The Education Gadfly Weekly

Carmakers hang their hats on J.D. Power and Associates’s annual safety ratings. Television stations live by Sweeps Week. And those interested in international educational competitiveness have the OECD’s annual Education at a Glance report. This vast compilation of data reports on the output of educational institutions (including achievement, graduation rates, equity, and labor-market outcomes); the resources invested in education (financial and human-capital, at the K-12 and higher-ed levels); access to education (including for pre-K youngsters and adult learners); and the “learning environment” (meaning class sizes, teaching time, examinations, etc.). The facts are interesting all by themselves. For example, the U.S. spends 7 cents less of each education dollar on teacher compensation than the OECD average (63 cents), but 8 cents more than average on non-teaching personnel (16 cents). (Caveat: While pension benefits are factored into this analysis, health-care benefits are not.) Further, the authors find that, even though evidence of the effects of class size on student achievement is weak, the student-teacher ratio has decreased in more than two-thirds of the countries studied, with a concomitant impact of education expenditures. Partake seriously of the data, but be careful not to overindulge in the report’s policy recommendations. While a few are palatable—adjust policy to allow effective teachers, irrespective of seniority, to spend more time teaching and mentoring their peers, for example—many others are stale.

SOURCE: Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Education at a Glance 2011: OECD Indicators (OECD Publishing, September 2012).

Education reformers have long argued against step-and-lane salary structures and defined-benefit pension systems, lamenting that they keep burned-out teachers in classrooms longer than is prudent, push away strong young candidates who could make many more dollars in other lines of work, and thereby hurt student achievement. This study by Katharine Strunk and Jason Grissom empirically evaluates how front- and back-loaded teacher-salary schedules impact student performance. (Front-loaded schedules provide larger raises early in a teacher’s career and smaller ones later; back-loading concentrates raises among veteran teachers.) The analysts use nationally representative school data from the Schools and Staffing Survey and student-proficiency data in fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading from a limited number of states (fifteen to twenty, depending on the grade and subject). Half of all districts frontload salaries; however, the districts that backload do so to a much greater degree: The average back-loading district provides 135 percent more yearly returns (or bump in pay for years experience), whereas in districts that frontload, novice teachers get 37 percent greater returns for their years of experience than do veterans, on average. Further, districts that bargain collectively with teacher unions are more likely to have back-loaded salary structures—unsurprising as unions tend to be dominated by their older members. Regarding student achievement: The analysts find that back-loading is consistently negatively associated with students reaching proficiency benchmarks in both math and reading and across elementary and middle school grades, but the magnitude is small and the relationship not necessarily causal. What to make of these data? The authors posit that awarding higher salaries early in teachers’ careers is important in attracting quality candidates. But compensation can be awarded in other ways. For districts struggling under onerous collective-bargaining agreements, other financial perks such as loan-forgiveness or signing bonuses might make sense instead. Worthy advice, indeed.

Jason A. Grissom and Katharine O. Strunk, “How Should School Districts Shape Teacher Salary Schedules? Linking School Performance to Pay Structure in Traditional Compensation Schemes” (Journal of Educational Policy, volume 26, number 5, September 2012).

College pennants line the halls of most high-performing charters. Selection Day (when students announce the colleges they’ve chosen to attend) feels much like NFL Draft Day. But, even though these students—prepared as they are—matriculate to college, graduation is far from ensured (as the Houston-based YES Prep charter network and KIPP have discovered). This study from Harvard’s Joshua Goodman and Sarah Cohodes offers perspective as to why these low-income, yet high-performing students may stumble: It comes down to college quality (not necessarily college affordability). The authors examined the impacts of the Adams Scholarship—which offers free tuition at Massachusetts public colleges for those who score in the top quartile of the state test—on college completion. They found that students who were induced by the scholarship to attend Bay State public universities (and forego a higher-quality private or out-of-state option) were 26 percentage points less likely to graduate. These students don’t drop out, then, because they enroll in colleges that are too hard; they drop out because they pick colleges that aren’t hard enough. (Thomas Sowell may not agree, but Paul Tough makes a similar point in his recent book: How Children Succeed—and others have as well.) Educators: This is yet another reason to push your students to set their sights high and push themselves to reach their full potential.

SOURCE: Sarah Cohodes and Joshua Goodman, First Degree Earns: The Impact of College Quality on College Completion Rates (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Kennedy School, August 2012).

Kathleen and Mike cross the picket line and ask whether reformers have gone too far too fast on teacher evaluations. Amber makes the case for front-loading teacher pay.

Amber's Research Minute

How Should School Districts Shape Teacher Salary Schedules? Linking School Performance to Pay Structure in Traditional Compensation Schemes by Jason A. Grissom and Katharine O. Strunk - Download PDF

Perhaps the most seductive trap in all of education reform is the idea of replication, a.k.a. “scaling.” A charter school is high achieving? Turn it into a CMO! A curriculum is achieving big results? Bring it into every classroom in its district! An instructional strategy is clicking with teachers? Take it nationwide! In theory, this makes sense, best practices and all that. We should multiply success and shun failure. If something is working, why not replicate it?

Copying success doesn't always lead to success. Photo by Andre W.

Too often, though, replication falls short of these high expectations. It ends up more like an old-fashioned Xerox, where each new copy is a little fainter and blurrier than the one that came before.

In education, the Xerox effect often stems from a shift in focus. In the high achieving schools and classrooms so many seek to copy, teachers and leaders work together with their eyes firmly trained on the goal of improving student achievement. In replication schools, however, that focus is too often diverted from student outcomes to the faithful implementation of “proven” programs, systems, and tools.

What’s more, feedback in replication schools is too often aimed at how well the program is being implemented, rather than on whether—faithful to the model or not—teachers are driving outstanding achievement. Unfortunately, when fidelity to a program becomes the goal, the program itself becomes a distraction rather than a catalyst for great instruction.

Understanding the limitations of simple replication is one of the many things that sets Doug Lemov’s book Teach Like a Champion apart from so many others. He makes it clear that his book:

…starts with and is justified by the results it helps teachers achieve, not by its fealty to some ideological principle. The result to aim for is not the loyal adoption of these techniques for their own sake but their application in service of increased student achievement. Too many ideas, even good ones, go bad when they become an end and not a means.

The strategies in Teach Like a Champion are suggested only to the extent that they serve the goal of improving student achievement. Indeed, what Lemov outlines are tactics aimed at improving the skills and techniques of teaching. These tactics are not meant to provide a “step-by-step guide” to great instruction. That’s because, as so many educators know all too well, getting results in schools is about much more than implementing a program, it is about the knowledge, skill, and commitment of those doing the implementing. In other words: In schools, the chef is at least as important as the recipe.

When fidelity to a program becomes the goal, the program itself becomes a distraction rather than a catalyst for great instruction.

That is why data-driven instruction is hard to do well, but also why it can be so powerful in the hands of a skilled teacher. Effectively implemented, data-driven instruction centers on setting clear outcomes for student learning, frequently assessing pupils’ progress towards mastery of the knowledge and skills they need, and thoughtfully planning and tweaking short- and long-term plans in response to the needs of the students. It relies on the skill of the teacher as much as the curriculum, analytic tools, or instructional program.

This is something that Paul Bambrick-Santoyo understands intimately. Bambrick-Santoyo is managing director of the North Star network of Uncommon Schools in Newark, New Jersey, author of Driven By Data, and an educator for whom I have deep  respect. In his new book, Leverage Leadership: A Practical Guide to Building Exceptional Schools, of the seven core areas—or “levers”—he lists as the most important drivers of school-wide student achievement, “data driven instruction” is highlighted as the most important.

Yet despite the author’s deep understanding of the importance of setting goals and using programs and processes only in service of achieving them, much of this new book falls into the “replication trap.” In Leverage Leadership, Bambrick-Santoyo seeks to pen a “step-by-step method for creating exceptional schools.” Unfortunately, by doing so, he focuses more attention on the systems and processes that effective principals use than on the importance of setting clear instructional, planning, and PD goals, then honing the skills that will help leaders help their teachers achieve excellence.

This focus on processes first and substance second is perhaps most evident in the chapter on “observation and feedback.” Here, Bambrick-Santoyo rightly notes that “effective observation and feedback…[is] about coaching,” and he recommends that principals spend far more time observing and giving feedback to teachers than is typical. 

Absolutely right, of course. The traditional teacher-evaluation model—where instructors are observed barely once a year and given very little by way of actionable feedback—is deeply flawed. And spending more time in classrooms and having one-on-one feedback conversations with teachers will go a long way towards helping them improve their craft.

Yet what Bambrick-Santoyo slights is how important the quality of that feedback is to a teacher’s development. Yet this is an area where the principal he profiles is truly exceptional. Yes, Julie Jackson does make more time for teacher observations and for direct, one-on-one feedback. And yes, she does create systems that ensure that feedback translates to action. (Two of the four “keys to observation and feedback” that the author outlines.) But effectively identifying the “one or two most important areas for growth” is where Jackson likely rises far above her peers. And that is the “step” that will be most difficult for inexperienced or struggling school leaders to replicate.

In fact, to better prepare her to give the kind of focused, targeted feedback that teachers need to develop, Jackson has gone above and beyond. She has developed her own rubric of the “Top 10 Areas for Action Steps,” where she clearly and concisely articulates the vision of instructional excellence toward which she and her team are driving. And she uses these indicators to inform her observations, to map teachers’ professional development plans, and to frame her feedback conversations. Given the sizable investment of time and learning she has put into this work, it would be near-impossible for another leader in a distant network to merely replicate what she’s done and achieve the same results. And most attempts to do so would lead inevitably to the Xerox effect.

In the end, there is no “step-by-step” guide to creating exceptional schools and there is no way we will replicate our way to outstanding student achievement results. Bambrick-Santoyo’s book is full of tips and advice that are as important as they are pragmatic. But the only way to take excellence to scale is to keep our eyes firmly focused on the outcomes towards which we’re driving.

Disheartening? Perhaps. But only if you see principals as middle managers, rather than the visionary instructional leaders we need to drive outstanding achievement.

A version of this editorial was originally published on the Common Core Watch blog.

I had a reporter ask me this week if I could remember a teachers’ strike as “confusing” as the one in Chicago; it was so hard, she explained, even to know over which issues the teachers were striking.

Mike broke down the significance of the Chicago teachers' strike on "The Kudlow Report" last night.

That’s not an accident. The local and national unions surely realized, after an onslaught of negative coverage, that complaining about 16 percent raises on top of $75,000 average salaries was not a winning argument during a period of 8 percent unemployment. So they changed their talking points: Now the teachers were upset about evaluations that would link their performance reviews with students’ test scores. But that position is unpopular, too—and puts the union at odds with President Obama—so now they are striking over…class sizes and air conditioning?

Right.

This is akin to the Republican defense of the dubious “Voter ID” laws: That they are necessary to protect against voter fraud. Everyone knows they are a cynical ploy to suppress the participation of poor and minority citizens—likely Democratic voters. But GOP officials can’t admit that. So they obfuscate.

So it is with the Chicago Teachers Union. It’s the meat-and-potatoes issue of pay and benefits that has been front and center during the months-long negotiations; to argue otherwise is simply dishonest.

And what about the issue of “respect”? The idea that Rahmbo is trying to steamroll the unions on his way to becoming an “imperial" mayor?

This is getting closer to the truth. The unions—in Chicago and other big cities—grew accustomed over the past four decades to holding veto power over all key education decisions. When leaders wanted reform, they needed to accept union-approved, watered-down versions—or pay up. As Rick Hess has argued, the more-money-for-more-reform bargain greased the wheels of compromise during flush times—but is unsustainable during today’s New Normal of flat-lined revenues and gaping deficits.

Is Rahmbo really trying to steamroll the union?  Photo by Yortw.

To be sure, many teachers (in Chicago and nationwide) feel blamed, discouraged, demoralized, and afraid; those sentiments were on display in the latest MetLife Survey of the American Teacher. The brash rhetoric and take-no-prisoners tactics of reformers—elected and otherwise—surely contribute to this dynamic (along with watching many colleagues get pink slips as districts try to close budget holes).

But such frustrations aren’t why the teachers of the Windy City took to the streets and sent the lives of hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans into disarray. Workers in all sectors of the economy experience stress and slights; it’s part of life. But most don’t walk off the job.

No, this is ultimately about power. The unions are feeling whipsawed by tectonic shifts that have occured within the Democratic Party in recent years, with Democrats for Education Reform creating space for political leaders—from the mayor’s office to the Oval Office—to challenge them on fundamental issues. (And of course there are the charter schools, still open for business, which challenge the union’s monopoly to boot.) As a Chicago teacher told the local news before the strike, “We didn’t start this fight. We’re only defending ourselves.”

She’s right, in a way: For decades there was no fighting, just abdicating, as Democratic city officials gave the unions pretty much everything they wanted. (That’s why there have been so few teacher strikes in the past couple of decades.) Those days are over; the unions aren’t happy about it. Yet even as this week's organized-labor tantrum winds down, it already feels more like a reminder of a past era or a last gasp than a sign of things to come

Los Angeles charter-school advocates are questioning the legality of a proposed moratorium on new charters. LAUSD's budget and achievement woes have many sources and underperforming charters are one of them, yes. Shutting out all new charters rather than shutting down the worst of the existing ones, however, is a bit like solving a technical disagreement over teacher evaluations by shutting down an entire school district. Ok, bad example.

A Los Angeles Times editorial accused the Adelanto Elementary School District of deliberately obstructing an effort by parents to take control of an elementary school using California’s “parent trigger” law. Well, yes, but did parent-trigger proponents really expect the district and other opponents to acquiesce without resorting to easy bureaucratic and legal stalling tactics? If the parent trigger has become the “lawyer trigger,” is it time to admit the limits of this idea?

Louisiana plans to launch a marketplace for publicly funded courses next year that would allow students to select from online and in-person courses outside of their schools. Kudos to the Bayou State for developing a creative way to guarantee access to the increasingly diverse ways that education can be delivered in the digital era.

Gadfly's prediction: The Chicago strike will end soon (perhaps today?) as national Democrats pressure both sides to end the potentially politically damaging struggle before Republicans can make too much hay from the episode. Gadfly's hope: The spat will inspire greater support among voters for private-school choice options, further eroding teacher unions’ abilities to strong-arm concessions over pay and accountability from politicians that districts simply can’t afford, for budget and quality reasons.

Drawing parallels is irresistible: Yesterday, the Boston Teachers Union reached a tentative contract agreement with the Boston Public Schools. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of striking teachers picketed outside Chicago public-school buildings as that city’s strike entered its third day. Two large urban districts serving predominantly poor and minority students, months of contentious negotiations between district and union officials that had sputtered over disagreements about teacher evaluation and pay; yet in Beantown a pact was reached that increased the use of student achievement in teacher evaluations while 350,000 CPS students waited on adults so they could return to class. True, crucial differences exist—for one thing, teacher strikes are illegal in Massachusetts. But remember one key similarity: In each case, the union-district squabbles are really the conclusions of battles fought years ago at the state level. The use of student achievement in teacher evaluation was already guaranteed in both states by Race to the Top-driven changes before these contracts came up for renegotiation. As union and district leaders quarrel over specifics of student-data use for teacher evaluations (the core of both disagreements), it bears remembering that, however the struggles in cities around the country like Boston and Chicago play out, the spark that ignited them was lit two years ago by a certain teacher-union-backed president and his Department of Education.

RELATED ARTICLE: “Teacher evaluations at center of Chicago strike,” by Sophia Tareen, Associated Press, September 13, 2012.

Many states, including Ohio, are moving toward more rigorous evaluation systems. We talked to DC teachers evaluated by DC's IMPACT evaluation system to hear their thoughts on how they're evaluated.

Many states, including Ohio, are moving toward more rigorous evaluation systems. We talked to DC teachers evaluated by DC's IMPACT evaluation system to hear their thoughts on how they're evaluated.

Carmakers hang their hats on J.D. Power and Associates’s annual safety ratings. Television stations live by Sweeps Week. And those interested in international educational competitiveness have the OECD’s annual Education at a Glance report. This vast compilation of data reports on the output of educational institutions (including achievement, graduation rates, equity, and labor-market outcomes); the resources invested in education (financial and human-capital, at the K-12 and higher-ed levels); access to education (including for pre-K youngsters and adult learners); and the “learning environment” (meaning class sizes, teaching time, examinations, etc.). The facts are interesting all by themselves. For example, the U.S. spends 7 cents less of each education dollar on teacher compensation than the OECD average (63 cents), but 8 cents more than average on non-teaching personnel (16 cents). (Caveat: While pension benefits are factored into this analysis, health-care benefits are not.) Further, the authors find that, even though evidence of the effects of class size on student achievement is weak, the student-teacher ratio has decreased in more than two-thirds of the countries studied, with a concomitant impact of education expenditures. Partake seriously of the data, but be careful not to overindulge in the report’s policy recommendations. While a few are palatable—adjust policy to allow effective teachers, irrespective of seniority, to spend more time teaching and mentoring their peers, for example—many others are stale.

SOURCE: Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Education at a Glance 2011: OECD Indicators (OECD Publishing, September 2012).

Education reformers have long argued against step-and-lane salary structures and defined-benefit pension systems, lamenting that they keep burned-out teachers in classrooms longer than is prudent, push away strong young candidates who could make many more dollars in other lines of work, and thereby hurt student achievement. This study by Katharine Strunk and Jason Grissom empirically evaluates how front- and back-loaded teacher-salary schedules impact student performance. (Front-loaded schedules provide larger raises early in a teacher’s career and smaller ones later; back-loading concentrates raises among veteran teachers.) The analysts use nationally representative school data from the Schools and Staffing Survey and student-proficiency data in fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading from a limited number of states (fifteen to twenty, depending on the grade and subject). Half of all districts frontload salaries; however, the districts that backload do so to a much greater degree: The average back-loading district provides 135 percent more yearly returns (or bump in pay for years experience), whereas in districts that frontload, novice teachers get 37 percent greater returns for their years of experience than do veterans, on average. Further, districts that bargain collectively with teacher unions are more likely to have back-loaded salary structures—unsurprising as unions tend to be dominated by their older members. Regarding student achievement: The analysts find that back-loading is consistently negatively associated with students reaching proficiency benchmarks in both math and reading and across elementary and middle school grades, but the magnitude is small and the relationship not necessarily causal. What to make of these data? The authors posit that awarding higher salaries early in teachers’ careers is important in attracting quality candidates. But compensation can be awarded in other ways. For districts struggling under onerous collective-bargaining agreements, other financial perks such as loan-forgiveness or signing bonuses might make sense instead. Worthy advice, indeed.

Jason A. Grissom and Katharine O. Strunk, “How Should School Districts Shape Teacher Salary Schedules? Linking School Performance to Pay Structure in Traditional Compensation Schemes” (Journal of Educational Policy, volume 26, number 5, September 2012).

College pennants line the halls of most high-performing charters. Selection Day (when students announce the colleges they’ve chosen to attend) feels much like NFL Draft Day. But, even though these students—prepared as they are—matriculate to college, graduation is far from ensured (as the Houston-based YES Prep charter network and KIPP have discovered). This study from Harvard’s Joshua Goodman and Sarah Cohodes offers perspective as to why these low-income, yet high-performing students may stumble: It comes down to college quality (not necessarily college affordability). The authors examined the impacts of the Adams Scholarship—which offers free tuition at Massachusetts public colleges for those who score in the top quartile of the state test—on college completion. They found that students who were induced by the scholarship to attend Bay State public universities (and forego a higher-quality private or out-of-state option) were 26 percentage points less likely to graduate. These students don’t drop out, then, because they enroll in colleges that are too hard; they drop out because they pick colleges that aren’t hard enough. (Thomas Sowell may not agree, but Paul Tough makes a similar point in his recent book: How Children Succeed—and others have as well.) Educators: This is yet another reason to push your students to set their sights high and push themselves to reach their full potential.

SOURCE: Sarah Cohodes and Joshua Goodman, First Degree Earns: The Impact of College Quality on College Completion Rates (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Kennedy School, August 2012).