Yet each school year thousands of principals beat the odds and do excel, women and men who love their leadership positions, relish the challenges and take pride in running schools that perform well year after year. Who are these people? And what are they doing that so many others aren’t?
“We know that principals matter for a school’s success, but we don’t know much about why and how they matter,” says Jason Grissom, an assistant professor of public affairs in MU’s Truman School of Public Affairs. Grissom and Susanna Loeb, a professor of education at Stanford University, are working to provide answers, thanks in part to a $1 million grant from the Institute of Education Sciences, the self-described “research arm” of the U.S. Department of Education.
“Our goal at the end of this study is to be able to offer some tangible recommendations for making principals more effective in terms of improving student outcomes,” Grissom says. “We’re excited about the proposal because it’s pretty ambitious. The kind of study we’ve proposed is essentially the first of its kind.”
Friday, February 11, 2011
The Good Principal Principle
This looks promising. While it is difficult to build a model for good management, this still strikes me as a simpler problem than modelling effective teaching. For one thing, K through 12 teaching includes a large management component. More importantly, the data on teachers runs into some nasty nesting issues. Things are much cleaner when you go up a level.
At least we've gotten more efficient at some things
From Wikipedia:
I Am Number Four is a young adult science fiction novel by Pittacus Lore, the pen name of authors James Frey and Jobie Hughes. The book was published by HarperCollins on August 3, 2010,[1] and has currently spent 6 weeks on the children's chapter of The New York Times Best Seller list.[2]
DreamWorks Pictures bought the rights to the film in June 2009; it will be released on February 18, 2011. The novel is the first of a proposed six-book series.[3]
Back in the old days, you used to have to publish one before they started the film series. By way of comparison, it took James Bond nine years, ten best sellers and the implied endorsement of JFK before it made it to the screen.
E-verify
This article linked by Thoreau is pretty frightening. The main issue seems to be the combination of error rate and lack of transparency. Two points of great interest:
and
Even worse:
The part that is the most painful about this process is that being denied employment is a cost (especially in the current employment environment). What happens if we refuse a person employment (incorrectly) and their unemployment insurance is about to expire? Worse, if they do not know why they were flagged then it might be years before they find out what went wrong.
This doesn't seem like a good idea at all.
And the results have been devastating. U.S. workers excited to start a new job are instead thrust into bureaucratic limbo as they try to sort out government mistakes. Their new employers hire, then fire them and never tell them why; or worse, they might never be hired in the first place and not know why . . . According to government reports, the program (even after years of work) has a stubbornly high error rate and well-documented problems in attempts to resolve those errors. According to the most conservative numbers, at least 80,000 American workers lost a new job last year because of a mistake in the system. If E-Verify were mandatory, that number would rise to 770,000
and
Ultimately the most brutal irony is that E-Verify doesn’t work. According to government-required audits, 54 percent of those not allowed to work in the U.S. were actually approved by the system.
Even worse:
The government mechanism to fix errors is a Kafkaesque tragedy. There is currently no court remedy to force Immigration and Customs Enforcement to fix an error. Many times those errors are as simple as an incorrect data entry or a name change, but in order to uncover the error, workers have to file letters with different parts of the agency seeking copies of their records
The part that is the most painful about this process is that being denied employment is a cost (especially in the current employment environment). What happens if we refuse a person employment (incorrectly) and their unemployment insurance is about to expire? Worse, if they do not know why they were flagged then it might be years before they find out what went wrong.
This doesn't seem like a good idea at all.
Administration
I was reading Mark's post today on principals and I thought it was interesting to see that Dean Dad has a post from the other side of the fence today as well. Some of the points in the Dead Dad post are extremely insightful. Consider the following question:
In other words, reform is hard to do even when you know where you want to go. In cases where the evidence is weak or where budgets are falling, the problem gets even worse. And, of course, right now we are experiencing a fall in most education budgets in the United States.
However, it was interesting how Dead Dad was unable to resist worrying about tenure as a barrier to reform:
I think that this line of thinking may also be part of why there is such a huge push for reform of teacher job security. Administrators are under enormous pressure to reform the education system and teachers may be very resistant.
Of course, one element that may be left out is that the teachers may be resistant to change for good reasons. When you have been in an organization long enough, you realize that a lot of reform can be about trying "old ideas all over again". These reforms can be both time consuming and ineffective. They may even lower outcomes due to the friction of implementation.
Let us consider a business analogy. One way that corporations tried to handle bad outcomes is a series of "re-orgs". These changes in structure have two good properties. One, the people in charge seems to be doing something to address issues by making changes. Two, a series of re-organizations can make it very hard to track a long term pattern of bad management as units break apart too often for performance to be easily tracked.
The ability of tenured people to resist cosmetic reforms is, obviously very frustrating to administrators who have little ability to influence the organization but seemingly unlimited accountability. However, endless re-organizations did not, in the end, help corporations like General Motors. Instead, they may well have accelerated the decline by focusing on making changes that were more cosmetic than effective. So do we really need to import the worst practices of modern corporations into the educational system?
[This post is also relevant -- Mark]
I’ll answer the question with another question. Good, strong, solid, peer-reviewed scientific data has made it abundantly clear that poor eating habits lead to obesity and all manner of negative health outcomes. There’s no serious dispute that obesity is a major public health issue in the US. And yet people still overeat. Despite reams of publicity and even Presidential support for good eating and exercise habits, obesity continues to increase. Why?
In other words, reform is hard to do even when you know where you want to go. In cases where the evidence is weak or where budgets are falling, the problem gets even worse. And, of course, right now we are experiencing a fall in most education budgets in the United States.
However, it was interesting how Dead Dad was unable to resist worrying about tenure as a barrier to reform:
There’s also a fundamental issue of control. Faculties as a group are intensely protective of their absolute control of the classroom. Many hold on to the premodern notion of teaching as a craft, to be practiced and judged solely by members the guild. As with the sabermetric revolution in baseball, old habits die hard, even when the evidence against them is clear and compelling. There’s a real fear among many faculty that moving from “because I say so” to “what the numbers say” will reduce their authority, and in a certain sense, that’s true. In my estimation, this is at the root of much of the resentment against outcomes assessment.
Even where there’s a will, sometimes there just isn’t the time. It’s one thing to reinvent your teaching when you have one class or even two; it’s quite another with five. And when so many of your professors divide their time among different employers, even getting folks into the same room for workshops is a logistical challenge.
Of course, accountability matters. Longtime readers know my position on the tenure system, so I won’t beat that horse again, but it’s an uphill battle to sell disruptive change when people have the option of saying ‘no’ without consequence. The enemy isn’t really direct opposition; it’s foot-dragging.
I think that this line of thinking may also be part of why there is such a huge push for reform of teacher job security. Administrators are under enormous pressure to reform the education system and teachers may be very resistant.
Of course, one element that may be left out is that the teachers may be resistant to change for good reasons. When you have been in an organization long enough, you realize that a lot of reform can be about trying "old ideas all over again". These reforms can be both time consuming and ineffective. They may even lower outcomes due to the friction of implementation.
Let us consider a business analogy. One way that corporations tried to handle bad outcomes is a series of "re-orgs". These changes in structure have two good properties. One, the people in charge seems to be doing something to address issues by making changes. Two, a series of re-organizations can make it very hard to track a long term pattern of bad management as units break apart too often for performance to be easily tracked.
The ability of tenured people to resist cosmetic reforms is, obviously very frustrating to administrators who have little ability to influence the organization but seemingly unlimited accountability. However, endless re-organizations did not, in the end, help corporations like General Motors. Instead, they may well have accelerated the decline by focusing on making changes that were more cosmetic than effective. So do we really need to import the worst practices of modern corporations into the educational system?
[This post is also relevant -- Mark]
The Principal Problem
One of the many odd things about the education reform debate is how little we hear about holding principals accountable. The subject does come up but it only gets a fraction of the press devoted to plans to punish or fire teachers.
This is particularly strange because, if you're looking for something to explain why a certain school is under-performing, you would obviously start by looking for a common factor, something that could explain why so many classes are bad and so many students are doing poorly. When you take out demographics and social factors, the only candidate left is administration, the people who hire and manage the teachers, who maintain overall campus discipline, who are responsible for how the school runs. Running a school is a tough job, but there are lots of great schools out there, both public and charter, so obviously it is possible to do it well.
I've always felt that every firing represents a failure of the hiring or management process, but if you have your heart set on reform by winnowing, it seems clear that administration should be the first to go. Unfortunately, administrators tend to be survivors (Ever been to a school board meeting? It's hard to avoid the cockfight analogy). Case in point...
Being politically skilled is valuable to an administrator, as is being media-savvy. This is not a bad thing. These talents can help administrators serve their students and promote their vision (look at Geoffrey Canada), but, as an old superintendent told me when I first started teaching (in somewhat more blunt language), you have to be aware of these talents and be careful when dealing with people like him.
Not surprisingly, superintendents have done pretty well for themselves in the reform movement. They have brought in additional money. They have managed to shift most of the attention from the damage done by bad administrators to the damage done by bad teachers. When colleagues actually were blamed for failing schools, they have frequently managed to shield them from any real consequences.
The past couple of years have even seen the emergence of the superstar school administrator. With the rise of Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein, what was a good gig now has at least the possibility of significant fame and fortune.
Having said all of this, it's important to step back and remind ourselves of some basic truths:
Whether you're talking about administrators or teachers or researchers or reformers, virtually everyone involved with education is there out of a deep concern for the education and general welfare of children;
At the same time, all of these groups will also tend to look out for their own self-interests. There is no contradiction here. We expect the police to have the interests of the public and of the police department in mind. We expect the same of firemen, journalists, the military and many others.
Administrators are very good at this game. There's nothing wrong with that, as long the people covering the game know the score.
This is particularly strange because, if you're looking for something to explain why a certain school is under-performing, you would obviously start by looking for a common factor, something that could explain why so many classes are bad and so many students are doing poorly. When you take out demographics and social factors, the only candidate left is administration, the people who hire and manage the teachers, who maintain overall campus discipline, who are responsible for how the school runs. Running a school is a tough job, but there are lots of great schools out there, both public and charter, so obviously it is possible to do it well.
I've always felt that every firing represents a failure of the hiring or management process, but if you have your heart set on reform by winnowing, it seems clear that administration should be the first to go. Unfortunately, administrators tend to be survivors (Ever been to a school board meeting? It's hard to avoid the cockfight analogy). Case in point...
U.S. Plan to Replace Principals Hits Snag: Who Will Step In?When I mentioned this story to Joseph, he drew a parallel between this and the financial crisis. In both cases we were told that we couldn't get rid of the people who screwed up because we supposedly needed them to fix the problem. It was hard to swallow with AIG; it's even less credible here. But it's what you expect from survivors.
By SAM DILLON
COLUMBUS, Ohio — The aggressive $4 billion program begun by the Obama administration in 2009 to radically transform the country’s worst schools included, as its centerpiece, a plan to install new principals to overhaul most of the failing schools.
That policy decision, though, ran into a difficult reality: there simply were not enough qualified principals-in-waiting to take over. Many school superintendents also complained that replacing principals could throw their schools into even more turmoil, hindering nascent turnaround efforts.
As a result, the Department of Education softened the hit-the-road plans for principals of underperforming schools laid out in the program rules. It issued guidelines allowing principals hired as part of local improvement efforts within the last two years to stay on, then interpreted that grandfather clause to mean three years.
Although the program created an expectation that most schools would get new leadership, new data from eight large states show that many principals’ offices in failing schools still bear the same nameplates. About 44 percent of schools receiving federal turnaround money in these states still have the same principals who were leading them last year.
Being politically skilled is valuable to an administrator, as is being media-savvy. This is not a bad thing. These talents can help administrators serve their students and promote their vision (look at Geoffrey Canada), but, as an old superintendent told me when I first started teaching (in somewhat more blunt language), you have to be aware of these talents and be careful when dealing with people like him.
Not surprisingly, superintendents have done pretty well for themselves in the reform movement. They have brought in additional money. They have managed to shift most of the attention from the damage done by bad administrators to the damage done by bad teachers. When colleagues actually were blamed for failing schools, they have frequently managed to shield them from any real consequences.
The past couple of years have even seen the emergence of the superstar school administrator. With the rise of Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein, what was a good gig now has at least the possibility of significant fame and fortune.
Having said all of this, it's important to step back and remind ourselves of some basic truths:
Whether you're talking about administrators or teachers or researchers or reformers, virtually everyone involved with education is there out of a deep concern for the education and general welfare of children;
At the same time, all of these groups will also tend to look out for their own self-interests. There is no contradiction here. We expect the police to have the interests of the public and of the police department in mind. We expect the same of firemen, journalists, the military and many others.
Administrators are very good at this game. There's nothing wrong with that, as long the people covering the game know the score.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
I originally had a mean headline but my better angels swooped in*
Not only is Diane Ravitch a knee-jerk liberal catspaw of the unions, she's also a right wing extremist:
*R.I.P. Gerry Rafferty
Admittedly, I have only skimmed the book, but it is not hard to find evidence that Dr. Ravitch has not left all of her highly conservative views behind. She blames the familiar bogeymen of the religious right for many of the problems in American public education, notably constructivism and whole language with the selective citing of easily refuted research. Her naive understanding of learning theory or learner-centered pedagogy is like that of a teacher education student or mom who just returned home from a “Tea Party” rally.In the education debate, you don't have a left/right divide; you have a Möbius strip.
*R.I.P. Gerry Rafferty
Do good teachers make difficult employees?
A few years ago I did a stint as an instructor at a large state school teaching, among other things, business calculus. The sections for that course tended to be good-sized, usually running from fifty to one fifty. At one time, I probably would have found the experience a bit intimidating but I was just coming off a couple of years as a TA for a professor who routinely taught sections of more than three hundred so I considered myself lucky to be able to make out individual faces.
With few exceptions, experienced teachers are comfortable addressing large groups and with very few exceptions, effective teachers are comfortable demanding the full attention of those group. Along with knowledge of the subject, strong communication skills, and commitment to the students, a "when I talk, you listen" attitude is a defining trait of an effective instructor.
That doesn't automatically translate to a room full of kids sitting quietly while the teacher drones on. Often the result is just the opposite. Teachers are more likely to have looser classes with more student participation if they feel in control. As a rule of thumb, you should never be more than ninety seconds away from having every student seated and reading quietly. For really good teachers, even the most adventurous lesson plans fall into that ninety second radius.
Put another way, it comes down to authority. A teacher's job is to teach, counsel and objectively evaluate his or her students. A sense of authority is an essential trait for all these tasks but it's an incredibly annoying one to find in a direct report.
Good principals (and I've met some excellent ones) are masters at the difficult art of managing managers. They can exercise their authority in a way that actually enhances the authority of those under them.
Even with the best administrators, however, there is always an element of tension and it only gets worse with less competent principals and superintendents. This is something to keep in mind when you hear about plans to improve education by giving principals more authority to get rid of bad teachers. Sometimes bad doesn't mean incompetent; it means inconvenient. (I don't have the book in front of me, but Diane Ravitch' Death and Life has some notable examples.)
With few exceptions, experienced teachers are comfortable addressing large groups and with very few exceptions, effective teachers are comfortable demanding the full attention of those group. Along with knowledge of the subject, strong communication skills, and commitment to the students, a "when I talk, you listen" attitude is a defining trait of an effective instructor.
That doesn't automatically translate to a room full of kids sitting quietly while the teacher drones on. Often the result is just the opposite. Teachers are more likely to have looser classes with more student participation if they feel in control. As a rule of thumb, you should never be more than ninety seconds away from having every student seated and reading quietly. For really good teachers, even the most adventurous lesson plans fall into that ninety second radius.
Put another way, it comes down to authority. A teacher's job is to teach, counsel and objectively evaluate his or her students. A sense of authority is an essential trait for all these tasks but it's an incredibly annoying one to find in a direct report.
Good principals (and I've met some excellent ones) are masters at the difficult art of managing managers. They can exercise their authority in a way that actually enhances the authority of those under them.
Even with the best administrators, however, there is always an element of tension and it only gets worse with less competent principals and superintendents. This is something to keep in mind when you hear about plans to improve education by giving principals more authority to get rid of bad teachers. Sometimes bad doesn't mean incompetent; it means inconvenient. (I don't have the book in front of me, but Diane Ravitch' Death and Life has some notable examples.)
I really ought to do a post on estimation and developing mathematical intuition one of these days
Till then, check out this decidedly cool offering from MIT's reliably cool Open Courseware (via DeLong):
18.098 / 6.099 Street-Fighting Mathematics
This course teaches the art of guessing results and solving problems without doing a proof or an exact calculation. Techniques include extreme-cases reasoning, dimensional analysis, successive approximation, discretization, generalization, and pictorial analysis. Applications include mental calculation, solid geometry, musical intervals, logarithms, integration, infinite series, solitaire, and differential equations. (No epsilons or deltas are harmed by taking this course.) This course is offered during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), which is a special 4-week term at MIT that runs from the first week of January until the end of the month.
The Principal Effect -- repost
[I'm working on a post about this New York Times story about not holding principals accountable for failing schools so I thought I'd use this to get the discussion started.]
When it comes to education reform, you can't just refer to the elephant in the room. It's pretty much elephants everywhere you look. There is hardly an aspect of the discussion where reformers don't have to ignore some obvious concern or objection.
The elephant of the moment is the effect that principals and other administrators have on the quality of schools. Anyone who has taught K through 12 can attest to the tremendous difference between teaching in a well-run and a badly-run school. Even the most experienced teacher will find it easier to manage classes, cover material, and keep students focused. All of those things help keep test scores up, as does the lower rate of burn out. For new teachers, the difference is even more dramatic.
On top of administrator quality, there is also the question of compatibility. In addition to facing all the normal managerial issues. teacher and and principal have to have compatible educational philosophies.
As we've mentioned more than once on this site, educational data is a thicket of confounding and aliasing issues. That thicket is particularly dense when you start looking at teachers and principals and, given the concerns we have about the research measuring the impact of teachers on test scores, I very much doubt we will ever know where the teacher effect stops and the principal effect starts.
When it comes to education reform, you can't just refer to the elephant in the room. It's pretty much elephants everywhere you look. There is hardly an aspect of the discussion where reformers don't have to ignore some obvious concern or objection.
The elephant of the moment is the effect that principals and other administrators have on the quality of schools. Anyone who has taught K through 12 can attest to the tremendous difference between teaching in a well-run and a badly-run school. Even the most experienced teacher will find it easier to manage classes, cover material, and keep students focused. All of those things help keep test scores up, as does the lower rate of burn out. For new teachers, the difference is even more dramatic.
On top of administrator quality, there is also the question of compatibility. In addition to facing all the normal managerial issues. teacher and and principal have to have compatible educational philosophies.
As we've mentioned more than once on this site, educational data is a thicket of confounding and aliasing issues. That thicket is particularly dense when you start looking at teachers and principals and, given the concerns we have about the research measuring the impact of teachers on test scores, I very much doubt we will ever know where the teacher effect stops and the principal effect starts.
In the center, the National Review. On the right, the New Republic
Jim Manzi has an excellent column discussing proposed teacher evaluation metrics from a business perspective, a column that raises some of the same questions that teacher's unions have brought up. There's nothing particularly surprising about that -- Manzi is an intelligent man with a well known independent streak. He's not going to disagree with a position just because he's a conservative.
Jonathan Chait dismisses Manzi's points with some sweeping generalities, completely ignores his point about fairness to the evaluated and ends up being significantly less sympathetic to the concerns of labor than Manzi. Sadly this not surprising either. Chait is one of the most brilliant pundits we have but on the topic of education he combines intense feelings with an apparent lack of knowledge of the important research in the field. This has caused him to embrace certain popular narratives even when they lead him to conclusions that contradict his long standing values.
But as unsurprising as the parts may be, when you put them together the strangeness of the current education debate just sweeps over you. Formerly right-wing positions like privatizing large numbers of schools or denying unions the right to protect workers from unfair termination are now dogma for much of the left. It has reached the point where when a writer for the National Review suggests, as part a larger analysis, that teachers can have legitimate concerns about the reliability of the metrics used to evaluate them, the voice of the New Republic dismisses the possibility without even feeling the need to make an argument.
Even without the political role reversal, Chait's response is strange and oddly disengaged. Judge for yourself.
[I'm presenting these out of order for reasons that will obvious]
There's an odd, listless quality to the entire post. Chait is normally an energetic and relentless debater. Here he just goes through the motions. He doesn't even bother to proof his prose (I'm pretty sure he either meant to say "the search...is futile"). He also makes a huge jump from the specific techniques Manzi is focusing on to "better systems." I'm pretty sure that Manzi believes better systems can improve the status quo; he just questions how big a role value-add metrics will play in those systems.
As for the case for longevity vs. value-added, I'll let Donald Rubin take it from here:
Chait's third point runs along similar lines:
But the weirdest part came in point 2.
Jonathan Chait dismisses Manzi's points with some sweeping generalities, completely ignores his point about fairness to the evaluated and ends up being significantly less sympathetic to the concerns of labor than Manzi. Sadly this not surprising either. Chait is one of the most brilliant pundits we have but on the topic of education he combines intense feelings with an apparent lack of knowledge of the important research in the field. This has caused him to embrace certain popular narratives even when they lead him to conclusions that contradict his long standing values.
But as unsurprising as the parts may be, when you put them together the strangeness of the current education debate just sweeps over you. Formerly right-wing positions like privatizing large numbers of schools or denying unions the right to protect workers from unfair termination are now dogma for much of the left. It has reached the point where when a writer for the National Review suggests, as part a larger analysis, that teachers can have legitimate concerns about the reliability of the metrics used to evaluate them, the voice of the New Republic dismisses the possibility without even feeling the need to make an argument.
Even without the political role reversal, Chait's response is strange and oddly disengaged. Judge for yourself.
[I'm presenting these out of order for reasons that will obvious]
1. You need some system for deciding how to compensate teachers. Merit pay may not be perfect, but tenure plus single-track longevity-based pay is really, really imperfect. Manzi doesn't say that better systems for measuring teachers are futile, but he's a little too fatalistic about their potential to improve upon a very badly designed status quo.Argument by modifier with not one but two 'really's and a 'very' to sell the point. What he doesn't give is any kind of supporting evidence whatsoever. With millions of teachers and a small but thriving industry of think tanks digging up damning anecdotes, you can always find something negative to say, but Chait doesn't even bother coming up a bad argument.
There's an odd, listless quality to the entire post. Chait is normally an energetic and relentless debater. Here he just goes through the motions. He doesn't even bother to proof his prose (I'm pretty sure he either meant to say "the search...is futile"). He also makes a huge jump from the specific techniques Manzi is focusing on to "better systems." I'm pretty sure that Manzi believes better systems can improve the status quo; he just questions how big a role value-add metrics will play in those systems.
As for the case for longevity vs. value-added, I'll let Donald Rubin take it from here:
We do not think that their analyses are estimating causal quantities, except under extreme and unrealistic assumptions.This is not to say that there isn't a case to be made for merit pay. I don't have any problem with rewarding teachers who do exceptional work, but the methods being discussed here are simply not the way to do it.
Chait's third point runs along similar lines:
3. In general, he's fitting this issue into his "progressives are too optimistic about the potential to rationalize policy" frame. I think that frame is useful -- indeed, of all the conservative perspectives on public policy, it's probably the one liberals should take most seriously. But when you combine the fact that the status quo system is demonstrably terrible, that nobody is trying to devise a formula to control the entire teacher evaluation process, and that nobody is promising the "silver bullet" he assures us doesn't exist, his argument has a bit of a straw man quality.More argument by adverb and a strange double straw man (straw-straw man? straw straw man man?) continued from the soon-to-be-discussed point 2. The first 'nobody' is doubtful; Chait seems to jump from the fact that no state currently bases evaluations primarily on value-added metrics to the conclusion that no one is even looking into the possibility. The second 'nobody' is just plain wrong; many reform movement followers have so much faith in the silver bullet status of value-added metrics that they have seriously proposed firing more than half of our teachers based on that one number.
But the weirdest part came in point 2.
2. Manzi's description...Argument by ellipses. Take a look at the whole paragraph:evaluating teacher performance by measuring the average change in standardized test scores for the students in a given teacher’s class from the beginning of the year to the end of the year, rather than simply measuring their scores. The rationale is that this is an effective way to adjust for different teachers being confronted with students of differing abilities and environments...implies that quantitative measures are being used as the entire system to evaluate teachers. In fact, no state uses such measures for any more than half of the evaluation. The other half involves subjective human evaluations.
Recently, Megan McArdle and Dana Goldstein had a very interesting Bloggingheads discussion that was mostly about teacher evaluations. They referenced some widely discussed attempts to evaluate teacher performance using what is called “value-added.” This is a very hot topic in education right now. Roughly speaking, it refers to evaluating teacher performance by measuring the average change in standardized test scores for the students in a given teacher’s class from the beginning of the year to the end of the year, rather than simply measuring their scores. The rationale is that this is an effective way to adjust for different teachers being confronted with students of differing abilities and environments.Manzi explicitly says "widely discussed attempts." Now, for the sake of comparison, check out the New York Times' similar wording:
A growing number of school districts have adopted a system called value-added modeling to answer that question, provoking battles from Washington to Los Angeles — with some saying it is an effective method for increasing teacher accountability, and others arguing that it can give an inaccurate picture of teachers’ work.
The system calculates the value teachers add to their students’ achievement, based on changes in test scores from year to year and how the students perform compared with others in their grade.
Manzi was perfectly clear with his wording and used language consistent with the New York Times' coverage. It was only by excerpting his paragraph mid-sentence that Chait was able to get even the suggestion of a distortion.
I have somewhat mixed feelings Manzi's business-based approach. There are certain aspects of education that are, if not unique, then at least highly unusual and you have to be careful when drawing analogies (obviously the subject for another, much longer post). That said, all of his points about the way evaluations work are valid and useful.
This is not a bad place to start the debate.
[You can read Jim Manzi's somewhat bewildered reaction to Chait's column here.]
On the off chance that you ever wondered what "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock" would sound like if written by Rudyard Kipling...
Today would, amazingly enough, seem to be your lucky day.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Jim Manzi has some smart things to say about teacher evaluations
From the National Review (via Chait, but more on that later)
Teachers want reliable evaluations not just because they want to be rewarded for good work but also because they want to see incompetent teachers identified so that those teachers can be encouraged to do better, given training to improve their performance or, should the first two fail, fired. What they object to is having their fates rest on a glorified roll of the dice.
This seems like a broadly sensible idea as far as it goes, but consider that the real formula for calculating such a score in a typical teacher value-added evaluation system is not “Average math + reading score at end of year – average math reading score at beginning of year,” but rather a very involved regression equation. What this reflects is real complexity, which has a number of sources. First, at the most basic level, teaching is an inherently complex activity. Second, differences between students are not unvarying across time and subject matter. How do we know that Johnny, who was 20 percent better at learning math than Betty in 3rd grade is not relatively more or less advantaged in learning reading in fourth grade? Third, an individual person-year of classroom education is executed as part of a collective enterprise with shared contributions. Teacher X had special needs assistant 1 work with her class, and teacher Y had special needs assistant 2 working with his class — how do we disentangle the effects of the teacher versus the special ed assistant? Fourth, teaching has effects that continue beyond that school year. For example, how do we know if teacher X got a great gain in scores for students in third grade by using techniques that made them less prepared for fourth grade, or vice versa for teacher Y? The argument behind complicated evaluation scoring systems is that they untangle this complexity sufficiently to measure teacher performance with imperfect but tolerable accuracy.I found the point about techniques that hurt futures performance particularly good. When I was teaching, how well a class would go was greatly influenced by how well previous teachers had done their jobs. Did the students understand the foundations? Did they have a good attitude to the material? Good work habits and study strategies?Any successful company that I have ever seen employs some kind of a serious system for evaluating and rewarding / punishing employee performance. But if we think of teaching in these terms — as a job like many others, rather than some sui generis activity — then I think that the hopes put forward for such a system by its advocates are somewhat overblown.
There are some job categories that have a set of characteristics that lend themselves to these kinds of quantitative “value added” evaluations. Typically, they have hundreds or thousands of employees in a common job classification operating in separated local environments without moment-to-moment supervision; the differences in these environments make simple output comparisons unfair; the job is reasonably complex; and, often the performance of any one person will have some indirect, but material, influence on the performance of others over time. Think of trying to manage an industrial sales force of 2,000 salespeople, or the store managers for a chain of 1,000 retail outlets. There is a natural tendency in such situations for analytical headquarters types to say “Look, we need some way to measure performance in each store / territory / office, so let’s build a model that adjusts for inherent differences, and then do evaluations on these adjusted scores.”
I’ve seen a number of such analytically-driven evaluation efforts up close. They usually fail. By far the most common result that I have seen is that operational managers muscle through use of this tool in the first year of evaluations, and then give up on it by year two in the face of open revolt by the evaluated employees. This revolt is based partially on veiled self-interest (no matter what they say in response to surveys, most people resist being held objectively accountable for results), but is also partially based on the inability of the system designers to meet the legitimate challenges raised by the employees.
Teachers want reliable evaluations not just because they want to be rewarded for good work but also because they want to see incompetent teachers identified so that those teachers can be encouraged to do better, given training to improve their performance or, should the first two fail, fired. What they object to is having their fates rest on a glorified roll of the dice.
Michael Hiltzik on the Texas Miracle
Lots of good stuff in this comparison of the surprisingly similar fiscal woes of my native and adopted states. In particular, the following passage caught my eye:
Curiously, Texas' reputation as a low-tax, business-friendly state survives although its state and local business levies exceed California's as a percentage of each state's business activity (4.9% versus 4.7% in 2009, according to a report by the accounting firm Ernst & Young). What's different is that Texas business taxation relies more on property, sales and excise taxes and government fees than California, which relies on taxing corporate income.
Of course, one reason many business owners and executives favor Texas over California is that the Lone Star State doesn't have a personal income tax — a big deal when you're pulling in a Texas-size paycheck.
But self-interest aside, what's at stake from fiscal policy in both states is the same — the services and programs that really matter to business owners, such as functioning schools, high-caliber universities and serviceable transport infrastructure.
Even more important are the measures that point to public well-being. In many categories, California and Texas are closer together than either state's residents would probably find comforting.
But here are a few where they're not: Texas ranks 49th in the nation (that is, third worst) in teen births; California 22nd. In providing prenatal care to expectant mothers, Texas is dead last, California eighth. Texas ranks 34th in median family income, with $47,143; California 13th, at $56,852. This is the harvest of its "superior policies," and given the current budget crisis, it's bound to get worse. Miraculous.
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:
From Mark Thoma:
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.
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.
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