Checker takes to the Wall Street Journal's op-ed pages to communicate to Ohioans this message: Wake up.
Performance-based pay (PBP) programs for teachers have been??growing, especially since the advent of the federal Teacher Incentive Fund program a couple years ago. ProComp out of Denver is probably the best known PBP and rather unique since it's being funded by a $25-million mill levy approved by taxpayers. Like many of these plans, ProComp is extremely complicated, which is part of the reason that management and union reached an impasse in contract negotiations over how to change and improve it for the next iteration.
ProComp is a voluntary program--indeed, this was one of the major reasons it was passed--and less than half of Denver teachers have now joined the plan. That??means roughly??$87 million in ProComp dollars will be left over at the end of the 2008-09 school year. Not surprising,??DPS says it could find a place for those extra greenbacks, perhaps by directing it??to younger teachers leaving the system at high rates. But Henry Roman, involved in the program from the get-go, says not so fast:??"At this stage, I feel more information is needed before people make final recommendations." Indeed.??Before that money is redirected anywhere,??stakeholders need to stop and ask themselves why so few teachers have signed on to the program.
Having evaluated one of these programs myself, it's often teacher misunderstanding??that's a primary roadblock to progress. And from what I know, ProComp is as complicated as they come. And it does not, as some have proposed, reconstruct a teacher's base salary from scratch. Instead, teachers layer??the base with??various cash amounts through fulfillment of or service in a variety of capacities. The laundry list of eligible cash categories covers both traditional ways of building earnings (e.g, masters degree) and more forward-thinking methods (e.g., student achievement,??teaching in hard to staff schools). Many of these "layers," though, become part of a teacher's salary year in and year out--a factor which some say is currently being overlooked with all of this talk of milk-and-honey ProComp surplus.
Teachers??either consider??the program??too risky to get involved??or they simply don't trust it. But really, how??risky is a laundry list of salary add-ons? And why, after so much time, energy, and positive P.R. on this effort (up until now), do teachers still look at it with a suspicious eye? This well-publicized??impasse doesn't help.??Let's hope this initiative doesn't get totally derailed. The Denver voters were sold a program that awarded teachers for raising student achievement, improving teaching skills, ??and taking on more difficult assignments. That's how the money should be spent. If we can't get more teachers to volunteer for it, so be it. Go back to the drawing board or let the money sit. But don't creatively redirect it so it no longer aligns with its original purpose.
As an aside, I'm wondering??if volunteering is really the way to go with these PBP programs. We have another one starting up right here in our own backyard. It's also voluntary, though on a much smaller scale (just 12 schools).??With??up to a $10,000 dollar bonus, might teachers suspicions disappear?
A new AP poll out today spends some time asking respondents about the state of public schools. The approximately 1,700 adults gave their opinions about how well schools prepare kids for college, how safe schools are, etc. etc. The Wall Street Journal's Real Time Economics blog has an interesting take on the relationship between education and economic productivity (which lends itself to exploring how Americans view their kids schools vs. everyone else's), but other results deserve some attention.
According to the poll, both the general population and parents think students should spend more time studying math (38% and 40%, respectively) and English (21% and 21%, respectively). The next most popular subject? History and government, says the general population (10% apiece), and "other" (10%) say the parents. Sure it makes sense that they'd want more time devoted to math and English, the bread and butter of our standardized testing system, but yikes. These results don't exactly give much hope to the push to keep the liberal arts in the curriculum. And one has to wonder what exactly these "other" subjects are, considering the survey lists choices in just about every major subject.
Another disturbing result: 70% of the general population and 69% of parents think classroom work and homework are the best way to measure student achievement (as opposed to test scores). Fair enough; it's easy to see how mom and dad can understand Johnny's A on a test in a vacuum, but there's no telling how his A measures up to his peers domestically and abroad. These same respondents are worried about international competitiveness (over 90% of both groups say U.S. schools are "just keeping up with" or "falling behind" the rest of the world). Yet while these parents are looking down their noses at standardized tests, they'd like to see more time spent on math and English--and more than likely that's not because they want Johnny to keep up those straight A's.
Eight-hundred and thirty-three general population adults and 854 parents of school-aged children took this Gates-funded survey. They may be only a small slice of America, but the contradictions presented in their responses are certainly worth a thoughtful look.
Video footage from the panel discussion of Fordham's recent report, High-Achieving Students in the Era of No Child Left Behind, is now online for your viewing pleasure:
High-Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB from Education Gadfly on Vimeo.
5:30 - Tom Loveless, Brookings Institution
19:05 - Steve Farkas, Farkas Duffett Research Group
33:25 - Josh Wyner, Jack Kent Cooke Foundation
41:15 - Ross Wiener, Education Trust
48:30 - Question & Answer
Download:
Does anyone out there believe that the dramatic test-score increases coming out of the Empire State are legitimate? Sol Stern, for one, highly-knowledgeable on all educational goings on in New York, is with the naysayers. He points out in a piece on the City Journal website that
almost none of the dramatic improvements in the state tests show up in the most recent tests administered by the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), otherwise known as the "nation's report card." NAEP scores in fourth- and eighth-grade reading and eighth-grade math in New York State remained flat from 2005 to 2007.
Many critics have jumped on this embarassing comparison already. But Stern also illuminates this dubious idea of "rigorous peer review," which state schools chief Richard Mills has used to try to deflect the inevitable charges of test-rigging:
One of the slides in his PowerPoint presentation was titled ENSURING THESE RESULTS ARE ACCURATE and claimed that "New York's testing system passed rigorous peer review by [the] U.S. Dep't of Education." But this "rigorous peer review," which all 50 states now undergo under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), is less impressive than it sounds. I was told by a federal education department official that the review covers only the general process used by the states in establishing a reliable system of standards and assessment. It does not constitute a federal seal of approval for the accuracy of any state's particular tests.
That's not really a surprise, considering how forgiving the feds have been on pretty much all of NCLB's most important requirements. What is suprising is that most everyone still believes this unwieldy law can be dramatically improved during the next go-round and that, somehow, politicians at all levels will lose the motivation to game high-stakes tests.
The newest issue of The Economist has a piece on international comparisons that offers a couple interesting lessons. The first is to be wary of them. In a recent analysis of Finland's PISA scores, which routinely top those of all other comers, Jarkko Hautam??ki and his colleagues at Helsinki University found
only one big policy element that could easily be replicated elsewhere: early and energetic intervention for struggling pupils. Many of the other ingredients for success that they identify--orthography, geography and history--have nothing to do with how schools are run, or what happens in classrooms.In Finnish, exceptionally, each letter makes a single logical sound and there are no irregular words. That makes learning to read easy. An economy until recently dependent on peasant farming in harsh latitudes has shaped a stoic national character and an appetite for self-improvement. Centuries of foreign rule (first Swedes, then Russians) further entrenched education as the centrepiece of national identity. So hard work and good behaviour are the norm; teaching tempts the best graduates (nearly nine out of ten would-be teachers are turned down).
So American education wonks are missing the point when they say, for instance, that we should emulate Finland and make teaching more tempting to college graduates.
Some argue, though, that PISA has at least been successful inasmuch as it has increased the pressure on countries to improve their education systems to avoid humiliation.
[Andreas Schleicher, the OECD's head of education research], says international comparisons teach a crucial lesson: what is possible. "In 1995, at the first meeting of OECD ministers I attended, every country boasted of its own success and its own brilliant reforms. Now international comparisons make it clear who is failing. There is no place to hide."
This should sound familiar, of course, as most people argue that NCLB's only clear success so far has been to shine a light on failing schools and get people worked up enough to do something about it.
As a fellow insect-themed edu-blog, we feel a certain kinship with our friends at BoardBuzz, produced by the National School Boards Association. But the Buzzers went bust with their analysis of our recent high-achieving students study. Let's tackle their misstatements, one by one:
Contrary to the thinking that high achieving students have been left behind, the report actually found that high achieving students (those scoring in the top 10 percent on NAEP) have been making similar gains on NAEP over the past 20 years. BoardBuzz hardly thinks that's being left behind. On the other hand, low achieving students (those scoring in the bottom 10 percent) have been making 4 times as many gains on NAEP since NCLB was enacted compare to before.
Ah, watch those apples-to-organges comparisons, NSBA. Yes, if you go back to the early 1990s, the progress of low and high achievers looks roughly the same, at least in some subject-grade combinations. But upon closer inspection the story is very different. Basically the 90s were quite good for high achievers (particularly in states without accountability systems); the post-2000 years have been quite good for low achievers (perhaps due to NCLB). The story since 2000, though, is straightforward: anemic gains at the top versus dramatic gains at the bottom. No, our top students aren't doing worse, but is their "languid" progress (Tom Loveless's word) good enough in today's competitive world?
Then the Buzzers say:
If you had listened to Fordham you would think the achievement of high achieving students remained flat or even declined but this simply is not the case. Would we all like to see greater gains from all our students? Of course. There is always room for improvement, but that does not mean that high performers have been neglected.
But anyone who reads our report, or even our summary in last week's Gadfly, will encounter statements like this: "The performance of high achievers is unimpressive at best. Their scores haven't fallen, mind you. But neither have they risen much." So I'm not sure who the Buzzers are "listening" to. Regardless, what we learn from our national teacher survey (part of the study) is that teachers are neglecting their top students, and feel guilty about it. I understand why, institutionally, the NSBA wants to engage in happy talk about how well the public schools are doing, but we need to face these tough choices in an honest way. School boards should know that lots of teachers feel pressure to spend all of their time on the lowest-performing students and that high achievers aren't getting the attention they deserve. That needs fixing, pronto.
Finally,
BoardBuzz has heard a lot that schools have been forced to focus on only those students right below or above proficiency, so called bubble kids, at the expense of their low and high performing students to raise their proficiency rates since high achievers would reach proficiency anyway and low achievers weren't likely to. Fortunately the report shows that this appears to be untrue.
Well, not so fast. Our Proficiency Illusion report from last year found that most states are defining "proficiency" as the 20th or 30th percentile nationally in reading and math. Several states aim even lower--around the 10th percentile. So the lowest-achieving students might be the "bubble kids," since state standards are set so embarrassingly low.
And with that, I'm going to take a break--not just from the high-achieving students issue, but from education policy. See you on July 7th.
We were pretty busy yesterday with our event, so I didn't get the chance to comment on a surprising advertising supplement in Wednesday's Washington Post. I'm used to the Russian or Chinese government spewing propaganda between Sports and Food (hey, print newspapers need to make their money somehow), but this time it wasn't a commie cohort. Instead, it was the NEA! They had 4-plus pages of articles written by the likes of Linda Darling-Hammond, Reg Weaver, Kati Haycock, and even the CEO of Accenture (although he was confined to the back page). I didn't stop to read the substance, but wow, it had great graphics and layout. Very colorful and splashy. Our neighbors must have quite the advertising budget--if nothing else, they've certainly upped the ante for the next time Putin wants to wax philosophical on the beauty of Moscow.
I'd wager that stupid immigration policies, which George Will assails in today's Washington Post, pose a much greater threat to long-term American competitiveness than sub-par schools.
The X Prize Foundation is teaming up with British telecoms giant BT to expand its offerings. The Financial Times says
The next prizes are likely to focus on cancer, renewable energy and oceanography. The foundation aims to revive a spirit of adventure in research, like the 18th-century prizes to measure longitude and the early 20th-century aviation prizes.
I guess I was foolish to expect the article to announce the unveiling of the long-awaited Education X Prize. The foundation's website shows they have thought a bit more about the idea, though.