Because NYC Educator decided to pick a fight

NOTE: 7 months ago I was mugged and my laptop was stolen. Laptopless I let this blog die a quiet death. But since my response to NYCeducator turned out to be longer than his comments page would manage I figured it would be worth temporarily resurrecting the blog. It all started here: NYC Educator’s original derogatory post about KIPP. Then Eduwonk on the NYC Educator post (especially the comments page) And then NYC Educator taking a major swipe at me and my comments. Below my response: ********************************************************************** Dear NYC Educator, As much as I do enjoy yelling on blog comment pages, I'm actually much more interested in persuading you than I am in trading insults with you. Contrary to your impression, I did in fact read your post carefully, as well as the news article you referenced, as well as Eduwonk's post. And having re-read all 3, I stand by my argument that your position on KIPP is anti-teacher, whether you think of it in that light or not. But before launching back into that argument, perhaps a little context is important. About my comment: When I said, "if your school produced results like KIPP, I'd want you to be given a trip to the Bahamas also," I was not being rhetorical. It was not immediately apparent to me from your blog where you teach or even who you are. But I am not the most tech savvy person, so it's quite possible this information is readily available and I just didn't see it. If I had, I would have googled your school and its results, rather than commenting in the hypothetical. And if you tell me where I can find those results now I would be very interested to read about them. You joke that you "don't suppose that commenter will send me an airline ticket anytime soon." I don't have much money and I can't afford to buy you a plane ticket, but send me your schools scores and an address to mail to you. If your success is what you claim, I give you my word I'll will send you a small gift that I can afford, in order to show you my appreciation of your work. Appreciation is the least we can do for those who help the needy. To be clear, I have just as much respect for outstanding educators in district schools as I do for outstanding educators in charter schools and I want just as much to learn from their successes. I get very upset however when people look for reasons to discount other people's success, especially successes with disadvantaged students. It still seems to me (after re-reading and reflection) that this is what you are doing in regard to KIPP teachers. So you understand where I'm coming from: I think KIPP is both a good place to work and a tremendous success in the effort to educate poor and minority students (which is for me the most important educational issue). I don't think this based on ignorance. I teach Saturday school at a KIPP school (for free) and have done professional development for KIPP Math teachers (for money). I am very well acquainted with the students, teachers, and administrators there. The picture you paint of a sweatshop just doesn't ring true. Instead what I see is a school where much, much more is demanded of everyone in the school: students, teachers, parents, and administrators. At the same time there is much more belief in the ability of all of those people to rise to this higher standard of performance and effort. To me expecting more of people and believing they can meet your higher expectations is the essence of respect. So back to our disagreement, and to my position that the philosophy you expressed was anti-teacher. You said, "Whopee! Let's spend five days in the Bahamas on the taxpayers' dime!" implying that this was either a frivolous or even corrupt use of public money. Your comparison to vouchers further implied that you felt the KIPP leaders would corruptly pocket the money if they could. And you reference more than once the issue of the disputed documentation around the source of funding for the trip, public or private. If you believed it was okay to use public money for the trip, it presumably wouldn't matter which pile of money the trip came from or whether there was documentation to prove the source. Taken together this all seems to me to imply that you don't think sending teachers and administrators on a nice trip is an appropriate use of public money. If my inference is incorrect, please correct me. And please do so publicly as well, because I think that many other readers would have to assume that you think this is an inappropriate use of public funds. My simple question to you is "Do you think it is okay for publicly-funded schools to use some of their public funds to give teachers and administrators perks like trips to exotic locations?" If your answer is "No" then I think you are buying into the philosophy that we should not be rewarding teachers with job perks, similar to those received by other high-performance professionals. To say that teachers shouldn't be given what other professionals routinely get is to imply that teachers are less deserving than other professionals. I don't think you can escape this argument by saying that the trip was an ineffective use of money. Both teachers and administrators said that the trip was great for their morale, and that they returned inspired and energized. My own experience of such work-related trips has always been of the same character. Such trips energize and motivate people who work very hard and are shown little appreciation. If the teachers at the school appreciated the trip (as the faces in the photo seem to imply) who are you to complain about it? Who exactly are you sticking up for here? It seems the only person who you could be bringing a grievance on behalf of is the taxpayer. And the only grievance a taxpayer could have is that his money was wasted or used corruptly. It is very hard for to me to believe that money spent inspiring and energizing teachers is money wasted or used corruptly. I understand that the general drift of your argument is that KIPP teachers have bad working conditions. But your comments about the trip specifically contradict this general theme. An argument about poor working conditions would follow something like the this logic: "KIPP teachers work more, but their extra pay is not proportional to their extra work. They get little vacation and are always on call. Even when they do get some time off it gets used for PD instead of time with their families. It is nice that their bosses treated them to a trip, but that is a small compensation for their otherwise poor working conditions." But instead your logic shifts at the point when the trip comes up. Instead of making the point that the trip is good, but not enough to offset the other bad things about the working conditions, you instead imply (in all the ways I mentioned above) that the trip is itself another bad thing. This point may seem like hair-splitting to you. But once again let me pose the question to you directly. Was the trip good or bad? If all other things at KIPP were to remain equal would you prefer that the teachers have this trip or not? If your answer is that the trip is bad, and it would be better for them not to have taken it, I have to disagree strongly. I fear though that, you will avoid directly addressing my question (which is a question of values), because you would prefer to frame the issue in terms of alternative uses of the money (a question of priorities). I would really appreciate if you would indulge me by answering the direct question regarding values, because I think it is hard to talk about priorities if there is not mutual understanding of values. For me, all other things being equal I would prefer for those teachers to have a trip to the Bahamas. Is the same true for you? If the answer is "Yes" (and I really hope it is), then our real disagreement is one of priorities i.e. tradeoffs. I would argue that your post characterizes it otherwise, but how the post came off is really water under the bridge if we actually agree about the values question. Then we can discuss, what I believe is a more serious (and probably more important) disagreement between you and I regarding priorities. In short, I think spending money on perks instead of across the board salary increases is often a better way to increase a teacher's sense of job satisfaction. I think this is because, perks (much like Christmas gifts) convey a sentiment of appreciation in a way that across the board raises do not. This opinion is not the perspective of some money-hungry executive, focused only on the bottom line. I work at a non-profit and I teach, and I will likely be doing one of those two things for most of the rest of my life. But I would prefer to discuss the issue of trade-offs with you only after we have clarified whether you think such perks are good or bad in the first place. If we don't agree on that then there is little room for discussion in the first place. -Dewey P.S. I wasn’t being sarcastic when I suggested you send me your school's info and a mailing address. You can e-mail them to deweyblog@gmail.com. If you’ve helped children as much as you implied, I would geniunely happy to send you a Christmas gift.

Explaining My Absence...

Dear friends,

It's been almost a month since my last post and that time has given me a little room for reflection. It started with a conversation with a good friend of mine, who also happens to be my former teacher and someone who has spent 30+ years in the classroom. When we got to talking about her experience of No Child Left Behind I was smacked in the face with two huge failings in this forum, which almost led me to abandon it.

One was the unique blend of arrogance and ignorance which is oh-so-DC. I was mouthing off quite loudly and taking pot-shots at people I didn't know, because I was convinced that I knew what was best. In particular I had an immature attitude towards people like blogger Dan Brown, who despite supporting policies I believe to be counterproductive, has something I don't: he is in the classroom working with disadvantaged students. In particular I would like to have a more respectful attitude toward the teachers of America, without compromising my ability to speak unpleasant truths. It is much easier to snipe from the sidelines than to do. In an effort to have more humility and civility I have changed some of the link titles on my Blogroll. "Dan Brown's misguided blog" will know be linked with "Dan Brown's blog, with which I strongly disagree. Similarly "You know who I hate? Gerald Bracey." will now be titled "You know with whom I strongly disagree? Gerald Bracey."

Besides arrogance, the other failing I became aware of was my irrelevance. My first post is still my best, largely because it was longer and provided substantive analysis backed up by research and data. But soon after posting it to widespread approval, I discovered that I could not post articles of that length and depth with anything approaching the speed and regularity of most blogs. I quickly transitioned to the newsreel/op-ed approach to blogging , simply so that I would have a regular stream of posts. But I began to despair of the dumbing down that this fast-paced approach brought with it. Does the world really need another vaguely opinionated webpage forwarding service? Of course it does not.

But I think it does need more substantive analysis that is created in dialogue rather than in academic isolation. And my feeling that this is something I can offer is what has brought me back to the blogosphere. I will still throw up some interesting news if I think it's not getting mentioned elsewhere. But I've decided that his blog will be fundamentally about more lengthy and meaty analysis, even if that means I will never gain a wide readership. I would rather provide a forum for thoughtful dialogue with a few interested readers than an endless stream of not particularly useful sound-bites. So if you'd like to be a regular reader of this blog I suggest you check it about once a week, rather than at typical blog-rate i.e. whenver you are bored at work. At least once weekly I hope to be able to put out something original, insightful, and substantive. And if you are the kind of reader who finds that more valuable than typical opinion and news on the run, than I welcome your comments, questions and suggestions.

One last note: the tags on this blog are no longer organized according to topic, but instead according to type of post, so that different readers can go to the kind of info they find useful. "News" is primarily events in education worth knowing about in 1 line to 1 paragraph; "Opinion" is me mouthing off in about op-ed length pieces; "Research" is the insightful and relevant studies from academia or the organization world, sometimes just linked to and sometimes digested into more user-friendly bullet-points; and finally "Analysis" will be the hallmark pieces of the blog, my attempts to go deeper than most of what is out here on the blogosphere and come up with something truly original; these pieces may be several pages long if the subject matter merits it.

I hope my new approach to blogging will be a useful contribution for those types of readers with a little more patience who are looking for something more substantive. And as always I am grateful to Monique Enos, my teacher, my friend, an inspiring example, and often a useful reality check.

Best wishes to you all.

Education on the Agenda

Check out the new Strong American Schools website. This group is pushing for a substantive education debate in the '08 presidential race as opposed to the usual vague generalities. Amen to that! An unusual idea, it's like a presidential campaign, but the candidate is education. And with the help of Roy Romer's prestige and big money from places like Broad and Gates, it looks like it's going to make some waves in '08.

Must Read Drop-Out Study

Senators Ted Kennedy (D-MA), Richard Burr (R-NC), and Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) yesterday introduced the Graduation Promise Act (GPA), which is being promoted by a coalition including the Center for American Progress, Jobs For the Future, Alliance for Excellent Education and The National Council of La Raza.

But before anybody moves on graduation rate policy everyone ought to all read this AMAZING! literature review on reducing drop-outs (with at a glance summary here), just published online by the Center for Public Education, and authored by education consultant Craig Jerald, who, if you don't know his work, is a man to watch in ed policy.

Though it was released completely without fanfare, the review shows that there is a lot more knowledge (including rigorous experimental studies) on preventing drop-outs than most people think. Jerald must have a vault of research studies in his basement because I've never seen a bibliography so diverse or comprehensive. From it he draws valuable and myth-busting insights like:

1) What schools do matters, even for the most at-risk students- in a randomized study using Check and Connect in Philadelphia, schools cut 4 year drop-out rates for high-risk students (low-income African-American males with disabilities and single-parent families) by 1/3rd and 5 year rates by 1/2.

2) Decreasing drop-out rates does not automatically increase graduation rates; in one Check & Connect study 4 year drop-out rates fell from 58 to 39 percent, while 4 year grad rates were up only 1 point (30% vs. 29%). To be effective programs have to address both monitoring/counseling and instruction.

3) Easy = boring - several studies found that making classes more challenging classes helped kids graduate and similarly unchallenging classes led to higher drop-out rates.

4) For programs to work they have to be intensive - low intensity, counseling, tutoring, or self-esteem workshops all had no effect on drop-out rates; successful programs essentially involved a caring, committed adult monitoring student attendance and grades almost daily, coaching students in academic and life skills, and intervening immediately if they start to fall off; as you can expect this kind of intensive approach can be expensive.

This is just the tip of the useful-info-iceberg and I highly encourage you to invest the time to read the full lit review and not just the at-a-glance summary. Coming soon, what I think this all means for grad rate improvement policy...

On the subject of support among teachers...

This news from MoJo should be a wake up call to those who think NCLB will implement itself. NCLB will do little to improve education if teachers don't believe in or support it.

The Angel in the Details - Performance Pay that Works

Though everyone's sure to be blogging about this one, I couldn't help but jump on the bandwagon to mention something so worthy of enthusiasm. The Center for Teacher Quality has just come out with a report on teacher pay, which among other things advocates a salary range from $30K - $130K for teachers, incentives to work in high-poverty schools, performance pay for individual teachers and small groups of teachers who work collaboratively, and creating a career ladder with novice, professional, and expert designations for teachers----with corresponding levels of pay, responsibility, and authority. The study was led by an diverse group of 18 effective teachers, giving its conclusions that much more legitimacy.

What's great about this study is not just that it advocates things like performance pay and challenge pay--which are easy to advocate, but harder to implement--but that it puts enough nuance into its formulation of these ideas to offer some usable solutions. For example, one of the most frequent criticisms of performance pay is that it sets teachers in competition with each other and undermines the collaboration and teamwork necessary to good teaching. Though this argument can be overblown, some common, but ill-conceived formulations of performance pay, such as Florida's recent attempts, do produce irrational results. Florida offered performance bonuses to the top 25% of teachers in every school. Certainly this does de-incentivize the sharing of instructional know-how that would help fellow teachers advance to top performance, because if you help others rise they might surpass you and jeopardize your bonus. Likewise the Florida plan simultaneously rewards tons of bad teachers--even if every teacher is terrible in a school someone is definitionally going to be in the top 25%--and neglects very good teachers who teach in schools full of very good and some truly outstanding teachers.

And regardless of whether these problems turn out to be big or small, the perception among teachers that performance pay is against, not for, them is as much of problem as are the purported consequences of such programs on teacher collaboration and the inaccurracy of the program in recognizing success. The point of performance bonuses is to motivate teachers to perform better, recognize teachers who do, and retain quality teachers in the school system. In other words we want happy, hard-working teachers. If even great teachers distrust performance pay because of the way its designed, the program will be fail to motivate or retain. And if the average teacher, who is neither amazing nor incompetent, is pissed off about it you are not helping motivation or retention among the vast majority of teachers.

A typical approach some have proposed to these problems is school-wide bonuses for student achievement. But this idea just sets up a typical prisoner's dilemma system of incentives. If I work hard and no one else does I get no bonus. If everyone else works hard and I don't I still get a reward. So what incentive (other than the intrinsic ones, which existed prior to the peformanc pay program) would motivate me to work any harder? Collective accountability rarely produces incentives for individuals. Also, schoolwide bonuses often include all staff, administrators, secretaries, janitors etc. While I have any objection to paying the lunch lady well, but no amount you put in her pocket is going to raise student achievement.

But the CTQ recommendation heads objections off at the pass. By allowing all teachers to be eligible to receive bonuses based on absolute not relative performance it undercuts the harmful competition argument. And by offering bonuses for collaborative teams of teachers based on the performance of the students they teach together, it actually incentivizes the sharing of best practices and mutual support that opponents say peformance pay undermines. And pay for small teams minimizes if not eliminates the collective action problems associated with school-wide programs. As astute students of collective action know small groups create a regularized flow of communication about participation in group activities and relationship-based accountability for group success. Lastly, small-groups provide opportunities for leadership among a much broader range of school staff, and most importantly among staff who are still anchored in the classroom unlike most school administrators.

A combination of universal eligibility-bonuses for individuals and small, collaborative groups is simple elegant solution to one element of the problem of building teacher buy-in for performance pay. Read the full report for a treasure trove of such ideas. Kudos.

Don't Get Me Wrong...

Update: It occurred to me after reading the Gadfly's thoughts on the WaPo article referenced in my last post that some might interpret my remarks below either as advocating "drill and kill" methods of teaching or as admitting that NCLB is producing such methods on a mass scale. Both assumptions would be incorrect. As E.D. Hirsch has spent a lot of time demonstrating teaching to the test is not the best way to help students pass the test; teaching to high and meaningful standards is. As the principal of a famous, "success story" public high school says, "If you teach to advanced, proficiency takes care of itself."

The reason I harped on this point about why drill and kill test prep would still be an improvement for failing schools was because I wanted to show that the worst-case scenario version of NCLB would still be a good thing, or at least I suppose, the lesser evil. Like democracy, NCLB is the worst system of school accountability, except for all the others. So, for the sake of argument, I momentarily assumed that NCLB was as bad as its enemies say it is. I leave it to a soon-forthcoming post to talk about what I think the real consequences of NCLB are for pedagogy, and also what I think a vision of truly inspiring teaching looks like in the era of standards and accountability. Until then I challenge the David Keyes's and Dan Brown's of the world to prove that even their straw-man NCLB has (or would) produce worse results than the system that existed prior.

A Case for the Basics and Against "pre-NCLB" Mythology

This op-ed in the WaPo literally made me physically ill. In it a second grade teacher argues that No Child Left Behind has created a higher-level thinking skills gap between poor and minority students and their more advantaged peers.

Anyone who has spent any time in an inner city public school (like the one I grew up in) knows that schools have given poor and minority kids less challenging assignments, lower quality teachers, and less of just about everything that would conduce to developing higher order thinking skills since long before anyone ever dreamed up No Child Left Behind. David Keyes, can you produce one scrap of evidence that the public education system was doing anything to teach critical thinking to disadvantaged students before Congress decided to shine an ugly spotlight on the disgraceful results? Wake up.

Kevin Carey points out the backwards logic of Keyes' argument.

But I'm willing to go it a step further. Even if NCLB produces the boogey-man version of public education its critics claim it will, with a narrow curriculum, and constant test-prep, it will still be an improvement. I don't think for a second that this state of affairs would be either desirable or acceptable. But it would be better than the status quo ante. That's because contrary to the imaginary world in which this author and people like Dan Brown live, poor and minority students were getting neither critical thinking, nor basic-skills training prior to NCLB. If, because of NCLB, they at least get basic skills training, they'll at least be getting half of what they need instead of none.

As an example, a colleague of mine recently went to visit an elementary school in Baltimore which serves large numbers of disadvantaged students and which had posted high test scores. She was dissappointed to find that school was indeed focused very narrowly on reading and math to the neglect of subjects like social studies and in general did a lot of drilling of basic skills. She did some spot checking of the students and discovered happily however that despite not knowing things like where China could be found on the map, the students could read passages they had not seen before quite fluently and were rather proud of their ability to do so.

When I asked her what she would recommend to a parent considering this school versus other public schools in the area, she said unequivocally "I would tell them to send their kids there. It isn't ideal, but at least the kids can read." Having visited many other elementary schools in Baltimore she was well aware that while students in most of those schools do not know the geography of China, they also struggle to even decipher basic written passages.

The mistake many well-intentioned people make is thinking that NCLB is creating a ceiling on education; the reality is that it has merely established a floor; a school that doesn't teach children to at least read and do math, is no longer acceptable. And whatever criticisms people have of standardized tests they are actually extremely effective at measuring whether students can do such basic things.

That however is the mistake. The lie critics are telling themselves (and the educator community is currently awash in this form of self-deception) is that you can teach critical thinking to children who lack basic skills. If you haven't already read enough of this from people like Dan Brown listen to David Keyes from the WaPo article:

"Schools often use test-prep programs to try to raise test scores. The problem with these programs is that they teach the skills covered on tests, and only these skills. Poor and minority students spend hours repeating "B buh ball" and two plus two equals four. Every hour spent drilling basic skills is an hour not spent developing the higher-level thinking skills that are emphasized in wealthier school districts."

Does Keyes think a student who doesn't know that "two plus two equals four" will be able to do higher level math like Algebraic problem solving, or that a student who is struggling with "B buh ball" will be able to read a book about the American Civil Rights Movement? He is right that "every hour spent drilling basic skills is an hour not spent developing higher-level thinking skills." But what he seems oblivious to is that these hours learning basic skills must precede the hours spent developing higher-order thinking. Luckily for them, many affluent and white students walk in the school-house door with the basic skills already in place or half-way there. They've essentially had tutors in their homes for the past several years. But for the kids who weren't so lucky, the schools have to do some major catch-up work, and they have to do it fast or the defecits in the basics will prevent them from building on this foundation and they will end up even further behind. And sometimes playing quick catch-up requires some serious drill and kill. But please don't talk to me about how impoverished a form of education this is if your proposal is to teach a "rich curriculum" to students who can't even read their textbooks.

I am no cheerleader for No Child Left Behind. But I am grateful to it for helping us at least start to get to square one. I will be so happy to see us get from 1 to 2 and 3 and beyond. But the fact of the matter is that there has to be a minimum below which we will not let anyone fall. Students go through school not being able to read and understand the newspaper nor figure out how much a 15% downpayment on $150,000 house would be; (I know; I am currently working with an 11th grader who cannot do either.) Someone with that kind of defecit in basic skills will not make up for it because they can "make music" or "tell vivid stories." David Keyes, are you going to tell your graduating seniors to put those skills on a resume? Of course that would assume they were able to write one in the first place.

Can Schools Save Drop-Outs?

Some Discouraging Stats from Philly:

Likelihood of dropping out given certain life problems:

-Abused or neglected: 71.3%
-In Foster Care: 75.2%
-Juvenile Justice placement: 90.1%
-Gave birth during high school: 68.3%

-Number of high school age children with these problems in Philadelphia: 13,393

Source: Unfulfilled Promise: The Dimensions and Characteristics of Philadelphia's Dropout Crisis, 2000-2005

Some Encouraging Stats From Philly:

Effects of the "Check and Connect" identification and intervention program on a high-risk population in Philadelphia:
-No intervention (control group) Drop-out Rate (5 year): 94%
-Treatment Group Drop-out Rate (5 year): 42%
-Improvement due to program: Decrease 5 year drop-out rate by 1/2

-Effects of "Career Academies" alternative schools program on a high-risk population in Philadelphia:
-No intervention (control group) Drop-out Rate (4 year): 32%
-Treatment Group Drop-out Rate (4 year): 21%
-Improvement due to program: Decrease 4 year drop-out rate by 1/3

Source: "Keeping kids in school: Lessons from research about preventing dropouts" by Craig Jerald. Research summary available through the Center for Public Education. (White paper forthcoming).

Some food for thought From Philly:

-Cost per student of the "Check and Connect" program: $1600 per year
-Number of students in need of such programs in Philadelphia School District: ~85,000 to 90,000
-Cost for all Philadelphia's drop-outs of the "Check and Connect" program: ~$135 - $145 million
-Percent of students nationwide who fail to graduate: ~25% - 33%
-Number of students nationwide who fail to graduate: ~12 - 16 million
-Cost of check and connect nationwide: ~$19 - $25 billion
-Current federal Title I expenditures: 12.7 billion
-Increase necessary to save these students: Doubling federal expenditures

Take home message:

It can be done, but it's going to cost us.

More on this later.

The Little Credential That Couldn't

Though I focused on class-size, there was another great story of waste in the new Clotfelter, Ladd & Vigdor study: Master's degrees don't matter. Kevin Carey over at the Quick and the Ed writes this one up well and draws the fire he was looking for from teacher's union defenders of MA differentials. Check it out.

New York Squanders Opportunity to Innovate

After the blogathon that was my second post, I was a bit tuckered out, but this piece of news out of New York was just too much to bear.

The theme of the article is the state budget overall and it talks mostly about who is getting how much. The good news is that Spitzer has successfully pushed New York in the direction of Fair Student Funding (FSF). But buried within that big budget is the following gem:

The Bloomberg administration also praised the lifting of the state’s limit on charter schools [to 200], but there were compromises on that front, too, including a provision that automatically unionizes [emphasis mine] the employees of any charter school serving more than 250 students in its first two years.

Without wading too far into a discussion of Charter schools generally, it is fair to say that the whole idea of charter schools is based on allowing some schools to run themselves differently in order to innovate new ways to help kids. Some ideas will succeed and some will fail, but the point is trying something new to SEE if it will work. Because they are not unionized or governed by typical regulations, charter schools can experiment with policies like longer school days and school years, merit pay, or differential pay for teachers in shortage areas like math and science (or for that matter higher pay for teachers combined with larger class-sizes).

And anyone who has heard of the amazing success of some charter schools like KIPP knows that some of those ideas (particularly more time in school) have worked really, really well. Friends and enemies of charters alike recognize that one of the biggest differences between charter schools and district schools is the lack of unionization in charter schools. And one does not have to be an opponent of unions to admit that the collective bargaining process slows down and restrains the ability of a principal to try radical, new approaches. With automatic unionization, charters end up being not much more able to innovate than normal district schools.

It is another debate entirely to discuss whether the benefits of experimentation are worth the costs. But to allow experimentation only under the conditions that a school not actually be allowed to experiment is equivalent to banning the practice in the first place.

To say "You can have more charter schools, as long as you run them like district schools" is essentially to say "There will be no such thing as charter schools in New York."

P.S. On another fun note, the budget deal also requires New York to cut class-sizes. While I'll stay out of this fight for the moment, on account of New York really pushing the limits of potential non-linearity on class-size (frequent 35-40 person classes or so I hear), I doubt rather severely that the reductions will be targeted to those classes only.

A Question of Scale: Class-size Reduction and America's Misplaced Priorities

Everyday Americans and politicians alike think class-size reduction is a key to any plan to improve education in America. I used to agree. Then I ran the numbers. I've since come to the conclusion that class-size reduction is a $40 billion mistake. Allow me to explain.

Though much research has shown (and common sense confirms) that teacher quality is the key variable when it comes to student improvement, teacher quality is hard to measure. And without accurate measurement, it is impossible to compare the impact of the various known components of teacher quality to the impact of other seemingly helpful interventions such as reducing class-size, instituting after-school programs, hiring additional school counselors etc. Lacking a scale for comparison we can't evaluate financial trade-offs and politicians are likely to go for popular, feel good programs of which class-size reduction is the American favorite. But new research has given us exactly the tools we need to make precise comparisons and the financial cost-benefit analysis this research makes possible is simply damning for class-size reduction.

The best source of this information is a new study called "How and Why Do Teacher Credentials Matter for Achievement" (Clotfelter, Ladd, and Vigdor 2007). Using value-added methodology*, this study took 10 years of data for every student and teacher in the state of North Carolina and used it to analyze the impact of various factors -- including teacher experience and credentials, student socio-economic background, and class-size -- on student achievement. Though the study was not new in conception, its massive data set suggests that its results may be the most reliable to date.

Of particular interest are the following results (for math achievement**):

Input	Increase in student achievement
The first 3 to 5 years of teacher experience:	7.2% - 9.1% of a standard deviation
(vs. a brand new teacher)
Teacher having a regular teaching license:	3.3% - 5.9% SD
(vs. having an emergency license)
Teacher same race as student:	2.0% - 2.9% SD
-All additional years of teacher experience:	2.0% - 2.8% SD
(beyond 5 up to 27)
Teacher is National Board certified:	2.0% - 2.8% SD
Teacher scored 1 SD above average on	1.1% - 1.5% SD
a teaching licensure exam:***
Reducing class-size by 5 students per teacher:	1.0% - 2.5% SD
Teacher attended a competitive college:	0.7% - 1.0% SD
(vs. attending an uncompetitive college)
Reducing class-size by 1 student per teacher:	0.2% - 0.5% SD
Teacher has an advanced degree:	–0.3% - 0.2% SD
(usually MA)

                                                                             

The numbers above represent the amount of improvement that students experienced when given the input listed. It's very important to note that the results above are measured in percent of a standard deviation, not in percent of a test score. If you aren't statistically inclined enough to interpret what standard deviations mean, don't worry; the percentages above still tell us the relative impact of these factors, which is the crucial factor when comparing trade-offs.

Comparing those relative factors you'll notice several things. First of all, teacher experience and licensure rank near the top of the list while class size reduction and teachers having masters’ degrees rank at the bottom. But more important than the ranking is how much smaller of an impact class-size reduction has than some of these other factors. For example, having a teacher who is not a novice (7.2% - 9.1% SD) exerts an influence 3½ to 7 times greater than the impact of reducing class size by 5 students (1.0% - 2.5% SD).

But the really mind-blowing results come when you start comparing class-size reduction to giving students a teacher with a reasonably good (though not unlikely) combination of teacher credentials (estimated by adding the relevant values in the table above). Clotfelter and Ladd do their own estimates of this sort and come up with a combined effect size of 15% - 20% SD for math (and 8% -12% SD for reading) of a well-credentialed teacher.

The first time I read this portion of the study I said to myself, "Yes, class size is less important,” but that finding is not particularly novel to anyone who follows this sort of research. However when I decided to actually compare how much less important class size is my jaw dropped. The effect size of teacher credentials is 8 to 10 times that of a major class size reduction in math and 6 to 8 times as big in reading.

To really understand the importance of these differences in scale you need to look at a few statistics in order to put a dollar amount next to a policy choice. America currently has a nationwide student to teacher ratio of about 16 to 1 (roughly 50 million public school students divided by roughly 3.1 million teachers). The average teacher salary in America currently floats around $48,000, which means we are spending roughly $150 billion dollars a year on teacher salaries. Cutting class size in half would require doubling the number of teachers and therefore doubling the amount we spend on teacher salaries, putting the figure at around $300 billion. (This does not even account for the increased costs of benefits, additional classrooms, and other factors needed to enact such a decrease in class size.)

The next important question is, "What would we get for such a monumental expenditure?" Based on the results in North Carolina we can estimate. If class size reduction has a linear effect-size (granted an assumption worth exploring) cutting it in half (i.e. reducing it by 8 students per teacher nationwide) would achieve an effect size in math eight times that of reducing it by one student per teacher, in other words 1.6% to 4% SD. To give you a sense of the meaning of that effect size, it is in the same ballpark as giving students a teacher who is of the same race (about 2% - 3% SD). The former intervention would cost nationwide about $150 billion dollars (or better than half of the $250 billion that all the states combined spend on education) and the other would cost roughly nothing.

The analysis so far has not compared the impact of class-size reduction to the impact of teacher effectiveness differences that have nothing to do with credentials. Put simply, quite a lot of research has shown that there is a huge difference in the performance of teachers that is not attributable to differences in credentials. (See for example the seminal "Teacher Effects on Longitudinal Student Achievement" Jordan, Mendro, and Weerasinghe 1997 or more recently Kane, Rockoff and Staiger's work published in simplified version at "Photo Finish" in Education Next and available at http://www.hoover.org/publications/ednext/4612527.html).

It's not possible to directly compare the effect sizes from the North Carolina data set to those in these other studies, but what these other studies have shown is that in much the same way that teacher credentials are an order of magnitude more important than class size, teacher talent is an order of magnitude more important than teacher credentials. This subject is actually worthy of another post entirely. The simple upshot is that if a direct comparison shows that the cost-benefit ratios of reducing class size and improving teacher credentials are in different categories, the cost-benefit ratios of reducing class size compared to increasing the concentration of teaching talent are on different planets.

So how about instead of setting a goal of halving class size, requiring us to spend $150 billion annually, we instead set a goal of doubling teacher pay, so that average is around $100 K and simultaneously impose a ruthlessly competitive tenure process where districts only offer tenure to teachers with dramatically high value-added?

For those who think that all this discussion of halving class size (i.e. cutting it by 8 students per teacher) is a crazy hypothetical, it's worth looking at the trend over the past 30 to 40 years. Since 1970 class size has gone down in America by about 6 pupils per student, a roughly 27% decrease. There is no indication that teacher quality has gone up by 27% or even 2.7% in that same time period.

Judging by the education news media, I must be the only person running these numbers. Every other news article, position statement by a politician, teacher blog, or opinion on the street, assumes that reducing class size is a high priority and should be done whenever possible. But it is quite simply the most misplaced priority out there and no one seems to be drawing any attention to this fact. The mild experiments in different versions of performance pay, about which there have been such intense fights, represent just peanuts compared to the money that has been sunk, and that prevailing sentiment proposes to keep sinking, into class-size reduction.

Of course increasing the teacher talent pool would require recruiting a large number of new teachers. So here's a proposal of what we could do with the money we would have saved from not decreasing class-size. How about completely free college for anyone who meets a high academic threshold (3.5 GPA, 700 or higher Math SAT) and commits to majoring in math or science and then teaching math or science in a low-income school for 4 years after college? (I mention these hypothetical credentials based on the 7% of a SD increase you get from having a teacher with licensure test scores not 1, but 2 SD’s above the mean). This approach to teacher recruitment would also help 100,000 students a year with college access and in particular could offer high-achieving low-income students a powerful opportunity to attend college while serving the communities from which they come. (I imagine this might have the side effect of improving the student-teacher racial matching mentioned above, which was measured as having an effect size similar to that of halving class size.)

If we assume a good state college costs $20,000 a year (tuition, room, board, books, everything) for four years and say we had 100,000 takers for our national program each year, it would only cost us $8 billion for each cohort (or roughly half of current Title I costs). If on the other hand we spent the same $8 billion reducing class size we could hire about 160,000 new teachers and achieve a nationwide decrease in class size of about 0.8 pupils per teacher.**** Based on Clotfelter, Ladd, and Vigdor’s numbers the latter intervention would likely produce a nationwide effect size of less than 0.2% to 0.5% of a SD; (0.2% – 0.5% of SD would occur if we achieved a full 1 pupil reduction in class size). Not 2% - 5% SD, but 0.2% - 0.5% SD. For 8 billion dollars.

As I mentioned above, states and school districts have actually enacted this horrendously inefficient second intervention. If we simply undid the 6 pupil per teacher, nationwide class-size decrease of the past thirty years, which would require laying off roughly 830,000 teachers nationwide (about 27%), and put us back to our previous roughly 22 to 1 ratio (not terrible), we would have an additional $40 billion or so a year to spend (830,000 teachers times $48,000 per year in salaries). If instead of teacher recruitment through financial aid we wanted to use this money to increase teacher salary, it would allow us to raise salaries for the remaining two and a quarter million teachers by almost $18,000 a year across the board. That's a raise that people considering teaching would notice.

If districts wanted to be more strategic than proposed above, we could raise salaries for 75% of those teachers (about 1.7 million of them) by $10,000 across the board ($17 billion total) and raise salaries for the top quartile (roughly 560,000 teachers) by approximately $40,000 per teacher ($23 billion total). Frankly, I would be for this even if top quartile was determined not by value-added, but by peer-review and principal evaluations since I believe we'd still be getting enough overlap between actually good teachers and people being highly compensated. We could then have those $100K a year teachers that so many of us dream of (or dream of being) and not just a few of them.

Maybe we could do all this without laying off any teachers if we just don’t replace the almost 1 million who are nearing retirement. But to do that we’d have to convince all of America to give up our most beloved, and misguided, policy intervention. We'd have to convince Americans that the bottom line in improving student achievement is teacher quality not teacher quantity. We'd have to convince them that there is a real trade-off being made and that every time you spend money reducing class-size you are not spending it producing, recruiting and retaining effective teachers. We’d have to convince them that bigger classes are actually better for education.

--Dewey

*Value-added methodology is a way of evaluating student-progress as opposed to just absolute test scores. To radically oversimplify, if a teacher takes a student who is scoring about a 60 on an exam at the beginning of a year and teaches that student to the level where she scores an 80 on the same (or a very similar) exam by the end of the year that teacher has added value of 20 points. If another teacher took a student who was scoring 85 and took her to scoring 90 that teacher added 5 points. Even though the second teacher's student scored significantly higher, we would say the first teacher did a better job helping her student grow, in fact a dramatically better job. This is a very gross oversimplification of value-added, but it conveys the basic idea. Most value-added models take into account various other factors besides just the student's initial test score, in order to not hold teachers accountable for factors outside of their control that differentiate their students from the students of other teachers.

**The fact that these scores are for math, not reading is actually quite important. In general the impact that school-based factors have on reading tests scores is significantly lower than the impact that school-based factors have on math scores and conversely the impact of non-school factors such as parental education levels is much bigger for reading than for math. Given that parents typically interact with their children more through language than through math, it makes intuitive sense that parental (and peer or community) impact on language skills would be larger than parental impact on math skills. The relevant effect sizes of class-size reduction on reading achievement are 1.0% - 2.0% SD for a reduction of 5 students per teacher.

***Scoring one standard deviation higher than average would mean you scored in roughly the top 16% of test takers. Scoring two standard deviations higher than average would mean you scored in the top 2% of test takers.

****Figures come from the following rough calculation: Current ratio: 50 million current public school students divided by 3.1 million current public school teachers = 16.1 students per teacher. Ratio after spending $8 billion on a class-size reduction initiative: 50 million current students divided by 3.26 million teachers = 15.3 students per teacher. Difference: 16.1 – 15.3 = 0.8 student per teacher reduction. This assumes that the new Math and Science corps replaces retiring teachers as opposed to being added to the current number of teachers. 

Post-script:

The one thing that this analysis doesn't address is the potential of non-linear effect sizes for class-size reduction. Clotfelter et al. actually found striking non-linearity in the effect size for increased teacher test scores with a teacher scoring 1 SD better than average producing barely 1% SD increase in student achievement, but a teacher scoring 2 SD better than average on the licensure test producing a whopping 7% SD increases. Frankly, non-linear effect sizes for class-size seem more likely than not. At the extremes it is obvious that teaching 40 elementary age children with even mild discipline issues starts to become ridiculous, and teaching a class of 4 children is essentially a form of tutoring. At some point in the future I'm going to come back to this issue. I'll just say for the moment that the kind of changes in class-size discussed in this paper i.e. changes of 6 pupils per teacher, are not creating these extreme cases in which we would predict severe non-linearity. More on this in time to come.

Welcome to The Common School

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the Common School, an Education and Education Policy Blog. Despite that fancy label, this blog is mostly a place for me to think out loud about issues in education policy and hopefully to get input from those who find my thoughts interesting and want to dialogue with me.

My approach is non-ideological, heterodox, and irreverent. I am persuaded both by evidence and argument and am not afraid to change my mind if the weight of either is against my position. In particular I am interested in examining the logically validity of the arguments that float around in education policy as opposed to just the plausibility of the premises that go into those arguments; while empirical backing is crucial for good arguments, a mountain of data that doesn't really support the proposition under consideration is nothing more than irrelevant information. In addition to demanding that arguments make sense, I care rather deeply about the interplay between policy. politics and implementation; good ideas that can never be put into practice are not really good ideas at all. And this blog is all about developing and refining good ideas.

A final note: though I do work in education policy, none of the content contained herein is representative of the views of any organization or individual other than myself. If you're wondering who I am, the simple answer is that I am an education nobody. Just imagine me as young guy working in the mailroom of some D.C. organization, being a fly on the wall and sneaking away to read the latest copy of EdWeek when I get a chance.

I hope you enjoy my musings and I hope to hear from you.

--Dewey