessing he's just suffering from living in Virginia this morning. Normally, it's a very nice state, but I've seen some pretty-well-expected "darned my state is going down the tubes" messages from Va. acquaintances over the past 12 hours.
The more fundamental questions for any domestic initiative are whether health-insurance reform passes this year and what happens with employment in the next 4-5 months. My best guess is that health-insurance reform will pass and employment will start to nudge up but not by leaps and bounds. The result is that the potential for "oh my gosh I have to protect my seat" paranoia by majority Congresscritters will abate as a result of a health-insurance law but that pressure on the employment front will keep members of Congress nervous (regardless of party).
And, in any case, since the action in education politics is usually at the state level, that's where the import of yesterday's elections lies:
- The death of two more TABOR referenda means that education funding is imperiled only by a horrid economy and state revenues. Yippee?
- An unpopular Democratic governor in NJ is replaced by a Republican governor who may well enter office nearly as unpopular, facing a legislature that tends to protect wealthy communities at the expense of poor communities when it comes to education.
- A popular Democratic governor in VA is replaced by a conservative Republican governor who promised to focus on education (among other service-oriented campaign promises), with a legislature dominated by Republicans.
- In the sick state of New York, a billionaire buys a third term and a probable minor scandal about his elbows as well. In the meantime, an ineffectual governor will increasingly be overshadowed by state-level politics over education.
- The sick state of California loses its often-running lieutenant governor to Congress.
November 1, 2009
Ready-made dissertation topic on local school politics
Anyone looking for a dissertation topic on school policy or politics can now rest easy: read the Palm Beach Post's description of a local reform effort that blew up in the face of a superintendent. You've got everything in there from the data-driven mantra to parental backlash to odd bedfellows with the teachers union and coalition politics. I have been watching the story unfold for a few months and suspecting that there's been a lot more beyond the headlines. I want to read the book on this, so get cracking, somebody!
October 30, 2009
Do Times reporters know the difference between percentages and raw numbers?
I suspect the following is an unfortunate placement by the reporter on a story about record high percentages of young adults in college (with an emphasis on percentages):
"What's behind this," Mr. [Richard] Fry added, "is that we have the biggest pool of young adults we've ever had who've finished high school."
I suspect that this is in reference to the growth of enrollment in two-year colleges, not total college-going. That distinction was not clear in the article.
October 29, 2009
Channeling Jerry Bracey on "proficiency": it's political, not scientific
One of the late Jerry Bracey's hobbyhorses was the pretense that the NAEP achievement level labels were scientific, as he argued in 1999: "The standards have generally been the object of scorn and derision from the psychometric community." He was fond of quoting the 1999 report on NAEP proficiency levels, esp. from p. 162: " Standards-based reporting is intended to be useful in communicating student results, but the current process for setting NAEP achievement levels is fundamentally flawed." So when NCES issues a report comparing the implied theta-values of cut-scores for proficiency on state assessments to the theta-values of cut scores for proficiency on NAEP and both Ed Week and the Christian Science Monitor report on the paper with a straight face, we're obviously seeing one place where Bracey's voice is already missing.
I think Jerry perseverated on this issue, to the detriment of a sensible argument about political judgments. The larger point which is inescapable is that cut scores are set arbitrarily, and there is no way to avoid that fact. Those who support setting achievement levels hope and pray that they're arbitrary in the sense of arbitration and careful judgment, not by being capricious. But they are arbitrary, and even moreso the labels assigned them. What we know is that someone who scores at a "proficient" level on NAEP is scoring higher than someone in the "basic" band. That's all we know from those labels: ordinality. Moses did not come down from Mount Sinai with NAEP scores carved in tablets.
So what do we do with the inherently political nature of those labels? As I have argued in Accountability Frankenstein, the caution with which we use the judgments on cut scores should depend on the stakes of their use. If they're used to target resources, that's one thing (resources are going to be targeted in some manner), but the more that someone's job depends on them, the more wary we should be of how we set thresholds.
Today, however, NAEP labels and cut-scores are serving a purely performative act, to stigmatize states for their political response to NCLB. I hereby propose that we have the following new labels for NAEP achievement levels:
I think that's in the spirit of the day's report...
Correction: I assumed that NCES was using detailed data from the state assessments to estimate IRT parameters. Silly me. They were using distributional data for linkage. Oops... for me for forgetting the methods from the last such report. I'll let the measurement folks argue about the methods used here.
October 25, 2009
Ted Sizer's push
It had instant credibility to the vast majority of readers who all probably shifted uncomfortably while reading certain passages, recognizing themselves. And the terms that came out of that project...
Classroom treaties.Tell me if you don't remember an entire class wheedling a teacher or two to change an assignment, to lower expectations a smidgen, and also reduce the teacher's workload.
The anonymity of the high school student. Tell me if you don't remember the bright classmate hiding in the back of the class, never called on, never pushed to think hard, never affected personally by a teacher.
The shopping-mall high school. That was the title of one of the other books that came out of the same project, and while it had a bit more of an edge, it had the same subtext: we can expect more.
Exhibitions. Most people call them portfolios, but he wanted them to be exhibitions in a more public sense, to get adolescents to be proud of their work, even if they were works in progress themselves (as are we all).
I know that I'm going to read laudatory eulogies of Ted Sizer in the next month, and I hope they don't forget his strategic choices in the 1980s, as he put together the project that became Horace's Compromise, The Shopping Mall High School, and The Last Little Citadel. I suspect that while his own books will be emphasized, along with his Essential Schools project, there was a subtle and clever point about his focus on the plurality experience in suburban high schools after World War 2: "I'm talking about you. Not Other People who don't have your advantages. You. Your children. How we're not expecting what we can from teenagers in your life."
His underlying ethic was one of pushing teenagers in healthy directions. It's close to Deborah Meier's point about a small high school: adults are supposed to be "in your face" in the right ways, so adolescents don't disappear into the woodwork. It's a structure to encourage pushing without having to be pushy. "I love you and expect more from you." "No, you can't get away with that." "I know you can do more." It's not without choices, by any means, but the choices have consequences and need to be deliberate, not the first thought off the top of a teenager's head. "That's interesting. How else could you do that?" "How did that affect the people in your lives? What else did you think about doing?" It's about pushing teenagers into thoughtful independence. "Here's the end goal. How would you get there? What would be your first step?"
I'm at the History of Education Society meeting this week, and there are so many here who knew or worked with Ted Sizer, including Bob Hampel (who wrote The Last Little Citadel). Many of the historians of ed who knew Sizer closely have retired, and many of us (including me) are young enough and unlucky enough that we never met him. But we know both his scholarly contributions (the first serious historical work on the high school) and his contribution to serious reform discussions over the past quarter-century.
In lieu of sending flowers, don't let an adolescent get away with sloppy thinking this week. Push.
October 22, 2009
Duncan's talk at Teachers College: first impressions
Some quick impressions of the text of Arne Duncan's speech at Teachers College today:
Historical quibble: Duncan said he was speaking at a place where "giants like John Dewey played such a formative role." No, he didn't, or at least not at Teachers College. When Dewey moved from Chicago to Columbia, he moved from education to philosophy, which is south of 120th Street. At Teachers College at the time, Edward Thorndike was far more influential. And after Dewey left Chicago, Charles Judd ruled the roost there. Correction to the quibble: In comments, Aaron Pallas points out that Duncan's speech was sponsored by Teachers College but held in a lecture hall south of 120th St. (i.e., on the Columbia side of the Academic Gorge of the Upper West Side). I stand corrected. Or I blog corrected.
Right: Duncan is correct that teacher education in the U.S. is currently inadequate. Duncan is correct that colleges of education do not teach everything that teachers need, and the reports he hears (about the inadequacy of preparation for classroom management and use of student performance information to improve instruction) is consistent with plenty of other information.
Wrong: Duncan wrongly implies that teacher education can easily fill the holes that teachers see from the classroom. Many years ago, I remember seeing the surveys for one absolutely solid program that taught about behavior management and using student performance data in a rigorous manner, and the primary complaints of alumni/ae was ... that the program didn't prepare them adequately in classroom management. On some things there is no substitute for experience, I suspect.
Right: Duncan argues that teacher education programs (and states) have not looked sufficiently to what happens with their graduates and the students of their graduates. He points in contrast to Louisiana's longitudinal analysis of teacher preparation programs, and he is right to do so. In contrast with all sorts of self-aggrandizing projects, George Noell has built a team whose reporting is relatively careful with methods and conclusions.
Wrong: Duncan baldly claims that he knows what good teacher education looks like. Dear Secretary Duncan: don't you remember the other part of the speech where you said that we don't look sufficiently at outcomes? Either we need to look at data carefully to figure out what works and what doesn't, or we know everything right now. I suspect that we know plenty of stuff that does not work, but that doesn't say much about the inevitable tradeoffs--whether it's more important to put resources into giving teachers detailed assessment classes or putting principal and specialist candidates through those classes, whether it's more important to make teacher-ed students spend their entire last year in schools (as happens with one of the programs Duncan praises), or make them spend more time learning content. By highlighting and praising a few current fads in teacher education, Duncan is falling into the same pattern he criticizes schools of education for.
Right: Duncan did not try to point fingers in politically-convenient directions. He did not try to claim that all teacher-ed programs are alike in content or structure. In contrast to Arthur Levine's semi-ahistorical report, Duncan did not claim that a major problem somehow lies with those of us on the margins of teacher education (as if all colleges of education are run by philosophers and historians). He correctly pointed to the institutional environment within which teacher-education programs operate:
It is far too simple to blame colleges of education for the slow pace of reform. In fact, universities, states, and the federal government have all impeded reform in a variety of ways.
Minor quibble here: One could legitimately claim that colleges of education have been on the forefront of reform plenty of times in the past century, sometimes but not always on the side of improving education. See my note above about Dewey, Thorndike, and Judd. And Diane Ravitch is correct about Teachers College in one very important way: William Bagley was on the right side in the early 20th century, against the conventional-wisdom of the day about reform.
But the reasons why elite schools of education headed in the wrong direction at the time fits with Duncan's institutional context: for universities, the easiest money in the early 20th century was in collecting school administrators and administrator wannabes into graduate programs, at the beginning of a trend that no one who reads Duncan's speech text should be surprised about: for decades, education and chemistry regularly vied for the highest number of doctorates granted in the country.
I teach at a college of education, one of the larger ones in the country. At first blush, Duncan's criticism strikes me on the whole as reasonable, and far more reasonable than the more venomous attacks I've seen before. I would love to trade the double standards and incredible micromanagement of programs we currently experience in our state (and I could tell tales of some of the idiocies we experienced in our last joint state-NCATE review--and this comes from one of the faculty members who had relatively little time sucked away for this) for a requirement to pay attention to what happens to our graduates and their students after they leave us.
October 21, 2009
A gadfly remembered: Jerry Bracey
An e-mail from Kevin Welner yesterday announced Jerry Bracey's death Monday night. I only met him a handful of times in the past 20 years of his persistent, indefatigable efforts to poke holes in every public report or news story he saw as an effort to demonize public schooling. His Huffington Post column from September 25 is representative of both the topics that he addressed year in and year out and the disdain he felt towards those who he thought libeled and slandered public-school students and educators.
According to one online biography, he was an early-childhood psychologist at the Educational Testing Service and Indiana University before becoming a testing director for the state of Virginia in the late 1970s and then taking a similar position in a small school Colorado district in the mid-80s. At about the same time he moved to Colorado, he began writing columns on education research for Kappan magazine, and in 1991 he wrote a long article excoriating critics of public schools, primarily the authors of the 1983 A Nation at Risk report and anyone who repeated the claims in that report.
He has spent the last 18 years writing detailed critiques of whatever target happened to catch his eye. I first met him when he visited the University of Delaware in 1992-93 as he was beginning his second career as a mythbuster. My impression at the time was that he was smart, detail-oriented, and tilting at a windmill. I think my judgment at the time has been borne out by his writings since then. For more than a decade, the Kappan magazine published his annual "Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education," which usually praised a handful of individuals and dished out acidic criticism to those Bracey thought were fools or worse. For a few years, Kappan published his "Rotten Apple" awards with Bracey's annual report and then thought better of it once the first lawsuit threat appeared (when Bracey handed Willard Daggett the "No, you're not a ham, ham can be cured" Rotten Apple Award in 2000). Thereafter, every year at about the same time as his rotten-appleless report appeared in Kappan, Bracey would e-mail his annual Rotten Apple nominations to the world (or at least a long list of recipients), eventually publishing them and the annual report manuscripts online. Bracey was the Pauline Kael of education research.
Bracey was a true gadfly, a semi-retired professional who did his best to discomfit those who he thought were abusing their positions. He held no White House post, no political appointments in the U.S. Department of Education, no leadership spot in a well-funded think tank.
It is often the case that gadflies are ill-appreciated during their lifetimes, and often they pick the wrong windmills, or they tilt at windmills when they could be digging out the foundation instead. But Bracey was always there to respond to what he thought was poor reporting and sloppy thinking. There is probably no national reporter on the education beat in the past 20 years who didn't hear at one point or another from Jerry Bracey about Simpson's paradox or why NAEP's achievement levels were more political than scientific. Debra Viadero's blog entry today is very much in the vein I've read from reporters on occasion over the years: "He was, to put it bluntly, a thorn in our side. Once in a while, though, he had a point and I was awed by his tireless persistence and his willingness to heap criticism on government leaders from both sides of the political aisle, from Margaret Spellings to Arne Duncan."
October 17, 2009
An historian reads the business section (with apologies to John Allen Paulos)
I do not generally comment on economic matters, but I think historians of education can say something productive about the current myths plodding around the internet about the stimulus and the non-bank sector of the banking industry. First, some of the current discourse:
- Sean Snaith, an economist at the University of Central Florida, is unimpressed with stimulus dollars being spent in Florida, arguing that to do much good, the money should have come in and been spent much faster.
- John Quiggen is upset over at Crooked Timber over Goldman Sachs's profiting from risky ventures, or maybe upset that they're getting significant leverage over financial firms that have taken federal recapitalization and sat on the money, or repaid it to avoid additional regulation. I am not exactly sure how close Quiggen is to Krugman's being upset that we're not moving fast enough to regulate the unregulated (non-bank) part of banking.
These appear to be fairly standard concerns with economists. And I sort of understand that, except for a few perspectives from the history of stodgy institutions (schools):
- Sometimes moving slowly is what's needed for longer-term needs. As other economists have pointed out, White House economist-in-chief Christine Romer's broader concern has consistently been with the general output gap over several years. In contrast with a mild recession where the output gap really is short-term, we're going to have problems with output for more than 8-12 months. So spending over more than 8-12 months is not a bad idea. This is about saving the entire country's economy, not just Florida or any single state.
- Lots of institutionalized changes are hidden, and that's as true for the stimulus as it often is with education. For political purposes, the White House is now starting to highlight the jobs created and to a lesser extent the jobs saved by the stimulus. To my mind, it's the thousands of public-service jobs saved that are evidence of effective policy, but that's hidden because people have kept jobs (and it's hard to see non-change as a success). Similarly, part of the stimulus is the reduction in federal income-tax withholding. If I understand things correctly, that's more effective than a tax rebate precisely because it's not that visible, and people of low and moderate means are likely to take that extra money every paycheck and spend it on things they desperately need to pay for... and that keeps demand up. (Giving people a tax rebate may be perfectly justifiable public policy for other purposes, but I'm not convinced that it's effective for stimulus.)
- Instead of hoping that we can fix those buggers so they can't game the system anymore (a common dream in accountability policy), maybe we should assume that the attempt to game the system is as much of a permanent feature of financial institutions as it is in schools. And maybe we should take a long-term perspective that we always assume there will be attempts to game the system and a need to adjust public policy on a cyclical basis to respond to such gaming. As many have pointed out, even if the bank-in-name side of banking has recovered and started to lend again (and I think it has), there is a huge hole where the non-banking side used to leverage itself out the wazoo to give out subprime loans, liars' loans, and the like. Yes, there needs to be better regulation of the finance industry, but we should assume it is always incomplete and never done. An example of where the evolution of financial regulation worked is in so-called peer-to-peer lending, where propser.com and lendingclub.com popped up in the wake of Kiva's charity microlending on a social platform. The difference between charity social-networked lending and social-network lending with interest is disclosure and risk. In Kiva, you're not expecting interest, and you know that your money loses value every day it's out there in a loan. But that's not a problem since your goal isn't making money. In 2008, the Securities and Exchange Commission ruled (properly, I think) that the Prosper and LendingClub operations were essentially securities and needed to be run as such. And both sites have now been approved and reopened as SEC-approved securities operations. This is where regulation works well to keep things transparent. This doesn't mean that P2P lending serves the functional role of putting money to its most productive uses, but I don't think subprime lending did, either, and at least the risks exist and are stated up front, while individuals have the power to make both wise and foolish investment decisions.
And now, I'll crawl back into my HistoryCave, waiting for the next Little Red Schoolhouse silhouette to show up on the underside of my metropolis's clouds to signal another emergency requiring an Historian of Education.
October 14, 2009
Don't exercise: you'll destroy the world
If you had asked me this morning what I expected from the latest round of NAEP math scores and what was going on in DCPS, I would have told you to expect NAEP math scores to increase at a snail's pace with loads of arguments about what that meant, that Michelle Rhee seemed to have decided at long last that working out a deal with Randi Weingarten was more important than a charismatic image, and that maybe we should focus on long-term issues more than evanescent news stories.
After I exercised midday ... and got dizzy and fainted slighty (I'm fine, don't worry, it's only a flesh wound) ... only one of those statements turned out to be true. Fortunately, it's the most important one. I wouldn't make too much of the NAEP trends from a single cycle, nor of the apparent resurgence of the image of Michelle Rhee the Warrior/Tyrant (depending on your POV).
But I've got to say I'm a little worried here. I partially lose consciousness, and a little bit of the universe's fabric frays. I've learned my lesson: I'll never exercise again, to keep the world and reality safe.
For those who are curious: probably a combination of too-little a/c in the gym and my body trying to fight off a virus. My daughter had a fever last night, and while I don't have a fever, I've been exhausted for the last 3-4 evenings. And the most embarrassing detail? It all happened at the leg-press machine. I mean, if you've ever looked at me, you'd say, "If that guy ever faints while working out, it'll be on upper-body work. No real biceps, and don't even try to identify triceps on the man. But the thighs and below? Not a problem." Apparently the large muscles in my body had a larger appetite for blood and oxygen than was healthy.
The comparability fly in the Ouchi/principal-autonomy ointment
Yesterday from a "stakeholders" meeting (I think at the USDOE), Charlie Barone tweets,
Richard Laine of Wallace Foundation: forthcoming Rand study will show [principal] autonomy in hiring a key factor in student achievement.
I've been expecting something like this for a while, not because I'm connected to a RAND insider (I'm not) but because this is the obvious new version of decentralization form that would marry the 1980s-90s site-based management fad with new managerial fads in education.
To some extent I am attracted to Bill Ouchi's argument about principal autonomy leading to lower total student load. Ouchi's claims about total student load is essentially one of Ted Sizer's central arguments from Horace's Compromise, that the number of students a teacher sees is a key factor in the ability to push student achievement. But... and here's a fairly important but... Ouchi's work is tantalizing rather than definitive (because it has not be replicated substantially in terms of total student load), and the temptation to manage large urban districts as "portfolios" with quasi-independent school-level management may push a single form of decentralization at the cost of comparability in expenses and access to great teachers.
What the heck do I mean by that? In a sentence, we may not want principals to have complete autonomy in a task where they have relatively weak skills: knowing which novice teachers are going to be great teachers.
Everyone and her or his grandmother is focusing on the problem of
where senior teachers work. This is an intellectual sleight of hand if
you simultaneously argue that teachers with seniority are taking
advantage of contracts with seniority privileges on transfer to avoid
schools who need them and also insinuate that experience means nothing.
Let me get this straight: we need to prevent experienced teachers from
exploiting labor-market choice to move to schools with more comfortable
teaching situations because... they're not inherently any better than
teachers with only a few years of experience? This is an inconsistency
ripe for Jon Stewart-like treatment.
More important than the intellectual sleight of hand is the way that this argument ignores an opportunity for a simple but politically sensitive intervention we could make that could simultaneously improve the lives of poor children and new teachers: create regional new-teacher clearinghouses and matching services. Here's the thought experiment: Far from decentralizing, I think it would be a healthy system for schools to require new teachers go into a large regional market where vacancies for relatively new teachers (e.g., those with fewer than three years of experience) would be balanced with a matching process akin to matching of med-school graduates to residencies. This would require collective bargaining and regional agreements between districts (or changes to statute), but here's the idea:
Brand-new teacher's perspective: A new teacher registers with the regional teaching market clearinghouse, with all of the stuff you'd want applicants to provide. The clearinghouse is directly tied to vacancies in the region, and that would probably include multiple districts in most parts of the country. The clearinghouse matches teachers to jobs for the first year. The teachers and administrators are told, explicitly, "This is a one-year arrangement. In the second year, the teacher is headed to a new school, and the administrator provides an evaluation knowing that the teacher is not coming back to that school until at least two years down the road." And that's what happens. At the end of the first year, the clearinghouse matches jobs to teachers who want to continue teaching and whom the first-year administrators recommend continue. Same with the end of the second year. And the clearinghouse's job is to make sure that by the end of a new teacher's third year, that teacher has worked in multiple settings, with different characteristics of students (at least within the range of the region), in areas of the teacher's documented expertise (i.e., no out-of-field matches).
At the end
of Year 3? Open market in the spring, in most places, and
administrators wanting to hire on the open market must hire teachers
with at least three years' experience -- in other words, teachers for
whom there is a record of evaluations from different administrators and
for whom there is a record of performance for students in different
settings (within the range of the region's student population). Schools
are allowed to hire teachers who worked in their schools before... if
the now-third-year teacher wants to work there again.
Benefit
to teachers: first-year teachers stuck with horrible administrators (or
generally toxic environments) know that they'll be moving on if they
survive. They'll get experience with multiple settings where they'll be
able to demonstrate their chops. At the end of their third year,
they'll have some variation in experience with administration to be
able to judge people better when applying in an open-market situation.
Disadvantage to teachers: if you happen to get lucky and get a great
job in Year One, you have to move on.... and let another new teacher
get the benefit of that experience.
Benefit to
administrators: because new teachers are forced to move on after a
year, honest evaluations are less likely to result in social
backlashes. When you hire on the open market, you'll know you'll have
evaluations and (where this is gathered) other performance data that is
from school settings with a range of student populations. Disadvantage:
you don't get to hire absolutely new teachers; you get whom you get,
and if you were great spotters of talent, or you think you're better
than the average principal at spotting good talent, you'll be upset.
(Personally, I think I would prefer this as an administrator: if you've read Moneyball, you know the sabremetricians' rule of thumb: you can predict a baseball player's professional performance from college experience, but someone straight out of high school is just a raw bet without college experience. Why would you want the authority to make hires in a situation where you're almost guaranteed to be a worse judge of talent/skill than any other personnel situation? Then again, I'm sure many principals think of themselves like the [very poorly-predicting] old scouts of baseball, making seat-of-the-pants judgments.)
Advantages
for systems: See advantages for administrators above. In addition, you
have lower risk with variation in administrators' skills in talent
judgment, while principals would still have the autonomy to pick more
experienced teachers, after they pick up enough of a record for
administrators to see who has more talent. You could also get
development of evaluation skills in a regional context without
diseconomies of scale. If clearinghouses have to track teachers, they
could also be tasked with additional evaluation responsibilities across
a region. Advantage for relatively poor systems: you know that
wealthier districts will not be able to be as much of a magnet for new
teachers, because of regional rotation, and you could push
administrators to do what is necessary to convince teachers that they
want to return to your district after their initial three-year rotation
is done. Disadvantages: there would need to be legal agreements to
cover this, and there would be some logistical challenges in
identifying vacancies (and making sure those vacancies are reported
accurately and promptly) as well as the operation of a clearinghouse.
School districts would have to delegate hiring authority for some of
their jobs to a regional body, and if school systems really thought
that they were hot stuff in terms of talent scouting, that might be
hard to swallow. (See above and Moneyball on the egos of baseball scouts and possibly school administrators.) Disadvantage for wealthy districts: poof
goes your advantage in recruiting brand-new and relatively-new
teachers, because they'll spend some time in your districts but also
some time in poorer districts.
Now, the payoff in terms of debates about comparability: a regional new-teacher clearinghouse/matching process would instantly equalize a significant part of the teaching staff across a region, because of rotation among jobs and districts. Yes, there would still be an advantage of wealthier districts in attracting teachers with three or more years of experience, but poorer districts would know that they at least have a shot of persuading new teachers that they can make a good career inside a district... if the relatively new teachers have an experience that is supportive.
Remember that this is a thought experiment: I don't know of any places with regional new-teacher clearinghouses/matching services, and I dreamed it up out of whole cloth (plus some inspiration from what happens with med-school students). But I think it points out a structural problem with giving principals entire autonomy: with complete autonomy, there is no balancing out of regional needs. Equality of opportunity would depend entirely on the skills of individual principals, and while principals are extraordinarily important, that's putting a heck of a lot of eggs in a single basket. If you care about making sure that a broad range of students have access to great teachers, there are serious dangers in the Ouchi principal-autonomy approach.Why you don't always need a statewide charter authorizer
I don't understand the obsession some people have with multiple charter-school authorizers. In Florida, it has always been the county school board since the charter-school law was first approved in the mid-90s. A few years ago in Florida, the legislature decided for some reason that not enough proposals were being approved and created (and spent gobs of money) on a commission that would be an uber-authorizer. To me, it looked like a giant loophole for low-quality applications and politics. Fortunately, the state court system struck down the law as an infringement on the constitutional authority of school boards.
While there may be an apparent conflict of interest between an elected board and charter-school authorizer, in fact there has not been. And there is a need for people with at least some experience looking at schools to vet the proposals. In Manatee County, for example, staff are going to recommend that the school board reject 8 applicants to open charter schools, and at least from a Bradenton Herald article, the rejections would come for some fairly good reasons. There is no charter cap in Florida, and a number of school boards have no problems approving well-planned charter schools. In addition (and this is fairly important), we have a public-records and open-meeting statute that is rigorous, and the administrative rules in place in Florida make it difficult for a public agency to be arbitrary without being held accountable on appeal.
Disclosure: I have been associated with two organizations that have started charter schools... and then stopped running them. In one case (my university), it was planned in my first year and I would not have had the chance to participate in planning. The USF charter school was essentially turned over to the county public schools (and became a local public school within the system) some months ago. In the other (a non-profit organization), I expressed my concerns about organizational capacity from the inside, the charter school started operations, and I was no longer a member at the time that the school closed.
October 12, 2009
News item: Boy Scout suspended for being prepared
The suspension of Zacharie Christie is the latest tomfoolery in zero-sense discipline policies, because the tyke decided to bring his Boy Scout cutlery to school. Next: Fox News special on the Evil Spork. And this brings to mind a parody of medieval-fandom-society "weapons at the door" policies:
A Bard was next whose goodly Voice has entertained us all
but he, too, was prevented from entering the Hall
and told he could not carry deadly weapons on the floor
he left his Voice and Harp among the weapons at the door
-- Joe Bethancourt, "Weapons at the Door" (1974)
October 10, 2009
One Blog Schoolhouse: the PDF
Should've been done a few months ago, but if you want to read the entire text of One Blog Schoolhouse, it's now available as a nonprinting PDF. (I recommend that you click the "PDF" link in brackets, since I don't know if scribd will convert a nonprinting PDF.) The entire thing. Absolutely free to read.
October 8, 2009
First, find me a box of cereal that squirms and drips snot in winter
Congratulations to former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who knows a critical rule of politics: declare victory whenever you can, no matter whether you were right. I am quite serious about his political acumen: his push of a system that assigned letter grades to schools was ingenious politics. And Bush deserves credit for supporting a research technical assistance center in Florida as well as funding for reading coaches. But Jeb Bush's comments to the Jeb Bush Celebration Conference this week had an interesting quip:
Frankly, if Walmart can track a box of cereal from the manufacturer to the check-out line, schools should be able to track the academic growth of a student from the time they step in the classroom until they graduate.
I am firmly in favor of using longitudinal data, but this comment is cheerleading and not serious discussion. There are significant challenges in the creation, maintenance, and use of longitudinal data systems, and Walmart-style tracking logistics don't touch the greater ones.
October 6, 2009
Dozens of Veblens, a handful of Heckmans, not one Keynes
Skimming the Ryan Lizza portrait of Larry Summers, reading Paul Krugman's focus on the size of the stimulus, and listening to Krugman's The Return of Depression Economics while driving around Tampa this week makes it clear to me that outside the bubble that is Fox News and talk radio, Krugman, Romer, and a number of other liberal economists are at heart technocrats: when they looked at the Great Recession, they saw an output gap that government could and should fill. This isn't socialism; this is Keynes. (As Krugman notes in passing in Return, Keynes was someone who believed in capitalism, in contrast to plenty of others who thought differently in the 1930s.) When you think there's a technical fix, you're not a revolutionary. And Krugman definitely thinks there's a technical fix to be had here.
Despite whatever else one might say about the dominance of economic policies by anti-empirical rationalists, freshwater Austrians, and other odd critters, Gertrude Stein's quip doesn't have a foothold: there is a there there somewhere. But we are far from there in education. There are a number of erudite, smart commentators on education, and while I try to learn from all of them, there is no Keynes. There are a number of technical savants in different corners of education, the education equivalents of James Heckman (and, heck, Heckman's helped out with small heaps of his talent focused on education), but there is no Keynes. And there are people who would like to or pretend to be systemic analysts like Keynes, but there is no Keynes.
In part as a result, when people debate education policy, it quickly slides into attacks on politics and posturing and whatnot. Now, of course people criticize Krugman for his politics and accuse him of posturing, but it's easy to see his technocratic leanings and from whence they come. There is no equivalent in education. Maybe there shouldn't be, but at least as a consequence, maybe we should stop pretending that there is a macro technocratic field in education. There just isn't.
October 3, 2009
Child murder, Chicago style
Chicago teacher Deborah Lynch pointed out in a Sun-Times opinion piece yesterday that one of the Chicago schools' "turnaround targets" this fall has been Fenger High School, near the gang fight that led to Derrion Albert's death and the school where she implies many of the combatants attend. (Hat tip/alternative source.)
I am not saying that knowing the kids better could have averted the melee and tragic death of last week, obviously. But trouble had been brewing at the school even before last week. Staff reported a riot the previous week inside the building, involving teachers being hit, and that two different police stations had to be called in to quell the disturbance. Those are the times when the staff members draw on their relationships with kids to urge restraint, to urge calm and peace, to try to talk things out rather than fight things out. Those are the times when a seasoned staff can identify strategies and resources to address and prevent further problems.
Lynch's argument is interesting and plausible. I'd be cautious of taking it at face value, but don't toss it out the window. As far as I am aware, there is nothing either to contradict or to support the claim that the length of time a staff (as a whole) has spent in a school is predictive of the general school environment. I suspect it depends on the staff; experienced good teachers and staff are going to have the types of relationships with students that Lynch describes.
But there is another important limit to Lynch's argument, and I'm thinking about the debate that's usually focused on academics rather than violence: the relationship between schools and the rest of students' lives. I suspect that if George Schmidt is correct, that the police congregated around Fenger rather than following potential combatants, any immediate investigation needs to focus largely on the tactical decisions of the police. It's possible that no matter what happened in the school, the gang fight would have occurred unless police decisions had been different.
The murder of Derrion Albert is representative of one fact: in violent neighborhoods students are usually safer in school than out of school. A skilled set of professionals can make it so kids are safe in school, safe enough to focus on school. And it's much harder to bring peace to a violent neighborhood without involving schools. What happens inside the classroom can change the conversations that happen outside school boundaries, but there are no guarantees. What if Fenger had not been the target of a turnaround effort: would Albert still be alive? I don't know.
Update (October 7): More on MSNBC, and more focused, on the rearrangement of enrollment patterns.
October 2, 2009
Whitmire and Rotherham fall prey to faux-trend fallacy
If I were a union activist without an historical perspective, I'd say ouch with Richard Whitmire and Andy Rotherham's WSJ opinion piece proclaiming a trend in news reporting on education and teachers unions. Or, to put it another way, there's an op-ed in Rupert Murdoch's new plaything proclaiming that a dying industry is giving birth to another trendlet about something, and we should therefore pay enormous attention?
Pardon my skepticism, but since I cut my teeth on documenting how one issue became a visible, recognized social problem in the 1960s (and the broader historical picture thereof), I have at least a little background to comment. I'd be cautious of making much of a handful of stories in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Washington Post. Most of the issues Whitmire and Rotherham mention have had small blips of attention over the past few decades, and you would expect there to be such blips in any year simply by random chance, with the only question being what issues pop up on the collective radar screen of journalists.
The bigger issues here are ... well, the bigger issues, or long-term trends in coverage. I'd wait a year or two to see if there is still a trend that anyone thinks is starting now.
September 24, 2009
Students can study more than one subject at a time
The future of our nation and world depend on our citizens' understanding of both how they interact with each other and how they interact with the natural world [emphasis added].
--FSU physicist Paul Cottle, responding to a critic who thinks we should be more worried about civics knowledge
As an historian, I agree with Cottle. I want my fellow citizens to have some grounding in more than one subject. I want my neighbors to know that a cookie contains more energy than an equivalent mass of TNT. And I want my neighbors to understand that Jehovah's Witnesses were the plaintiffs in the landmark 1943 case striking down a West Virginia law that mandated students say the pledge of allegiance. And I want them to have those small bits as part of a larger context from each discipline. I think it's possible to hold ideas in one's head from more than one discipline. More than possible: necessary.
Unfortunately, no one has yet taught high school students -- or college professors -- how to answer 80 e-mails in five minutes, which is why I now need to turn to my inbox instead of blogging about anything in depth. 134 e-mails. Yikes.
September 17, 2009
Serious science toy for the International Year of Astronomy: the Galileoscope
Galileoscope (not the ones in my house)
I wasn't going to mention it here until I got my hands on it, but the two Galileoscopes I ordered in the summer finally made their way to my house yesterday, so I can now tell you all: they're shipping! They're real! One is for us and the other is for a young man we hope to surprise with it (and not upset his parents by giving him an excuse to stay up far, far too late, as well as insisting that they drive him somewhere without light pollution).
These 25x telescopes were designed for the International Year of Astronomy (2009) to have much better optics than telescopes of similar cost ($20 per for small orders), and while I cannot vouch for their qualities (yet!), I am definitely looking forward to putting this together, putting it on a tripod, and looking up at the sky this winter (when Floridians can stargaze with some reliability). The people who are behind this project are dearly hoping that this will give kids all over the world an experience that helps teach them science and inspires some to go into science. I hope they're right!
The following is an image of the moon through a prototype of the Galileoscope:
A great site for astronomy photos if you can't stargaze today: APOD, or the Astronomy Picture of the Day. Today's is absolutely amazing (and that's going to be true no matter when you read this entry).
September 16, 2009
Pork-barrel airplane hangars or science?
Florida State University physics professor Paul Cottle has a wonderful way of comparing the state's science-education needs with what the state legislature's pork-barrel politics has produced in the recent past: think about the $6 million cost of the airplane hangar former House Speaker Ray Sansom stuffed into the budget a few years ago pretending to be a classroom building for Okaloosa-Walton Community College, and then figure out how many "Sansom Airplane Hangars" would be the equivalent of different options for science education. Cottle's list includes the following:
- 4 Sansom Airplane Hangers = a comprehensive set of end-of-course science exams for high school
- 5 Sansom Airplane Hangars = comprehensive professional development for science teachers across Florida
I'm biased: I have two teenagers in high school, I hate when politics distorts higher-ed governance, and want the state's economy to rely on more than tourism, cattle, and real-estate bubbles.
September 15, 2009
And now, Harvard digs deep in the public interest--NOT!
Is there anyone else who read of Harvard's new tuition-free doctorate in ed leadership supported by the Wallace Foundation and first thought, "Oh, that's in competition with the Broad leadership indoctrination inbreeding mutual backscratching society training"? I know what faculty and administrators thought: if there's a (reputational) market for a tuition-free, glitzy finishing school for superintendents, why shouldn't Harvard get in the game?
Reality-check request
I have what should be a more long-lasting podcast that I'm starting for both of my classes this semester. It'll be a set of historical perspectives on education news, and it should be public-access, though it's hosted on a walled-garden CMS. Right now there are three podcasts, and I'd appreciate if someone could try to add it to your podcast aggregator (whether iTunes or something else) and let me know if you can grab the episodes.
September 11, 2009
Health insurance reform and college completion
I have yet to see anyone discuss the obvious relationship I see between health-insurance reform and education policy: health-related financial crises and college completion problems. There are many reasons why students leave or switch colleges, but one of them is the financial fallout from health crises of students and their immediate family members. Over the years, I have known about a number of students who have either cut back from full-time to part-time status or left college entirely because someone got sick (either them or a relative) and that left a huge hole in the family budget. Especially for first-generation, older students, many of whom have children, many of whom are going to college to escape the dead-end, no/low-benefits jobs they're currently in, this is a nasty catch-22.
I do not know the extent of the problem, but the discussion within higher ed often runs something like this:
- We know some students drop out because of health problems, either directly or indirectly from the financial fallout.
- We have college-sponsored insurance plans, but either the premium or the coverage is lousy because the only people in the pool are the people most at risk of having problems.
- Let's recommend mandatory health insurance for all students!
- Oh, shoot -- the legislature is telling us we can't, in part because we're already in a financial hole and can't subsidize poor students.
That's what happened in Florida: one university started discussions about mandatory insurance, another (Florida State) took the lead and mandated insurance, a statewide group at the university level continued discussions, and the legislature (this year) banned any university but the first mover (FSU) from mandating insurance.
I don't know the exact extent of the problem, but this is one of the reasons why I am bewildered that major business groups continue to oppose health-insurance reform that would create nearly-universal coverage. With assurance of coverage, people can go out on a limb and start new businesses, something that business groups always claim they want to promote. With the dramatic reduction of health-induced bankruptcy and financial crises, more people would complete college, something business groups say they want.
September 9, 2009
Bowling for senators, dominoes falling, or some other inapt metaphor
Alyson Klein is reporting that Chris Dodd is probably staying with the banking committee, which leaves the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) chair to either Tom Harkin or (if he doesn't take it) Barbara Mikulski. While the rest of the world (rightly) worries about Max Baucus's control of/chokehold on health insurance reform, the HELP committee is where Ted Kennedy held sway. For those who doubt the influence of the Kennedy family on federal education policy, ask yourself who started substantial federal funding in both education for students with disabilities and research into special education, who created the Special Olympics, and who insisted on annual tests in ESEA originally, as well as who helped shepherd many education bills through Congress in the 1990s and in this decade. The most influential single politician in education policy in the 20th century may have been Lyndon Johnson, but the most influential family was definitely the Kennedy clan.
So there are some mighty big shoes to fill, and as important as those shoes, some interesting relationships to negotiate. As many people have said for months regarding health care policy, Kennedy had enormous negotiating credibility, and whoever replaces him will have to work very differently, in addition to having different priorities and ideas. I am going to assume that some version of health insurance reform will pass this fall, and the primary question about education policy mid-fall will be whether higher-ed policy or K-12 policy is more urgent, and how those issues play out vis-a-vis other legislative priorities.
If Harkin decides to drop the leadership of Agriculture for HELP, he is going to be a tough negotiator for the White House on NCLB/ESEA. Part of that comes from what I gather is a close relationship with Iowa's teachers, and part is probably from his status as a rural-state legislator (and wanting to protect federal funding that would normally go to Iowa in formula-driven processes but might be diverted in a discretionary program). In the end, I suspect he'll stick with Agriculture because he is from Iowa, but even if he is not the HELP chair, he'll still exert influence because of his seniority and the way the Senate works.
I don't know much about Mikulski and education policy, except that from her senate issues site, her focus is on higher education (and that is consistent with whatever vague impression I've had). If she were HELP chair, she'd probably push the higher-ed priorities, probably leading to K-12 issues (NCLB/ESEA) being left for late in 2010 or even 2011.
This just in: the Baltimore Sun's Paul West is reporting on the paper's political blog that Harkin is hopping from Agriculture to HELP. Wow. If that report is true, the USDOE's legislative liaison job just got about three times more interesting.
September 8, 2009
Rebuttal to the president and the extension of the silly season
One of my Chicago friends, author and professional smart aleck Adam Selzer, has the best rebuttal to the President's school comments today. The theme? "Responsibility is for squares. Slack off, buster!" (taken from one of Adam's FB notes--not in his rebuttal, but it captures the essence)
In the nutty wing of the loyal opposition, the next criticisms of the president:
- Republican Party of Florida chair Jim Greer will criticize Obama for "socialist breathing." Then, when he is presented a tape of what Obama actually sounds like when asleep, will proclaim, "Oh, it's okay breathing, but he changed his respiration to acceptable, American breathing after my criticism!"
- Radio/tv show host Glenn Beck will attack Bo as "the most racist dog in America, or at least the most vicious Portguese water dog in America, and probably an illegal alien as well. Maybe a Muslim terrorist illegal alien Portguese water dog who is waiting for us all to fall asleep."
The most serious (and legitimate) criticism I expect of the speech: too long. He was lucky he was in front of high school students, though fourth-graders would also have sat for the entire speech. But kindergarten students or seventh graders? He'd have had no chance.
September 5, 2009
Alterknit educashun polticks
In the alternate reality where pundits and talk-show hosts live, Barack Obama is not going to say Tuesday that students have a personal responsibility to work hard in school. Somehow this is indoctrination, or maybe unseemly politicking for all the 7-year-olds who will be voting in 2012. Though Richard Whitmire and many others are scratching their heads on this one, putative social conservatives evidently don't want to echo the fundamentally conservative point Obama will make: put yourselves to work and get a stake in society.
Do I really need to explain why the paranoid style of education politics is supremely nutty?
September 2, 2009
"Lake Wobegon" Klein
From pp. 68-69 of Accountability Frankenstein:
The complexity of an accountability system can also help muffle opposition to accountability if it gives a reasonable chance for students or schools to be successful in the system's labeling... the political potential to muffle opposition within a system may be more important than the technical qualities of a system, for schools typically trumpet any positive label on any website, pamphlet, or streetside marquis. All three of these states provide evidence of the capacity for complex systems to muffle dissent. In North Carolina, the majority of schools have received some recognition award in every single year of its accountability system's history. In Florida's system, 13% earned recognition in its first year, 1999, but that proportion rapidly grew, and a majority of schools received recognition awards in each of the years from 2003 to 2006. In California, 47% of California's schools earned statewide recognition in 2002, and two thirds of the schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District earned recognition.
I don't know why anyone would suspect that there is any political convenience involved in having the single letter grades assigned to a whole slew of NYC schools jump to A, but it's not isolated to New York. It's just that New York has overtaken Lake Wobegon as a symbol of overestimation of results. Then again, since Garrison Keillor spends several months a year in New York, maybe it's highly appropriate.
August 31, 2009
Structure, choice, or just good books to read?
Several years ago on the prompting of then-Governor Jeb Bush, Florida's legislature mandated reading classes for middle-school students and ninth graders. On the first day of seventh grade a few years ago, a teenager I know discovered that his reading teacher had assigned Stephen Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens. Yes, this was a stellar choice as mandated reading for the hard-bitten cynical set: time-management skills. You can imagine the snide comments from students ("great work of fiction"), and it was truly a double facepalm moment in the annals of reading instruction.
So when debate erupts over the New York Times "we have no news to report so we will make up a trend" story on letting students pick their own books, I hope you will pardon my bewilderment. I am not too old to remember the structure of middle-school English classes: you read some books together as a class, and then you read others on your own and wrote a book report. In my day, the "let's try to engage the students" ploy was letting students create dioramas. Today, I guess it's keeping a reading journal. Those are both fine as long as teachers understand that no trick-du-jour works with all students.
There is a role both for mandated reading and choice, and maybe 36 weeks of school allow both, as long as there is a reasonable chance that the mandated books will not be treacly. Less Stephen Covey, more Gordon Korman: "Go to the library and pick out a book with an award sticker and a dog on the cover. Trust me, that dog is going down."
August 30, 2009
Race to the Top comment sausage
A friend of mine from Chicago introduced me to the term link sausage as a blog entry that is not much more than a set of links. Here are links to various comments on Race to the Top (a tiny slice of the well-over-thousand comments submitted):
- National Education Association (Word)
- American Federation of Teachers (PDF)
- Learning Disabilities Association of America (PDF)
- New Teacher Center (part 1 and part 2) (both PDF)
- Thomas Kane et al. (PDF)
- Forum on Educational Accountability (Word)
- Charles Barone et al. (PDF)
As I expected, others have started to chime in on the NEA comments. The New York Times took the comments as a sign of obstinance. Former Park Ridge Education Association president Fred Klonsky wrote,
While it seems to me that it is late in coming, the letter from Brilliant is well deserved, and [Sherman] Dorn's comments notwithstanding, I think it reflects the views of the NEA membership. At least among those who have been following the debate.
I think that was my point: the comments reflected the views of a large slice of the NEA membership, but not in a productive fashion, and I fear that on balance it will harm the concrete interests of teachers (both in and out of the NEA) no matter how you want to define those interests.
Note: As Klosnky points out in comments, he's not an ex-president (yet). The error is all mine in sloppy reading of his about page.
August 28, 2009
I'm commenting on Race to the Top, and I want a pony, too!
Impressions of a quick skim of 20 or so comments on the draft Race to the Top regs:
- I couldn't find the national AFT comments anywhere.
- Thus far, the two sets of technical comments by the Learning Disabilities Association of America and the group of academics with Kane, Staiger, and several others (uploaded by Thomas Kane), respectively, earn my "okay, you guys read the regulations and targeted your comments" award. Whether you agree with them or not, the comments were shrewd and focused. (I happen to like most of the comments, which are practical and sensible on the whole.)
- The New Teacher Project signed onto the multi-organization letter that was essentially a vague "okay, we agree with this" note (with the advice for the USDOE to be selective in the first round), and then submitted comments that were, ahem, not nearly as far in the opposite direction as NEA but bewildering in its unbridled confidence in the suggestions made. TNTP staff, please read the comments written by Kane et al. You're smart, and they're smart, and they're much closer to the mark than you were this week. At least you don't come close to winning the second "I'm commenting on Race to the Top, and I want a pony, too!" award (first was to the NEA).
- I think that the California Teachers Association (the NEA affiliate in California) avoided the factual blunder in the NEA comments of asserting that Race to the Top is a mandate. Instead, they asked what states would have to give up in return for the money. In this case, they were deeply, deeply concerned with the threat to federalism embedded in asking that a state be able to link teacher and student records. That would be more plausible if TNTP's comments were enacted, but either the draft regs or the Kane et al.'s suggestions are reasonable in an imperfect world.
- One state department of education accidentally sent the USDOE its cover
letter to a national organization telling the national organization it
was sharing its reg comments, in the place where it was supposed to
upload comments. No signs of actual comments on the regs (thus far
today). Ouch! I suspect there are similar technical glitches in other places.
I didn't comment. This is the first week of classes, and I'm a firm believer in the biggest bang for my buck (or hour).
Greg Mankiw provides the laugh of the day
Economist Greg Mankiw provides the unintentional humor of the day: "Smart parents make more money and pass those good genes on to their offspring."
Smart parents years ago miraculously picked employers who survived the Great Recession without laying them off?
Smart parents are dumb enough to spend money on expensive private schools and expensive private test-prep services when according to Mankiw's claim their kids would do well anyway?
Smart parents who choose public schools are dumb enough to spend far too much for houses in wealthy areas because it's really not necessary for their kids to have a decent education?
Historical perspective: I think that Greg Mankiw is living in the past, a time when wealthy people would accept the argument that they're wealthy because they're smart rather than the argument that they're wealthy because they work their tails off. The second that we became a workaholic society, the arguments of Charles Murray, Greg Mankiw, and the like became dinoideologies. Wealthy people no longer need to argue that their wealth derives from their being smarter than other people in the sense of algorithmic cognition. And it's been years since I've heard any of that crap from actual wealthy people who don't fancy themselves as part of the chattering class. They and their close admirers will talk about their being "whip-smart," sure, but also working very, very hard and having the luck to have good mentors, the right opportunity at the right time, and so forth.
August 23, 2009
NEA's comments: righteousness over responsibility to members?
I'm an NEA member, through my membership in the United Faculty of Florida. I'm a skeptic and critic of high-stakes accountability. Wrote a book and a few articles on the topic. And I am astounded at the NEA's comments on the Race to the Top draft regulations. (Hat tip.)
It is one thing to submit a righteous objection to the entire program if you are an individual with no responsibilities but to your conscience and your personal judgment of posterity. It is an entirely different thing when you represent several million teachers and you submit a document that for all intents and purposes appears to have an internal audience inside the NEA. That's nice, in the worst sense of the word "nice," because NEA staff had a responsibility to protect and advance their members' interests, not indulge any of our fantasies. To put it bluntly, on what planet would this regulatory comment have any effect on the final regs?
Let me be clear on my perspective as an NEA member and as an observer of political processes: There are lots of reasonable individual passages within the document, but you don't submit a manifesto when you comment on regs as an organization. You don't submit a manifesto that covers up any potential for effectiveness with what amounts to political poison. And you don't submit a manifesto that undermines your credibility.
Two examples will have to suffice, because there's only so much I can wince at publicly: "we cannot support yet another layer of federal mandates" (from p. 2), or with regard to the creation of statewide longitudinal data systems, opposition to "[i]gnoring states' rights to enact their own laws and constitutions" (p. 24). The problem with these claims (and attendant tone of outrage) is that Race to the Top is not a mandate. Love it or hate it, it's something states must apply for.
There were certainly alternatives available to the NEA, including the following choices:
- Realpolitik: nudge the regs a bit to help state and local affiliates.
- Legal: set up a legal challenge after final publication.
- Abstinence: if you need to make a statement of conscience, declare that "we have serious doubts that this program will substantially help schools and will not participate in the regulatory comment process."
I may be dead wrong about this, and there may be some uber-secret strategy behind this comment, but from where I sit at the end of the summer, it looks like one of my national affiliates' new president's first major move has been a bunch of wasted electrons.
August 17, 2009
The principal as eunuch?
I will confess to tremendous confusion about the actual skill level of principals, especially after reading a bunch of stuff about teacher evaluation and teacher labor markets (and whether principals should be able to hire teachers directly). Many of those who criticize the current state of teacher evaluation note that principals usually are poorly trained in evaluation, engage in drive-by observations, and give satisfactory ratings to almost every teacher. Yet the same people who criticize principals' evaluation of teachers are often in favor of dramatic autonomy for principals in selecting teachers. I am confused: principals are incompetent at evaluating teachers, so we should give as much authority to them as possible in hiring?
In the comments on my entry about teacher evaluation policy debate ground rules, New York math teacher Jonathan writes, "Our current evaluation does not work well because administrators implement it poorly, not because it is inherently flawed. Why should teachers be punished (for that's what the refomers' schemes would do) for something that people other than teachers have messed up." And then he proposes a vague transition to holistic review of teachers. Again, I'm confused: principals have screwed up massively, so let's move from a checklist to an unstructured process where they'll be important partners?
The common phrasing here sounds remarkably like rhetoric that frames the principal as simultaneously a doofus and an entrepreneur, someone in a 1980s suburban-teen flick or a turnaround artist, a petty tyrant or a serious partner in collaboration, or, let's face it, a cipher moldable into whatever you think is necessary at the moment. In the early 1990s, Lynn Beck and Joe Murphy wrote a book about the changing metaphors used for principals, and I'm wondering how to think about the inconsistencies in how people write about principals. They should be functionaries in a giant bureaucracy aimed at achievement, I guess, and they can rise as far as their talents take them, but not to the top, which should be reserved for visionaries, and they can be trusted with all sorts of tasks.
The principal as eunuch, in other words.
It's probably a saner goal to see principals as human beings with a certain set of skills, and like all of us, that set of skills can be impressive but is always finite. The concerns I always have about systems and proposals that rely heavily on a single role within a school is that people are variable, including principals. Setting up the principal as a hero is no better than setting up the teacher as a hero.
August 16, 2009
What "multiple measures" looks like in reality
Friday's Sun-Sentinel article on the new evaluation scale for Florida high schools shows what happens when a state moves away from general-assessment test scores as the end-all and be-all of accountability. In this case, Florida's new scale for high schools rewards schools for graduating more students, especially those who have problems with the state assessments, for enrolling students in challenging courses, for students who succeed in the challenging courses, and for student success in voc-ed certification programs.
How are Broward County schools responding?
At South Broward High School in Hollywood, students will get the chance to take additional AP classes, such as human geography, world history, music theory and macroeconomics, in addition to more traditional offerings such as AP English and biology, said principal Alan Strauss.
They're also ready to better monitor performance of at-risk students and ensure the entire senior class is ready to graduate, Strauss said. "I say overall I would hold myself accountable for grad rate and preparing my kids for college," Strauss said. "I don't find a problem with that. I think that's what my job should be."
Surprise, surprise! A more balanced accountability mechanism leads to planning a more balanced set of programs for students. I can quibble with loads of details on the new scale, but the direction is the right one, and I think we'll know in a few years how this is going. I'll stick my neck out and predict the evidence will be reasonably good (in terms of outcomes). A small step for a single state, a giant step for accountability options.
August 13, 2009
How can we use bad measures in decisionmaking?
I had about 20 minutes of between-events time this morning and used it to catch up on two interesting papers on value-added assessment and teacher evaluation--the Jesse Rothstein piece using North Carolina data and the Koedel-Betts replication-and-more with San Diego data.
Speaking very roughly, Rothstein used a clever falsification test: if the assignment of students to fifth grade is random, then you shouldn't be able to use fifth-grade teachers to predict test-score gains in fourth grade. At least with the set of data he used in North Carolina, you could predict a good chunk of the variation in fourth-grade test gains knowing who the fifth grade teachers were, which means that a central assumption of many value-added models is problematic.
Cory Koedel and Julian Betts's paper replicated and extended the analysis using data from San Diego. They were able to confirm with different data that using a single year's worth of data led to severe problems with the assumption of close-to-random assignment. They also claimed that using more than one year's worth of data smoothed out the problems.
Apart from the specifics of this new aspect of the value-added measure debate, it pushed my nose once again into the fact that any accountability system has to address the fact of messy data.
Let's face it: we will never have data that are so accurate that we can worry about whether the basis for a measure is cesium or ytterbium. Generally, the rhetoric around accountability systems has been either "well, they're good enough and better than not acting" or "toss out anything with flaws," though we're getting some new approaches, or rather older approaches introduced into national debate, as with the June Broader, Bolder Approach paper and this morning's paper on accountability from the Education Equality Project.
Now that we have the response by the Education Equality Project to the Broader, Approach on accountability more specifically, we can see the nature of the debate taking shape. Broader, Bolder is pushing testing-and-inspections, while Education Equality is pushing value-added measures. Incidentally, or perhaps not, the EEP report mentioned Diane Ravitch in four paragraphs (the same number of paragraphs I spotted with references to President Obama) while including this backhanded, unfootnoted reference to the Broader, Bolder Approach:
While many of these same advocates criticize both the quality and utility of current math and reading assessments in state accountability systems, they are curiously blithe about the ability of states and districts to create a multi-billion dollar system of trained inspectors--who would be responsible for equitably assessing the nation's 95,000 schools on a regular basis on nearly every dimension of school performance imaginable, no matter how ill-defined.
I find it telling that the Education Equality Project folks couldn't bring themselves to acknowledge the Broader, Bolder Approach openly or the work of others on inspection systems (such as Thomas Wilson). Listen up, EEP folks: Acknowledging the work of others is essentially a requirement for
debate these days. Ignoring the work of your intellectual opponents is
not the best way to maintain your own credibility. I understand the politics: the references to Ravitch indicate that EEP (and Klein) see her as a much bigger threat than Broader, Bolder. This is a perfect setup for Ravitch's new book, whose title is modeled after Jane Jacobs's fight with Robert Moses. So I don't think in the end that the EEP gang is doing themselves much of a favor by ignoring BBA.
Let's return
to the substance: is there a way to think coherently about using
mediocre data that exist while acknowledging we need better systems
and working towards them? I think the answer is yes, especially if you
divide the messiness of test data into separate problems (which are not
exhaustive categories but are my first stab at this): problems when data cover a
too-small part of what's important in schooling, and problems when the
data are of questionable trustworthiness.
Data that cover too little
As Daniel Koretz explains, no test currently in existence can measure everything in the curriculum. The circumscribed nature of any assessment may be tied to the format of a test (a paper and pencil test cannot assess the ability to look through a microscope and identify what's on a slide), to test specifications (which limits what a test measures within a subject), or to subjects covered by a testing system. Some of the options:
- Don't worry. Don't worry about or dismiss the possibility of a narrowed curriculum. Advantage: simple. Easy to spin in a political context. Disadvantage: does not comport with the concerns of millions of parents concerned about a narrowed curriculum.
- Toss. Decide that the negative consequences of accountability outweigh any use of limited-purpose testing. Advantage: simple. Easy to spin in a political context. Disadvantage: does not comport with the concerns of millions of parents concerned about the quality of their children's schooling.
- Supplement. Add more information, either by expanding the testing or by expanding the sources of information. Advantage: easy to justify in the abstract. Disadvantages: requires more spending for assessment purposes, either for testing or for the type of inspection system Wilson and BBA advocate (though inspections are not nearly as expensive as the EEP report claims without a shred of evidence). If the supplementation proposal is for more testing, this will concern some proportion of parents who do not like the extent of testing as it currently exists.
Data that are of questionable trustworthiness
I'm using the term trustworthiness instead of reliability because the latter is a term of art in measurement, and I mean the category to address how accurately a particular measure tells us something about student outcomes or any plausible causal connection to programs or personnel. There are a number of reasons why we would not trust a particular measure to be an accurate picture of what happens in a school, ranging from test conditions or technical problems to test-specification predictability (i.e., teaching to the test over several years) and the global questions of causality.
The debate about value-added measures is part of a longer discussion about the trustworthiness of test scores as an indication of teacher quality and a response to arguments that status indicators are neither a fair nor accurate way to judge teachers who may have very different types of students. What we're learning is a confirmation of what I wrote almost 4 years ago: as Harvey Goldstein would say, growth models are not the Holy Grail of assessment. Since there is no Holy Grail of measurement, how do we use data that we know are of limited trustworthiness (even if we don't know in advance exactly what those limits are)?
- Don't worry. Don't worry about or dismiss the possibility of making the wrong decision from untrustworthy data. Advantage: simple. Easy to spin in a political
context. Disadvantage: does not comport with the credibility problems of historical error in testing and the considerable research on the limits of test scores.
- Toss.
Decide that the flaws of testing outweigh any
use of messy data. Advantage: simple in concept. Easy to spin in a
political context. Easy to argue if it's a partial toss justified for technical reasons (e.g., small numbers of students tested). Disadvantage: does not comport with the concerns of
millions of parents concerned about the quality of their children's
schooling. More difficult in practice if it's a partial toss (i.e., if you toss some data because a student is an English language learner, because of small numbers tested, or for other reasons).
- Make a new model. Growth (value-added) models are the prime example of changing a formula in response to concerns about trustworthiness (in this case, global issues about achievement status measures). Advantage: makes sense in the abstract. Disadvantage: more complicated models can undermine both transparency and understanding, and claims about superiority of different models become more difficult to evaluate as the models become more complex. There ain't no such thing* as a perfect model specification.
- Retest, recalculate, or continue to accumulate data until you have trustworthy data. Treat testing as the equivalent of a blood-pressure measurement: if you suspect that a measurement is not to be trusted,
take the blood pressuretest the student again in a fewminutesmonths/another year. Advantage: can wave hands broadly and talk about "multiple years of data" and refer to some research on multiple years of data. Disadvantage: Retesting/reassessment works best with a certain density of data points, and the critical density will depend on context. This works with some versions of formative assessment, where one questionable datum can be balanced out by longer trends. It's more problematic with annual testing, for a variety of reasons, though that can reduce uncertainties. - Model the trustworthiness as a formal uncertainty. Decide that information is usable if there is a way to accommodate the mess. Advantage: makes sense in the abstract. Disadvantage: The choices are not easy, and there are consequences of the way of modeling uncertainty you choose: adjusting cut scores/data presentation by measurement/standard errors, using fuzzy-set algorithms, Bayesian reasoning, or political mechanisms to reduce the influence of a specific measure when trustworthiness decreases.
Even if you haven't read Accountability Frankenstein or other entries on this blog, you have probably already sussed out my view that both "don't worry" and "toss" are poor choices in addressing messy data. All other options should be on the table, usable for different circumstances and in different ways. Least explored? The last idea, modeling trustworthiness problems as formal uncertainty. I'm going to part from measurement researchers and say that the modeling should go beyond standard errors and measurement errors, or rather head in a different direction. There is no way to use standard errors or measurement errors to address issues of trustworthiness that go beyond sampling and reliability issues, or to structure a process to balance the inherently value-laden and political issues involved here.
The difficulty in looking coldly at messy and mediocre data generally revolves around the human tendency to prefer impressions of confidence and certainty over uncertainty, even when a rational examination and background knowledge should lead one to recognize the problems in trusting a set of data. One side of that coin is an emphasis on point estimates and firmly-drawn classification lines. The other side is to decide that one should entirely ignore messy and mediocre data because of the flaws. Neither is an appropriate response to the problem.
* A literary reference, not an illiteracism.
August 12, 2009
Belated kudos to Broader, Bolder and to Fordham
In the whirlwind of my obligations this year, my reading has lagged, and I am late in recommending and praising two reports published in the first half of 2009:
- The Broader, Bolder Approach's accountability report, published in late June. This report suggests combining the use of achievement test data and on-site school inspections for school-level accountability. For those who have read Accountability Frankenstein, you'll know that I agree with those ideas. This report addresses the central gap in the original Broader, Bolder manifesto, and I am delighted to have read the proposal.
- In March, the Fordham Institute published a report recommending a scaled approach to accountability when private schools take public dollars. Their proposal is roughly that the more dependent a private school is on public funding, the more the school has to provide data and be accountable in a way similar or parallel to local public schools.
Both are thoughtful, well-reasoned brief arguments, and they move each debate in interesting directions. Whether or not you agree with the conclusions, you'll have things to think about.
Updated: Aaaaargh! Six days later, I realize I've been calling the group the Bolder, Broader Approach instead of the other way around. Dear readers: when I make a stupid error, please point it out as soon as you see it.
Proposed ground rules on teacher evaluation and test discussion
Seeing how too many writers about Race to the Top, tests, and teacher evaluation would have taken actions in the Cuban Missile Crisis that would have led to nuclear war--i.e., seeing the worst in opponents, or maybe seeing posturing as the best path forward for themselves personally or for their positions (sound like the health-care debate-cum-food-fight?)--I am hereby proposing the following ground rules/stipulations:
- The modal forms of teacher evaluation used in K-12 schools are not useful.
- Some aspect of student performance (abstracted from all measurement questions and concerns about flawed tests) should matter in teacher evaluation.
- At least one problem of including student performance in teacher evaluation is how to use messy and flawed data. This comes from the fact that current tests are flawed. Heck, all tests are going to be imperfect and create the dilemma that Diane Ravitch referred to this morning. But plenty of today's tests should embarrass anyone who approved their use.
- Yes, people who disagree with you have used inane arguments, and some of them might even have gotten some provisions through a legislature by logrolling. I know I can say the same about your putative allies. Let's call each other out on those moves, and then move on to the substantive issues. Doing more than calling people out on that at the time (i.e., holding grudges) is playing the game of "your side is dirtier than mine," and you will inevitably lose that game, especially if there's an historian in the room (and in addition to me, there's also Diane Ravitch, Larry Cuban, Maris Vinovskis, and others who can quickly point out where folks have played dirty political pool for decades, though many of us will just call it the standard operating procedure in education politics). See reference above to Cuban Missile Crisis. If Reagan make an arms-control treaty with Gorbachev, we can all be a little more mature in disagreements.
August 4, 2009
Your personal, homemade commission on tenure and test scores
Sick of finger-pointing in the absence of a New York state commission to study how to use test scores in teacher evaluation (including tenure) decisions? Look no further! In this space, we will be conducting our own homegrown commission over the next three months. No need for the New York Assembly and Senate to act! We'll do it ourselves.
What? you say. You're in Florida. Well, yes, but everyone knows that Florida is just the Southern branch of New York. My father grew up on Flatbush Avenue and graduated from Lincoln High School. He was in New York City for his residency in pediatrics (with an office in Bellevue, but that's another story). The Yankees' spring training home? Eight miles from my house.
And if that doesn't convince you, you should know that Alexander Russo runs his blog on Chicago schools from Long Island. If he can do that, I can run a citizens' commission for New York from here (and then someone in Chicago can run something in Florida).
Apply in comments: name, role in New York education, what you'll bring to the table.
August 2, 2009
The liberal arts and narratives of declension
There is a teacher's voice in my head, asking the logical question of New York Times reporter Patricia Cohen who speculated whether the humanities are in decline (perhaps because of the Great Recession) and whether older history subdisciplines are also in decline: "where did she go to school, and who were her teachers?" Evidently, the Times is hiring reporters who either never had good history teachers, never paid attention to them, or forgot one of the basic lessons in a good college history class: beware narratives of climbing societies, falling societies, or any society-wide "rise and fall." The February article brought the expected number of letters to the editor to a newspaper that might just depend on readers who want to read (you know, that humanities-ish activity), Timothy Burke had some words, and Michael Berube had solid things to say in early June and late June. About the second article, again see Burke as well as Mary Dudziak, Mark Grimsley, Claire Potter, and David Silbey. I am months late on this, so I will do what I can.
First, before panicking it probably makes sense to divide what parts of the proportionate decline of humanities majors in the past few decades are attributable to different factors: the growth of undergraduate professional degrees, the growth of higher-education enrollments more generally, the decline of GI Bill-related enrollment as a proportion of undergraduates, and any leftover changes that just might be related to the nature of the disciplines themselves. In part because the expansion of higher education came side-by-side with the belief that a college degree's main utility was getting a job and growing credential requirements for jobs, enrollment grew faster in professional majors than in the humanities.
Maybe I should cry over the fact that a lower proportion of students are history majors than there used to be (though the percentages bounce up and down), or maybe I should celebrate the dramatic expansion of college attendance in the past 70 years and the fact that even if the proportion of history majors has dropped, there are still more graduates with history majors living in the country today than were living in 1950. Remember new "old saw" about the total population of China and India; apply as balm to humanities woes. Not only does the general expansion of college attendance make me less concerned than others are, but my guess is that they're more likely to be exposed to teaching that asks important historiographical questions and that uses primary sources. I didn't say immersed in: exposed.
Those perspectives do not completely eliminate concern about the future of humanities teaching and humanities departments in colleges and universities. Though regionally accredited colleges and universities have some version of a distribution/breadth requirement or general-education program (depending on your regional accreditor), that fact does not mean that a department has to be anything more than a "service outlet," the higher-ed equivalent of the quick-lube shop tucked in between the strip malls of Finance and Psychology. "Shakespeare while u wait! Fulfill writing requirement in 30 mins or ur money back."
On the other hand, while the standard choices of academe has been for greater adjunct use in all high-student areas (and that is true whether they're called adjuncts or graduate students), the reality is that humanities classes are cheap in comparison with science and math if one looks at course credit earned. High failures rates in algebra and the costs of maintaining labs add up in a pragmatic sense, and that's only looking at credit courses. What about community college remedial classes? As DeanDad has noted, developmental courses in math are a death march in comparison with other noncredit classes. Teaching-heavy institutions may short the humanities in individual places, but the combination of gen-ed/distribution requirements makes it virtually impossible for college students to graduate without some liberal-arts classes and thus virtually impossible for colleges to eliminate liberal-arts programs entirely.
And then, if you look at the costs of maintaining the research capacity of faculty, the humanities look even better: no lab animals to house, fewer research assistants to hire, and the primary need for many scholars is a computer, some travel funds for conferences or research trips, and time. The big difference is in universities with doctoral programs, where the expectation of support for doctoral students has both direct costs (tuition waivers, which are on top of the pitiful stipends for TAs and RAs) and also indirect costs (in terms of the classes that graduate faculty are not teaching while they are running seminars and advising students). What I'm seeing in Florida universities is a combination of closing small doctoral programs as well as some atrocious decisions about closing departments.
The probable consequence of the first type of decisions--closing down small doctoral programs in the liberal arts and in other areas--is a change in the doctoral-education opportunities in those fields, somewhat different workloads for those faculty, and perhaps a bit of status shift back to traditionally-elite programs. It's not as though small-program closures is going to bump the publication trends in any significant manner, and Cohen's articles presume that the rolling crisis in academic publishing is in an entirely different universe from the mythical status decline she posits. In her February article, the world of publishing is entirely ignored, and the June article only discusses a presumed shift in journal publishing. In the real world where I live, as opposed to the make-believe world of the New York Times reporter, the long-term crisis in the liberal arts is in academic publishing and questions about the economics of monographs and the long-form argument.
(Among the atrocious departmental closure decisions, the University of Central Florida almost shut down its statistics department the same year it's opening up a new medical school, and Florida Atlantic University reorganized its engineering college into the Department of Tenured Faculty We Like, Department of Tenured Faculty We Hate, Department of Tenure-Track Faculty, and Department of Non-Tenurable Faculty Who Teach Boatloads of Undergraduates. Those weren't the official names of the reorganized units, but that's the central function of the reorganization. Guess which "department" was closed, with the tenured faculty told to leave by August 7?)
July 27, 2009
Talking turkey on "Race to the Top"
The hoopla surrounding the draft "Race to the Top" guidelines have obscured the long-game strategy involved here. If you think about the structure of the funds--more discretionary money than the U.S. Department of Education has ever had before, competitive grant system, and a set of priorities that the Duncan department has been signaling for six months--there are two guesses I have about the broader goals:
- The double-shot of grants over the next year is intended to be the first of two or three shots of large amounts of discretionary money for the department.
- Duncan's learned about vicarious reinforcement and intends to use it here.
The obvious initial "winners" will be states such as Florida which have a number of the required elements in place and are ready to go on a few payoff projects. But there will also be a few very large states left in the cold (and without that extra funding) after these first two rounds of awards. What if California is one of those states out in the cold? Or New York? There will be local pressure from school boards and administrators on members of Congress to continue feeding money to the department until their states land at least one award.
In the long game, the fact that Race to the Top can't bail California out is not really the issue, and I disagree with Mike Klonsky's assumption that this is an attempt to starve the states into submission. While I think a number of people would have preferred a larger ARRA stimulus fund, I don't think you can claim that the Obama administration has acted at all as if it wants thousands of teachers fired. Far more likely is the ordinary political dynamics of federal programs: no one wants to be without a slice of the pie. For these reasons, if it were legal to place a bet of this kind, I'd give rather interesting odds that California loses out big in the first two swats at Race to the Top money.
And speaking of misdirected Mikes, Mike Antonucci is wrong about the teachers union dynamics in Race to the Top. While my higher-ed local has both the AFT and NEA as affiliates, I'm generally out of the loop on national headquarters stuff, but I can see the writing on the wall: one of the unions may well push in the regulatory process to increase the leverage of state affiliates, not to eliminate the requirement on linkability of teachers to student data. The best thing that the national affiliates can do is help state affiliates' negotiating position with their own state departments of education. If two states' applications are similar, but only one has a letter of support from their state affiliate's (or affiliates') elected officers, both the NEA and AFT need the state with union support in the application to have an advantage. (There are some interesting dynamics here vis-a-vis merged state affiliates, but the larger incentive at the national level is to help all state affiliates.)
July 25, 2009
Temporizing and teasing on tests and teacher evaluation
I still don't have time to expand at length on combining qualitative and quantitative sources of data for teaching evaluation, but given the hoopla surrounding the draft Race to the Top regulations, I should at least provide an update, or rather a bit of a tease for what's developing into a short paper-to-be. In addition to my fairly general understanding of some technical issues, I'm developing the argument that any point-based system for combining professional judgment and test scores needs to avoid fixed weights for the components of the system.
The explanation is not that technical, and I can sketch it here: the benefit of a truly Bayesian approach to using test scores to evaluate teachers is a reciprocal relationship between the decision-making authority of professional judgment and the power of other data (including test scores). A forceful judgment by professionals reduces the power of test scores in such a system, while tepid judgments increase the power of test scores. That is one possible solution to the thorny question of relative weights: if educators are willing to judge their own, test scores are less important (addressing the concerns of teachers unions and many administrators), but if educators are not willing to judge their own, test scores are more important (addressing the concerned of those criticizing the very low proportion of teachers given poor evaluations).
In a point-based system with fixed weights (or fixed percentages of the total) assigned to individual components, you don't have a structure with a reciprocal relationship between the exercise of professional judgment and the authority of test-score data. But I think the dynamic benefits of a Bayesian approach can be created in a point system, as long as the weights are not fixed. I need to think through the potential approaches, but it's possible.
There: that's the tease.
July 22, 2009
On the proper state of being bothered
Are you bothered?
Seasonal bother: It's summer in Florida, and if you park a car anywhere outside a meat locker, touching a steering wheel earns you a second-degree burn.
Caffeinated bother: I started the day a little after 7 am at a local coffee shop, grading student papers. My brain fried about 210 minutes later, after a few cups of coffee and my getting to the point where two-thirds of the papers are now read (no, not two-thirds read this morning).
Unreasonable bother 1: I'm at a public library, where a children's program started in one of the library's rooms an hour ago, and one of my fellow (adult) patrons was bothered that there might possibly be a crying child anywhere in the building whom he could hear. (The child was taken out into the hallway reasonably quickly.)
Political/policy bother: Ezra Klein (along with Matthew Yglesias) seems to understand the long-term game of the Obama administration on health care (among other issues). Unfortunately, most reporters still don't get it, about health-care politics or, to pick another random topic except that it's my interest, education politics. It's too much fun to report the latest (wording-dependent) poll results or the latest pronouncements by the diva du jour.
Unreasonable bother 2: TMI in the library. You really don't want to know (and neither did I). But in my head and heart, I know that I'd rather be bothered in the public library than not have a public library.
Intellectual bother: The popular philosopher's text by Howson and Urbach on Bayesian reasoning troubles me, less because of its style (which is fine, if dense for us nonphilosophers) or omissions (which I will trust statisticians can correct) than because of the disturbing but sensible point early in the book and that Steven Goodman has described as the p-value fallacy: statistical tests of significance say nothing about the probability of ruling in or out various hypotheses. If I understand Howson and Urbach's analogy between the standard discussion of medical tests and inferential statistics, the conditional probability of any hypothesis (after gathering data) depends not just on the inferential equivalent of false-positive rates (tied to statistical significance and p-values) or the equivalent of false-negative rates (power) but also on the underlying probability of the hypothesis being true. I pondered this last night while cleaning the kitchen, and the small point got under my skin. On what basis would a non-Bayesian (frequentist) respond? If I remember correctly, the easy response is to say, "Ah, a frequentist perspective is close to a Bayesian one with a non-informative prior." Except that the prior for categoricals, even with a non-informative assumption, depends on the number of bins, or hypotheses being tested. I think that the only way out for a frequentist is to either artificially restrict the number of hypotheses or to not care about the number of hypotheses being compared. To answer a question Gene Glass asked me a few years ago, it's just about at this point that my brain begins to dribble out my ears: historians are generally not theoretically minded.
Unreasonable bother 3: I need to concentrate on an article that's already late, but rewinding to 7 am and having the whole day over again to work on the article as well as grading? Not going to happen.
Why bother: decaf nonfat latte with sugar-free flavoring, no whip.
July 15, 2009
The clinching argument for national curriculum standards
"Let's do it now, before total nuts from Texas take over!" To be truthful, there have also been nuts in New York, Florida, California, and other places (and of various flavors) where a state's size gives enormous temptations to warp the textbook approval process as leverage for controlling the entire country's text market. That's not a 100% clinching argument for some national standards, but it's very tempting to strike while the people holding the irons are definitely not hot.
Crazy idea on teaching induction...
One more idea while my attention wanders from writing the exam for tomorrow morning: why do large school systems rotate administrators on the principle that they "need experience in a range of settings" for leadership purposes and then keep new teachers in the same school year after year? Who needs more rotation through a range of settings? In which case would rotation provide better evidence that student outcomes are not the result of selection effects?
Full-credit answers require coherence, avoidance of tangents, and reference to relevant research. Oops. Sorry. Thinking about that exam, obviously.
Journalistic kudos on NCES NAEP-gap analysis
I agree with Alexander Russo: much of the news coverage of the new NAEP score releases has been sober and nuanced, the stuff that the New York Times can be proud of (as opposed to stuff that prods Brad DeLong). It looks like the Ed Week coverage came too late for Russo's entry.
And now that I have my regular laptop back, I should return to preparing the final for tomorrow morning...
Intellectual baubles
Jay Greene's comment about intellectual fetishes and think-tank cliques had me grinning from ear to ear this morning, in part because of the multiple layers I'm reading into the comment (and that I doubt Greene intended: I use Janice Radway as my excuse to poach) and in part because Heathers is one of my favorite teen movies:
Dismissing policies because they aren't on the agenda of the current majority is like the type of argument heard in the 1988 film, Heathers: "Grow up Heather, bulimia's so '87."
In this case, David Figlio's data-informed hunch aligns with mine: in the long run, the evidence will not show vouchers to improve the achievement of students who use them, and the asymptotic effect will gravitate towards zero. (The potential competitive effect of vouchers is a different research question, one that relatively few rigorous studies have touched, and the evidence is mixed: see Figlio & Rouse, 2006, for the only refereed study of Florida vouchers' competitive effects that I find to be sufficiently rigorous.) As Jeffrey Henig notes, in the long run research can matter, and I suspect only part of the reason why the Fordham Institute is shying away from voucher debates (Greene's instant target) is because it's not politically viable at the moment. If the evidence does not show that vouchers are a smash-bang-up success, it's going to be hard to justify them except on grounds of values, emotions, or political interest. The second and third may provide enough for current voucher programs to survive (see Florida's and DC's voucher politics for variations on a theme), but probably not to expand.
July 13, 2009
AFT QuEST presentation slides on performance pay
I am not in DC, but I do catch things online: the presentation slides for the AFT QuEST session on performance pay are available, and while Edward Tufte thinks Powerpoint is awful, a stack of straightforward, well-written slides provides a wonderful vicarious outline for those of us who Were Not There.
Hechinger Institute hypes the obvious -- this is a role model for reporters??
I received an e-mail advertisement for a "webinar" on "The Dropout Crisis" from the Hechinger Institute. This is an organization that claims it "exists to equip journalists with the knowledge and skills they need to produce fair, accurate and insightful reporting."
Both the e-mail and the webpage for the seminar claim that "new research shows that 17 states produce some 70 percent of the students who don't graduate." Is that a mundane claim that is being hyped to produce seminar enrollment, or is it truly interesting? A quick check of the relevant table from the 2007 Digest of Education Statistics reveals that --voila!-- the 17 states with the highest high school enrollment also contain about 70 percent of all 9-12 enrollment in 50 states and DC (70.4%, if you want a third significant digit). In other words, this fact would be entirely expected simply from the pattern of school enrollment across the states.
So... is the Hechinger Institute modeling the type of "fair, accurate and insightful" publications that they wish reporters to produce, or are they trying to jack up enrollment with scary and misleading statistics? C'mon, folks: high school graduation and dropout patterns are of serious concern as it is, without modeling patently bad reporting.
July 10, 2009
Those evil union supporters who denigrate objective measures...
Quick: who said the following recently?
We do see the incredible power of setting stretch goals. But if you set a goal that's really not within reach, people will just give up on it and you really don't have a goal. We've seen this over and over. I think there's as much talking down of goals around here as there is of actually saying, "You're not thinking big enough."
Oh, this evil denigrator of the value of objective goals. From the text, you might conclude that this person is a teacher union supporter who will die before wanting to break down the firewall between teacher records and student test scores.
Except that the speaker was Wendy Kopp, head of Teacher for America and someone who said later in the interview that she is an advocate of using data and setting goals. But there's an important piece here about motivations and goals. No, I don't have answers for the K-12 world, but as I will continue to state until someone proves me wrong, there is something deeply wrong when an historian knows more about the relevant goals and motivation literature than most of the people who advocate setting extremely high goals in education.
Combining qualitative and quantitative evidence for teacher evaluation: What does "predominant" mean?
According to Gotham Schools, former NSVF and current USDOE official Joanne Weiss "said the Obama administration aims to reward states that use student achievement as a 'predominant' part of teacher evaluations with the extra stimulus funds" (emphasis added). I followed up with a USDOE representative, who emphasized after talking with Weiss that she meant a predominant part, not the
predominant part of teacher evaluations, and that is how Walz reported
the comment. The department representative added that department
leaders "consider it illogical to remove student achievement from
teacher evaluation, and we want states and districts to remove any
existing barriers."
This came on the heels of TNTP's Widget Effect argument and Joan Baratz-Snowden's Fixing Tenure. I know that the political context of Weiss's remarks is to push the Duncan line that New York State's moratorium on the use of test scores in personnel decisions is wrong, and if necessary Weiss will bar New York from the Race to the Top funds if the legislature doesn't get its act in gear. Stand in line, please; I have a feeling a few million New Yorkers have the first dibs on dunking the entire state senate in the Hudson near Albany sometime in late November.
Back to policy, though: the word predominant perked up my ears because Florida legislature's language has evolved from language involving the dominance of student achievement to quantification. The current language on personnel evaluation is a legacy of language first written in 1999:
The assessment must primarily use data and indicators of improvement in student performance assessed annually as specified in s. 1008.22 and may consider results of peer reviews in evaluating the employee's performance. [emphasis added]
The current performance-pay language in Florida has the Merit Award Program which stipulates that for the purposes of merit pay, achievement data "shall be weighted at not less than 60 percent of the overall evaluation" (F.S. 1012.225(3)(c)).
I need to think about this in some depth, but it strikes me that the Florida legislature mandated one of several options to use in combining quantitative and qualitative judgments of teacher effectiveness, the point system. You can probably come up with other variations that meet the statutory language, but my guess is that any real-world implementation would almost all be linear combinations of different subscores, and I will use incredibly technical measurement language to call it the point system of combining different sources of information about teaching effectiveness. But that's not the only one, and I am always troubled when a clunky system is chosen as the default because it is the first option rather than a deliberate decision among options. I understand why a point system is in the bureaucratic and political gravity well, and it may well be that this particular clunky point system is the best option. However, it should be considered in comparison with what other clunky systems might be appropriate.
For example, there is also the holistic review of teacher effectiveness, such as exists in the new Green Dot-UFT collective bargaining agreement teacher evaluation system. There's no specific way that test scores inherently enter the judgment as such, though the implication is that teachers will have to show that they use assessment to shape instructional practices (what's called action research in the document, at the very least).
But those aren't all: a flow-chart is at least theoretically possible, though I do not have a real-life example. Yes, there are process flow-charts such as exists in Denver (and in the Green Dot system), but it's a flow-chart essentially describing when and how you schedule meetings, not how you make decisions in a meeting. (Step 1: Can you understand this chart? Yes: read the rest of it while walking to your secretary's desk; no: pretend to read it while walking to your secretary's desk. Step 2a [at secretary's desk]...)
Most theoretical: a Bayesian bump algorithm. I am guessing that there is a high probability that any subjective Bayesian statistician reading this blog will have thought of this idea already, but I'll adjust that guess after some data comes in. Since even well-trained evaluators are making subjective judgments about people, you could treat a principal's or peer's judgment as a prior judgment about the probability that a teacher should be retained/rewarded, given help, or fired. In the Bayesian world, that prior judgment can and should be shifted based on data, to form a posterior estimate of the probabilities of what should be done (you can play with a Bayesian calculator here, in a medical-test context). That adjustment is why I'm calling it a "bump" -- start with a professional assessment on various grounds and allow that to be bumped somewhat by test data, with the magnitude of the bumping depending on the data. Going down this path would involve some interesting studies, and it would probably be working with Bayesian posterior odds (which provide an interesting possible back door to a point system). This is a little out of my league in terms of specific characteristics, but the Bayesian perspective on statistics makes it possible to combine qualitative and quantitative data in a framework that already exists.
So we have four large categories of ways to combine essentially qualitative and quantitative data. While I am busy reading student work and doing other stuff in the next week, you all have a chance to dive in and describe what you think are strengths and weaknesses of each approach, as well as any additional categories (or disagreements with my classification entirely). After I have a weekend and get other tasks finished, I will return to explain (a) why a Bayesian approach is not only philosophically appropriate but serves the needs of unions, students, and anyone Alexander Russo describes as reformy; (b) why a Bayesian approach is not that different from a point system, at least in theory; and (c) what characteristics you would look for in a point system for teacher evaluation to meet the political interests described in (a).
July 8, 2009
A word to the wise on accountability
Dear fellow Americans who support equal education and are inclined to attack teachers unions when you get frustrated (e.g., Charles Barone and Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights):
- Borg-like rhetoric ("Those who resist the school reform movement are going to find they are on the wrong side of history. They may affect the pace of reform, but not its inexorable direction") is not likely to convince anyone that they're wrong and you're right. It's not even close to the level of Rod Paige's NEA = terrorist remark, but it's still intemperate. And I don't know about you, but the last degree I earned came with a beautiful, shiny rearview mirror, not a crystal ball.
- I'm persuadable that NEA staff and national leaders made some incredibly stupid/venal moves in trying to shift policy in the backrooms of power (which apparently are no longer smoke-filled), that the AFT may have made (fewer) such moves, and that locals and state affiliates of both national affiliates also make stupid/venal moves at varying rates depending on location and internal union politics. But a report that essentially treats policy concerns and backroom politics as identical? It strikes me as shoddy analysis, for several reasons. First, it's scattershot, which undermines the credibility of what probably would be stronger arguments on more narrow grounds. Second, it misunderstands the nature of organizations, assuming that unions have intentions rather than internal politics, agreed-upon positions, strategies, and tactics. Third, if you criticize both regular and backroom politics, you're implicitly committing yourself not to do much politicking on your own part.
Every few years you see a wavelet of attacks on teachers unions, and I am assuming that this is part of a new one. Sometimes it's just a coincidence, and I hope that's the case in the entries linked above... and here.
Addendum: Charles Barone takes me to task on two items; in comments I say he's right on one and wrong on the other, but you'll have to read what he writes rather than my summary.
July 7, 2009
Not a love fest on mayoral control, but close
Something in the National Journal's website is swallowing spaces after periods when I submit comments, and I discovered that I could not edit remarks after submitting them, but those are not really the important matters. It turns out that at least for most of the respondents who have written thus far this week, no one believes that mayoral control is a cure-all for city school systems (or those who do have been chastened enough to admit the obvious). I think that of the comments thus far, Randi Weingarten's has been the most upbeat about mayoral control, at least in NYC. Go figure. But we have close to a consensus.
For my friend who asked me Sunday why I hadn't written a blog entry in five days, here's your entry and a pointer to another one, and another one in a few seconds. No promises about how long these will be, at least for the next week or two. I had a great weekend, but the fact that I spent about 12 hours this weekend reading student work tells you something about it.
June 30, 2009
Grading reports that grade states, which have schools that grade
It's now a PR cliche in education wonkery: grade states. Issue grades, and that's a hook for reporters to write stories about the reports, because the reporters at daily metros can say, "[Your state's name here] receives 'F' in think tank report on education." But beyond the PR value of grades, it's facile, which is why I'm surprised Education Sector gave into this particular venal sin in its report on states' higher-ed accountability policies. C'mon folks: can't you figure out a more substantive way of evaluating states? At the very least, this is so 1990s.
So I'm thinking about developing a report over the next year that grades think-tank reports that issue grades for states on some matter of education, where of course schools have teachers who grade students. Among the standards will be the following:
Clear standards for grades: a year before the report is issued, does the entity that issues the report publish grading standards or criteria?
A - Entity publishes grading standards with sufficient criterion specificity that an outside observer would not be surprised at the grade a state receives the next year. (Note: this is a low bar, not requiring agreement with grades.)
B - Entity publishes standards, but standards are too vague to provide benchmarks for policy progress.
C - Entity has previously published reports issuing grades to states, but changed the standards, or described the project and the areas where states would be grade, but no standards for those areas.
D - Entity has previously published the existence of the report project, but there is no previous publication of intent to grade states in this area of policy.
F - Report appears out of the blue with no publication of intent in this area.
Okay, folks: where does today's Education Sector report fit? How about Ed Week's annual Quality Counts phonebook? Fordham's reports that issue grades?
And, yes, if I'm serious about this, that implies I have to develop some more grading criteria. After all, it would be most interesting and ironic if I created a report that contained the mechanism by which the report itself could be torn apart. Hint, hint, ...
Find the typo! and other national-stage blogging
The National Journal unveiled its new education policy blog yesterday. My first response has an embarrassing writing goof; see if you can spot it!
No differences -> politics as usual?
While the DC vouchers debate swallowed more airtime, it's David Figlio's new study of Florida's voucher programs that will reveal the state of voucher politics. Several years ago, opponents of vouchers pointed out the lack of accountability for the programs, and in response supporters inserted a mandated study comparing achievement of students using vouchers to public-school students. Fortunately, they picked one of the best economists of education, who is careful and cautious and has done several studies of Florida's voucher programs in the past decade (including the best article on the topic, published in 2006).
Figlio's conclusion is roughly that given the data he had available, there is no evidence of differences in student achievement between those in the corporate tax-credit voucher programs and similar students in public schools. Further, the usually-cautious Figlio went out on a limb and said if additional data were available, he wouldn't expect the conclusions to change. This is not the only report I expect Figlio to produce on the corporate tax-credit voucher program, since the interesting questions for microeconomists are about how the shape of the market (the presence and size of a voucher program) changes its characteristics (esp. responses of public schools).
But until that report is produced, and probably after it, the no-difference finding here mirrors a bunch of other studies. At this point, it looks like there is no solid evidence that students using vouchers perform better as a result, and in Florida at least, it also looks like students don't perform worse, either. So the voucher debate will not be settled by evidence of effectiveness, and we default back to questions of values embedded in public policy and the way that experiences shape the policy-relevant questions.
Those who support vouchers are spinning the no-difference findings as "vouchers do the job for less money, and choice is a positive value." Those who oppose vouchers are spinning the findings as "vouchers are no panacea, and choice can exist within the public system." And as voucher-receiving schools accumulate in the state, the ordinary politics of constituents make it hard for legislators to oppose eliminating the program. It is the last item that makes Florida (where a number of Democrats have voucher schools in their districts) different from DC (where the governing authority, Congress, has only one voting representative with constituents who use the vouchers). In the end, I think we'll see voucher programs generally stay in the states where they currently exist (primarily from the constituency-experience dynamic) but not expand much (because of the lack of evidence of great effects and because charter-school expansion in cities is an easier political sell).
June 29, 2009
Prevent backtalk: turn on the television!
I knew it years ago, and in two studies released earlier this month and this week, I think both in peer reviewed journals, we have it confirmed: the best way to prevent teenagers from talking back to you is to turn on the television years earlier so that they don't develop the ability to talk back. So that spring day in 1996 when my wife and I decided to sell our television before moving to Tampa? A big mistake.
And there we were, deciding that we were advancing our children's interests. No, that wasn't it at all: they were 4 and 1 at the time, and we decided that since we didn't like their arguments over the television, we'd see how long we could go without one in the house.Answer: 13 years and counting. And no matter what arguments we have in our household, it's not about the channel the television's tuned to. Instead, it's about who gets the computer...
Serious side: The article released this week is more about the relationship between adult caregiver and child than about television, and it highlights the importance of one-to-one interactions at early ages. I suspect this will be followed by other analyses from the same data set.
June 26, 2009
How to steer CYA-oriented bureaucracies, or why NCLB supporters need to think about libel law
Someone at USDOE sent me an invitation to listen to the June 14 phone conference where Arne Duncan explained how disappointed he was in Tennessee, Indiana, and other states with charter caps, let alone states such as Maine with no charter law, and how that disappointment might be reflected in the distribution (or lack of distribution) of "Race to the Top" funds (applications available in October, due in December, with the first round of funding out in February 2010). There are a few details that reporters didn't ask about (Duncan's somewhat surprising statement that a good state charter law would set some barriers for entry rather than establish a "Wild West of charter schools," and the way that small charter schools and charter schools with grade configurations outside state testing programs can stay off the radar for accountability purposes), but I was not surprised that two Tennessee reporters were called on for questions.
But apart from the selection of reporters for questions, the phone presser and other DOE moves made me think about the various uses of power in education-policy federalism. In limited ways, explicit mandates can be effective, if there is a sustained willingness within the USDOE (and esp. OCR) to make painful examples of the nastier school systems that try to evade those mandates. Offering technical assistance is another method, and despite the massive conflict-of-interest problems in Reading First, I agree with one of the researchers in the field who thinks that Reading First did improve primary-grade reading instruction, on balance. (Thumbnail version: hourslong scripts, ugh; explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and some other fluency components, obviously necessary.)
But neither heavyhanded mandates nor technical assistance can do
everything, and neither works with the greatest motivation for both
defensive and hubris-oriented bureaucracies: risk management. If you
are a public school teacher or administrator, my guess is that you can
identify some fairly silly action by your district that was motivated
almost entirely by CYA motives, and if you can marry those CYA
activities to pedagogy, you've been lucky or have a black belt in
administrative maneuvering. (If you have such victories, please
describe them in comments! Otherwise, we'll all wallow in the shared
misery of observing defensive administering and the all-too-frequent ensuing
train wreck.)
I think the federal government can shape bureaucratic behavior to
the good by using that risk management and structuring accountability
policies around that. And here's the lesson I take from my high-school
journalism class in ninth grade 30 years ago: libel law in the U.S.
generally recognizes the truth as a positive defense agaist libel
allegations. That seems like a backwards way to frame the legal issue
-- after all, isn't it common sense that a publication is libelous only
if it's false? -- but the notion of a legal positive defense gives an
individual or organization a way to organize behavior in a way that is
both professionally appropriate and also make a legal defense aligned
with professional expectations. Because the truth is a positive defense
against libel claims, even an idiotic general counsel for a newspaper
or publisher looks to the professionally-appropriate standard: is there
documentation that the published work is true?
Sometimes a positive defense is not explicitly part of jurisprudence
but evolves as a practical guidance for clinical legal work and
internal advice for school systems. Observing procedural and
professional niceties create exactly that type of positive defense in
special education law. There is nothing in federal special education
law to carve out an explicit positive defense for school system
behavior, but many articles written by Mitchell Yell over the past few
decades constitute a convincing case that school systems now have a de
facto positive defense: professional documentation of decisionmaing and
scrupulous adherence to procedural requirements are a positive defense against a broad range of allegations by parents of and advocates for students with disabilities.
Yell has argued (persuasively) that due-process hearing officers and judges use procedural adherence and professional documentation as a filter in special education cases.
If a school district can document that it has paid attention to
procedural mandates and has met professional standards for documenting
decision-making, then hearing officers and judges are extremely
reluctant to look at the substantive merits of those decisions. But if
a school district has ignored standard procedural expectations that
most districts meet, or if a school district has kept no or inadequate
documentation of its decision-making rationale, then all bets are off
and a hearing officer or judge will be much less likely to defer to the
school district on professional judgments.
In essence, Yell implies, school districts can avoid adverse judgments if they pay attention to timelines and other procedural niceties and if they keep teachers and principals on their toes about current "best practices" as well as deadlines, notices, etc. Not all districts are aware of this positive defense, or I suspect that some enterprising special education researchers could make a mint running seminars, "How never to get sued again."
More broadly, I'm beginning to think that the construction of a positive defense against charges of incompetence would be healthy for school systems and state policies. The devil would definitely be in the details, but instead of being frustrated by a consistently observed school system behavior, maybe we should take advantage of that consistency.
The right kind of infection
The Powell et al. article on cultural complexity 90,00 years ago, published in the June 5 issue of Science, has some interesting consequences for education policy, though it's an archaeology article. The argument the authors make is that one needs a certain population density before one can find surviving signs of cultural complexity (archaeological evidence of more sophisticated used of symbolism and technology). Sub-Saharan Africa had both those population densities and archaeological evidence from 90,000 years ago, as did Eurasia 45,000 years ago.
Powell et al. are arguing that the development of the earliest human cultural skills may have depended on nothing other than density. This is an appealing story: get enough humans living in proximity, and whatever culture is developed will be maintained while the various subpopulations (clans, etc.) interact and teach each other, keeping the ideas floating around the population in a way that would not happen in a sparse population with little interaction between subgroups.
I suppose that as someone without an archaeology background, I have no insider knowledge of the contribution this paper makes to studies of human evolution. The authors are portraying the issue as an explanation of how human culture could appear suddenly (on the eon-scale) without resorting to changes in biology (esp. cognitive capacity). We'll see what other researchers of human evolution say about that, but there's something important there for education.
The article suggests that one can categorize various cultural characteristics by the extent of continuity across time. Isolated behaviors and skills may not survive unless they spread beyond the individuals who may exhibit/learn them for a time. With enough contact among people, knowledge, skills, and behaviors can become continuous; that continuity is the subject of the article. But one can look at knowledge, skills, and behaviors that are more than continuously existing. Are they common (maybe the experience of a minority but where everyone knows several people who have that experience)? Are they the normative expectation? Are they ubiqitous (universal or nearly so)? That's a five-category, ordinal variable for the extent of cultural behavior in a population: isolated, continuous, common, normative, ubiquitous.Okay, there's a sixth category, absent.
Many of the debates over education policy are about shoving the national population from a common experience of X to a normative expectation of X, or from a normative expectation to the ubiquity of X. In the space of 70 years, high school graduation moved from a continuous population behavior to a normative experience; that's the story in my first book. But the rhetoric surrounding a national population's experiences often obscures variations. As Claudia Goldin has pointed out, high school graduation became normative in the midwest and northeast by 1940, while it moved much more slowly in the South (for Southerners of all races/ethnic backgrounds). And today, while approximately a quarter of teenagers leave high school without a standard academic diploma, there are many high schools where graduation is common but not the majority experience, and probably a few high schools where graduation exists every year but is not common.While the latter should be alarming to anyone, in reality the majority of high schools in deep crisis fall in the former category, schools where graduation is common but not the majority experience.
There is an argument that the Powell et al. article suggests: if culture "spreads" once there is a sufficient number of "carriers," maybe we should look at education as akin to a disease process that we want to propagate. This is close to the contamination theory Geoffrey Canada has (or had when Paul Tough followed him around while writing his book about the Harlem Children's Zone). There are both ways in which that argument is interesting (esp. in communities where half or more teenagers drop out without a high school diploma) and others in which it is disturbing (assuming that students can be "carriers" of culture in way that adults can manipulate, though they can't shape adolescent experiences directly.. uh, no).
How do you move a behavior from a common-but-minority experience to a
normative expectation? That's
essentially the question we have in a large number of high schools in
the country and with regard to baccalaureate degrees for the entire
country. At least in my understanding, there are two requirements,
involving both the spread of an idea and set of habits (habitus, in Bourdieau's language of cultural capital) and also institutional infrastructure. Attending high school became the normative experience
for teenagers when they could no longer enter the full-time labor
market with ease, when people began to think of high school as an experience that could be useful, and when there were enough high schools for majority
attendance to be physically possible.
I do not think that there are exact parallels for all circumstances, just a combination of population behavior and institutional behavior. They go together. And, yes, there are cases where the extent of cultural experiences can reverse: working-class attendance at Shakespeare in the late 19th century, if you believe Lawrence Levine, or girls' primary education in Afghanistan from 1995 to 2001.
June 25, 2009
Nothing fuzzy about fuzzy math
George W. Bush is probably responsible for people calling constructivist math advocacy "fuzzy math". There is a field called fuzzy logic, and while I know very little about it, I'm irritated that the former president's maladroit use of English is messing up technical terminology. Fuzzy logic is a useful tool in engineering, and while Lotfi Zadeh's original term may not be perfectly descriptive, math teachers should be the last to misuse a term that's in their own discipline.
See-no-knowledge in education policy?
I seem to be reading several "we don't know anything so let's plow ahead" arguments in education think-tankery, from Mike Petrilli's argument that because we don't currently have a solid research base about how to turn schools around, we shouldn't try, to Kevin Carey's consistent argument in Education Sector's blog that because there is no research consensus about predictors of good teaching (and considerable research suggesting that there is not a link between effectiveness and countable items like years of experience beyond the first few or graduate degrees), it makes better sense to let people into teaching and then evaluate their effectiveness.
Fortunately, that's not the approach of the Institute of Education Sciences under John Easton, which has just announced a large research initiative on turning around schools. I suspect that both Petrilli and Carey would acknowledge that research in difficult topics is a good thing and argue that IES initiatives are different from policy, because sometimes you have to make decisions based on the state of knowledge you have, not the ... oh, shoot, there's Donald Rumsfeld phrasing again. But you probably know what I mean: Petrilli and Carey's stances are policy stances based on topic-specific agnosticism, not opposition to research.
But there's a serious question buried here: on big questions of policy, where you have to make choices, and the research is nondirective, how do you make decisions? I think the answer has to be incrementally, to allow research to catch up and influence policy later. If you make a huge political and institutional commitment to a policy path that has no research support and no ethical/legal obligation, then you're committing millions of children and hundreds of thousands of educators to a path that is very hard to change later.
For that reason, while I think Arne Duncan's four-choice speech earlier this week is not based on research, and Petrilli is correct that there is no particular reason to believe that charter schools will somehow rescue the education of students otherwise stuck in horrible circumstances, the policy itself is good largely because it doesn't make hard and fast commitments to a particular path. The good thing about a charter is that it can be revoked, and in states such as Florida where there is a single authorizer for a geographic area (here, the county school boards), authorizers can be reasonably aggressive in shutting down shady or incompetent operations. So I share Petrilli's skepticism, but precisely because I am skeptical of any particular approach to schools in crisis, and because Duncan is being wishy-washy, I will applaud the Secretary for being wishy-washy.
Update: I first used the term "know-nothingism" in the title. Ugh. Bad move for an historian. Petrilli and Carey are not members of the 19th century anti-immigrant party. Mea culpa.
June 19, 2009
Conversation often works ... where it's tried
Today, ACTA's Anne Neal thanked the AAUP and AACU for welcoming her outreach efforts.Towards the end of the blog entry, she writes,
ACTA also shares many faculty members' legitimate concern about administrative bloat and about trustees who lack a sensitive understanding of the special protocols and values that underwrite the unique enterprise of higher education. That said, we also believe that it is the professoriate's job to reach out to trustees. Faculty should understand that presidents and trustees are engaged in enormously complex, vital, and often urgent fiduciary endeavors. They should also understand that, going forward, trustees must be included among academia's primary stakeholders, alongside faculty and administrators.
I hope that's possible; that depends both on faculty and on trustees not accepting upper-level administrators as gatekeepers. My experience in Florida is that trustees often accept the role of administrators as gatekeepers of information, so that a president can essentially filter out quite a bit. I know of one UFF chapter at a community college that was able to meet with the chair of the trustees and establish a good working relationship, but that's rare. Far more common is a fairly uncomfortable and unproductive divide between trustees and most faculty, with a handful of administrators controlling the interaction.
I suspect that there's a pretty easy way to prevent greater access from becoming a vehicle for cranks and sophists (who will get their word in, anyway): err... asking faculty to provide the reality-check filter.
For those readers outside Florida, what is your experience with the extent of interaction between governing-board members and faculty?
June 18, 2009
The world is complicated, part 752
So the Center for Research on Education Outcomes has a report on charter-school performance, the Center on Education Policy has released a report on student achievement trends, NAEP released art-education data, and the spin has begun. Missing from almost all the reporting: Statements about the extent of peer reviewing for any of these reports. I'm not too worried about the professionalism of these reports, since I know that the Department of Education always has an internal review process, CEP usually asks researchers in the area to review draft reports, and I would be surprised if CREDO did not have a pre-publication review process. However, the failure to report on the extent of peer review is a continuing and glaring omission in the reporting of education research.
In terms of the substance of the reports, I'm up to my eyeballs in prior commitments, but it's clear from the brief reading I have been able to do that the findings for all three reports are more complicated than the spin emanating for many of The Usual Suspects.* That's not news, I know, but I am the King of Things That Are Obvious Once He States Them, and I have a job to do.
* a great name for an a cappella group, if you happen to be starting one up.
June 13, 2009
On graduation rates and auditing state databases
I sympathize with Florida's Deputy Commissioner of Education Jeff Sellers, finding himself defending the state's official graduation rate the week that Education Week published its Swanson-index issue and pointed to Florida as a low-graduation state, using numbers far below the state's official numbers.
Some perspective: Florida's official graduation rate is inflated, but it's still better than Swanson's. Florida's graduation rate does more than Swanson (i.e., does anything) to adjust for student transfers and the fact that ninth-grade enrollment numbers overestimate the number of first-time ninth graders.
Because of Florida's state-level database and the programming/routine that already exists, Florida is much closer to the new federal regulatory definition of a graduation rate than many other states, and Commissioner Eric Smith has been preparing the state board and other interested parties for the likely effect of the change on the official published rate -- i.e., that the rate will be a visible quantum lower than the currently-published rates (and largely for the reasons I have explained in the 2006 paper linked above). So in a few years we'll get a closer estimate of graduation from a lay understanding (the proportion of 9th graders who graduate 4, 5, or 6 years later).
The point in the St Pete Times interview where I winced was Sellers's answer to the question of how the state (and the general public) knows that the exit codes entered for a student are accurate: Sellers said that his department conducts an "audit from a data perspective."
That statement is misleading. It is technically true that there is an audit in two senses: each school district is required to check its data for accuracy before sending the data to the state's servers, and the state conducts a search of students reported as withdrawn in one county to see if they entered another county system before labeling them dropouts. But while I have seen reference to checking that the withdrawal codes are correct, I have not seen any evidence that such checks have actually occurred, and I have been unable to find that evidence anywhere on the Florida Department of Education website. That doesn't mean that it doesn't happen, but call me a touch skeptical. Without random checks, there is no guarantee that a 16-year-old coded as a transfer to another school actually was a transfer.
Given Florida's long experience with a state-managed education database, the lack of published audits of this process should caution us about the magic of state databases. They are important, but they need to be done properly. It makes sense to talk about the internal and external checks that should happen as other states construct databases and all states start to conform to the mandated longitudinal graduation rate:
- Districts will need to be the first party to check accuracy, both in terms of preventing mistakes/fraud but also conducting consistency checks--are there any records which claim that a 45-year-old is attending kindergarten, for example? The first is supposed to happen in Florida, and I suspect that counties catch the low-hanging fruit in terms of errors. But the accuracy check on withdrawal code is the type of check that requires extensive follow-up to document whether a student identified as a transfer did in fact enroll in another school.
- States will also need to conduct accuracy and consistency checks, though a state will necessarily be far less likely than school districts to catch outright fraud in claiming students transferred when they did not.
- States will also have to conduct the cross-checking that Florida currently performs every year and that I describe above: which students move between districts in the same state, but are counted as dropouts because a county only looks at its own students.
- Finally, the auditing of transfer records would be MUCH easier if there is a standard way for school districts and individual schools to request the transfer of a student record and simultaneously use that authenticated request as verification that a transfer code is appropriate.
This is an incomplete list, but it's a start.
June 10, 2009
Teachers and school demographics
A few weeks ago, the Journal of Labor Economics published C. Kirabo Jackson's study of teacher moves away from schools in Charlotte that were moving towards single-race, segregated status (see lay description here; subscription-required article here).
Today, the Education Policy Analysis Archives publishes Kitae Sohn's article, Teacher Turnover: An Issue of Workgroup Racial Diversity (secondary site), which focuses on the potential attrition associations with teacher demographics rather than the student demographics. The punchline from the abstract: beyond a relatively small threshold of racial diversity among the teaching staff, "young White teachers are more likely to stay in their original schools when the proportion of minority teachers is smaller." The article was accepted well before I knew of Jackson's study, and there are a few small (and disturbing) nuggets apart from the main findings.
I suspect that for both of these studies, there will be replications, criticisms, and debates, and that's absolutely appropriate. Both articles focus on what is an important issue for policy (how do teachers make choices about where to work), and the conclusions are fairly disturbing. For that reason alone, I hope that they are the start of more work in this area.
June 9, 2009
Drug education is NOT working... at least not at ED in '08
Strong American Schools' ED in '08 campaign became one of the most successful independent advocacy initiatives of the 2008 election season and has helped turn the need for education reform from a low-priority campaign issue into one of the Obama Administration's top policy priorities.
--"Final Report from Strong American Schools" e-mail from Roy Romer and Marc Lampkin, June 9, 2009
ED in '08 spent millions of dollars with almost nothing to show for it. That's not a shame in and of itself, because loads of policy and political experiments fail (and that's why we call them experiments). But when you flop on a big stage and then claim an Academy Award? Sheesh. Education was one of the lowest-visibility issues in the campaign, it's hard to see how education is trumping the economy or health care as a focus of the White House's attention, and it's even harder to see how ED in '08 is responsible for whatever attention is being paid to education policy.
I don't know what Roy Romer and Marc Lampkin are smoking, but I'm tempted to ask.
June 8, 2009
No one ever accused Arne Duncan of impersonating an education researcher
Hopefully some day we can track kids from pre-school to high-school and from high school to college and college to career. Hopefully we can track good kids to good teachers and good teachers to good colleges of education.
This was an excerpt from a speech Duncan gave today to IES staff about the need to use data warehouses to link individual teachers and test scores and then use that linkage to evaluate teachers (hat tip). Oh, yes, and do it based on research. Some day, Secretary Duncan, but tying an individual teacher to student performance is not something that you can assert is based on research available today. It is more wishful thinking than anything else. The best apparent on-the-ground research of this type with teacher education is nonetheless full of caveats. And that's on a program-level scale, not on the level of the teacher.
I'd accuse Duncan of spouting fuzzy logic, but fuzzy logic (the real stuff, research-wise, using fuzzy sets) may be one tool we use to get out of this dilemma.
June 6, 2009
Sifting priorities, micro and macro
I had such good intentions this morning. After dropping off my daughter at the High School o' SATs, I figured I'd sit in the local Starbucks and read student work while she was wearing down No. 2 pencils. So there I was at about 7:45 in the morning, listening to slightly-too-loud Sinatra and reading drafts of one section of the major paper for the class I'm teaching this summer. After about a third of the batch, I bailed on both student reading and the environment of too-loud soft music and too-loud jovial fellow customers. I listened to Scott Simon's interview of Naturally 7 while driving a few blocks to the library branch that just opened up, and I'll sit here for the meantime, trying to figure out what to do for the rest of the weekend. As usual, I have Too Much to do, and I have to do some of it and not the rest. May I make the choices wisely, but more importantly, may I make the choices consciously.
In many ways, education policy and policy debates are about the same
types of choices: you can't do everything at once, you can't fix
everything at once, and being ambitious requires being selective about
where you spend energy. It also requires a big-picture perspective.
That's part of why I shook my head at Norm Scott's confectionary history of UFT.
There's an important role for internal debates inside unions, and I
have respect for UFT activists who are willing to go toe-to-toe with
the most powerful teachers union leader in the country, but there are
huge leaps of logic in Scott's thumbnail history and a failure to see a
crucial big-picture issue.
Scott assumed that there was an overarching "sellout strategy" that Al Shanker consistently used after spring 1968, and that the sellout strategy was based on a circumscribed realpolitik vision of unions:
After the brutal '68 strike Albert Shanker knew the UFT could never again win much more than salary increases for teachers, and at some point only those at the expense of selling out. Thus over the next 15 years was born the "new unionism" where the union no longer is an antagonist but a cooperative partner with management.
The problem with this argument is not that it has no basis
in fact but that it gives far too much credit to a single individual
for the direction of the UFT (and AFT). Shanker was certainly a
forceful unionist, and both the UFT and AFT were shaped by his
leadership, but the general dilemmas facing UFT in 1968 were not new or
unique, Shanker would never have been able to take the UFT on strike
without the agreement of hundreds of UFT leaders, and there is
something odd about the obsession of union dissenters with a single
leader.
It's the last that's the most surprising to me on
both intellectual and political grounds. If I were a member of ICE (a
dissenting caucus within UFT), I would not be obsessing about Randi
Weingarten. While focusing on individual targets can be useful for
energizing one's base, it's useless for public discussion and the nuts
and bolts of organizing and campaigning. To put it bluntly, it's
following the reasoning template offered by the New York Post,
whose editorial board loves to focus on personalities and the imagined
virtues and vices of key figures. Imagine for a second that Shanker had
died fifteen years earlier than he did, in 1982 rather than 1997. How
would the history of the AFT have been different?
Oh, wait. We don't have to speculate. We can look at what's happened to the AFT in the past 12 years, since his death. There have certainly been stylistic differences, and the AFT has a far less closed culture (and is thus healthier) than it was at Shanker's death. But many of the strategic decisions taken in the late 1990s and early part of this decade would probably have been taken if Shanker had been alive, and it wasn't because anyone at AFT held seances to figure out "what Al would think" (despite the jokes made about Richard Kahlenberg's attempt to channel Shanker and probably some debates framed in that way).
Consider the debates about mayoral control in New York City. I don't pretend to know the inside politics, but anyone looking at the picture three months ago could have predicted a few things:
- Mayoral control would not be extended precisely as is, but neither would it end, and whatever came out would be a political compromise.
- There would be test scores released that would be spun by multiple sides, and almost surely inaccurately on multiple sides.
- Weingarten would have to make choices about where to push for change in mayoral control.
- Someone would accuse Weingarten of being a sellout no matter what position she took, because she would be presumed to have given her okay for whatever came out.
I can't see either the logic in Scott's understanding of his own local or how Scott thinks teachers unions should behave in public debates such as over mayoral control. He either is using Shanker as a synecdoche for the strategic choices many UFT leaders have made over the decades or truly thinks that the key problem is that the wrong charismatic leader is in charge. Okay: Weingarten will be gone from the active UFT leadership in some months, so who's going to be the next target? I suspect that Scott knows deep down that his fight is with a very large group of fellow unionists who just disagree with his desire for more open conflict.
One of the dilemmas with collective bargaining is the fact that the act of collective bargaining channels an adversarial conflict into a pattern of routines that then circumscribes relationships between union and management. Sit down and bargain, ratify, enforce agreements, picket and strike, lobby publicly for your members' interests and values: these are the public tools of power for a recognized union. A skilled union leadership knows how to use more than one of the tools at any time and if both wise and lucky will use the right tools more often than the wrong tools. An unskilled union leadership relies on a narrow set of tools in a predictable and increasingly less effective way until its members have essentially lost all the advantages of representation. But as several labor historians have pointed out (and my apologies for forgetting the names right now), there is no way to avoid the fact that if you buy into the legal authority of a union, you then buy into the set of tools that gives you.
Buying into that set of tools is not the only choice, of course; there's the historical example of the Wobblies who disdained contracts and collective discipline. I don't mean to suggest that the alternative is to match the violence by some Wobblies, but suppose for a moment that a union's leadership essentially ignored contracts, contract enforcement, and the like, and instead let the union culture evolve into wildcat direct action much of the time. There are two problems with arguments that unions should look more like the Wobblies (absent violence) than the UFT. First, I don't think it's a very smart political move. Because this country has 70 years of at least putative legal protection/recognition of union organizing and close to 40 years of effective public-employee organizing, most of the general public would conclude that anarchic direct-action participants over the age of 22 are trying to eat their cake and have it, too -- have the benefits of legal recognition without trying to take on any responsibility to follow the consequences of that recognition. In addition, in the internet age, glaring inconsistencies in the explanations of direct-action participants will make a union look like its members are less in touch with reality than George W. Bush, more manipulative than Dick Cheney, or both.
Perhaps more importantly, a lack of collective discipline and strategic choice is a path that is going to lose more often than win. Direct action does work where it's organized and lucky. It does not always work, and as one observer noted about the United Teachers of Los Angeles one-day strike fizzle, if it's intended as a public show without a broader strategy around it, it's nothing but street theater, perhaps entertaining and good enough for the evening news, but not enough to shape policy.
Maybe Weingarten needed to drive
a harder bargain (and I think that's a reasonable position to take, that she made her peace too early), but you are making an implicit argument against collective discipline if you pretend that a union doesn't have to make strategic choices, make bargains with adversaries, or decide what is a reasonable settlement.
June 1, 2009
The Procrustean bed of teacher tests
Mike Petrilli's stab at the Sonia Sotomayor nomination via the Massachusetts teacher tests is a little askew, and I'm surprised he didn't look at an obvious dilemma that's deeper than the politics of a judicial nomination. Several former teachers have sued the state (and Pearson) for what they claim is a discriminatory impact of teacher tests given the disproportionate failure rate of minority teachers. This is the employee side of impact-analysis law that most school lawyers probably know better under the graduation-exam cases in Florida and Texas.
The landmark case here is Debra P. v. Turlington, which led to a number of federal decisions that guide the use of tests that have disparate impact in schools. To wit, tests with disparate impact by protected classes are acceptable if...
- There is a rational state purpose for imposing them (guarantee graduate skills, in the Debra P. case)
- There is sufficient notice to those affected
- Those affected have a reasonable opportunity to learn the material on the test (the key reason for delaying graduation test applications in Florida, where federal judges did not want to hold the victims of segregation responsible for the unconstitutional behavior of schools)
- The application of the test is professionally done (I'm bundling together several separate issues, including the composition of the test, defensible setting of cut scores, multiple opportunities to retake the tests, etc.)
- There is no better way to meet the state's purpose that also reduces the disparate impact.
In the employment context, Petrilli is probably correct that the translation of the first item is essentially whether the test is a reasonable proxy for necessary teacher qualifications. But there is almost no way for anyone engaged in the current debate over teacher qualifications can defend these tests or defend the teachers' lawsuit without having some fairly severe inconsistencies.
Consider first the folks who have the approach that we should not care who enters teaching as long as we measure student achievement and make personnel decisions as a result. Several (whom I will not name to protect the guilty) have accused the High Quality Teacher standards in NCLB of obsessing about inputs (i.e., what teachers know) in contrast to outputs (what students learn). Anyone in this camp should abhor the Massachusetts teacher tests (and all teacher tests) because they continue the "let's look at the teacher qualifications absent the kids" approach, and we should be moving away from proxies for teacher effectiveness.
But the lawyers for the teachers and their supporters are not in much better shape, logic-wise. It is going to be very difficult to knock the legs out from the state's teacher testing
program. They have to argue that the tests are a poor proxy for teacher
skill, or that the tests were poorly constructed, or that there is a
better option with a reduced disparate impact. If they cannot convince a judge that the tests were constructed and administered unprofessionally, the lawyers are going to be in the uncomfortable spot of arguing that the testing is an inferior proxy for judging teacher quality, in contrast to ... [The conclusion is left as an exercise for the reader.]
Summary: If you are in favor of judging teachers by student learning, then content-testing knowledge is a poor proxy by your own arguments. If you are against the content-based testing, then you have to come up with a better standard that will hold up in court. No, I don't think there's a way out of this for anyone with skin in the game, but if there is no summary dismissal and no evidence of rank incompetence in test construction, the fireworks will be interesting to watch.
Texas, South Carolina, Missouri, and Alaska
I know that the reports of the common-standards agreement shepherded by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association describe a few different reasons for why four states have not joined in a standards framework that is probably going to be about as close to a less-is-more approach as one can get in a bureaucratic standards document. Yes, I know Texas has just drafted standards (as has Florida, which is joining), that Missouri is searching for a new state superintendent (my guess is others are as well), that South Carolina has Mark Sanford (which is enough for any state to deal with), and that we haven't heard from Alaska. But here are my imaginary real reasons for why these states have opted out (thus far):
- Other states refused to agree that everyone in the country would have to pronounce Harry Truman's state as mizZURah.
- Texas would have to admit that bidness is not a word.
- South Carolina did not get its way that there would be history standards with the required benchmark, "All six-year-olds will understand that each state is required to have at least one completely nutty elected official at all times, and this is a heritage of the Founders."
- There was a riot, not when Alaska insisted that NAEP math exams all use the Iditarod as an example of measure, rate, and general all-round toughness (other states just wanted to add their own events), but instead fisticuffs broke out when the Alaska rep. insisted that the current accepted size of the Earth was incorrect because if it was as large as most people thought, then you couldn't see Russia from your house.
Unfortunately, I suspect that the truth is far less entertaining. That's okay. We still have Joe Biden and George Will to mangle the facts in an interesting way.
Addendum: Lest anyone think I am making fun of other states, I should be very clear: I grew up in California in the 1970s, and I now live in Florida. That's enough ridiculous states to live in for a lifetime!
May 29, 2009
Unhappy with my brain right now
- Fuzzy logic
- Responders/nonresponders
- Donald Rubin and multiple imputation
- Dichotomous variables
- Record linkage: whether a linkage allows one to determine outcome
- Limits
- Category theory
You have now been infected. That is all (for now).
Disappointing debate over teacher unions
I wish I could say I had learned something from the education globule's recent debate over the role of teacher unions, but I haven't. When the apparent tail end of the discussion ends with a claim that "unions... are tenacious and need to be defeated, over and over and over again if reform is to advance," I shake my head. Insert "Fordham Institute and other think tanks" where Mike Petrilli had written "unions," and you probably have Jerry Bracey's views on one of those days when the air conditioning breaks, the power goes out, and the roof begins leaking. It's more than a touch of demonization, or what's worse, facile reductionism (a more damning intellectual sin, in my book).
Surprisingly, Andy Rotherham's rejoinder isn't much more substantive. Maybe there is a role in recapitulating the arguments for people who haven't heard them before, but this blog conversation has read to me much like Joan Scott's 1986 article Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis ($JSTOR), to which one of my fellow graduate students in the late 1980s accurately responded (and the following is a rough paraphrase), "Well, yes, this makes sense, but by now it's obvious rather than productive."
One
of the missing pieces in all this is some sense of the historical roles
teachers unions have played over the past century, at times when they
have been both powerful and not. Petrilli and others are focusing on
three roles of teachers unions: collective-bargaining agents, public
representatives for teachers (including lobbyists in legislatures), and
scapegoats. The collective-bargaining role of teachers unions is
relatively recent, dating from the 1960s and 1970s, and given the
variation in legal authority (the "why is Mississippi so bad if it
doesn't have collective bargaining?" question), the facile answer now
is "because they lobby."
That's an interesting hypothesis, but I have yet to see a single study documenting evidence for the claim that the reason why many school structures in Mississippi are similar to those in Massachusetts is because of the tremendous lobbying power of the Mississippi Association of Educators (the NEA affiliate), or that those school structures are the primary reason why Mississippi's education is inferior. Which structures are the same? Ah, things like changing classes in high school. Bureaucratic rules. You want to throw away things like an academic curriculum? And teacher lobbying is responsible for all that? Maybe it has something to do with institutional isomorphism, or the authority of administrators at midcentury, when many of these structures were consolidated, or the inertia that Mary Metz calls the script of "real school" and Tyack and Cuban call the "grammar of schooling." Homework, folks: do your homework first.
I stick "scapegoat" in that list because teachers unions have been scapegoated in the past in matters entirely unrelated to the concerns of today's... I'm with Elizabeth Green here in needing a better descriptive than "reformer," "reformy person" (I think Alexander Russo gets credit for that), or "wannabe reformer" (and I don't know from whom I've heard that phrase). In Florida in the 1960s, teachers and their unions were accused of various things from communism to sheltering gay teachers. In the early 20th century, the Chicago Federation of Teachers was accused of ... being a union and consorting with unions. Now Petrilli blames "unions" writ large for not being reformy-ish enough for him. Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt, gave it to Goodwill.
Two other roles Petrilli (and many others) are ignoring. One is the role of unions in social movements that extend beyond them. An example of that is the type of innovative organizing drive that UFT had with day-care workers, which simultaneously addressed issues of social class, gender, race, and early childhood education, not to mention the historic focus of teachers unions with K-12 employees in bureaucratic systems. To put it bluntly, childcare workers are on the low end of the education totem pole, women who work for pittances given the huge responsibilities in caring for young children. Childcare is also one of the hidden underbellies of the changing gender dynamics of the American workplace, making possible hundreds of thousands of two-earner and two-professional-earner households, not to mention professional single-mother households. Organizing childcare workers is the type of thing you'd expect SEIU to do (such as in its janitorial organizing campaigns), not UFT, and there will be consequences down the road inside UFT in terms of policy and leadership, and interesting possibilities in other cities.
Reaching back further in time, teacher unions have been involved in a range of social movements from the Progressive Era (with the Chicago Federation of Teachers, Jane Addams, and other progressives suing to recover uncollected taxes from corporations to pay for city services) to the post-WW2 civil rights movements. Teachers unions often have struggled with these issues, but it has also bolstered them. Case in point: the 1968 teachers strike in Florida, where according to my colleague Barbara Shircliffe the public images of teachers was often explicitly multiracial, a message of cross-racial solidarity that's hard to miss as dramatic in the 1960s.
That relationship has not always been negotiated smoothly, as Daniel Perlstein describes in his history of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville controversy, and that touches on the fifth role of teachers unions historically, as organizers of teachers' social identities. Probably the best theorizer here is Ira Katznelson, who has argued in multiple palces that people construct their social identities and roles around different contexts. In the U.S., he argues that there is often a split between the identity at work and the identity in one's home, and the outcomes of political conflict often revolves around how and where those active in a controversy define themselves. Perlstein's book Justice Justice! is an uncomfortable reminder that workplace solidarity is not always synonymous with justice.
A more interesting and productive conversation could revolve around the last, largely ignored issue. How are teachers' social identities formed, and how do workplace politics (including unions) feed into that? To the extent that teachers see themselves as either technical test-preppers or astructural "facilitators," they're ignoring real needs of students, and the context of those tendencies are important. Even the reformy-ish-ist folks believe that, or they wouldn't argue so hard for "reconstitution," "reconstruction," and other proposals to disrupt local school culture. So we all agree with school culture. We all agree that teacher unions matter. Does anyone else see a huge research opportunity rather than a place for pat answers?
May 24, 2009
The three-year degree already exists
Yesterday's Washington Post article on the three-year degree argument skimmed over what most such proposals ignore: there already is a three-year degree, and I don't mean the small number of three-year degree options that have largely failed to attract students. I mean the way that students currently speed up their college education: AP classes and dual enrollment in community-college courses while in high school. The Post story briefly mentioned George Washington University student Justin Guiffre, who might graduate a year early with AP credit. A college friend of mine did the same in the 1980s. I have known some students at USF who have also used AP class credit to finish general-education requirements early, which makes graduating a semester early almost automatic, and a year early quite possible.
Maybe I am naive or out of touch, but I don't recall this being a focus of any discussion vis-a-vis the three-year degree. Instead of blathering on about "better marketing" (which always rescues flops regardless of the merits of an idea), maybe American Council of Education President Molly Corbett Broad should be asking where students use AP credits and where they don't, and why. And maybe we should be asking whether a three-year-degree option would address the reasons for swirling or academic probation or lack of academic support from the institution, or any of the many reasons why degree completion is lower than many of us would like. Until then, the three-year-degree proposal is facile, not substantive.
No-shoe-leather-used alert: did anyone else notice that the only students Valerie Strauss quoted were from George Washington University, less than two miles from the Washington Post headquarters, and Howard University, which is within three miles. They're both private, nationally-known colleges and not the typical college or university. Maybe she should have talked with University of District Columbia or University of Maryland students to see what the public-university student perspective is.
May 23, 2009
U.S. Secretary of Mixed Metaphors
"Investing in the status quo is not going to move the ball down the field," said Arne Duncan in discussing California education, and I wince. This is a Secretary of Education who thinks "incent" is a word, and when asked yesterday what happens when he plays the president in basketball, he answered,
Everyone asks me that. We usually don't play one-on-one. We usually play on the same team. We do pretty good.
No one has spoken using perfectly-correct grammar since Peter Jennings died, and Duncan is nowhere close to Joe Biden on the embarrassment scale (let alone GWB). But for someone who runs a Department of Education? Even if it is largely irrelevant to policy debates, this is at least a little embarrassing.
Addendum (2 pm): And to prove that no one is perfect, I realized that I should have used using in the paragraph above, where I have now added it. That correction does not necessarily make me any better a user of language than I was at 9 in the morning, but maybe I am a little less of an abuser of language.
May 20, 2009
A blogger to USDOE?
Peter Orszag is being joined by Thelma Melendez de Santa Ana, the newly-announced assistant secretary of education nominee, who has maintained a blog while running the Pomona school district.
Worst-governed state?
A few thoughts on the budget catastrophe that California is facing:
- Before voters imposed a supermajority requirement for crafting a budget several years ago, California's political system was broken. Voters approved Prop. 98 to guarantee a slice of general revenues going to K-12 and community colleges for a reason, even if the rigidity was not well thought through.
- The "fix" of a supermajority and the elimination of nominal deficits several years ago didn't work.
- The "fix" proposed on yesterday's ballot was an awful mess, because it refused to face the central problems. Nonetheless, the ballot measures would have been better than what California now faces.
- Don't expect the problems to be solved anytime in the near future.
The fallout--an additional gap that has to be filled with taxes (not going to happen with the supermajority requirement) or cuts--is going to devastate a number of schools and colleges, and while I thought I was in the least governable state in the union, I have now seen the Florida legislature act at least a little more rationally than other major political actors in various states. South Carolina's governor, both political branches in California, Nevada's governor, and Arizona's legislature are among the actors who have outdone Florida for destruction in the name of political expediency, and that's hard to do (and comes after I exclude the notable folks who were shooed out of office because of scandal rather than mismanagement). But I have a single person's perspective, so maybe there's a contest we can have about the worst-governed state in the country. I wish I could suggest criteria, but there's a wealth to choose from, and maybe we should have different parts of the contest, sort of like there's the talent competition, etc., for beauty pageants:
- Duct-tape governance competition--the state with the worst constitution, that is impossible to change, too easy to change, warped, inviting conflicts of interest, etc. Alabama and California are probably going to vie for this one.
- Ostrich-impersonation competition--states where politicians are the best at sticking their heads in the sand to avoid uncomfortable choices. Florida's going to place highly in this one.
- Lotus-growing competition--similar to ostriches, except that everyone points to the obvious problems and somehow argue that lotuses grow out of them, interpreting a dungheap as a site for beauty instead. Florida's hydra-like higher-education system, where every community-college president dreams of running a four-year college with a "leadership institute," is my nominee, but I'm sure you can figure out others.
- Mushroom-feeding competition--the state with the worst "keep everyone in the dark and feed them ****" decision-making.
- Mushroom-eating competition--the state where politicians are the best at delusions about the future.
- Dollar-grab competition--politicians that (would) do their best at shamelessly grabbing someone else's money in a transparent box even if they knew they'd be watched the whole time. I'll put my bets on Illinois or New Jersey, but Florida's got a shot at this one, too, with its former Speaker of the House.
Put nominations for each competition in comments!
May 19, 2009
A day in the life of a summer course
Third class of the summer session this morning, first one where students were supposed to have finished readings. This is an undergraduate social-foundations class, and the readings for this week include Gary Becker on human capital, Sam Bowles on social reproduction, and either the start of Paul Tough's Whatever It Takes or Joe Williams's Cheating Our Kids (which is apparently out of stock now).The summer session is only ten weeks, so they need to hit the ground running. I tossed the schedule around a bit to put the suck-the-reader-in books at the top of the term.
We start with an ungraded quiz. The incentive to do well here is
because the questions might show up on the (absolutely graded) final
exam. The last item is to propose scoring criteria (jargon: rubric)
for one question on the back of the sheet. The substantive questions
are of the compare/contrast sort with an implied 3-4 sentence answer,
and I provide the broad hint that the authors "cannot all agree."
Student groups talk about their answers, propose them on the dry-erase
board, then we talk about the sketchy phrases, and they turn in the
sheets, which I've now read.
Next is a quick exercise suggested by the latest edition of Wilbert McKeachie's college-teaching classic: they read drafts of their weekly papers to a peer, give reality-check feedback (i.e., after the reading, the listener summarizes what she or he thinks the main point is), and then hear me remind them to use formal citation mechanics, even if the format for the paper may be informal.
We then started to talk about the books -- they first had to find
someone at a different table who read a different book and represent
their book to their classmate. Then as a whole, we compared the
settings, the (inferred) motivations for each author, the (implied)
major questions in each book, and the assumptions behind those
questions. Students decided they wanted to discuss Bowles and Becker
rather than have me lecture, so we spent the rest of the two-hour class
talking about those ideas, discussing how Bowles and Becker would interpret Geoffrey Canada's personal history and education, and figuring out where Barack Obama's stated views on college would fit.
Somewhere in there we had questions on the logistics of the class, I met the three students who registered after the second class last week, I discovered that a PDF I thought I had locked for editing had been locked so students couldn't open the file (ouch), and we left loads of potential issues on the table. That's life. Thursday they upload a draft section of the major paper for the course (the section where they don't need a critical mass of readings under their belt yet), and Friday they upload the final version of the weekly paper. And somehow I will return feedback and grades Tuesday morning.
In some ways I am "working without a net" this semester, with a
little more turnover on readings than usual. In particular, I dropped
Kozol's The Shame of the Nation and paired Williams with Tough this semester. Maybe
I should have dropped Williams because of the limited supply of books,
but while Kozol and Williams were great contrasts the last time I
taught this course (they both express outrage over unequal education in
many of the same cities, but their explanations are worlds apart), I
wanted to get Tough in there, and I may stick with Tough as a universal
reading because of Chapter 2. But switching books always creates a
little more demand in thinking-on-my-feet skills because I don't have
experience in how students will respond.
Also, because of the compressed schedule, I made a commitment to
learn student names in the first week. I'm awful with names and used
every mental trick I could. I think I'm about 80-90% of the way there,
and for a class of approximately 40, that's good for me. Right now, students are trying to keep up with the readings. My challenge is to keep the class rolling, to identify students who are behind from the get-go, and to manage the reading/feedback in a compressed semester.
I know that guy! (Delta higher-ed cost project)
I am pleased as punch that Nate Johnson's new Delta Cost Project report is being publicized nationally. I first met Nate about a decade ago when he was working deep in the bowels of the Ralph Turlington Education Building in Tallahassee, before he was plucked by the former state university system chancellor to be his data guru, and it was a good choice. Nate now works at the Florida branch of the Evil Empire (aka University of Florida), but I'm sure we can rescue him from the Dark Side some day, and until then, maybe he can have occasional opportunities to do work like the project released today. If it's like his other work, it'll careful and cognizant of a range of ways to look at important issues.
May 14, 2009
Changing higher ed, from Mr. Obvious Man
Craig Smith tagged me in an AFT FACE entry asking about the future of/a better vision for higher education, and given the way that Mark Taylor's schizophrenic vision of higher ed prompted not only a flurry of comments but thoughtful comments by Dr. Crazy, Dean Dad, Marc Bousquet, Timothy Burke, H. Saussy, and Michael Berube, among many others, not to mention Andrew Delbanco's review essay, it's time for me to underwhelm the universe with ten obvious comments about the future of higher education.
- Marc Bousquet is wrong in some very significant ways, but he's absolutely right in many others, and if his creative ravings prompt a healthy discussion of higher ed in the long term, my hat is off to him.
- In addition to other criticisms of Mark Taylor's curricular utopia, an important purpose of a stable curriculum is to eliminate one huge potential (expletive) waste of time reinventing wheels. It's far more productive to improve the wheels we've got and maybe invent a few carbon-fiber ones than to figure out how to make wheels made of hemp, green beans, recycled computer parts, and spent nuclear fuel rods.
- The entire discussion of college "costs" and tuition is off the deep end even while there are interesting sub-arguments. The discussion of tuition almost always ignores opportunity costs and generally ignores non-tuition costs (such as books or the cost of living). The Delta Project's analysis is interesting but entirely ignores the definitional problems in IPEDS reporting and the division of labor in colleges and universities. (I'd love to wave my hands and say, "Yes, fire all the student-life administrators, plow the money into faculty, and don't ask me to advise students!" Somehow, I don't think that's a practical suggestion) The human-capital arguments in favor of debt ignore the fundamental way that college student loans privatize the risks of going to college. At the same time, we have the chance to make a substantial incremental improvement in helping students with a shift to entirely direct lending and the automatic indexing of Pell Grants. I'll take the incremental improvement (it's HUGELY necessary) and still wish for some better model-building. I have no grand theoretical synthesis, but anyone who wants to buy me a good whiskey some evening and talk this over is more than welcome to!
- The vocational rhetoric surrounding higher education benefits the liberal arts because it implies that college students are responsible for their own affairs and should not be babied. This is in tension with arguments that liberal-arts programs and either a core or general-education curriculum should be at the heart of undergraduate studies, but on balance the vocational rhetoric of higher education has drawn far more students to college than would otherwise have been the case. We liberal-arts folks should be happy to have the chance to evangelize rather than preach to the converted. Give me 100 enrollees in my classes for a requirement, and I will convert 90 of them into students.
- The only national organization right now with a productive agenda on higher-education accountability is the American Association of Colleges and Universities. I'll take that good with the other, mediocre attempts funded by Lumina, but this is not a healthy state of affairs in the long run. The Shopping Mall High School's thesis is as applicable to large universities as to high schools, and until we can clone Cliff Adelman, we need a group of people with intellectual depth discussing the curricular problems at universities.
- Right now, discussions of student learning are largely isolated from the widespread reliance on contingent faculty. Half of the discussions I see blame tenured faculty for avoiding teaching (as if all tenured faculty work at the University of Chicago). Does anyone else see the problems with this?
- Academic freedom can survive with a core of tenured faculty at an institution with non-tenure-track faculty, but we don't know the minimum size of that critical mass. For a variety of reasons, while the aftermath of 9/11 threatened academic freedom, it has been far more robust in the past decade than the worst fears in late 2001, including at my campus. At the same time, there are continuing threats, both inside and outside colleges and universities. In many places, tenured faculty are the most active defenders of academic freedom because they are safe; that was a crucial rationale for tenure in the first half of the 20th century, and it remains a valid argument. I have yet to see anyone who simultaneously advocates the abolition of tenure and can also point to a place that survived a real threat to academic freedom without any tenured faculty.
- Faculty are fragmented into too many communities of interest to defend academic values in a robust way. All too often, two-year and four-year faculty fail to understand the worlds that the others work in, let alone teaching institutions vs. research institutions, or even primarily teaching faculty and primarily graduate or research faculty in the same institution. Unions and the AAUP provide national organizations to defend values, along with disciplinary organizations, but the barriers are significant.
- When administrators ignore faculty organizations or do their best to do end-runs around them, they are missing substantial opportunities to advance institutional interests and feeding the behavior they presumably hate. I winced when I read one book by Derek Bok advising university presidents to do their best to go around the faculty senate or equivalent, because they're largely dysfunctional. Let me see if I understand the reasoning: if faculty senates are full of deadwood, and you go around them, what faculty support can you claim for your initiatives, and what incentive do you give the faculty you think should be in the faculty senate to serve? Oh, yes, and any monolithic model of your university demonstrates an essentially anti-intellectual temperament.
- Conversely, faculty who think that all administrators are evil are doing a remarkably good job of undermining collegial governance. There are serious problems with the development of academic administration "tracks" in the past 50 years (see item above), but the fact is that colleges and universities have administrators, you want the administrators to understand faculty and work with them, and what incentive do you give your colleagues to be willing to serve as administrators if they know you'll be the first one putting a target on their backs? Oh, yes, and any monolithic model of your university demonstrates an essentially anti-intellectual temperament.
May 12, 2009
Should artists know something about money?
It's cringing time for this union activist: Teaching is an art, not a business wrote Hans, commenting this evening on a story about a judicial mandate prohibiting a UTLA one-day strike this Friday. That statement is irrelevant in the specific context (teacher layoffs), is a false dichotomy, and is wrong-headed in other ways. Let's start with the literal claim that art is incompatible with business. The daughter of a friend and colleague went to SMU on a dance scholarship. She was smart and after a minor injury decided to get some business training and is now an administrator in an art-related New York nonprofit. Artists and non-profits need people who are passionate about art and can also manage money (ask members of the Florida Orchestra, which I hear is surviving today in this economy because its new executive director is very competent).
Or to take another example, there's a wonderful segment of Stuart Math's documentary on desegregation in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where one of the old-time activists describes a post-WW2 meeting of residents who were trying to figure out how to create a stable housing market, and a business owner said, "You know, we can be liberal and effective, too." And they were, running a neighbor-managed real-estate outfit that was crucial in maintaining a stable, desegregated, prosperous community.
So much for the claim that art can't be business and warm-hearted liberals can't think in terms of getting stuff done. But the whole premise is wrong; I don't think teaching is an art. You can make a good argument that teaching is a craft, but there has to be solid practice at the bottom of it. In addition, anyone who is skeptical of the value of high-stakest testing, as I am, has to have something that's just a tad, a teeny, a tiny bit more astute than a statement that screams, "Just let me do what I want when I'm paid with the public purse." That's nuts, both philosophically and politically.
May 11, 2009
"Governance reform" is not reform
While New York rages over mayoral control, which is all the rage, schools in Pinellas County are headed towards The New Site Based Management, which was the rage in the late 1980s and early 1990s and which Bill Ouchi hopes will be the rage again.
While there are plenty of ways that governance can affect the classroom, I am consistently underwhelmed by the argument that governance reform improves what happens in the classroom. I've seen it all before.
May 8, 2009
No holy grail, just inexpensive texts, please
I love the inspiration of the Student PIRG Open Textbook campaign as well as the Hewlett Foundation Open Educational Resources initiative, not to mention the excitement over H.R. 1464 over at iterating towards openness (relevant entries one, two, three, and four). I think I'll take the latter's subtitle as my theme on this topic: "pragmatism over zeal." The blog's motto is about open content. I'm going to apply it to the practical issue when common-course texts are more expensive than community-college course tuition: we need good, inexpensive texts.
Open content may be one way to the goal (good, inexpensive texts), but it is not the holy grail. It's a possible path. There are a number of reasons to avoid putting all one's eggs into the open-content basket: the need for development and updating material, respect for the effort that good text authors expend, and the legitimate need to provide an incentive for good texts as opposed to any texts that don't count as highway robbery. In this, I take my philosophy from John Willinsky's The Access Principle: we'll take improvement as it comes.
What are the different paths towards this goal? Let me imagine a few:
- Open content writing supported by private or public grants.
- "Loss-leader" investment in texts by institutions.
- Open content writing supported by communities of users.
- Self-published textbooks using print-on-demand technology.
- Some combination of the above.
Some explanation is in order on each of these. Currently, Hewlett is banking on the first: if the foundation can support the writing of text material for some of the most common college courses, it will save thousands of college students. That's pretty good leverage where appropriate. But that's not the only path, and it's important not to rely on that for a few reasons.
One reason to be cautious is because an institution can and should be free to innovate, and sometimes that innovation requires a different approach to material. Or faculty in a department may decide that a grant-supported open text in accounting or college algebra is just junk. So what else to do? In many public universities and colleges, the cost of a textbook for a single large-enrollment class is often greater than even a noticeable tuition hike. (Think calculus texts at $200+.) If a community college or university subsidizes textbook writing for a handful of large-enrollment classes, it can simultaneously save students hundreds of dollars, make a substantial point in public about how it serves the public, and protect its political legitimacy.
A variant of the grant-supported development of open content is the community support of open content text materials. This is a lot harder to organize (even along an open-source software model), but especially in technical fields, this may well be developing even as I write. But it does require some organization.
But what about the many college classes that have a niche but not enough enrollment to attract the attention of a Hewlett Foundation, the federal government (if the bill on open-content support goes anywhere), or an institutional investment? And where there isn't a community of faculty nationwide or worldwide to write and rewrite texts? In essence, grant-funded and community-supported open-content textbooks are going to be most feasible for the largest-enrollment classes. For many other classes, I suspect that faculty could develop texts inside the classes they teach, make electronic versions of the texts available for free inside the institution (to avoid conflict-of-interest problems), and then self-publish the material through a print-on-demand outfit either for their own students who want hard copy (and because that is optional, the conflict of interest is mooted) or for other institutions. Or publish through the Kindle mechanism at Amazon. For a variety of reasons, this allows faculty authors to bet and win on the long tail in niche courses. And for students, the cost of a text can be minimal while still providing net income to authors comparable to royalties through standard text publishing.
There are variations on the theme, but I hope that the obsession with open content for its own sake is replaced with the end goal: cheaper texts for students. I suspect students don't care whether the $25 text they might have access to is published through Lulu.com, is available on their Kindle, or is published through LightningSource and bought online. I suspect that if the text works for them, they'd be happy to pay $25 rather than $200.
"My university administration has asked me not to speak to the press"
Fellow education policy blogger Sara Goldrick-Rab wrote a painful entry earlier this week about how her administration treats her speaking up on a policy issue in her area of expertise (in this case, her opposition to UW-Madison's tuition hike), and I'm sorry I haven't followed up before now, because if she is reporting correctly (see the comments attributed to her in the Madinson Capitol Times), the University of Wisconsin-Madison administration is infringing on her academic freedom.
I was contacted the night before the initiative was rolled out by vice provost for enrollment management Joanne Berg, who informed me of the news and told me to refer all press inquiries to the University Communications office.
I should note that while I am sympathetic to Goldrick-Rab's policy perspective, I think she's wrong about the policy (for reasons I'd rather explore in a different entry). But my disagreement with her on specific policy grounds is very different from my absolute support for any colleague who is speaking on a matter of public concern, including employers' actions, from her or his expertise. This is one of those cases where I'd prefer knowing more about what's going on at the ground level, but at a first glance, it looks like Berg was acting the bully. Even if there were a miscommunication involved, Berg owes Goldrick-Rab a blunt apology for not remembering that tenure-track assistant professors have a pretty rational paranoia and a finely-tuned power meter. Berg could even use the wording President Obama has to acknowledge error: "I screwed up."
Anyone want to guess what the odds are that she'll do that?
Does Duncan need a program-closing commission?
The recommended chopping of a dozen programs and half a billion dollars from the Obama recommended budget, and the expected political defense of those programs, reminds me of the various efforts to eliminate programs in the Pentagon that have developed political roots. A few weeks ago, I was wondering if the Pentagon needed a weapons-program-closing commission so that weapons programs such as the F-22 could be killed. But I suspect that the F-22, most of the dozen education programs Obama is trying to kill (several of which were also targeted by Bush), and some other programs that make me wince will instead survive because they will have fierce defenders on Capitol Hill who have a greater reason to fight for their continuation than other Congresscritters will have to kill them. And the outcomes will have little to do with intrinsic merit.
What is needed is the domestic-policy equivalent of the old base-closing commission: something that develops a list of programs in the discretionary domestic budget that should be closed, a list that is submitted to Congress for an up-or-down vote with no or few amendments allowed. There are multiple ways of doing this in a way that will allow ineffective programs to close, but the dangers of ineffective programs go beyond the money wasted to the general feeling that the federal government wastes money. There is a political cost in the long run to rampant corruption or political protection of ineffective programs.
May 5, 2009
Florida could still jump forward on end-of-course exams
The St. Pete Times is reporting that the death of the Florida House bill mandating end-of-course (EOC) exams in high school starting in science is the death of end-of-course exams, at least for this year. I'm not so sure. If I remember correctly, the legislature authorized EOC exams in principle last year, and there is an alternative funding mechanism: stimulus dollars. Embedded in the stimulus bill is section 14006, which is part of the $5 billion discretionary amount given the U.S. Department of Education. The state's application for state stabilization funds probably satisfies the nominal requirement for Florida to be aligible for a state incentive fund, if the state asks for incentive funds to develop EOC exams. This is precisely the type of project that the state incentive fund is designed for; it would replace the single comprehensive test with a number of tests tied to specific courses and instead of having to upset science teachers (such as in physics and earth sciences) with subjects not included in the first round (the filed bill in the House excluded them), there could be development of a full range of EOC exams in science. Seems like an obvious "yes we'll do that" to me.
I could be wrong; there may be legitimate reasons not to apply for state incentive funds to develop EOC exams. What surprises me is that during the legislative session, there was no public discussion I am aware of about the possibility of using federal stimulus dollars to develop EOC exams. I have heard nothing publicly at all about this, yet it's been an obvious possibility, at least to me. Has any reporter asked Commissioner Eric Smith about this? Is there any legislator or legislative aide who has asked about it?
May 3, 2009
AP feature in St Pete Times
I have microseconds before my day is captured by other things, but this morning's St. Petersburg Times gave Ron Matus inches and inches of space for his feature on AP classes. Kudos both to Matus for capturing both the promises and risks of expanding advanced-placement classes with a portrait of a student before the exams start ... and to the Times for devoting as much space to this story as it did, the same day that it also devoted pages to a scandal in the state's public investment bureaucracy.
May 1, 2009
Charters beat the pants off Florida Virtual School on the disruption scale
Maybe it's my training as an historian, but book titles such as Disrupting Class bring out my inner Larry Cuban. Disrupting Class author Clay Christensen points out that he tried to respond to Cuban substantively throughout the book, and the Florida Virtual School is a case in point, both for Christensen and also Bill Tucker. Yet I think the reason why the Florida Virtual School (FVS) both was in danger from and survived a legislative threat was not because it was tremendously disruptive but rather the opposite: it has matched parents' and students' expectations of "real school" to a remarkable degree.
A few times this month, education reporters contacted me, asking about the attacks on FVS,
and all I could reply was that it smelled like a typical Florida
legislative back-room deal to help someone's friend (or friends):
require counties to start virtual-school programs, then the next year
cut funding to FVS dramatically and also restrict its mission (thus
feeding the county programs--presumably outsourced to for-profit
entities--a bunch of guaranteed students). I don't know why
that came unbidden to mind; maybe 13 years of watching the state
legislature honed my preexisting cynicism? As in many other areas of
schooling, it looked like someone saw money in public education and
tried to sidle up to the legislative trough.
But that did not come to pass, in large part because a broad coalition of interests pressured legislators to keep the existing mission for FVS and to minimize the cuts (relatively speaking), essentially removing the class-size funding for FVS but (I think) not much else. There are a few notable elements in this battle that readers of Cuban (and David Tyack and Mary Metz) would recognize:
- The different purposes people identify in using FVS--or the flexibility in the construct "distance learning" and a specific institution (FVS)
- The way that defenders of FVS used language that reflect a perceived "normality" in online schooling: students, teachers, classes, credits, graduation, honors, etc.
In this context, last month's policy brief by Gene Glass and the response by Cathy Cavanaugh and Erik Black are far closer to Cuban than to Christensen. Glass's recommendations focus on accreditation, teacher certification, curriculum, and assessment. And Cavanaugh and Black agree. Wow, those sounds like standard school policy issues to me!
With one important exception, my own experience as a teacher and
parent tracks with all of this. Students in my online course behave in
ways similar to face-to-face students: many work very hard, some try to
see what classroom (or Blackboard) deals they can cut, all need a
certain amount of scaffolding, and their performance varies. My
daughter has used the Florida Virtual School, and while the work is
nominally independent, she has homework with due dates, times when she must speak with the teacher directly, and
she receives grades. If her high school had independent-study options,
her experience would probably be no different except that the
conversations would be face-to-face and the homework submitted in
person rather than online.
The one caveat is the one I have written about before: what/where
is dramatic engagement online? There may be nothing wrong with online
education as a vehicle for massive multiplayer online parallel play
(i.e., independent study), but that's not the face-to-face dynamic.
There may be nothing wrong with classes organized around online
bulletin boards, and I have been told by several friends how that can generate the type of drama and thoughtfulness
that concerns me, and maybe the relevant way to frame the issue is to
think about the conditions necessary for such engagement. But enough
about me: the fact that I have one generic quibble after approximately
a decade of teaching online courses, my daughter's experience, and
watching the policy environment in Florida suggests how much I think
about online education in terms of the standard structure of schooling.
Maybe I'm not trustworthy on this because of my own biases. So maybe I'm an awful Luddite-prone troglodyte with no imagination, but I've had a blog for most of the decade and edit the English-language side of an online journal. Maybe Gene Glass is also an awful troglodyte, but he started the journal I now edit.
So take from this what you will, but I do not think that the FVS is an example of "disruption." As Bill Tucker's essay in Education Next suggests, FVS did not compete with public schools, private schools, or home schooling but complemented all of them. Maybe that's disruptive, but it continues a long history of supplementation of the school program. Anyone who attended religious schools outside public-school hours should understand that, as well as anyone who participated in private chess clubs, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, Campfire, various volunteer organizations, martial classes, private music groups, and so forth. Or, to take another example, those who have watched television programs with explicit educational purposes in mind. If Clay Christensen is right that online education is fundamentally disruptive, he should be able to point to the disruptive effects of another technology with some educational content: television. Please don't get sidetracked into the "how television ruined young minds" debate. This is about the relationship between explicitly educational television and formal schooling. What happened in that case was not competition or disruption but complementarity and hybridization. The spread of VCRs happened while I was in high school, and I saw Cuban's classic hybridization in process: in selected cases, teachers recommended that my classmates and I watch a program, or they taped a program to show in class for a specific purpose.
There are four historical cases of potential disruption of schooling routines in the past century, and here I mean honest-to-goodness challenges to the legitimacy of public schools: private commercial schools in the early 20th century, federal youth programs in the Great Depression, Mississippi Freedom Schools and segregation academies in the 1960s, and charter schools in the past two decades. In the first two cases, the challenges were to high schools, and administrators responded in different ways. In the early 20th century, urban public high schools were in the midst of developing tracking, and while there were few challenges to the urban high school after the demise of academies approximately half a century before, one did: the private school teaching commercial skills such as typing and shorthand. Since young women were beginning to see pink-collar jobs as a reward for one or two years of secondary schooling, these commercial schools were practical and valuable. Harvey Kantor explained what happened next: public schools began offering courses to recapture the students. I suspect that the courses were more expensive than most other classes (and that would be consistent with the costs of most vocational education), but the point was to recapture the legitimacy of being the place where adolescents should be in school. How disruptive was that? I think that's arguable: it probably did more to confirm school officials' belief in the rightness of vocational programs than to push them off where they would have driven high schools otherwise. But that is a case where competition (if for legitimacy, not dollars) truly drove public-school behavior.
Edward Krug has the short canonical version of public-school officials' reactions to federal New Deal youth programs: AIIIEEEEEE! The criticisms of the National Youth Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and some other programs focused on federal-state relations, but there is no doubt that school officials saw those programs as direct threats to public high schools at a time when teenagers were flooding schools as the place to spend adolescence. In the end, it was not the criticism of the educators that ended the programs: conservative Congressmen of the late 1930s were uncomfortable with federal work programs in the first place and ended the programs, at probably the first point that they could (in part with the excuse that WW2 and economic recovery made the programs obsolete).
I would probably not put the Mississippi Freedom schools and segregation academies in the same boat for any other question, but in one sense you could say that they both challenged public constructions of race and schooling. In the case of the freedom schools, operators challenged segregated schooling; in the case of segregation academies, operators challenged desegregated schooling (even the mildest desegregation). In several places (such as Jackson, Mississippi), segregation academies successfully siphoned off children of segregationists, and that success in some places drove public-school behavior for desegregation. In Tampa, as my colleague Barbara Shircliffe has documented, county school officials closed the historically all-Black high schools because their primary concern was keeping white children in the schools. There were both financial reasons for doing so and also political reasons, the same protection of legitimacy that drove educators to expand vocational schooling in the early 20th century and criticize New Deal youth programs in the 1930s.
Charter schools have represented a different type of challenge to public schools. At this moment, from a long-term historical perspective, I think charter schools are primarily challenges to urban school systems. Cities are where charters have repeatedly captured a noticeable minority of enrollment, and while there are some isolated attempts to "capture" charter opportunities for other purposes, you could legitimately say that charter schools are disruptive in several cities. Whether that changes the construction of formal schooling inside the classroom is an interesting and entirely unresolved question, but there is no doubt that in some cities such as New Orleans and DC, there are now several sectors of schooling that are public in the senses of both public access and public funding. I would not be able to say whether the relationship between those sectors right now is either complementary or truly competitive, and part of my uncertainty on that score is probably with the organizational leaders of the "public" public sectors (Paul Vallas in New Orleans, Michelle Rhee in DC).
This professional judgment is not about the comparative worth of either the Florida Virtual School or charter schools, though my impression of FVS is consistent with Tucker's. But historians commonly argue about continuity vs. discontinuity, and when someone uses the word disruption, it immediately starts up my mental circuits in that area. So this is an historical judgment about systematic effects. And here's the bottom line: if I were to pick between the Florida Virtual School and urban charter schools as disruptive, I'd have to pick charter schools.
April 29, 2009
The NY Post is shocked, shocked to find that donations are going on in here!
The New York Post is playing to a double standard this week in counting up donations from UFT to state politicians. Not only is there no examination of donations from others (Hi, Mayor Bloomberg and allies!), but one of the UFT's adversaries in mayoral-control politics is Democrats for Education Reform, which prides itself on getting down in the dirt and political.
So for the 37 Big Apple adult citizens who are not yet aware that there is shmuts in the big city, I have news for you: people donate to political campaigns. Organizations donate to politicians. If you don't have public financing of campaigns, you either have to have donations or all your major politicians will be billionaires. Well, maybe not all of them. Just your mayor.
April 27, 2009
PCAST, mostly very good except for Rensselauer's president
Today, the White House announced President Obama's picks for the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), and with one exception, they look great to me.
The exception is Shirley Ann Jackson, whose scientific reputation is fine but whose administration of Rensselaur Polytechnic Institute is rife with signs of problems, from the close vote of no confidence in 2006 to the dismissal of the faculty senate in 2007, stripping a professor emeritus of e-mail privileges, and (just discovered a few months ago) the provision of a second home in the Adirondacks for her at a time when RPI was laying off dozens of staff members.
I don't think that PCAST's reputation is well-served by one of the poster children for administrative arrogance in higher ed.
April 26, 2009
What are the costs of education at universities? A quibble
Sara Goldrick-Rab reports on Kevin Carey's visit to the University of Wisconsin at Madison. One thing about his comments and the Delta Project on higher-ed costs makes me wonder about the failure to talk about messy data with college costs, or rather what Goldrick-Rab reports on his comments:
Of course, Madison is a research university, a very good one, and research is expensive. So let's set all that research aside and look only at spending on what the feds classify as "instruction, academic support, and student services."
The problem is that it's not possible to rely on IPEDS reports to separate out the costs of research from the costs of instruction etc. If you want to read the relevant glossary items from IPEDS, you can scroll down this page to "instruction," but the gist is that IPEDS cost reporting for instruction can include a broad range of stuff you could describe as research-oriented including the salary of faculty (WITH time spent on research), salaries of academic deans, and even in some cases the depreciation of buildings when distributed to different functional categories. I don't know where graduate research assistant stipends and tuition waivers would be counted, but the point is that even without delving into support and student-services categories, lots of spending at research universities that is research oriented is counted as instruction for IPEDS purposes. Essentially, the IPEDS cost categories are functional to a moderate extent but not comparatively useful in the way that many assume.
That messiness makes it hard to have productive political conversations around instructional costs. On principle, Carey is right: students deserve the same general education wherever they go, and flagship public universities are often favored over community colleges and regional or directional state universities. But the key adverb is "often," and in some states it's a favored community college that receives interesting treatment (e.g., Northwest Florida State College and the Destin airport hangar... oops, educational building at the airport 15 miles from campus). And historical trends are relevant: many states ramped up raw-dollar investment in community colleges in the 1970s and 1980s as they were starting to disinvest in universities when examined per-pupil. That doesn't make the institutions equal by any means, but I suspect institutional leaders can point to inequities in how their sector has been treated by the legislature. They're different inequities, of course.
I don't mind Carey's asking the question about the relative costs of instruction -- even based on mediocre data, it's the right question. But I don't think it's easy by any means to have a single formula that apportions instructional costs per student FTE, advising and support costs per head-count, and research infrastructure with some other function. I'd love to be proved wrong with something that would be politically robust and not end up with all state support being zeroed out (in which case all institutions are certainly treated equally), so kibitzing is most welcome!
Brevard County schools want to go out of business?
Apparently the Brevard school district has a problem when the nondenominational church renting space on Sundays from a Melbourne elementary school wants to attract new parishioners by talking about sex within marriage (hat tip). Never mind that this is now standard fare in churches, synagogues, mosques, etc.
Despite teaching many children of NASA workers (Brevard County includes the Kennedy Space Center), Brevard school officials must be afraid that even if they are nowhere near school on Sunday, students of the elementary school will somehow be polluted/corrupted if a mailing to adults mentions "sex" and the school name on the same page. As my wife shot back when I explained why I was laughing, "Don't they know where their students come from?"
I suspect that Brevard has no legal basis for discriminating against the church on the content of sermons, and I hope they are ridiculed to the point of backing down before the contract is up for renewal. I'm not Christian, but this is absurd.
April 22, 2009
Margins for error in policy
We're operating without water in my building for today and tomorrow, at least until the lab reports come back after the drop in pressure overnight. Faculty and staff know, so they'll get to know their colleagues in nearby buildings. I feel sorry for students who run to the right (usual) place and then hope to dip into the bathroom right before class without knowing in advance that the bathroom is unavailable; I hope they all give themselves a little extra margin for error in timing.
I wish the same for policymakers, that they give themselves and their desired/favored policies some margin for error. A policy that falls apart without perfection is a doomed policy, and while everyone understands this, it's sometimes hard to put in place. Here's the practical difference between the stimulus package and Geithner's management of financial policy: the stimulus package can do a lot of good even if implementation is imperfect. I may not get my desired high-speed rail line going from Tampa to New York or Chicago, but someone will get jobs, take the money and spend it, and thus help replace the demand we're losing in this downturn. I'm much more concerned about Geithner's management of the financial mess and the resuscitation of credit markets, because I think there is far less margin for error without nasty consequences (either a waste of money or ineffectiveness).
To some extent, the discussion of the difference between assurances and firm enforcement in federal education policy is an issue of margin for error. I'm an historian, so I can go back to the prehistory of the 1960s (for all you young wonkish types) and Gary Orfield's first book, The Reconstruction of Southern Education (1969). As Orfield explains, Southern states resisted and tried to work their way around the requirements of the Civil Rights Act's Title VI (nondiscrimination), and it took some years for the federal government to make a bona fide threat of enforcement before school districts would desegregate in response to demands by the Office of Civil Rights. Someone who expected instant enforcement would have been sorely disappointed. Someone who expected that lawyers and the federal government would have to push and push hard for several years to begin the ball rolling -- and really rolling -- would have been more realistic.
There's isn't very good language for talking about this with education policy other than the vague terms implementation and transition. Some fields do have practical terms, though. For example, in meteorology the term I have heard tossed around with regard to hurricane forecasting is the "path of least regret." That means that if the choice for hurricane forecasters is between alerting people to evacuate when there is a definite chance it's unnecessary or failing to alert people to evacuate when they might really need to, the forecasters see evacuation or other preparations as the path of least regret. That term does not mean that forecasters always pick the path of least regret, but the language allows them to discuss choices in a clear fashion.
I'll be clear: while I agree with some of the mandates in ARRA money, I've already gone on the record as skeptical of unique student-teacher record linkage. But because regulation is a fact of life in both state and federal education policy, I think it's important to step back occasionally and think about the broader issues involved. That's part of why I've come to think that accountability systems need have a positive defense that teachers and schools can use, because it can allow systems and individuals to manage risk in ways that benefit students. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Basic takeaway: all regulatory policies need some margin for error.
April 18, 2009
Research blog started
For those who want to walk into the weeds with me on a new research project, feel free to follow my new research blog hosted at USF. Dorn's dangerously public research blog has the subtitle "conducting research without a net," and I am likely to fail in public view. [Update 4/20/09: the blog server's database had a problem over the weekend, but it's fixed this morning. I swear, my entry did not break the internets.] See today's entry for an an example of a "duh, this is why you don't look at your project at 9:30 pm" story. That's not quite true: looking at the project at 9:30 on Saturday showed me something I didn't pick up the last time I worked on the data at a perfectly sane time. But that's what being a tenured faculty member is supposed to allow and even encourage: taking greater risks either in terms of potential failure or the time required for a project.
For those who are curious about the background for this project, we currently don't have a good way to translate administrative reports of enrollment by grade into a trustworthy measures of graduation. Chris Swanson's work doesn't count without considerable assumptions, but that's not a shame at all, since no one else's does with the exception of measures adjusted for interstate migration (such as Rob Warren's), and that's not feasible except with states and other large population units. Longitudinal measures such as the NGA and federal regulatory graduation statistics will go a long way to fixing this, but there will continue to be an important need to be able to work with administrative data. And it's an interesting intellectual puzzle.
In my spare time in the past few years I've been trying an analytical approach using whatever meager skills I have in formal demography. There are limits to that, and I've decided to try a different approach, simulating a range of conditions of potential high schools and looking at relationships that way. This'll start with the simplest approach, a hypothetical world where the student population at schools never change, each ninth-grade cohort has identical experiences, and no one transfers in or out. If I can look at that artificial world, I might be able to relax those assumptions one at a time.
But I need to be able to generate data for that world that is plausible, as opposed to something I could generate by my imagination. So I'm playing around with data from the National Longitudinal Sample of Youth cohort beginning in 1979 to have a set of nationally-sampled data from real, historical adolescents with a year-by-year longitudinal record of school attendance and high school graduation. From that, I'll generate a set of synthetic (or Monte Carlo/simulated) cohorts with a range of grade retention and graduation. Consider it a pilot, or proof-of-concept, or just playing around.
If your spectator sport of choice is not baseball or opera, follow the new blog. As I've said, I'm as likely to fall flat on my face as not.
April 17, 2009
Are GPAs dirty while the SAT-I score is clean?
Before I dive into a minor patch of weeds, some basic issues: Above all else, the vast majority of college and university admission slots are not at selective institutions, so the debate over SAT use for deciding admissions should largely be tangential to policy concerns about postsecondary attainment. This is akin to spending all one's time thinking about the undergraduate curriculum at Harvard or the civic engagement of students at Oberlin. Even if you look at the institutions that require SATs, I suspect the vast majority of slots are at selective institutinos only in the barest sense of rejecting some applicants. But the use of SAT scores is a political hot topic because it stabs into our ideas about meritocracy (as Nicholas Lehmann has written) and also because it has been used for status purposes by institutions or pushed down on institutions (either by state politicians or U.S. News & World Report).
So when Michael Kirst gives us a heads-up that a forthcoming book will argue that SAT I scores have no added predictive value for finishing a degree (not first-year grades, but finishing a degree), I am not surprised one whit. I will wait for the book to see if the evidence is convincing, but I don't think that it will change either the use or the dominant themes in the debate. When SAT scores are used for things it was never intended to and for which there is no documented validity (as a placement tool in college, or for use in judging high schools), you're talking about culture rather than rationality and evidence. A case in point is Chad Aldeman's recent discussion of the SAT debate:
It may or may not be biased against minorities and low-income youth, and kids can be coached on how to improve their score. But, what else do we have that's better, that elite colleges and universities would trust as a replacement? High school GPAs are tarnished by grade inflation and high schools themselves are yoked to reputations. Personal statements are no less coachable than SATs, and extracurricular activities favor the children of parents with time and money. Even worse, none of these things are objective; a student in Abilene, TX cannot be compared to a student from Anchorage, AL on these things. The SAT, on the other hand, is a national test.
Since Aldeman had previously argued that selective institutions should set a basic "we think you can do the work" threshhold and then run a lottery, this is a fascinating defense of a largely defenseless practice. Here's the gist: plenty of research documents that despite all of its problems, a high school GPA is (roughly) at least as good as the SAT in predicting first-year grades. But while many people understand that imperfect data can still be useful (and I suspect that would be Aldeman's defense of the SAT), there is a theme in the excerpt above that appears commonly in debates about admissions standards: GPAs are dirty, SATs are clean.
The argument is almost always laid out the way that Aldeman does: high school GPAs are inconsistent from place to place. Even course titles don't mean the same thing; first-year algebra in one place can be remarkably different from algebra in another. Grades are often a reward of students' putting up with seat-time rather than a demonstration of accomplishments. In contrast, the SAT is a nationally-normed test, and whatever weaknesses it has, it more than makes up for that in its being objective.
One practical problem with this argument is that college is not a set of SAT-like tests. College is messy in all sorts of ways, and for all its flaws, there is something in a high school transcript that has more information about a student than an SAT score. We'll have to wait for the book to come out to see more, but there's a reason why a regular diploma is a more valuable credential than a GED, and the GED is also a nationally-developed test.
A second problem with the "GPA dirty, SAT clean" argument is that the use of the SAT can most harm the chances of students who come from high schools with the lowest graduation rates, schools where one could argue a relatively high GPA says a great deal about relative persistence. As Ted Sizer argued almost a quarter-century ago in Horace's Compromise, suburban schools are filled with the types of classroom treaties that result in grade inflation. But in a school where roughly half of the students never graduate, grades tell you a great deal. They may not tell you if someone who finished algebra I with an A can derive the standard binomial-equation solution (the SAT-I doesn't tell you that, either), but they tell you how much a student has persistence, guts, bureaucratic navigation skills, etc. And if someone from such a school writes an essay (we're talking about selective institutions, again), I suspect it would be far less likely to be coached or professionally edited than the essay of a student in a comfortable suburb.
As an historian, my professional judgment is that the debate over the SATs has almost nothing to do with whether there is a rational justification for its use in admissions. Instead, the public debate is almost entirely over our ideas of merit, and the framing by one side of the debate as a claim that the high-school GPA is dirty while the SAT is clean is confirmation of that judgment.
April 16, 2009
Migration and graduation
I'm experimenting with publishing working papers on the Social Science Research Network, with the first one, Migration and Graduation Measures, freely downloadable on some technical issues with graduation rates. The gist: without knowing accurate information about migration (and transfers), non-longitudinal graduation rates are going to be inherently problematic.
April 11, 2009
Bewildered at arguments about rent-seeking
Not to accuse the conservative left hand of not knowing what the conservative right hand is doing, but I am bewildered by the latest publication of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. (Hat tip.) The report repeats an argument I have heard before why student aid is horrible: it feeds rent-seeking behavior from colleges and is therefore counterproductive in terms of larger spending patterns. Apart from the thin evidentiary base and failure to consider alternative hypotheses (primarily, that public colleges universities raised tuition as state appropriations per student have fallen), there's a gaping inconsistency between the "it just encourages them" argument against student aid and arguments in favor of publicly-funded vouchers that pay part of private-school K-12 tuition.
Some K-12 voucher programs are conditioned on schools' accepting vouchers as complete payment, but that is not true with either Florida's tax-credit voucher program or its voucher program for students with disabilities. Yet--not to my complete surprise--I don't think that anyone who has argued that college student promotes rent-seeking basis has lifted a finger to see if there is rent-seeking behavior with K-12 voucher programs. This is not a call for anyone to research this, particularly, since I don't think the salient issues with K-12 vouchers are the possibility of rent-seeking. But it's an inconsistency in conservative education policy arguments that is rather curious.
April 10, 2009
Remedial math in community colleges
The anonymous community-college Dean Dad wrote this morning about remedial math classes in community colleges, and I'll use this as an excuse opportunity to bring together several thoughts I've spread around in different places or have not articulated:
- Remedial education in community colleges should be the logical place where we try Carol Twigg's approach to improving essential common instruction.
- We should stop blaming a mythical lack of alignment between high school and college for remedial-education needs in community colleges. I'd bet a bundle that every high school counselor tells students that algebra is required for college, and I'd bet a bundle that students who pass algebra and then are slotted for remedial education in community college knew far more algebra at the end of the algebra course than when they took the placement test for CC. My alternative hypothesis: students forget, especially if their hold on algebra in high school was by the fingernail. I'd be happy to be disproved wrong here, but someone has to do the research to keep stating the myth without my tossing tomatoes.
- There should be no conflict between the National Mathematics Advisory Panel's final report recommendation emphasizing fractions as a central pre-algebra skill, on the one hand, and the desire to teach probability and statistics, on the other hand. How can you teach probability without students' understanding fractions?
- My guess based on observing weaknesses in communicating math-ed expectations is that one key stumbling block in learning fractions and teaching them is grasping/explaining how they can represent multiple properties and how the same properties of a fraction can be represented in different ways. If someone understands that 2 is a fraction, and that 67% not only is close to 2/3 as an abstract value but also can represent an approximation of the same darned thing (for a whole load of values for "thing"), then the concept of rational numbers is a small step, or at least a much smaller step when someone responds to the first statement with "huh?"
April 7, 2009
Mediocre education reporting #357
Sam Dillon's story this morning on the evident pending Giant Teacher Shortage IV: Postapocalyptic Horror... uh, pending retirement of many teachers struck me as extraordinarily poor reporting on a National Commission on Teaching and America's Future report because Dillon wrote his lede from the first two pages of the report.
Here's what the report says, or the gist of it: let's develop alternative models of socializing new teachers, models that take advantage of the demographics of teaching.
Here's the lede in the article: "Over the next four years, more than a third of the nation's 3.2 million teachers could retire, depriving classrooms of experienced instructors and straining taxpayer-financed retirement systems, according to a new report."
Do you see the same problem I do? The main argument of the report is not mentioned until paragraph #4 of Dillon's story. (In addition, like many other reporters Dillon fails to mention whether the report was peer-reviewed.) Then Dillon apparently called up Michael Podgursky for a publishable quotation, who dutifully responded with his usual skepticism about demographic Chicken-Littleism.
Except in this case, the primary Chicken Little was the reporter. Look at the chart in Appendix B, on p. 18, and you'll see quite a bit of room for optimism. For those who need a hint: the Baby Boom echo cohort is now beginning careers.
Update: Apparently USA Today has the same take on the report as Dillon, and like the Times, it fails to note that the report did not appear in a refereed journal. C'mon, reporters: raise your game when reporting on research.
April 6, 2009
One teacher's response to Ron Matus's article
There's been lots of coverage of the Ron Matus story March 29 on firing teachers in Florida, but there's been no follow-up online about the letters to the editor that were printed April 4 (last Saturday), and at this point, I can't even find the letters on the Times website. But I think one needs to be highlighted, because it's from a teacher and makes a few important points:
The premise in the article [by Ron Matus] is that tenure makes it too hard to fire bad teachers, yet the few examples given don't demonstrate that, but rather, simply show inaction on the part of school districts.
If the writer had found districts attempting, but failing, to fire bad teachers, he might have a point. I see this drive to get rid of tenure as an effort to instill fear in teachers and keep them silent. Teachers living in fear for their jobs can't afford to speak out.
Getting rid of tenure (read: due process) might make it easier to dismiss the rare teacher who shouldn't be in the profession. It would also make it easier to dismiss the good teachers--even the great ones, because the great ones are the ones who stand up and advocate for their students, themselves and their profession, and in doing so sometimes step on toes...
John Perry, Tampa
I've known John Perry for a number of years; he's an activist in the Hillsborough Classroom Teachers Association, but I don't think he was when we met. I think Perry's wrong about the order of magnitude of "the rare teacher who shouldn't be in the profession" (emphasis added), but since a good portion of teachers leave the field within a few years, I don't think that there's a shortage of ways to discourage teachers from continuing.
More broadly speaking, I think more sophisticated critics of teachers and their unions understand that administrators are the ones who fail to fire teachers, but Perry's other point is important: while K-12 teachers do not have academic freedom in the same sense that higher-ed faculty do, they're the ones I often hear a certain style of reformers praise for precisely the type of dissent that would be in danger without due process.
So let me phrase the question in the following way: does anyone want administrators to be able to fire teachers summarily after teachers do the following?
- Refuse to change a grade to let an athlete play.
- Complain that the new math textbook series is confusing to new teachers and likely to lead to poor teaching.
- Sign and date a request that a child be evaluated for eligibility for special education services.
- Complain when girls have fewer opportunities than boys.*
As far as I am aware, the only case above for which K-12 teachers are clealry protected when they speak out is the last one, and that's because of a Supreme Court decision stemming from Title IX; I suspect that the are likely to be protected if they push for assessment to gain services for a child, but I don't know of anything as clear-cut as a Supreme Court decision. And I don't see people who are in favor of "tenure reform" rushing to replace workplace due process with greater whistleblower protections.
April 1, 2009
Sharpton paid off? Please tell me this is an April Fool's joke
The New York Daily News is reporting this morning that former NYC Schools Chancellor Harold Levy is involved in a $500,000 payoff set of donations to the Rev. Al Sharpton's organization, with payments beginning shortly after Sharpton and Joel Klein launched the Education Equality Project in June 2008. With friends like Levy,...
In other news, I am hereby announcing my support for the public flogging of teachers whose students' test scores decrease from year to year, my hope that NYC invests an addition $1 billion in the ARIS system, my trust in the market to determine the true worth of schools within a voucherized environment, and my death last Thursday from reading Michele Foucault. In lieu of flowers, my family is asking that donations be made in my name to the John Birch Society, except for my son, who would appreciate iTunes cash cards instead.
Okay, it looks like the DN story is serious. Yikes. That'll take the wind out of the Education Equality Project (EEP) conference starting today. Then again, maybe "eep!" is the reaction of participants and fans of the Klein-Sharpton effort.
March 31, 2009
Lies, damned lies, and the Pacific Research Institute
Often, it takes a bit of time to uncover statistical flummery; one needs to dig deep inside arcane methods or the details of data collection. But sometimes it takes just a few clicks. Matthew Ladner's blog entry today, $243,000 per student school districts?, quoted work by the Pacific Research Institute that claimed two small districts in California each spent more than $200,000 per student. Scandalous! Criminal!
Well, it might be, but so is the credibility of anyone who quotes those statistics without taking a few minutes to look a wee bit more closely. According to the quoted press release, California spends something over $10,000 per student ($11,600 is the figure quoted for 2006-07), but the Mattole Unified and Mineral Elementary districts supposedly spent $225,256 and $242,610 per student.
My first thought was of the tiny New Jersey districts that literally had no students for odd administrative-law reasons. Or maybe these were essentially fictive districts created by companies that incorporated towns and funneled money into specialized programs for a tiny population of executive children. But the locations (Humboldt and Tehana counties) didn't fit with either hypothesis. I was curious: I clicked. And then I saw the magic words in the PRI website pages: "Revenue Received per ADA." ADA = average daily attendance and is not always the same as enrollment. Okay, so what was up?
Mattole apparently has 905 enrollees but the ADA listed on the PRI site is 35.2. Mineral has 123 enrollees and an ADA reported by PRI as 4.7. If you divide the revenues by the enrollment, the average revenues are a much more sensible $8,761 and $9,270 per student, respectively. That sounded very odd: WHY would ADA be so low? So I checked out the districts. In Mattole, the vast majority of enrollment is in a single charter school, Mattole Valley Charter, which had 864 enrollees in 2007-08. In the Mineral Elementary district, the eScholar Academy virtual charter school had the bulk of enrollment.
If gambling on proposition bets were legal in Florida, I would bet at least a little money on charter-school enrollment NOT counting for the district's official ADA. So in any small district where the majority of enrolled students were in charter schools (or in this case, one charter school each), the official ADA would be far lower than the actual enrollment of students in schools receiving public support.
But instead of betting any money, I'll just bet my reputation. Does anyone want to prove me wrong?
Update: In comments, Ladner and PRI staff member Vicki Murray acknowledge that I was correct, and the original claim was incorrect.
March 30, 2009
Seattle will be drier
I spent some time this weekend finishing the first complete draft of a talk I'm giving in Seattle on Thursday. I'm going to be heading there while a few thousand historians are leaving Seattle after the end of the Organization of American Historians meeting. I'm either expecting to find a time machine or I am heading there for a different meeting (Council for Exceptional Children). Last time I was in Seattle, it was wetter and colder than what's forecasted for the middle of this week. We had a drenching rain in Tampa this morning, so things will even out in my personal experience this week, even if not for the world.
I hope my neighbors weren't paying close attention while I was timing the draft. I don't read papers word-for-word, but I wanted to get a sense of how far I'm off on time, so I read it aloud while alternating between the laundry room and the kitchen.
Oh, the topic? Accountability and students with disabilities. I think I know how I'm ending the hour, but the cliffhanger before the third set of commercials is the tough part right now, and I haven't yet decided if Jason's going to live. If he does, I'm going to have to tear up the last act and start fresh. I've given a spoiler, haven't I?
More seriously, this talk is giving me the opportunity and prod to think through some connections between areas of education politics that I mentally put on "percolate": the democratic rationale for public education, tensions between public and private purposes of schooling, and what technocratic mechanisms may be useful for (and in what circumstances). When I get back, I have to think about potential outlets and how to get a potential coauthor to give up enough time to participate (and the value involved in that).
The only serious performance question I have is the extent of corny jokes and how far I can/should push them.
- An RTI Tier 2 intervention plan and a Writ of Mandamus walk into a bar...
- Peter Singer dies and finds himself at the Pearly Gates facing St. Peter: "So your most important goal right now is to avoid pain?" St. Peter begins...
- How many IEP team members does it take to screw in a lightbulb?...
- A rabbi, a minister, and a psychometrist are in a rowboat in the middle of the lake...
Maybe not those jokes.
March 23, 2009
Fordham Fellows
Once again this year, as in 2007-08, the Fordham Institute has brought in a group of Fellows with a diverse set of views. Today's blog entry by Catherine Cullen is a case in point. I side with Cullen on the substance about Charles Murray, but Mike Petrilli and Fordham in general deserve kudos for creating an environment where their fellows are free to speak their minds.
March 22, 2009
Grokking social-science statistics
Several comments in the past few weeks have expressed some wonder that I use statistics when I am publicly skeptical of several policy-related uses of education statistics. I am a little confused by the comments (and implicit accusation of inconsistency), since many of the most articulate critics of high-stakes testing are assessment experts, but for the record, here are a few of my personal stances towards social-science statistics:
- If for no other purpose than to engage in political debates in a conscientious and credible fashion, adults need to have some rudimentary knowledge of statistics and probability and also be able to listen to and discuss essential concepts without doing enormous violence to them. This is on the same order as needing to have some rudimentary knowledge of Newtonian motion, thermodynamics, electricity, algebra, natural selection, etc., to engage in public policy debates in a constructive fashion. Know why perpetual-motion machine patents require extraordinary (and highly improbable) evidence; know why regression to the mean invalidates many change-over-time claims when the baseline comes from a sample of outliers.
- If you're tempted to be proud that you don't know statistics, see what happens to the following sentence if you replace "in French" with "using statistics" and "French history" with your current interest: "Yes, I'm writing about French history; what do you mean, I need to read stuff that's written in French?"
- One of the reasons why one needs that basic knowledge is to know the limits of statistics and be able to ask probing questions of the claims that are made in public debates. Probing questions are not of the formalist type that could be applied to any claim, "You can say what you want by picking a statistic" or "It's unethical to use statistics without talking about the metause of statistics." Probing questions engage the specific claims made in debate: "Politician Yodel says we saw a 102% increase in the incidence of Echoing Disease last year, but I want to know what the incidence was the year before so I know if this is a serious problem."
- Though social-science statistics are inherently constructed objects, they can nonetheless be enormously useful. For a thoughtful and useful discussion of social-constructionist arguments, see Ian Hacking's The Social Construction of What? (1999). (Michael Berube and I both very much like Hacking's discussion of dolomite, though I suspect I am closer to Hacking's end view than is the Paterno Family Professor of American Airspace and Dangeral Studies.)
- To work with social-science statistics, at least I find it tough to simultaneously criticize every character that I type in a statistics program and also work the darned program and think about what I'm doing. So I engage in a form of suspension of disbelief, work the statistics, pause and think about the larger meaning and doubts, work again, doubt, work, doubt, etc. I know I'm embedded in the statistical machinery when I hear, "Sherman, are you going to get any sleep tonight?" And I know when I've doubted enough when I realize I forget the syntax for calling up multiple regression.
And tomorrow morning, because of the idiosyncrasies of the USF IRB-02 records, I need to write and print an IRB protocol so I can finish a long-delayed project ... assuming I can climb the learning curve for the R-Project language.
March 21, 2009
Michael Crow and Bernie Machen up the yin-yang
Monday's New York Times story on Arizona State University stole my point earlier this month about the expenses of public research universities and the tension between undergraduate teaching and the building of a research infrastructure. Either that, or I was stating the obvious (I think I was stating the obvious). The Times quoted the ASU student State Press in pointing out that the budget cuts had turned ASU into the Neutered American University instead of Crow's "new American university."
Today, Timothy Burke has another thoughtful entry about the future of higher education, this time on the difficulty of building the core of a great teaching university, on top of September's argument that the party's over as far as a several-decades boom is concerned. And Thursday's news about prospective cuts at the University of Florida's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences should be sobering given that UF is putatively part of the Association of American Universities, the country club of higher education in the U.S. Michael Crow's ambitions did not protect ASU from a fiscal fiasco, and after Bernie Machen continued a decade-long trend to turn UF into a medical center with a university appendage, budget cuts have resulted in a layoff grievance that my union won decisively this month, pending disaster for science at UF, and the widespread destruction of morale around campus. So much for the value of being a member of the country-club set.
ASU and UF are the extremes of this pattern of overweening administrative/political ambition, stories of mission creep having become mission sprint and now the mission trots. Other institutions may survive this downturn without as much of a visible fiasco, and well-placed institutions might even benefit, at least in comparison. The irony of the entry title is that while "up the yin-yang" is slang for extremism (well, in one of its uses), the reason why Crow and Machen are in the Academic Hall of Shame right now is because they have not understand balance at a public university. I suspect that there is a reasonable balance, and part of my job as a faculty union leader is to do my best to push that balance. But I recognize that historical trends and current budget crises make that balance much more difficult in most places.
March 18, 2009
By request: on teaching quality
I am not going to write today about the new report, An Evaluation of Teachers Trained through Different Routes to Certification, because I haven't read it. (Other things take higher priority for me right now; the report is heading to my to-read pile. But after reading the praise and also Aaron Pallas's criticism, let alone Sean Corcoran and Jennifer Jennings's review, my curiosity is piqued.) But I have an outstanding request from a reader to discuss teaching quality, and I'm going to pull the exam-writer's trick and reformulate the question: what should policymakers know about the history of "teacher quality" in the U.S.?
Short answers: the long shadow of character, the education bootstrap, the short history of the single salary schedule, and the porous nature of certification/licensure.
The long shadow of character
First, teaching as a career is
less than 150 years old. In North America teaching was largely a short-term and
part-year occupation until sometime in the 19th century (depending on
where you're looking). In part because of the mix of private and
taxpayer funding, and the short sessions in many places in the country,
few people in the early 19th century could make a living teaching
full-time. So many of the mostly-male teachers were in schools only
part of the year, filling in when they didn't have opportunities to
preach, attend college, or engage in something else.
Because of the multiple missions of schooling, academic qualifications were low on the priority list for those hiring teachers. The key qualification was high character, and the most common practical qualification was the ability to control a classroom. The source in many history of ed texts illustrating the second is Edward Eggleston's The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871), a novel whose subtitle tells the tale: "A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana." At the beginning of the story, the new schoolmaster is asked by trustee Jack Means,
"Want to be a school-master, do you? You? Well, what would you do in Flat Crick deestrick, I'd like to know? Why, the boys have driv off the last two, and licked the one afore them like blazes. You might teach a summer school, when nothin' but children come. But I 'low it takes a right smart man to be school-master in Flat Crick in the winter. They'd pitch you out of doors, sonny, neck and heels, afore Christmas."
In the nineteenth century, a smart teacher had the ability to control older boys, presumably by making them smart when necessary.
That wasn't universally true; one of the common arguments for hiring women as teachers rather than men was their presumably nurturing nature. The gender stereotype of who was the right teacher inevitably involved questions about who could properly motivate students, especially boys. Never mind that women could use a switch on a student as easily as a man could. Or the rather clever way that hiring women allowed urban school districts to have a workforce that was cheaper and less likely to hop to other jobs -- because women had fewer higher-paying opportunities. (The same dynamic was true with African American teachers in the 20th century, at least until the 1964 Civil Rights Act; teaching was one of the best opportunities for upward mobility.) The rationale was all about sweetness and light, nurturing and character.
The
legacy of all that history is that academic qualifications became an issue
decades after the spread of mass primary schooling in the North. Part
of the resistance was a fear of centralization; as New York state
politician Orestes Brownson said, once the first normal schools were
established, then states would try to work it so that no one but a
normal-school graduate could teach. (He was partly right; see the
"porous nature" section below.) Concerns about morality led schools to
bar women from teaching after marrying, then forcing maternity leave
when pregnancies began showing. Even now, morality will trump academics
in the news. When was the last time your local television news show ran
a story about teacher qualifications (either academic background or
effectiveness)? When was the last time it ran a story about a teacher
having sex with a student?
As I have argued elsewhere,
this focus on virtue has caused serious long-term harm in how we look at
teaching. And in the long run, those who argue about whether it's most
important to intervene in teachers' disciplinary background,
pedagogical training, or effectiveness in raising test scores are
having a debate that could not have existed 100 years ago. So to the
partisans in that argument, you are all light-years ahead of Jack Means and his real-world counterparts.
The education bootstrap (as in lifting up onself by one's, not engaging in violence with a)
Teaching
was not a career in the early 19th century, but women could be teachers
by the middle and end of the century, because the start of mass
schooling generated an adult population with at least a minimum of
formal education. A few weeks ago when I heard Joseph Kisanji of the Tanzania Education Network
talk about the state of special education in Tanzania, what struck me
was the low proportion of primary students who continued to secondary
grades. That plus the high fertility rate in Tanzania puts the country
behind the eight-ball, having a very high ratio of children in need of
a teacher to adults with enough education to teach. Add sex
discrimination in the form of requiring girls to work and thus
discouraging them from secondary school, plus the legacy of "villagization" in the 1970s (the Tanzanian equivalent of Soviet collectivization) and you've got a serious
dilemma for the country. While the average student-teacher ratio is
something like 50:1, according to Kisanji in some areas of Tanzania,
that ratio is 70:1, 80:1, or even 100:1.
At some point,
that dilemma exists with every population, at least in the abstract if not with 100:1 ratios) because you start out with
less knowledge in the adult population than you'd like, and to get there, you first need a
critical mass of adults who are both educated and also willing to
teach. Let's call that the educational starting hole.
The United States essentially lifted itself out of the
starting hole through coeducation and mass primary education (even if
it was inconsistent). The pool of available teachers grew in
the 19th century with the willingness (and eventual preference) to hire
women and also by declining fertility and mortality, so that the
proportion of the population in elementary and secondary school ages
shrank. That demographic transition gave the next few generations a
chance to keep expanding the critical mass of educated adults.
One stumbling block since WW2 has not been the number of adults with
bachelor's degrees but the consequences of reduced discrimination for
fields such as teaching that have historically relied on discrimination
elsewhere as a recruiting device. In terms of generating an educated
adult population, we're doing fairly well as a country. (That's an
historian's hindsight, not a statement of satisfaction.) What is
remarkable to my historian's eye is that so few college
graduates today need to enter teaching to satisfy the bulk of school
needs. The struggle to attract great college graduates to teaching is
less the total number of graduates than the question of who goes into
teaching and the alternatives that pull potential teachers into other
fields.
That doesn't mean that teachers know everything
they should. The accessible availability of "content knowledge" (an
awful phrase, to be honest) is far more widespread than access to great
repertoires of teaching techniques and the opportunities to practice
them. There's a long story and debate there, and I'll just suggest that
while you can learn a great deal about physics online from Walter
Lewin, there's little parallel for how to teach high-school physics. (Fans of sciencegeekgirl, please understand I'm talking about videos... I know there's plenty of text-based material online.)
This also suggests that what Tanzania desperately needs is to boost its secondary schooling. The country is one of the world's poorest, and while it is not in the same awful shape as Zimbabwe or Darfur, that's saying very, very little. Get a critical mass of young adult Tanzanians reasonably educated, and the following generation will be much better off in part because there will be a greater mass of potential teachers.
In terms of the U.S., we should understand both where our strengths lie
(a much more broadly educated adult population than many countries) as
well as weaknesses. Maybe one example will illustrate: the teaching of
math in elementary and middle schools. In the past two decades, there
has been a generational change in the amount of math that high school
graduates have taken, especially among girls. (This change comes from
the mid-80s increase in graduation course requirements in many states.)
At the same time, there has been a deliberate effort to improve the teaching of math. I'm not going to get into the debates
over the 1989 National Council for the Teaching of Mathematics
standards statement or its more recent revisions, but the discussion is
out there in the ether and should not be ignored.
The first
trend is something that is a strength as far as the academic skills of
potential teachers is concerned: more high school graduates (and thus
college graduates) have exposure to math through any level than before
1982 or 1983. It is certainly not universal or complete; there are
still too many elementary teachers who fear math and pass that fear on.
(As far as I'm concerned, a single teacher who does so is too many.)
The second trend? I'm not sure, and I'll hedge my bets by referring to
Larry Cuban's hybridization thesis: I'd bet more elementary and
middle-school teachers are using manipulatives and activities that try
to "make sense" of math, but probably few are engaging in what its
critics might refer to as unstructured teaching in the name of
constructivism. Some part of that, but probably not much, is related to
a deeper understanding of how children do or could learn math. Both
issues (knowledge of math and knowledge of teaching math) have changed
over the past generation or so. One of them, possibly both, is likely
to be responsible for Florida's steadily increasing math scores on NAEP for eighth-graders since 1990.
The history of the single salary schedule
Advocates of differential and performance pay for teachers sometimes portray the single salary schedule as a long-term legacy of an inefficient bureaucracy, and that's partly true. You can find some sort of salary schedule in the growing school bureaucracies of 19th century cities. But there are some substantial features of salary schedules before World War 2 that suggest how short the single salary schedule's life has been.
First is the difference between elementary and secondary teacher pay. In Philadelphia, the teachers at Central High School
were treated like royalty in comparison with all other teachers in the
system, at least at the beginning of Central's life when it was the
only high school in the city. Teachers were called "professors," were
paid much better than elementary teachers, and were largely autonomous.
And they were men. As Philadelphia added more high schools, Central
High and its teachers lost prestige and authority, but the gap between
elementary and high school teachers was persistent and reflected in the
structure of teacher organizations (including nascent unions) and pay.
Second
is the treatment of teacher pensions and gender. In many cities in the
mid-20th century, pensions had conditions that disadvantaged women who
had children. In Nashville, for example, I've come across age
guidelines that eliminated all teachers who began a job over age 40
from being eligible for the pension plan. What that did was eliminate
from pension plans the women who taught for a few years before having
children, left teaching as their children were growing up, and then
wanted to return to teaching later.
Third is the persistent racial inequalities in teacher pay, even after the 1940 Melvin Alston equalization case. Scott Baker has argued
that in the fight for teacher equal pay, many Southern school districts
began to use the National Teacher Examination as a basis for pay
differentiation after they were told that African American teachers
scored lower on the NTE than white teachers.
In the history
of teachers in the U.S., the development of bureaucratic pay schemes
fit comfortably with discriminatory practices, and one of the victories of unions, civil rights activists, and women's civic groups has been the elimination of explicit discrimination in pay schemes. Need one require a single salary schedule to maintain that accomplishment? I don't think so, but to ignore the history is foolish, and there needs to be a watchdog so that there isn't a resurgence of pay discrimination among teachers.
The porous nature of certification/licensure
Nineteenth-century New York politician Orestes Brownson was partly right when he thought that the creation of normal schools would centralize the qualification of teachers. The normal schools of the 1800s became recognized and eventually grew to teachers colleges and regional state universities, and "teacher training" has become a common feature of what people do before they become teachers.
At the same time (and in a related way), if slowly, inconsistently, and unevenly, school administrator