Weaker economy, better teachers

Department of silver linings.

WEAK MARKETS, STRONG TEACHERS: RECESSION AT CAREER START AND TEACHER EFFECTIVENESS

Markus Nagler
Marc Piopiunik
Martin R. West
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
July 2015

ABSTRACT

How do alternative job opportunities affect teacher quality? We provide the first causal evidence on this question by exploiting business cycle conditions at career start as a source of exogenous variation in the outside options of potential teachers. Unlike prior research, we directly assess teacher quality with value-added measures of impacts on student test scores, using administrative data on 33,000 teachers in Florida public schools. Consistent with a Roy model of occupational choice, teachers entering the profession during recessions are significantly more effective in raising student test scores. Results are supported by placebo tests and not driven by differential attrition.

~~~~~~~~~~

How do alternative job opportunities affect teacher quality? This is a crucial policy question as teachers are a key input in the education production function (Hanushek and Rivkin, 2012) who affect their students’ outcomes even in adulthood (Chetty et al., 2014b). Despite their importance, individuals entering the teaching profession in the United States tend to come from the lower part of the cognitive ability distribution of college graduates (Hanushek and Pace, 1995). One frequently cited reason for not being able to recruit higher-skilled individuals as teachers is low salaries compared to other professions (e.g., Dolton and Marcenaro-Gutierrez, 2011; Hanushek et al., 2014).

Existing research provides evidence consistent with the argument that outside options matter. A first strand of the literature has used regional variation in relative teacher salaries, finding that pay is positively related to teachers’ academic quality (e.g., Figlio, 1997). A second strand has used long-run changes in the labor market – in particular, the expansion of job opportunities for women – finding that the academic quality of new teachers is lower when job market alternatives are better (e.g., Bacolod, 2007). However, both bodies of evidence suffer from key limitations. First, relative pay may be endogenous to teacher quality. Second, measures of academic quality are poor predictors of teacher effectiveness (cf. Jackson et al., 2014). This important policy question therefore remains unresolved.

[snip]

We find that teachers who entered the profession during recessions are roughly 0.10 standard deviations (SD) more effective in raising math test scores than teachers who entered the profession during non-recessionary periods. The effect is half as large for reading value-added. Quantile regressions indicate that the difference in math value-added between recession and non-recession entrants is most pronounced at the upper end of the effectiveness distribution. Based on figures from Chetty et al. (2014b), the difference in average math effectiveness between recession and non-recession entrants implies a difference in students’ discounted life-time earnings of around $13,000 per classroom taught each year.2 Under the more realistic assumption that only 10% of recession-cohort teachers are pushed into teaching because of the recession, these recession-only teachers are roughly one SD more effective in teaching math than the teachers they push out. Based on the variation in teacher VAMs in our data, being assigned to such a teacher would increase a student’s test scores by around 0.20 SD.

[snip]

Our finding that the effect of recessions on teacher effectiveness is twice as strong in math as in reading is consistent with evidence that wage returns to numeracy skills are twice as large as those to literacy skills in the US labor market (Hanushek et al., 2015).

[snip]

Our results also suggest that recent improvements in cognitive skills among new teachers in the US documented by Goldhaber and Walch (2013) may be attributable to the 2008-09 financial crisis, rather than an authentic reversal of long-term trends.

[snip]

To our knowledge, ours is the first paper to document a causal effect of outside labor market options on the effectiveness of entering teachers in raising student test scores.

[snip]

We find that teachers who started their careers during recessions are more effective.

[snip]

Chetty et al. (2014b) find that students taught by a teacher with a one SD higher value-added measure at age 12 earn on average 1.3% more at age 28. Using this figure, our preferred recession effect translates into differences in discounted lifetime earnings of around $13,000 per classroom taught each school year by recession and non-recession teachers (evaluated at the average classroom size in our sample).

in other words, the answer is homeschooling

For some reason, I stumbled upon an Education News interview with Joshua Angrist that contains the following exchange:

[QUESTION]
School quality and human capital ARE major issues for all Americans. But we all know that some schools are failing. What can the typical parent do for their child other than attempt to home school?

[ANSWER]
Some schools are better than others. For many parents, however, this is not worth worrying about. For example, I never worried much about my kids schooling. I told them that teaching is hard, many teachers are mediocre at best, and they should try to get something out of badly taught classes as well as inspiring ones. The evidence suggests that’s a reasonable approach for children in educated families like mine. I worry most about the children of teen mothers, from families where there isn’t much adult supervision, little in the way of role models, and little hope for a middle class life. In this situation, a good school can make a huge difference.

An Interview with Josh Angrist: School Quality - Who Decides? 

For white kids, good enough is good enough.

My first reaction was exasperation. Don't worry, be happy doesn't cut it, and I am in a position to know. I am the parent of a (white) college freshman, and I teach (some) white college freshman as well as black and Hispanic students. None of them -- black, white, or brown -- are where they should be, and Ed, who occasionally teaches (mostly white) freshmen at NYU, will tell you the same.

Maybe "the evidence" used to "suggest" that graduating high school as a white 18-year old with mediocre skills was "a reasonable approach," but this interview was published just 9 months ago, and things are different now.

See, e.g., the Hamilton Jobs Gap calculator. If the economy continues to create 155,000 jobs per month, which has been the rate for the past two years, full employment does not return until after 2025. At that point today's college freshmen will be 31 years old and will have spent their first decade of employment in a buyer's market for labor. In a buyers' market, employers have more applicants than they can sort through and, often, no real need to hire if they can't find a purple squirrel.

See Urban Dictionary for the expression that covers that situation.

"Never worrying much" about your kids' schooling is a luxury white parents no longer enjoy, along with all those other luxuries that disappeared when household wealth fell by 40% in 3 years time. Assuming Angrist is right about what parents "can do" (nothing) and I'm sure he is, then homeschooling is the answer.

That was my first reaction.

My second reaction was: jeeeeeezzz.

"...many teachers are mediocre at best..."

"...the children of teen mothers, from families where there isn’t much adult supervision, little in the way of role models..."

In one short paragraph, he's managed to insult both teachers and a fair share of minority parents, while dismissing afterschoolers and math warriors out of hand.

Pretty efficient, I'd say.

Education in Singapore -- the role of good teachers

I found an adorable video on the Singapore Ministry of Education's page. Blog post and video discussing the role of teachers in education is on Throwing Curves: Education in Singapore - the role of good teachers.

Teacher Training No Boon for Student Math Scores

Sigh. The more it changes, the more it stays the same.


Published Online: April 16, 2010
Teacher Training No Boon for Student Math Scores
By Debra Viadero

First-year findings from a federal study of 77 middle schools suggest that even intensive, state-of-the-art efforts to boost teachers’ skills on the job may not lead to significant gains in student achievement right away.

The "Middle School Mathematics Professional Development Impact Study," which was released April 6, is the second major experimental study by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences to find that a high-quality professional-development program failed to translate into any dramatic improvements in student learning. A two-year study of efforts to improve teachers’ instructional skills in early reading reached a similar conclusion in 2008.

“What accounts for this somewhat consistent pattern of results? We don’t really know,” said Michael S. Garet, a vice president at the American Institutes for Research. His Washington-based organization conducted both studies with the MDRC research group of New York City. “I think what we’re learning,” Mr. Garet added, “is that it’s challenging to make a big enough difference in teacher knowledge and instructional practice to have an impact on student learning.”

The results are already providing some intellectual ammunition for finding better ways to select and retain effective teachers—and shedding those who are ineffective—as the best way to improve instructional quality in schools.

The new study shows that “you can’t change teacher effectiveness very well with the tools that we have, and that you can’t change ineffective teachers into effective ones,” said Eric A. Hanushek, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, based at Stanford University. He is also the president of the IES advisory board, which heard a presentation on the new study’s findings last week.

But other scholars said it is too soon to issue a verdict on the effectiveness of professional development.

“We know teacher change takes time,” said Hilda Borko, an education professor who is also at Stanford. “The general belief is that it takes a while for teachers to take ownership of change and really incorporate change into their instruction.”

.....

Findings in Detail

By the end of the school year, the researchers found, teachers who participated knew slightly more about rational numbers, overall, than their control-group counterparts, but the effect was not statistically significant. Those slight improvements were most notable on a test of pedagogical content knowledge, where teachers stood a 55 percent chance of getting a question right, compared with a 50 percent chance for their counterparts in the control group. (In comparison, the trainers’ chance of answering a question correctly on that test was nearly 93 percent.)

On the plus side, the training did lead to changes in teaching practice. Compared with the control group, the teachers in the experimental group were more likely to try to draw out students’ thinking by asking students whether they agreed with a classmate’s response, or inviting them to share their mathematical strategies.

The changes in practice were not dramatic enough, however, to translate into student-learning gains on the computer-adaptive tests that students took in the spring. The students, most of whom came from schools where more than half of students qualified for federally subsidized school meals, continued to score, on average, at the 19th percentile on the tests, which were developed for the experiment by the Northwest Evaluation Association of Lake Oswego, Ore.

Mr. Garet said the researchers are now analyzing the results from a second year of similarly intensive teacher training in the same schools, which they hope to publish this year.

If those results show learning gains from the training, they might suggest the need for even more sustained professional development.

“You might need to have pretty intensive professional development all the time, every year, and then slowly get schools into a culture such that the expectation is that you always keep working on your knowledge,” said Sybilla Beckmann, a math professor at the University of Georgia in Athens and an adviser to the study.

The Case With Reading

The results from the 2008 reading study were based on two years of data, but just one year of professional development. That study also differed from the latest one in that it provided in-class coaching, randomly, to only about half the group in an effort to see whether that approach yielded any added benefits for teachers or their students. But that did not turn out to be the case.

The reading study also found that, while the skills of the 2nd graders in the study did not improve, there were some measurable gains in teachers’ knowledge.

For the middle school math study, Mr. Garet said, the researchers tested various possible explanations for why the training had failed to affect student achievement. They ruled out the hypothesis, for instance, that the tests were too hard or too easy for the teachers or their students.

“As you move away from the study itself,” Mr. Garet added, “one hypothesis worth testing would be to see what would happen if the professional development aligned with what teachers were evaluated on.”

Ms. Borko, who is leading her own study of teacher professional development, said it also would have been instructive if the federal studies had measured the quality of the instruction that teachers were getting.

Teacher Training No Boon for Student Math Scores

advice for curriculum committees everywhere

We've got so much going on here in town (posts t/k) that I'm only dimly aware of what is or is not happening at state & federal levels .... so I was surprised to discover this Daily News editorial yesterday while paging through looking at whatever it was I was looking at post-tennis lesson, no less.

I assume this is what they're referring to.

The Regents are authorizing the development of a performance-based approach to teacher certification and inviting – on a trial basis – new entities to prepare teachers for certification. As part of this new approach, the Regents will support the development of new performance-based assessments for teacher certification (including the eventual use of value-added assessment as a component of professional certification), will develop new methods to recruit and retain teachers for high needs schools in subject shortage areas and will allow additional content knowledge demonstrations for prospective teachers to bring new talent into the teaching field.

I'm interested to hear from teachers on this.

I would dearly love to see different teacher training programs (I'm guessing most teachers would dearly love to see different teacher training programs), and I think David Steiner is the person to do that.

But why does Kendall Hunt get off scot-free?

Or Heinemann?

Shouldn't these folks have to show a value-added value or two?

I guess this is a policy question, really. Targeting teacher-ed programs seems like a good idea to me. At least, it's a reasonably novel idea -- and I think that, historically speaking, a reform effort directed at medical schools may have had an enormous effect (yes?)

Data is good; value-added is good. In my view.

But targeting teacher ed programs and pushing through value-added measurements without reference to New York state's vendor-driven curricula is a different matter.

Have I ever mentioned my rule of thumb for school districts buying curricula?

Buy whatever homeschoolers are buying.

pop quiz

Are You Qualified to Teach Elementary School Math? (pdf file)

3 to 1

GROVER J. “RUSS” WHITEHURST: One of the points, Jane, that's made is that if we had linked data systems, we would be able to have a fair accounting of what works and what doesn't. My bias is it's a lot harder than just having the data systems. But you’re an expert on this.

JANE HANNAWAY: [W]e were focusing on in particular was value-added measures of teachers. Teachers, I think, are arguably, and there is evidence to show the most important in-school factor affecting student achievement, number one.

Number two, there’s huge variability across teachers and how productive they are, a three to one ratio in terms of teachers who are at the low end of the distribution and teachers at the high-end of the distribution.

[snip]

Determining which of those teachers are indeed the most productive ones is a difficult technical task that we're working on. I think the bottom line, where we are right now, is that we can estimate these differences fairly well, not perfectly.

FACING THE FUTURE: FINANCING PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Monday, December 1, 2008

Why Students Don't Like School is here!

Speaking of cognitive flexibility, Dan Willingham's book is out!

I've got it!

We all need to buy it, read it, and write 5-star comments on Amazon.

more from palisadesk re: learning speed & precision teaching

At some point the student's learning rate will stop accelerating. There are various steps to take when this happens, but if the student consistently meets a wall at that point, despite the recommended steps, s/he has probably reached the ceiling in that area of learning. The ceilings might be different in different cognitive domains.

I take a flexible approach and figure the student's ceiling is likely within 2 standard deviations. Getting student performance (even IQ) up one standard deviation is not all that uncommon, and getting improvements of two standard deviations is less frequent but a regular occurrence. I suspect this is easier with younger students than older ones, but I do not have data on that. The SD range is what I keep in mind myself. Thus, I would not be trying to get a student with a diagnosed developmental delay and an assessed IQ of 55 into a college-prep program (4 SD).I would try to get this student functioning in the low average range. The data would tell me when a student had reached the ceiling on performance improvement in something specific.

[snip]

There is plenty of data on what effective teaching looks like -- observations that can be gathered and assessed in a scientific way. The late Dr. Michael Pressley has written extensively on this; I recommend his Motivating Primary Grade Students for a well-written look at this question. He wrote more technical articles in journals; this one is an astute analysis of what makes early grade teachers effective, with examples and non-examples, and (for teachers) some workable suggestions that one can start to use right away.

[snip]

I do not profess to understand the mind of the education administrator. I do know that good results are always attributed to what the school is doing (even though the results may be the outcome of actions by parents and tutors) while bad results are usually attributed to characteristics of students and families. It seems to be the way it is.

[snip]

Learning centers such as the ones I cited serve a widely varied clientele, so I would be wary of overgeneralizing . What I know from my own research is that they set goals, develop detailed plans to meet those goals, and are successful with a wide variety of learners of different ages. It's probably a safe statement to posit that MOST people could learn much more and faster than they currently do, given the appropriate application of learning science and technology. Much is known now about cognitive processes and how learning occurs and how to work around various obstacles, but very little of this knowledge has trickled down to the grass roots -- schools in particular.

[snip]

General principles of teaching effectiveness seem to apply across the board. For instance, effective teaching is highly interactive. Teacher and students(s) are interacting at a high rate -- teachers may model, give examples, pose questions, clarify distinctions, scaffold tasks, provide feedback, etc. while students may listen, ask questions, demonstrate, practice, compare/contrast, respond orally, by actions or written output, etc. The key thing is lots of interaction -- ON TASK interaction, not chit-chat; learning is active, not passive. Think of an orchestra conductor, or an athletics coach --the relationship of those people with their team/orchestra is highly interactive. Lots of back and forth. Engagement is high (another important component).

Pressley developed something like a checklist of behaviors of effective teachers . What these behaviors would look like and the specifics of application would vary of course (the type of interactive teaching that is effective in first grade would not be appropriate for seventh grade), but the general case would be the same. Pacing -- another important characteristic of effective teachers -- also varies by population. You speak faster and can move things along quicker in a group in middle school than in K. But appropriate pacing as a characteristic of effective teaching remains constant.

[snip]

"Slow learners" are often (in educational jargon) those students who are deemed rather low in academic ability but not low enough to be considered intellectually disabled. They are very low average, and they take longer to reach the same levels of achievement as same-age peers (their physical development is sometimes slower as well). Then there can be students whose academic ability is average or even high but who are slow processors -- they may have difficulty with word finding, working memory, lexical access, various types of memory, co-ordination, motor skills. Typically these students need more repetitions to mastery and more distributed practice over time to become automatic on fundamental skills which they may *grasp* easily (conceptually) but not be able to apply reliably. The evidence is that some of these difficulties are neurologically determined, but again, we are working with a range -- so the individual can improve his or her own performance level and while s/he may never be "fast," s/he can meet average expectations. I think this is worth striving for, as it gives the individual many more choices in life and much more sense of competence.


If a child is truly slow, then it seems to me that there could be a variety of reasons and solutions that should be customized for the child

I agree, but realistically this is seldom done in school and in many cases I've seen, it is not realistic to expect it to be entirely done in school. We can only customize so far for individuals -- which is why homogeneous instructional grouping is so important in key areas.

I'm really an amateur in these matters myself, but I recommend people interested in the issues go to the excellent site maintained by an amazing self-educated parent activist: PT Wiki
Some of the items in the bar along the right -- "Why frequency matters," "Why celeration matters" etc. are a good place to start.

It's kind of a seeing is believing thing. When you see kids (or adults) make HUGE, sudden, dramatic leaps forward in their learning that change their lives, you can't help saying to yourself, Holy cow! WHAT was THAT? and trying to learn more to make it happen again.

If you haven't seen it you may not think it's possible and you certainly won't see what the fuss is about.

I have fun introducing as many of my colleagues as possible to that HOLY COW!! moment. They never look back.


Catherine speaking: the issue of slow processing has been intriguing to me ever since John Ratey told me a story about a patient whose husband left her because he thought she was timid and unadventurous. What she was, John said, was a slow perceptual processor. So, if she happened to be standing on top of a tall building, she'd hang far back from the edge because she feared she'd walk over the edge before her brain got the message she'd reached it. She applied the same principles to her driving, and a good thing, too.


and from Steve H:

Is effective teaching the same for true slow learners and for average kids? (I suppose you could say that effective means effective.) I wouldn't think so. My nephew was considered to be a slow learner, but my sister worked to provide him with better skills for approaching new material. She had the same issue when she was young. Now that he is grown up (with a degree in computer science), he is anything but a slow learner.

Gladwell on Selecting Successful Teachers

http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/2008/12/teachers-and-quarterbacks.html

Teachers and Quarterbacks

My latest New Yorker piece, "Most Likely to Succeed" is now up.

A couple of additional thoughts.

In some of the responses to the piece, I've seen some resistance to the idea that choosing NFL quarterbacks and choosing public school teachers represent the same category of problem. There are only a small number of NFL quarterbacks, and we are selecting candidates from a tiny pool of highly elite athletes. By contrast, we need a vast number of public school teachers and we're recruiting from an enormous non-elite pool to fill that need. So, the response has gone, it's apples and oranges.

Precisely! But of course non-symetrical comparisons are far more interesting and thought-provoking than symetrical comparisons. If I wrote a piece about how finding good point guards in the NBA was a lot like finding good quarterbacks in the NFL, the comparison would be exact. And as a result, it would be relatively useless. What new light does the addition of a second, identical example shed on the first?

Link to the New Yorker piece: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell

Superintendent: Teaching Doesn't Matter, Curricula Trumps All?

The blogger known as MS_Teacher teaches in a financially-strapped district in Northern California. The other day she wrote,

One of the teachers in my school district was told by our superintendent yesterday that it shouldn't matter who is in the classroom that it all came down to good curriculum.

One of the commenters wrote:

I would ask him where he gets his research. Citation please! Much of the research supports the exact opposite of his claim.

Do you have the sense that this notion that "curriculum trumps all" is prevalent in your district?

I'm rummaging through the literature to find good studies to prove the opposite. Difficult, since most research on K-12 education is so bad.

Here’s a clue about why our schools are in trouble

If I didn't know anything else about our nation’s public schools, this one sentence from the WSJ article about merit pay in Denver would go a long way in explaining the trouble with our education system.

Nationwide, most teachers are paid based on two factors: education and experience.

Teachers take risks when they decide to teach middle-school math

The headline in the WSJ article says “Denver Teachers Object to Changes In Pay-for-Performance Plan”

Yawn

But what really caught my eye when reading this story was this sentence:

But the biggest rewards will go to early- and midcareer teachers -- and to those
willing to take risks by working in impoverished schools or taking jobs few
others want, such as teaching middle-school math.

No one who reads KTM regularly is surprised to find that teaching middle-school math is considered a job desired by few teachers. It must be darn hard to teach students who’ve emerged from elementary school not having mastered such things as fluency with multiplication tables, long division or fractions. These are considered by many mathematicians to be critical stepping stones on the way to higher-level mathematics. Instead, middle school math teachers might typically find students who have mastered things like math journaling, sorting colored manipulatives as a way to demonstrate they understand the “concept” of multiplication and pizza-slice fraction analysis.

Middle school math – where the math sh*t hits the fan.

PS – Actually, the entire article is worth reading.

The Denver teachers may decide to strike while the Democratic Convention is in town.

That could create some awkward moments. The Democrats don't want to anger
teachers unions, which are key allies. Nor do they want Denver's plan to fall
apart.

Merit pay did make a difference.

Before the plan took effect, she said, "we almost never sat down with our
principals to say, 'Where are our students now, where do they need to be and how
do we get them there?' This really has changed the culture in our schools."

Let the sun shine in

I think (hope??) the roaches are scrambling after this report by the National Council on Teacher Quality. The overall conclusion...

For kids to do better in math, their teachers might have to go back to school. Elementary-school teachers are poorly prepared by education schools to teach math, finds a study being released Thursday by the National Council on Teacher Quality.

and here's a surprise (please excuse my sarcasm)...

Math relies heavily on cumulative knowledge, making the early years critical.

The study by the nonpartisan research and advocacy group comes a few months after a federal panel reported that U.S. students have widespread difficulty with fractions, a problem that arises in elementary school and prevents kids from mastering more complicated topics like algebra later on

Our math teachers don't understand the basics and how math concepts build on one another

Author Julie Greenberg said education students should be taking courses that give them a deeper understanding of arithmetic and multiplication. She said the courses should explain how math concepts build upon each other and why certain ideas need to be emphasized in the classroom.

Teacher candidates know their multiplication tables, but "they don't come to us knowing why multiplication works the way it does," said Denise Mewborn, who heads the University of Georgia department of math and science education.

Somehow I doubt any of this surprises KTM readers but perhaps it will start to slowly open the eyes of school administrations.

general knowledge and ability & teacher effectiveness

Concerned Teacher's post on the academic math slums reminded me that I'd just come across this summary of the relationship between teacher effectiveness and general cognitive ability last week:

General knowledge and ability

The most robust finding in the research literature is the effect of teacher verbal and cognitive ability on student achievement. Every study that has included a valid measure of teacher verbal or cognitive ability has found that it accounts for more variance in student achievement than any other measured characteristic of teachers (e.g., Greenwald, Hedges, & Lane, 1996; Ferguson & Ladd, 1996; Kain & Singleton, 1996; Ehrenberg & Brewer, 1994).

This is troubling when joined with the finding that college students majoring in education have lower SAT and ACT scores than students majoring in the arts and sciences. For example, among college graduates who majored in education, 14% had SAT or ACT scores in the top quartile, compared to 26% who majored in the social sciences, compared to 37% who majored mathematics/computer science/natural science. In addition, those who did not prepare to teach but became teachers were much more likely to have scored in the top quartile (35 percent) than those who prepared to teach and became teachers (14 percent) (NCES, 2001).

Research on Teacher Preparation and Development
Grover J. Whitehurst, Ph.D.

My favorite part of this graphic is the lavender bar representing the effects on academic achievement of "workshops."

going nuclear

Joe Williams on the no teacher left untenured legislation Brett brought to our attention a week ago.

Kevin Carey on same.

Daily News.

NYTIMES says "no."

So that's a clean sweep.

And here is Randi Weingarten explaining why a law forbidding school boards from looking at student test scores when granting tenure does not "take away local control":

Opponents are arguing that the legislation takes away local control from school districts. In fact, it does nothing of the kind. Nothing precludes districts from making tenure decisions based on myriad criteria —just not student test scores.

Right Way to Grade Teachers
Randi Weingarten
New York Sun, April 7, 2008

And these are the people teaching our kids "critical thinking."

Meanwhile, my own district uses scores of "3" on the state test to refuse 7th grade students a place in 8th grade algebra. Yes, the 8th grade algebra class has any number of kids with scores of "3" on the state test currently enrolled and doing well, but never mind.

Life-altering decisions for kids, not teachers, can be based on these tests.


one more nail in the coffin

The union's advocacy for this legislation strikes me as a misstep.

Few parents are aware that student achievement is not factored into teacher evaluations. I certainly wasn't. Just the other day, a parent I know who spends every evening reteaching his child's h.s. science course at home asked me, "Are teachers ever evaluated based on how well their students learn what they're teaching?"

The answer is no. Student achievement doesn't enter in. No data on student achievement inside a particular teacher's classroom as compared to any other teacher's classroom are collected, and no such data are used in tenure and promotion cases.

This is deadly for kids and families in two ways:

• first, ineffective teachers are granted tenured
• second -- and perhaps more importantly -- when ineffective teachers receive tenure and students fail to learn in their classes, the student is blamed for the problems. The student has failed to prepare for class, the student has failed to Seek Extra Help, the student has failed to develop inferential thinking and/or conceptual understanding, and on and on. [see Galen Alessi]
  

Obviously, there are lots of other problems, too, one being the fact that highly effective teachers have no special protection from the whims of administrators and precious little authority outside the four walls of their classrooms. If an administrator wants to treat a star teacher like a pawn on a chess board, he can.

But that's a story for another day.

In a "standards-based era," the trouble with this system -- and it is everywhere the system -- is that it only works as long as parents and the broader public are kept in the dark. This is why schools are managed via loose coupling:

....the administrative superstructure of the organization – principals, board members, and administrators—exists to “buffer” the weak technical core of teaching from outside inspection, interference, or disruption.

Administration in education, then, has come to mean not the management of instruction but the management of the structures and processes around instruction. That which cannot be directly managed must, in this view, be protected from external scrutiny. Buffering consists of creating structures and procedures around the technical core of teaching that, at the same time, (1) protect teachers from outside intrusions in their highly uncertain and murky work, and (2) create the appearance of rational management of the technical core, so as to allay the uncertainties of the public about the actual quality or legitimacy of what is happening in the technical core. This buffering creates what institutional theorists call a “logic of confidence” between public schools and their constituents. Local board members, system-level administrators, and school administrators perform the ritualistic tasks of organizing, budgeting, managing, and dealing with disruptions inside and outside the system, all in the name of creating and maintaining public confidence in the institutions of public education. Teachers, working in isolated classrooms, under highly uncertain conditions, manage the technical core. This division of labor has been amazingly constant over the past century.

Building a New Structure for School Leadership
by Richard Elmore
Albert Shanker Institute

The purpose of loose-coupling is to protect the core function of the school -- instruction -- from "outside" scrutiny and interference: "outside" meaning parents and taxpayers. Most of the time this goal is achieved by keeping things secret, either directly, e.g. by refusing "comment," or indirectly, by speaking and writing in acronyms and buzz-words. Acronyms & buzz-words serve their protective purpose extremely well. For instance, I would estimate, conservatively, that 9 out of 10 parents cannot tell you what the words "balanced literacy" mean. If nobody knows what "balanced literacy" means, nobody's going to squawk because his school is using a balanced literacy curriculum. No one's even going to know. Unless a parent has spent years immersing himself in the edu-world, he has no clue what's going on. True of school board members, too.

However, the whole scheme starts to come undone once you have the president of the teachers' union publicly lobbying for legislation making it illegal even to consider objective measures of student achievement in awarding tenure. It comes as news to your basic parent and taxpayer that the schools are not now, and never have been, using test scores and the like as part of tenure decisions.

Plus which, while 9 out of 10 parents have no idea what an SBRR reading curriculum is, no one is going to have a problem working out the meaning of a statement like, "teachers shouldn’t be evaluated on student test scores."

It's a short step from there to voting down school budgets.


death by data redux

That said, I should add that I can see why Randi Weingarten & c. would want such a law on the books. Death by data can't be any more more fun for teachers than it is for students and parents.

Still, I would appreciate some recognition from Ms. Weingarten that just as a teacher can be blamed for a student's educationally impoverished home life when statistics are used incorrectly, millions of American school children are blamed for their teachers' failings each and every day of the school year.

NYT article

I'm on semi-hiaitus from blogging, but I had to come out of my hole to highlight this article in the New York Times:

Bill Would Bar Linking Class Test Scores to Tenure
By JENNIFER MEDINA
Published: March 18, 2008
While the state was consumed by the downfall of Eliot Spitzer last week, the Assembly passed a bill that would pre-emptively bar New York City and other school districts from linking teacher tenure to students’ test scores.

Read the rest here.

There's not much more to say, other than how appalling this is.

TMAO on "The Achievement Gap"

In a previous post, TMAO heard a presentation by Jack O'Connell and responded to O'Connell's elision of the factors contributing to the achievement gap. He felt he did not get his point across, and clarified here:

Do teachers need to utilize more culturally responsive pedagogy? (Banks et al) Do kids and families of group X need to start acting more like the kids and families from group Y, and like, y'know, get their act together? (Cosby & the staff lounge) Do we put our efforts into wide-scale social transformation, because schools are not powerful enough to overcome such a pervasive inequity? (Rothstein) Do we stop talking about poverty, because it's not about poverty, but about innate factors out of our control? (silly race-based IQ-gap people)

Or do we say, here is School A which has the same demographics as School B, but kids at School A learn and those at School B do not -- just why is that exactly? (Folks who scribble the word educator in front of every published utterance of the phrase "achievement gap.")

That's my thing. Don't engage an endless debate that may or may not get us closer to bringing a better education to more kids.

For those of you who don't read his blog, Teaching in the 408, TMAO teaches in a low-SES, high-percentage-of-English-Language-Learners (ELLs) district in the Silicon Valley.

Here's another piece of his philosophy:

We must reject the ideology of the "achievement gap" that absolves adults of their responsibility and implies student culpability in continued under-performance. The student achievement gap is merely the effect of a much larger and more debilitating chasm: The Educator Achievement Gap. We must erase the distance between the type of teachers we are, and the type of teachers they need us to be.

drive-by

The nonprofit National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) reports that, despite many calls for performance pay coming from state capitals, only 14 states require school systems to evaluate their public school teachers at least once a year, while some are much more lax than that. Tennessee, for example, requires evaluations of tenured teachers only twice a decade.

[snip]

Teachers union contracts dictate the professional requirements for teachers in most school districts. But the NCTQ study found that only two-thirds of them require teachers to be evaluated at least once a year and a quarter of them require evaluations only every three years.

The evaluations themselves are typically of little value—a single, fleeting classroom visit by a principal or other building administrator untrained in evaluation wielding a checklist of classroom conditions and teacher behaviors that often don’t even focus directly on the quality of teacher instruction. “It’s typically a couple of dozen items on a list: ‘Is presentably dressed,’ ‘Starts on time,’ ‘Room is safe,’ ‘The lesson occupies students,’ ” says Michigan State University Professor Mary Kennedy, author of Inside Teaching: How Classroom Life Undermines Reform, who has studied teacher evaluation extensively. “In most instances, it’s nothing more than marking ‘satisfactory’ or ‘unsatisfactory.’”

It’s easy for teachers to earn high marks under these capricious rating systems, often called “drive-bys,” regardless of whether their students learn.

source: Rush to Judgment: Teacher Evaluation in Public Education
by Thomas Toch and Robert Rothman

My favorite was the department chair who told me that so-and-so was "an excellent teacher" because Department Chair had visited so-and-so's classroom and "all the students understand."

We were in the midst of a conversation about the fact that my own child, a member of so-and-so's class, manifestly did not understand.

That didn't affect Department Chair's evaluation because "he's the only one"^* and "you're the only parent complaining."^**

Principal concurred. "So and so is a fine young teacher. I've visited so-and-so's class many times."

That was it.

I've visited the classroom. They didn't even look at the freaking bulletin boards, for God's sake.


^* He wasn't.
^** I wasn't.

"Do Public Schools Hire the Best Teachers?"

3. Public schools do not exhibit a marked preference for teachers whose academic backgrounds signal strong cognitive ability and command of subject matter. Analysis of the experiences of new college graduates during their first year on the labour market shows that graduates of more selective colleges are no more likely to succeed in obtaining a teaching position (if they seek one) than are applicants from the least selective schools.7 Among applicants for secondary school positions, an education degree is as helpful as a subject area degree. While it is true that schools are more likely to hire graduates with good college grades, there is no adjustment for the overall quality of the institution at which those grades were earned.

[snip]

2. Changing the incentives facing school administrators might lead them to reconsider their priorities when hiring new teachers. The private sector, despite paying salaries substantially below those in most public school systems, employs disproportionately many teachers with strong academic records. This appears to be due, in part, to the greater emphasis on academics within these schools. Increased parental choice in the public sector might have similar results.

by Dale Ballou (pdf file)

I've always wondered why, here in Westchester, Ivy Leaguers & people with Ph.D.s, etc., are teaching for lower pay in private schools instead of for higher pay in the public schools.