Back to education for a moment

This comment from Dana Goldstein is directly on point:

I'm often asked what one education reform I think would make the biggest impact on American students' achievement. I don't like this question. The real answer--vastly decrease poverty--isn't going to happen anytime soon
 

 It may not be in the cards, but poverty and the knock-on effects of poverty are hard to ignore in the context of United States education policy.  It simply connects to too many different pieces.  Neighborhood funding models for schools mean poor neighborhoods end up with under-resourced schools.  High rates of incarceration increase issues like single parent families and foster care families.  Lack of trust in social institutions makes short term planning much more rational. 

All of these things end up impacting the overall quality of education.  Any inefficiencies due to a teacher's union preventing teacher recruitment are likely to be a rounding error compared to the main effects that we are estimating here. After all, when there are enough problems with home life (stress, food insufficency, lack of child care, etc . . .) there is only so much that a teacher can do for the 30 students in his/her class. 

K12

This is not surprising:

Nearly 60 percent of its students are behind grade level in math. Nearly 50 percent trail in reading. A third do not graduate on time. And hundreds of children, from kindergartners to seniors, withdraw within months after they enroll.

By Wall Street standards, though, Agora is a remarkable success that has helped enrich K12 Inc., the publicly traded company that manages the school. And the entire enterprise is paid for by taxpayers.

Now, we've long been test score critics at OE. So I will accept the argument that test scores should not necessarily be the most important feature of a school. But if they are the motivation for shifting to private education then I'd at least like to see reasonable scores (after all, this is the reason for the existence of these options).

Nor is the fact that the schools are focusing on aggressive expansion reassuring:

Despite lower operating costs, the online companies collect nearly as much taxpayer money in some states as brick-and-mortar charter schools. In Pennsylvania, about 30,000 students are enrolled in online schools at an average cost of about $10,000 per student. The state auditor general, Jack Wagner, said that is double or more what it costs the companies to educate those children online.

“It’s extremely unfair for the taxpayer to be paying for additional expenses, such as advertising,” Mr. Wagner said. Much of the public money also goes toward lobbying state officials, an activity that Ronald J. Packard, chief executive of K12, has called a “core competency” of the company.

I think that it is concerning that a core competency of a large (and growing) private school is that it focuses on lobbying governments for money. If the main issue that we have with traditional public education is rent-seeking by teachers, how much worse is rent seeking by a corporation? After all, if teachers gain a small surplus per teacher that at least has a broad social impact. Clearly K12 has managed to avoid expensive teachers:

But online schools have negligible building costs and cheaper labor costs, partly because they pay teachers low wages, records and interviews show. Parents, called “learning coaches,” do much of the teaching, prompting critics to argue that states are essentially subsidizing home schooling.

At what point is the school simply letting the parent home school their children and accepting educational grant money for the purpose? This is a model that, I suspect, has a chance if and only if you have a stay at home parent that focuses on working with the child on education (or if sleep is an activity that you engage in only on weekends).

Now, I do not want to be a luddite. There may be a role for online education and this particular NY Times piece may not capture all of the nuances of K12 (the articles about traditional schools often has this issue as well). But this sort of business model has long been one of my major concerns about the push towards privatization of schools.

Smart comments from Matt Yglesias and Dana Goldstein are also worth reading.

Ms Goldstein on Tenure

I think that Dana Goldstein has a really good view on tenure:

Indeed, the Green Dot model calls for teams of teachers to be actively involved in hiring their peers; this is a highly-vetted workforce operating in an environment that emphasizes collegiality and professionalism. Without such healthy school envirnments, unions and teachers will have a hard time giving up the tenure protections they've won because of a very real history of adminstrative overreach.

I see this issue as being very similar to online education. My department has a very strong online graduate program. Contrary to all predictions, moving education to an online environment takes a lot of work and isn't as effective at improving productivity as one might imagine. It's possible to do a high quality online program, but it sure isn't inexpensive or easy.

In the same sense, the idea of removing tenure and leaving effective (albeit different) schools has a lot of the same properties. By increasing teacher empowerment, involving teachers in decisions, and increasing compensation you can develop a workable model. After all, tenure is a job perk and it can be replaced by other job perks like employee autonomy and empowerment.

But what the removal of tenure isn't is a cheap way to reduce teacher salaries while holding quality constant. I am agnostic as to the existence of tenure in a workplace. It is a nice perk but it brings downsides as well. What I find more alarming is the effort to remove tenure and replace it with . . . nothing. Or, even worse, replacing nuanced teacher review with test scores (and then removing tenure).

I admit to being very sympathetic to empowered workplaces. My natural work environment is likely the Left Coast and reading about the corporate culture of Silicon Valley convinced me that I'd do better there than in Boston. But these environments are not a cheap and easy substitution for conventional models. They are hard to develop and really require that the employees be either mobile or empowered.

Is that a goal reformers really want to work towards?

It's too late tonight to do it justice...

But this post is another reminder why Dana Goldstein is probably the most important education blogger currently on the beat.

A big recommendation and a small caveat for "The Test Generation"

Dana Goldstein has a great piece of education reporting over at the American Prospect. It's balanced and well-informed, though one section did make me a bit nervous:

Colorado politicians don't need to travel as far as Seoul, however, to get a look at education reform that prioritizes good teaching without over-relying on standardized testing or punitive performance-pay schemes. In 2009, in the southwest Denver neighborhood of Athmar Park -- a Latino area studded with auto-body repair shops, tattoo parlors, and check-cashing joints -- a group of union teachers opened the Math and Sciences Leadership Academy (MSLA), the only public school in Colorado built around peer evaluation. The elementary school borrows some of the cooperative professional development tools used in other countries: Every teacher is on a three-person "peer-review team" that spends an entire year observing one another's classrooms and providing feedback. The teachers are grouped to maximize the sharing of best practices; one team includes a second-year teacher struggling with classroom management, a veteran teacher who is excellent at discipline but behind the curve on technology, and a third teacher who is an innovator on using technology in the classroom.

Each teacher in the group will spend about five hours per semester observing her peer's teaching and helping him differentiate his instruction to reach each student. (MSLA is 92 percent Latino, and more than 97 percent of its students receive free or reduced-price lunch. Sixty percent of the student population is still learning basic English.) "It's kind of like medical rounds," explains Kim Ursetta, a kindergarten and first-grade English and Spanish literacy instructor who, as former president of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association, founded MSLA. "What's the best treatment for this patient?"

Peer review accounts for a significant portion of each MSLA teacher's evaluation score; the remainder is drawn from student-achievement data, including standardized test scores, portfolios of student work, and district and classroom-level benchmark assessments. MSLA is a new school, so the state has not yet released its test-score data, but it is widely considered one of the most exciting reform initiatives in Denver, a city that has seen wave after wave of education upheaval, mostly driven by philanthropists and politicians, not teachers. Alexander Ooms, an education philanthropist and blogger at the website Education News Colorado has written that MSLA "has more potential to change urban education in Denver than any other single effort."

When I visited MSLA in November, the halls were bright and orderly, the students warm and polite, and the teachers enthusiastic -- in other words, MSLA has many of the characteristics of high-performing schools around the world. What sets MSLA apart is its commitment to teaching as a shared endeavor to raise student achievement -- not a competition. During the 2009-2010 school year, all of the school's teachers together pursued the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards' Take One! program, which focuses on using curriculum standards to improve teaching and evaluate student outcomes. This year, the staff-wide initiative is to include literacy skills-building in each and every lesson, whether the subject area is science, art, or social studies.

Don't get me wrong. I think that MSLA is a great model for education reform but it's only one school (so the successes might due to an exceptional leaders like founder Ursetta or principal Nazareno) and it's new (so you have to figure in things like the Hawthorne effect and unsustainable practices).

Unlike many of its competitors, MSLA is based on sound ideas and I'd like to see more schools give these methods a try, but the history of education is filled with promising success stories that didn't pan out. Until a model is replicated and sustained, it should generally be approached with caution.

What do you do when things are tight?

I was reading two different pieces today and I thought that they had a really interesting link between the two of them.

From Dana Goldstein:

While we're on the subject of Wisconsin, I find Scott Walker sort of terrifyingly simple-minded but charismatic. His education platform is basically Race to the Top plus vouchers while somehow massively cutting education budgets. (Huh?)

From Mark Thoma:

Local school districts have cut 154,000 education jobs since August 2008.

So my question is this: why is the push for excellence being connected with schemes to reduce manpower costs? If the argument is that education is a key priority then why are we not increasing funding for education? Instead we have the odd situation where the state wants education to improve while cutting expenses.

Usually when this contradiction shows up, the government is seeking cover for the decision to cut services. If cutting expenses also results in better outcomes than we are all better off, right? Or it could be an attempt to remove the more senior (and thus higher paid) teachers to minimize the impact of budgetary decisions that have already been made. But that is a different conversation, isn't it?

Now consider another area that the state runs that is in a similar position, namely the military. Is anybody seriously arguing that some soldiers do not pull their weight? That we could be more effective with a smaller force? After all, wasn't there a movie (Rambo, for example) where a single heroic special forces soldier was more effective than a brigade? But if the administration began talking about waste and cost effectiveness then you would be certain what they really wanted was cover for cuts. Now imagine they talked about those lazy soldiers who re-enlisted or who were only interested in rewards? Who needs a veterns administration when soldiers are fighting for principle and principle alone?

Would such cuts make sense? Either for the military or for education it is a matter of opportunity cost. But maybe the best conversation to have is one about the trade-off between the options. Taxes hurt economic growth but lack of education or defence can both lead to fairly bad long term outcomes. I am not sure where the balance is but I'd prefer to have the conversation openly. Pretending that test scores plus cuts will somehow improve education seems odd.

More efficient models of defense and education may both exist, but then the optimal path seems to be to show the efficiencies first and implement the cuts second.

Catching up with Dana Goldstein

I'm going to try to comment on each of these individually later. Feel free to beat me to the punch.

How Politically Astute is Michelle Rhee?

The Revival of the Private School Voucher Movement

Wisconsin Teachers' Union Prepares for Battle with GOP Gov

Another Education Post

Dana Goldstein:

The fact is that where such programs exist, they are oversubscribed--parents don't seem to mind sending their kids out-of-district (sometimes just a 5 minute drive away) into a town where they do not enjoy political representation when the result is a better education.

I think this direction is non-controversial. However, this scenario assumes one of two things:

1) There are more students in the district which is accepting students. As the United States funds a lot of education out of local property taxes, this may create less resources per student in the destination district (and ways to try and balance this out are quite tricky)

2) Some students need to be sent the other way. If the perception is that going the other way leads to a lower quality education (even if untrue in fact) then that could be an issue.

In the second case, I suspect that the lack of representation will be a much bigger issue (as it makes it hard for parents to engage the new district to try and remedy issues that are seen as concerns).

School segregation

From Dana Goldstein:

American schools are more segregated by race and class today than they were on the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, 43 years ago. The average white child in America attends a school that is 77 percent white, and where just 32 percent of the student body lives in poverty. The average black child attends a school that is 59 percent poor but only 29 percent white. The typical Latino kid is similarly segregated; his school is 57 percent poor and 27 percent white.

There are clearly some places that our current educational system could stand to be reformed. I would rather focus on issues like segregation and access rather than whether removing tenure would be a panacea.

h/t Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution