A question of values

So if the returns on this country's economic investment in public education show up in our industries, how much is a good teacher worth? NPR's Planet Money recently hosted economist Eric Hanushek who attempted to address that question in a study on the subject. Using test scores as the measuring stick, and following his own weird correlation-implies-causation train of thought, Hanushek claims that replacing, by removal or retraining, the "bottom" 5-8% of teachers with "average" teachers (as measured by student test scores) would result in a 100 trillion dollar boost to the GDP.

Without reading the study (available only by paid subscription), I can't comment on the particulars, but I can recommend Diane Ravitch's excellent, well-researched, and thorough response to studies like Hanushek's that focus on "Value-Added Analysis": The Pitfalls of Putting Economists in Charge Of Education. Her piece appears on one of my favorite education blogs, Bridging Differences, where she and Deborah Meier (another beacon of sanity and thoughtfulness) write back and forth about their different perspectives on issues in education today.

Beyond the high error rates, multiple ethical issues, questionable methodologies, and wide-reaching policy implications of "Value-Added Assessments," the bigger problem with these evaluation methods is the dangerously nebulous definition of value in education and society. Before we can evaluate teachers and schools, we must clearly articulate our values and develop appropriate ways of assessing the extent to which our education system embodies and promotes those values. This work requires us to look beyond the economic purposes of education to focus on the civic, moral, and ethical implications of our efforts and actions with regard to public education.

Ready for some good news out of Congress?

A few senators on both sides of the aisle spoke some sense about education in a Senate Appropriations Committee meeting, today, where Secretary of Education Arne Duncan appealed for an education budget increase. Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) agreed in principle, saying, "It is wishful thinking to expect improvements in school quality when we are laying off teachers."

In the same meeting, Senators Richard Shelby (R-AL) and Jack Reed (D-RI) criticized competitive grant programs including Race to the Top (RTTT) and Promise Neighborhood (PN) grants. Shelby expressed concern that RTTT ensures inequitable funding and threatens states' rights by introducing a de facto requirement for states to support charter schools. Reed cautioned that funding should not be allocated to "untested" competitive grants, while being stripped from research-based programs.

The senators gently couched their concerns in party rhetoric, but my hope is that this is a sign of a larger political shift away from trying to apply competition-based business strategies to an education system that is supposed to provide equitable education to all. With increasing attention to the way this country educates its children, it seems more folks are starting to understand that the economic purpose of schools is not to turn a profit, but to ensure strong profits, over time, across all industries, by providing a skilled, knowledgeable, creative, and capable national workforce.

Links:

Reuters on the Senate Committee Meeting

HuffPo on the Senate Committee Meeting

Tech yourself before you wreck yourself

Today was the first day of the Education Summit in Iowa. Most of the events were streamed live, and I'm hoping the Department of Education will also post the videos for anyone who missed them today. For now, I want to focus on the afternoon's opening remarks by Scott McLeod, professor at Iowa State University and Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Technology in Leadership (CASTLE).

McLeod is an educator who understands the digital age, the 'Net Generation, and the possibilities and challenges our increasingly tech-based world presents to educators. In his remarks, he named a dozen things (including a catch-all "And so on...") educators would do "[i]f we were REALLY serious about educational technology." As a fairly regular ad hoc Wiki* contributor and editor, I particularly enjoyed item four: "we'd teach students to understand and contribute to the online information commons rather than 'just saying no' to Wikipedia." All of McLeod's suggestions focus on involving students (and ourselves) in learning and using technology to engage with the digital world in which our students already exist and for which they must be prepared by the time they graduate.

To McLeod's list I would add that we should involve students in developing the software and technology of the future. I know from personal experience that technology development is within reach for our students; I was eight or nine when I wrote my first DOS-based computer program on an IBM PC and saved it to a floppy disk before the end of class time. My school was a technology leader of its time, with a computer lab, weekly computer classes for all students, and one or two computers in each classroom. Nearly two decades later, not much has changed in the schools where my teacher peers and I have taught and are teaching. Each is equipped with a computer lab, weekly computer classes for all students, and one or two computers in each classroom. And cell phones and other hand-held digital devices are banned.

Even SMART Boards, truly revolutionary tools in the hands of tech-savvy educators, are often reduced to their lowest-tech function when time-pressured classroom teachers become stuck using the digital markers to jot down test-prep lessons, just as they would use dry-erase markers on a non-interactive whiteboard. It doesn't have to be this way. With tech knowledge, computers for students, and the freedom to teach, today's teachers can and should be pushing students to develop new computer programs -- call them apps, if you will -- along with written, oral, and digital presentations to "pitch" their initial ideas to peer-collaborators and, later, "market" their final products to classmates. If we teach them, these are skills our students can use today, as they prepare themselves for the future.

Motivation in the 21st Century

The testing debate is really heating up this week, with cheating investigations continuing in Atlanta and New Jersey, and teachers in Ogden, Utah, choosing whether to resign or sign a new merit-pay contract. Meanwhile, New York City's mayor Bloomberg has canceled the city's merit-pay pilot program, yet reinforced his support for performance pay in general.

The only good news, recently, on the issue of merit-pay comes from Ohio, where Republican Governor Kasich has made the entirely reasonable decision to hand teachers the task of creating a fair merit-pay process. To comply with Race to the Top requirements, the final plan must include teacher evaluations that weight student academic achievement for at least 50% of teacher ratings. However, if done right, the decision to let teachers design the details could result in a merit-pay system that has the support of teachers because it supports teachers in making the efforts they understand to be essential to their jobs, like collaborating with colleagues and developing relationships with students' families.

I'm encouraged by efforts of politicians to respect and defer to the knowledge and skills of teachers when designing education policy, but I'm having trouble getting truly excited about even a good merit-pay program. Focusing efforts on merit-pay program details begs the question of whether merit-pay is an effective incentive, and if so, what it actually incents. Early studies have shown that offering performance bonuses of 20% of salary might slightly motivate top-performing college students to enter teaching, but any motivational effect on current teachers to change their teaching is unproven at best. A McKinsey study revealed that bonus pay isn't even in the top five motivators for current teachers to consider teaching in a high-need school, and a RAND study revealed that many teachers in NYC's merit-pay pilot program "reported viewing the bonus as a reward for their usual efforts, not as an incentive for changing their behavior."

For another perspective on how to truly motivate creative and thoughtful teachers, check out Vicki Davis's excellent article on "The Freedom to Teach" in today's Washington Post. Davis's thinking is exactly what 21st century students need. As Levar Burton always said on Reading Rainbow, "You don't have to take my word for it!" because a few members of the 'Net Generation would like you to hear it from them:

More Links:

Biz Journal article on Atlanta educators resigning amid cheating scandal

CNN report on upcoming cheating investigations at 34 New Jersey Schools

Deseret News report on Ogden teacher contract

Wall Street Journal article on the new teacher rating system in NYC

Columbus Dispatcher article on decision to ask teachers to design merit-pay process

McKinsey's "Closing the Talent Gap" study

Edweek reports on RAND study of NYC merit-pay

FOUR, FOUR, FOUR improvements in ONE

The big news out of the Big Apple this week is that the city is ending its merit pay pilot program after a study showed that the merit pay had no effect on student achievement. Analysts at RAND, the independent research company that designed the study of the program, suggest that the small bonuses were not motivating enough to change teacher behavior in the current context of one-test-fits-all carrot-and-stick "accountability."

The NYC merit pay program focused on motivating existing teachers to work hard to boost student scores, but what if we shift the focus to motivating existing hard workers to lend their efforts to same goal? This would more closely resemble the national strategies of top-performing Finland, Singapore, and South Korea. McKinsey&Company, another research company, recently released the report of their comprehensive study of what factors might motivate current teachers and top college grads to teach in high-needs schools.

Much has been made of this study, and the reports and commentaries I had read focused heavily on radically increasing (essentially doubling) teacher pay in order to draw top students into teaching, especially in high-needs schools. However, the study itself does not suggest that increasing teacher salary is the only, or even necessarily the most effective strategy to provide the highest-need students with top-tier teachers. In fact, the results of the study imply that the most effective progress could be made by combining a few different strategies targeted to different populations.

Salary increases were especially motivating for top grads in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) who expect to take their pick from a range of well-paid career options. Salary also motivated top college grads, but the study found that simply marketing teaching careers to college students and providing drastically better training for entering teachers would go a long way toward motivating top grads to pursue teaching careers.

The one group not very motivated by salary increases was current teachers. These folks, who had already spent a few years working in the system, placed more value on good working conditions, professional development, and excellent school leadership. The fabulous news here is that all three of these indicators also independently raise student performance, and all three can be achieved by simply attracting excellent school leadership to work in the highest need schools. The McKinsey report proposed several different "scenarios" to attract top-tier teachers, but by focusing on independent variables instead of combined effects they missed this simplest one.

Links:

Edweek article on the end of the NYC merit-pay pilot program

McKinsey's Closing the Talent Gap

Read my lips: reform requires taxes

In today's news, Illinois Schools Superintendent Christopher Koch pointed out that funding cuts are bad for education reform. Now, I wasn't a huge fan of the Illinois reforms to begin with (the big focus was on preventing teacher strikes and paying teachers for high test scores), but Koch is right that education reform is going to take some serious funding.

Real reform, like the suggestions from Iowa's roundtables and the initiatives AFT president Randi Weingarten highlighted last week at the AFT Teach conference, will require real funding. Selling this reality to parents, pundits, politicians, and private sector CEOs will be the biggest challenge we'll face in achieving the long-term goal of improving the US education system to rival those of Finland, Singapore, and South Korea.

While we work on the mid-term goal of selling folks on the idea of higher taxes to fund real school reform, we could act in the short-term to divert funding away from unproven and disproved reform efforts, such as bonus pay for high test scores and developing standardized tests for preschoolers.

More links:

Evansville Courier Press on Koch's funding frustration

AFL-CIO blog summary of Weingarten's remarks

AFT Quality Education Agenda for evidence-based, equitable, scalable, and sustainable reform

3 big goals and 1 enormous elephant in Iowa

I came away from watching the 3 hour-long roundtable discussions in Iowa this week with three big-picture takeaways:

(1) We need to focus on connection and collaboration at and across all levels. Iowa's education system (and I would argue this is true for New York and most of the United States as well) is fragmented and disorganized. We need to develop an education system where educators are connecting with business leaders, as well as other educators across grades pre-k through college. We must develop appropriate student assessments that are correlated to real-world outcomes needed for college and career success and also correlated to meaningful applied learning experiences in school.

(2) We need to raise the expectations for all students, and provide educational experiences that prepare students for the 21st century demands for creative, technologically proficient, collaborative problem solvers. Students need more hands-on experiences and applied learning, more opportunities to connect with others within and beyond the classroom, and more assignments involving working in groups to creatively solve problems. Enriching educational programs must be provided to students across all communities, regardless of socioeconomic status. Struggling students need more time (whether before or after school or during school breaks) for focused instruction to ensure their success.

(3) We must make the teaching profession more attractive to top scholars by making teaching better respected, better paid (especially in highest-need areas like math and science), and better supported. Teachers are well-supported when they have ample opportunities for meaningful evaluation and targeted professional development. Teachers can grow tremendously by observing other teachers and being observed and informally evaluated by other teachers. Teachers also need more time to collaborate within grades and across grades in order to develop and deliver cohesive and meaningful educational programs to prepare students for success on appropriate assessments of college and career readiness.

The enormous missing piece in these discussions (though it was mentioned briefly in two of the roundtables) is a focus on resources. How is Iowa (and by extension, each state within the United States) going to pay for the resources it will take to put these excellent ideas into place? It will be interesting to see what, if any, conversation about providing more resources comes out of next week's Town Hall meetings and Education Summit.

You can go to the brand new Iowa Department of Education website for videos of the roundtables and a schedule of summit events that will be available live. The complete schedule of events, including breakout sessions that will not be shown live, is available on the old Education Summit website.

A business leader, a university president, and a teacher walk into Iowa....

Interesting news out of Iowa today as Governor Branstad prepares for his July 25-26 Education Summit. Today's roundtable discussions with business leaders, college and university presidents, and teachers were made available for live streaming and the videos of each roundtable are to be posted after the events. It looks like the Iowa Department of education will also make the summit presentations widely available during that event in a couple of weeks.

Just one comment for now, about integrating a few of these ideas. Business leaders rightly pointed out that teachers need to be appropriately compensated for their work, just as employees in the private sector are. The group focused on increasing pay for teachers in higher-demand positions (challenging schools, math and science instruction, special education) as well as performance-based pay. Later, in the teacher roundtable, teachers pointed out that one stellar teacher in a mediocre school cannot independently raise the field of education or the even the function of the school where they teach; great schools are the result of great coordination.

This is why any serious performance-based pay system must be implemented at the school level, rather than at the level of individual teachers. Whole schools must be accountable for rising or sinking together, just as whole businesses are. John Bloomhall, president and CEO of Diamond Mills (an animal feed company) suggested during the business leaders' roundtable, "If I had a classroom, I'd put the [students] in charge of being successful: 'Your job is to make sure every kid gets a passing grade." This is the strategy we need for schools: we need to tell school communities that it is their responsibility to make sure every teacher succeeds, and we need to give them the resources to do it.

You can access the videos here: https://educateiowa.eduvision.tv/default.aspx

Tuesday Bonus Post: Historypin!

Last night I had the opportunity to join Amy Sample Ward of NTEN Nonprofit Technology Network for the unveiling of the new and wonderful Historypin app and platform. I went intrigued and left enamored; Historypin is a phenomenal and completely free resource for students and educators across the grades and around the world.

I have had an extremely difficult time containing my enthusiasm about this project, and I hope you will, too. Check it out and spread the word!

From their website:

Historypin is a way for millions of people to come together, from across different generations, cultures and places, to share small glimpses of the past and to build up the huge story of human history.

Everyone has history to share: whether its sitting in yellowed albums in the attic, collected in piles of crackly tapes, conserved in the 1000s of archives all over the world or passed down in memories and old stories.

Each of these pieces of history finds a home on Historypin, where everyone has the chance to see it, add to it, learn from it, debate it and use it to build up a more complete understanding of the world.

Historypin has been developed by the not-for-profit company We Are What We Do, in partnership with Google.

School, virtually

Just a quick note today about another experiment in education: the growing online K-12 school movement. Louisiana just approved the first two free online charter high schools for the state, and Connections Academy received 1900 applications for 600 spots. The school is appealing to the state to be allowed to hire more staff and enroll 1200 students.

Virtual school programs provide an educational experience that is truly different from the traditional in-person schools. The option is usually marketed to students who prefer independent work, who want to get ahead in their studies, who have trouble interacting socially or experience difficulty controlling their behavior in large classes, or who feel ostracized or bullied in their traditional schools.

Online schools already operate nationwide as private alternatives to public schools, but several states (OH, UT, LA, IN, and TN among them) have begun incorporating virtual learning into their public school offerings as well. This means funding that used to go to traditional public schools now goes to virtual schools.

The trickiest situations occur in states like Utah that fund students to attend traditional schools and online schools, each part time. In that situation, costs f0r the schools are duplicated, but funding is not. Both schools have to maintain student records and process student paperwork and both schools have to adequately staff their classes, despite being only partially funded for some of their students. This is particularly challenging for traditional schools that have a few students attending online classes part time. They lose partial funding for the students, but still have to physically accommodate them in the classes they elect to take traditionally. In contrast, the school does not lose funding when students attend co-curricular college courses during high school.

Watch where you put that yardstick!

On the theme of What Gets Measured Gets Improved, here is some very exciting news from the great state of Utah: State lawmakers are considering replacing grade-specific high-stakes tests with adaptive tests that allow students to demonstrate what they actually know and have learned, even if they are performing well-below or well-above grade level. This is encouraging news for all students and teachers, most especially those involved in education of exceptional students in special education and gifted and talented programs.

Two major problems of traditional grade-level tests limit their usefulness as measures of individual student progress. First, tests vary, often greatly, in content and rigor from one grade to the next, making them meaningless for tracking learning from year to year. Second, the tests fail to measure the progress of exceptional students. In New York, if a student is reading on a kindergarten level in third grade and improves to a first-grade reading level by fourth grade, that student's year of progress is obscured and diminished by a Level 1 score ("Not Meeting the Standard") on the state test. Meanwhile, a third grader capable of seventh-grade math could score a Level 4 ("Meeting the Standard with Distinction") for three years in a row without making any individual progress at all.

Computer adaptive tests solve these problems by adapting to students' abilities regardless of grade level. Basing questions on student performance during the test, the software allows more-advanced students access to more-advanced questions and less-advanced students access to questions at their current level of academic function. This targeted testing provides students and educators with meaningful data about how much students actually know and can do. Paired with software to analyze test results and provide students and educators with individualized "next steps," computer adaptive testing could give students and teachers an incredibly useful tool for growth and development: the feedback loop.

How big of a deal is this? The Deseret News quotes State Board of Education member Dave Thomas's statement to the Education Interim Committee: "This is the biggest change we've seen in public education in the last decade.... It really puts Utah at the forefront.... And I mean right at the forefront." I agree. For now, Utah is the only state with an adaptive test pilot program because it's the only state with a NCLB waiver. State legislators will consider adopting the program statewide during the 2012 legislative session.

Keep an eye on this one; if computer adaptive testing is allowed to develop and improve in Utah, the innovation could spread to New York State to support the development (and boost the morale!) of under-recognized students and teachers right here at home.

Links

Thomas Goetz's excellent Wired Magazine article

Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops

Molly Farmer's Deseret News report

Utah lawmakers mull ditching CRTs in favor of adaptive tests

Raise up your staff, part 2

In part 1, we looked at new principal training programs preparing school leaders to manage increasingly businessified education settings. Now we turn our attention to the preparation of the teachers -- the professional subjects of educational management and the front-line leaders of classrooms. New York City currently claims a three-year new teacher attrition rate of 40% or more. Clearly new teachers are under-supported and under-prepared for their professional roles.

Doug Lemov, once a successful teacher and now a managing director with Uncommon Schools, recognized this and set out to do something about it. As the national rhetoric has shifted toward "getting rid of bad teachers," Lemov realized that many good people were failing as teachers simply because they had never actually learned how to teach. Replacing them with equally ill-prepared peers would not solve the problem. He set out to discover and codify the specific practices effective teachers employ. Last year Lemov published his book of "49 Techniques that Put Students on the Path toward College." He uses the book as a guide to train new teachers in the Uncommon Schools network.

Last spring, I had the opportunity to read an advanced draft of the book and see the techniques in practice in several classrooms at Uncommon's Leadership Prep Bedford Stuyvesant Charter School. The effect was impressive. Students as young as five were consistently orderly, engaged, and on-task. It was all very controlled. Admittedly, this is a huge step up from the disorganization and lack of focus I have witnessed in over a dozen New York City schools.

It disturbs me, though, especially in light of recent research on problem solving and executive functioning, that Lemov devotes only one chapter out of 12 -- less than 15 pages of his 310 page book -- to "Challenging Students to Think Critically." As long as we're businessifying our educational system, let us not forget that What Gets Measured Gets Improved. Current high-stakes tests prioritize measuring content knowledge over critical thinking, and Lemov's Taxonomy aims to improve those measurements.

I agree with Lemov (and Deborah Lowenberg Ball, and so many others) that we need to commit to training teachers effectively if we expect them to be effective in the classroom. Lemov's techniques have been critical to the excellent test scores achieved by Uncommon's students, but let's not trick ourselves into thinking that excellence in test scores equals excellent education. Lemov's Taxonomy is a wonderful and necessary start to preparing effective educators, but for the sake of excellence let it not be an end.

Celebrating independence

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men (sic) are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

~ Declaration of Independence of the United States of America

Sharona Coutts and Jennifer LeFleur at ProPublica recently published the results of their incredibly thorough analysis of recently released survey data from the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights. Unsurprisingly, the analysis revealed a national correlation between race and access, and a more striking correlation between wealth and opportunity. Disparity differs by state, however, and some states (Florida is the major dark horse here, with Texas close behind) seem to be leveling the field in terms of providing equal access to higher-level courses across richer and poorer districts.

It is intriguing that Florida and Texas are the leaders in equality of educational access, especially because they are far from the top according to another measure: the states are ranked 32 and 35, respectively, out of 52 (50 states plus D.C. and overseas military bases) in terms of student performance on national standardized tests. Meanwhile Kansas (ranked 16) and Maryland (8) are among the states providing the least equality of opportunity. Are poorer kids in Maryland scoring higher than their economic peers in Texas, or, more likely, are the scores the result of a higher prevalence of poverty in Texas relative to Maryland?

The available data do not yet show whether [more] equal access to higher level coursework at the high school level in Florida and Texas is translating into higher rates of high school graduation, college enrollment, and success at the college level. ProPublica promises future articles on the subject as more information becomes available. I would also be interested to know just how wide the economic gaps are in each of these states. Does equity of access correlate with economic parity, or are the most accessible states making gains in spite of, or in response to, great economic disparity? How will recent gains in educational access affect the national standings of states like Florida and Texas in future rankings based on national standardized tests. Finally, to what extent is the success of Florida and Texas replicable?

One final, unrelated note on the theme of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness: check out this story of a kid who, with the support of those around him, is taking his own "walk down freedom's trail."

On Wednesday Ed Nerd returns to the topic of leadership; check back for part 2 of Raise up your staff.

Raise up your staff, part 1

As efforts continue to make schools run more like businesses, the job of principals is becoming more like the job of CEOs. Balancing school budgets and making large purchasing decisions used to be the purview of school boards and school districts, but principals are increasingly expected to make the short- and long-term decisions about the business aspects of the schools they head. In response to this shift, some new preparation programs are focusing heavily on the business and management side of running a school.

In 2008, Rice University, an elite private school with no education department, introduced an MBA program for aspiring school leaders. The program focuses on developing the business skills of principals, while de-emphasizing the role of principal as instructional leader. The directors of the Rice Education Entrepreneurship Program (REEP) are explicit about thinking of principals as CEOs. Being a good principal means being a good manager -- of employees, data, and financials.

According to REEP, it also means bringing new ideas to the field of education. Traditional preparation programs focus on developing instructional leaders who are well-versed in education theory and history, like super-teachers who can help their faculty develop as educational professionals. In contrast, programs like REEP seek to develop leaders who challenge accepted education theory and are willing to try new approaches to get better results.

I respect the efforts of programs like REEP (including the New York City Leadership Academy) to prepare principals for a job that increasingly requires business management skills. I also agree that the public education world needs big thinkers and innovators to face the challenges of educating an increasingly under-resourced student population to participate in an increasingly technology-driven business world. But I think it is a mistake (and such an easy mistake for people coming from a business paradigm) for the directors of these programs to position themselves as competition for traditional principal preparation programs.

The reality is that today's schools need brilliant instructional leaders, capable of connecting with and supporting students and teachers, and excellent business managers, able to collect, analyze, and utilize data to make decisions about staffing and budgets. I wonder if it's possible, or wise, to expect principals to handle a job that big and varied. According to a 2009 NY Times article on the uncertain success of the NYC Leadership academy, Amy Ellen Schwartz, director of the only independent study of the Academy so far, has her doubts. The article quotes Schwartz saying, "It may be that it's an impossible job.... You're asking for things that don't often come in the same person."

Next Monday is Independence Day; tune in for Celebrating independence, Ed Nerd style.