Former Assistant Secretary of Education (and onetime colleague of mine) Susan Neuman promotes the "broader/bolder" agenda in the pages of the Detroit Free Press today. (HT to Alexander Russo.*) I've already expressed my dismay with said agenda (and Checker and Liam go even further), but let me quibble with a few of her article's specifics. First:
Six years after the passage of the federal No Child Left Behind law, there is frustratingly little evidence that it will close the achievement gap between low-income, minority children and their middle-class peers.
Perhaps not, but there is plenty of evidence that NCLB-style accountability is helping to narrow the gap between low-achieving and high-achieving students, for better or for worse. But let's be honest: none of the social service programs Neuman touts are likely to "close" the achievement gap between poor and middle-class children either. Maybe they can help to "narrow" the gap. That's a big distinction. As I wrote the other day, we're unlikely to entirely erase group differences in achievement, particularly class differences, so holding that up as the standard for NCLB (or any other program to meet) is rather silly. Also:
The impetus for change built into NCLB was to effectively "shame" schools into improvement. We now see that the shame game is flawed.
Let's be clear about NCLB's theory of action. It wasn't to "shame" schools and their educators into working harder, with the assumption that they were lazy or ill-intended. It was to shift the political environment on the ground, so that needed reforms could have a shot at winning the day. It was to undo the veto power so many teachers unions and other adult interests hold, so that sensible changes (such as, say, paying teachers more in high-need schools or high-need subjects) might be embraced. In the past, unions could just say niet, but now superintendents can respond, "we have to embrace these reforms and improve our failing schools or else we'll suffer terrible consequences under No Child Left Behind." And reform-minded superintendents, from New York to Denver to Chicago to Washington, have been saying exactly that. Which is why many of these superintendents don't want NCLB's political cover to go away.
Professor Neuman is a reading expert (and a good one at that), but clearly she's still not well versed in the politics of education reform.
* In this case, Russo actually found an article we wouldn't have otherwise come across, as opposed to this case.
"What if ???improving teacher quality' isn't THE answer?," wonders Mike, who does not generally capitalize definite articles, so you know he's serious about THIS. In the newest Gadfly, just out, he writes:
Allow me to add yet another dollop of doubt to the reform consensus: Are we sure that "improving teacher quality" is the panacea that so many (including us and our friends) have suggested? Is it possible that our current fascination with "human capital development" is misguided? That both presidential campaigns' embrace of this issue is ill-considered?
With Rick Hess on vacation, sunning himself on some Chesapeake beach, we recruited Kevin Carey, he of the Quick and the Ed fame, to fill Rick's customary spot as Mike's podcast interlocutor. Sense must waft upon the air currents in Fordham's offices because Carey managed to make it through the recording session with nary a wholly preposterous remark escaping his lips. Sadly, I couldn't be on hand to witness it and for that reason remain unconvinced that it was the Kevin Carey on today's podcast and not some wily impersonator. Nonetheless, you should listen to this week's??segment, which is less jejune than usual.
Or perhaps it is. American Teen, a documentary about five high school seniors who live in Indiana, opens tomorrow. It picked up an award and a lot of buzz at the Sundance Film Festival, and the reviews have so far been pretty positive. Perhaps I can convince Coby, our resident film critic, to spend his Friday evening reviewing this movie, surrounded in the theater by gaggles of 17-year-olds whose cell phones, when called by their friends several seats away,??sing out??the latest from Ludacris.
If you can't make it to American Teen, though, be sure not to miss this.
Update: If you watch the video appended to the Wall Street Journal article, you may confuse??the reporter??with the "teens."
That's the upshot of this new Achieve report.
Is this the summer of school reform discontent, when the core assumptions of the past decade are reexamined? Are assumptions such as those that gave birth to the "Washington Consensus," which in turn created No Child Left Behind, being questioned anew? So it appears.
There's the broader/bolder crowd, who argue that it's unfair to hold schools accountable for raising student achievement because so much that influences achievement is outside of schools' control. There's a growing chorus of voices that wonder whether "closing the achievement gap" should continue to be the primary objective of our education system, mostly because such an objective implies that we aren't much interested in maximizing the progress of white, middle-class, and/or high-achieving students.
Allow me to add yet another dollop of doubt to the reform consensus: Are we sure that "improving teacher quality" is the panacea that so many (including us and our friends) have suggested? Is it possible that our current fascination with "human capital development" is misguided? That both presidential campaigns' embrace of this issue is ill-considered?
Yes, the research is quite clear that the quality of a student's teacher has a greater impact on that student's achievement than anything else that schools can control. It's also clear that low-income and minority children are much less likely to be taught by "high quality teachers" (however defined) than are affluent and white children. So reformers make the jump: If we could just fill every classroom with society's "best and brightest," we'd have our education problems licked. Or, they continue, if we could just get our most talented teachers to serve in our neediest schools, we'd have our achievement gap beat.
Unfortunately, we can't hire enough great teachers, and we can't get the best teachers to serve in the neediest areas. So what's our Plan B?
Why can't we recruit millions of fabulous teachers (assuming, that is, that we need millions)? Haven't Teach For America (TFA) and The New Teacher Project (TNTP) proven that, by employing the right recruitment methods, top-notch college graduates and seasoned mid-career professionals will flock to needy classrooms? Yes and no. They've certainly demonstrated that many more of our "best and brightest" are willing to teach, at least for short periods of time, than lots of people once assumed. TFA is growing robustly; this fall's class will reach 5,000 teachers, up from 1,000 ten years ago. And TNTP is getting great results in a handful of major cities. In New York City, for example, almost one in ten current teachers came through its Teaching Fellows Program--and now that city's "teacher quality gap" is shrinking. The strategy of opening up the teacher pipeline to non-traditional routes is clearly showing some success, in some areas. (Areas, by the way, that tend to attract young high-flyers; the list of such areas is unfortunately short.)
But this strategy isn't showing success at scale. And thanks to our national obsession with "reducing class size," we boast a teacher workforce of more than three million; teachers coming through TFA and TNTP are a metaphorical drop in the bucket.
Certainly lots more new teachers are these days entering classrooms through alternate routes (up to a third, according to some estimates), but we found last year that most alternative certification is of dubious quality and doesn't attract stellar candidates. Furthermore, the teacher recruitment challenge is only going to get tougher in coming years as Baby Boomers retire en masse. Many of the Boomer teachers taught for thirty-odd years; they will likely be replaced by twenty-somethings who will last five years at best. (That's not necessarily because education has a "retention" problem but because today's twenty-somethings don't work anywhere for more than a few years.) And the education system will be competing against other employers for top-notch college grads, particularly since the number of workers in their 30s and 40s is dropping precipitously. (This is the demographic "trough" between the Boomers and their children.) The math doesn't lie: it's highly unlikely that we're ever going to recruit three million "great" teachers.
That leads to the other teacher quality strategy du jour: creating incentives (or mandates) for great teachers to serve in tough areas, thereby (if it works) at least creating a more equitable distribution of top teachers. By all means, let's try it, particularly the incentives variety. Let's see if ten or twenty thousand dollars extra a year will entice the most effective teachers into the most challenging schools. (Finding that money is going to be quite a trick during a recession, though.) But compelling great teachers to work in rough schools will definitely fail, for the same reason that busing failed three decades ago: we live in a free country, and if pushed into neighborhoods in which they don't want to be, teachers, like parents, will leave the system.
That would be the likely result of the laudable but naïve reforms currently contemplated for Title I's "comparability" rules, whereby districts would have to ensure that each of their schools' payrolls would be roughly the same. (Affluent schools now tend to have much larger payrolls because they can recruit veteran teachers, who earn much more than rookies.) That would mean recouping money from middle-class schools and forcing them to release some of their more expensive teachers, all in the hope such teachers will gladly transfer to a school across town, in a tougher neighborhood. Unlikely. What's more probable is that these teachers will leave the district entirely and head to the suburbs--just as desegregation-era parents did.
The challenge these reforms can't overcome is the simple fact that most local teacher markets span multiple school districts. Equalizing the teacher distribution within one district is hard to do when teachers can simply move to another district. And equalizing the teacher distribution between districts is tougher still, because it requires equalizing funding between districts. (Otherwise, the better-funded districts can always outbid the others when it comes to teacher salaries.) And though our funding system has grown more equitable in recent years in terms of the allocation of state dollars, does anyone believe that the wealthiest suburban districts will ever give up the extra funding and salary advantages they hold over their neighbors?
So let's summarize: we're unlikely to fill all of America's classrooms with teachers from the ranks of society's "best and brightest." And we're particularly unlikely to do so in tough urban or rural areas, outside of a handful of hot cities where young college grads like to live. Which means that lots of our children--especially poor and minority children--are going to have teachers who may be good but are not likely to be great. These are teachers who themselves received so-so public school educations, attended so-so colleges, are raising families and thus probably don't want to work sixty hours a week, but who do care about their students and want them to succeed.
Shouldn't we be thinking about how to make these average teachers more effective, too, and augmenting them via technology and other stratagems, rather than putting all our eggs in the "superstar teacher" basket? (Look out for my thoughts about how to do that in a future Gadfly.)
Mayoral control of schools is surely no silver bullet, but in the case of Baltimore, where Mayor Sheila Dixon is, according to the Baltimore Sun, "floating the idea" of taking over the schools, it would be a leaden musket ball. The city's relatively new education CEO, Andres Alonso, is quickly making big changes; he's shifted authority away from the district's central office, for example, and has given greater responsibility to principals. Baltimore's entrenched bureaucrats don't like Alonso's style, and it seems they've communicated their distaste to Dixon. She recently told a Sun columnist about the CEO, "You can't come in and change everything." Imagine wanting to take charge of the schools in one's city in order to retard the pace of change! In June, Dixon brazenly criticized Alonso on a radio show: "I cautioned him not to move so quickly in some areas." But quick movement to reform broken classrooms is, in fact, exactly what Baltimore needs--far more than it needs mayoral control.
"Dixon Eyes Bid to Run Schools," by Liz Bowie, Baltimore Sun, July 27, 2008
"Shift Control of Schools? Why Now?," by Jean Marbella, Baltimore Sun, July 29, 2008
All hail ProComp!, we once were impelled, for it hath shown that teachers' unions and reformers can work together for good. Not so fast. Now we learn from Education Week that Denver's teachers' union, "in a recent newsletter, called on teachers to prepare for a strike if negotiations [to reform ProComp] fall through." ProComp, you may recall, is Denver's well-meaning but rather weak-kneed merit pay plan, enacted in 2004 through a much-ballyhooed union-district partnership. It was understood that the program's specifics would be renegotiated every three years. Thus, the city's school district (which just posted big test score gains), led by Superintendent Michael Bennet, recently proposed changes to ProComp that would raise the starting teacher salary from $35,000 to $44,000 and would bump from $1,067 to $2,925 the bonuses that teachers who work in hard-to-staff schools, or who teach subjects such as math and science, could earn. These changes are specifically targeted to attract more high-quality teachers and increase retention. The union, however, doesn't get it--it's stonewalling Bennet's proposals and wants a 3.5 percent increase in the salaries of all educators. How a 3.5 percent boost will attract new, talented teachers to the district and then retain them is unclear; it's also unclear how the union's plan is different from the imprecise, across the board salary schedules to which ProComp was intended to be an alternative. Work with the unions, yes we can?
"Model Plan of Merit Pay in Ferment," by Vaishali Honawar, Education Week, July 28, 2008
Andrew C. Zau and Julian R. Betts
Public Policy Institute of California
2008
What if you could predict the likelihood that a fourth-grade student would, years later, pass the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE)? Two researchers at the Public Policy Institute of California claim to have done just that. By using a longitudinal and comprehensive data-set from San Diego, authors Zau and Betts have identified academic, language, and behavioral markers that help predict the probability that a given pupil will pass the test. For example, a good "behavior GPA," based on a student's classroom conduct, is strongly correlated with passing the CAHSEE. Zau and Betts contend that developing an early warning and intervention system, based on such data, would be smarter than employing rushed tutoring programs during eleventh and twelfth grade. We'd add that states might also "vertically align" their assessment systems so that passing the fourth-grade test means you're on track to pass the high school test. (According to our Proficiency Illusion report, such alignment is missing in a majority of the states we studied.) There's much more to dig out of this interesting study, which you can find here.