He Can't Be Serious

Reeling from recent school shootings, Rep. Frank Lasee of Wisconsin introduces a bold new proposal: Give guns to teachers. "To make our schools safe for our students to learn, all options should be on the table," he said, according to an AP article in today's USA Today. "Israel and Thailand have well-trained teachers carrying weapons and keeping their children safe from harm. It can work in Wisconsin." The article is quick to point out that Thailand and Israel might not be quite the epitome of peace and safety that we're going for in our schools.

NCLB Ratings Week

Jennifer Booher-Jennings' op-ed in today's Washington Post on the unfortunate incentives NCLB gives educators to focus on average students at the expense of the above-average and those who are really struggling may sound familiar to Education Sector and Washington Monthly readers, who were able to read an extended discussion of the problem here a year ago.

NCLB encourages teachers and principals to neglect large swaths of students because the law's drafters decided to judge schools on the basis of whether a sufficient percentage of their students cleared a statewide test score hurdle once a year, rather than on the basis of how much schools educate each student over the course of a school year (which presumabely is what parents and taxpayers want to know). This is in-the-eduweeds stuff, but the point is that the single-score method incentivizes schools to focus on kids who score close to state standards, because such kids are going to be a lot easier to get over the bar than kids who can barely read and write. (In theory, schools will have to focus on these kids by 2014, when NCLB requires 100 percent of students to meet state standards--but loopholes in the law will allow schools to continue to ignore at least some of these kids). Nor are kids who cruise over the bar worth focusing on; schools don't get any credit for raising their scores, even though they represent more than half the kids in many school systems.

I don't like making educators out to be cynics, caring only about the kids who will help them keep their reputations and, ultimately, their jobs. Many teachers obviously care deeply about all their students. But educators are rational people and the logic of NCLB is pretty clear--it's the kids near the bar, those who score near state standards, who are going to provide the biggest returns on tutoring and othe investments, because schools only have to raise their scores slightly to get them over the reading and math bars and thus help educators avoid the consequences of failing to meet NCLB's performance expectations--consequences that ultimately include losing their jobs.

All this matters because NCLB's school-rating system is at the core of the law's effort to raise student achievement. Encouraging schools to help students at the expense of others (including the neediest students) isn't exactly good public policy--or smart politics.

The solution to NCLB's wrong-headed school-rating incentives is to expect schools to increase every student's achievement every school year, a so-called value-added method of rating schools. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings earlier this year allowed North Carolina and Tennessee to begin rating schools this way. If NCLB's reauthorizers are smart, they will ensure that in the near future every other state has the capacity to do the same.

The benefits of a long-term investment

Eduwonk brings up some good points about an op-ed in today’s Washington Post - while “triaging” students might be a reasonable response to making AYP in a single year, there are few rewards in the law for continuing that approach over even a couple of years. Also, states, not just Tennessee and North Carolina, have already taken advantage of flexibility in NCLB to do what the author recommends: reward schools for making progress, even if students don’t cross the proficiency threshold.

Principals and teachers concerned with making AYP have little motivation to ignore students with the lowest test scores. In fact, this is illustrated best in a quote from the op-ed:

“Ana’s got a 25 percent, the teacher said. What’s the point in trying to get her to grade level? It would take two years to get her to pass the test, so there’s really no hope for her. I feel like we might as well focus on the ones there’s hope for.”

What’s the point? Aside from giving Ana a chance to succeed academically, there is still an NCLB “point” in getting her to grade level. If the school invests in Ana in 3rd grade despite her low scores, Ana could be adding to their percent proficient by 5^th grade. The school, or school system, will still be accountable for Ana in 2 years, so I’m confused as to why it is rewarding to ignore Ana. The ultimate goal of 100% proficiency does, after all, mean 100% of students, Ana included.

On another note, several states have already created ‘Index’ systems that reward schools for increasing achievement at all levels. States’ calculations differ, but essentially schools receive an increasing number of points (say, zero for Level 1, 20 for Level 2, 30 for Level 3, etc.) with the maximum number of points given for students scoring at or above proficient. For some states (e.g., New York, Minnesota, Massachusetts) this formula is used to determine which schools meet AYP, for others (e.g., Pennsylvania, South Carolina), this is used for safe harbor. Either way, it rewards schools for growth, without ignoring the ultimate goal of 100% proficiency.

Is NCLB 99% pure? No, and it is important to keep pointing out problems with the incentive system, and potential solutions, but it is also necessary to keep both the short and long-term incentives in mind.

Speak English or Die

Happy Hispanic Heritage Month.

Well, not everyone is celebrating in the same way. I'm assuming these folks in Danbury CT, site of the recent "Danbury 11" protests, are not so keen on it.

Don't worry, Danbury. A recent study by Douglas Massey of the Woodrow Wilson School, along with Rubén Rumbaut and Frank Bean from the University of California-Irvine, concludes that Spanish is not actually winning the language wars. Not even in South Texas or Southern California, where the largest concentrations of Hispanics live.

The study finds that by the third generation only 17 percent of children of Mexican immigrants can speak Spanish fluently. By the fourth generation, it drops to just 5 percent. So it appears that we're not really holding onto our native language much at all. Just as the German immigrants a century ago gradually gave up their native tongue for English too. Despite the half a million elementary school kids who went to bilingual German-English schools at that time and the absence of any English-only legislation, English managed to survive.

Make no mistake. The bilingual education debate is complicated for good reasons. But the benefits of teaching and learning more than just English in our schools are well documented and simply undeniable. Unfortunately, the unfounded fears of people who speak only English, and related conspiracy theories about Atzlan, get in the way of productive solutions.

And certainly put a damper on an otherwise month full of great celebrations.

Note to the Media: Most American Families are not Rich

Po Bronson's essay in the latest issue of Time calls the media to task for hyping the problems of overscheduled, overachieving, hyper-ambitious affluent families while ignoring the very different set of challenges facing the lion's share of American families. It's completely rational for the media to focus on these issues--affluent families are the people who buy their magazines and books. But it doesn't always reflect reality or serve the public interest. This focus also has a negative impact on education policy debates, particularly when you add in the fact that most people in the policy-making class are themselves members of the affluent group. There is a lot of handwringing that kids are being pushed too hard--but the reality is that a lot of children aren't being pushed enough to develop the skills they need to succeed later in life, nor are they getting any access to the kinds of extracurricular opportunities affluent parents worry about "overscheduling" their own kids for.

Alumni News

Education Sector alum Bridget Kelly is now teaching in Honduras and is writing about her experiences at www.the-start-of-something.blogspot.com. Bridget was the editor of the Yale Daily News a couple of years ago and authored our Connecting the Dots report on Teach for America. Check out both her blog (we've added it to the Quick and Ed blog roll) and her TFA report.

Rookies Redux

Michele over at the AFT’s NCLBlog responds to my post on The Wire and rookie teachers by implying that I’m a hypocrite for making a qualifying remark about Teach for America. However, as Eduwonk also points out, Teach for America has submitted its corps members to a sophisticated evaluation by the respected research firm Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., which found that TFA recruits perform significantly better than typical novices and even slightly better than typical experienced teachers. One reason might be that TFA recruits candidates with much stronger academic backgrounds. Another might be that its corps members strongly believe schools can impact learning, rather than blaming kids and families for poor educational outcomes—even citing “teacher quality” as the single biggest cause of the achievement gap. (Those zany young radicals!)

But that does raise an interesting point. Not all new teachers are created equal. Teachers who enter the profession through some routes, programs, or ed schools might be better prepared than their peers or might learn more quickly on the job. If a truly just society would never unthinkingly assign rookie teachers to its most disadvantaged students, a truly rational one would make exceptions for programs or institutions that routinely supply stronger candidates. Not just TFA, either: Some states are experimenting with ed school evaluation schemes that track the success of graduates by measuring how much academic growth their students make in the classroom, and, as Louisiana discovered, some programs produce new teachers who are even more effective than veterans.

Bottom line: We should be talking about this problem more openly and honestly and we should do more to address it, but at the same time the issue is complicated and it’s dangerous to over-generalize. In fact, I suspect The Wire will use Kima’s situation to make the same point in subsequent episodes. She’s smart, persistent, and she takes her job very seriously. Despite her inexperience, she’ll probably make more progress on that case than anybody expects—including the politicians who want it stalled until after the elections.

-- Guestblogger Craig Jerald

Higher Education "Performance"

InsiderHigherEd.com has a story today about a growing trend in college president compensation, whereby pay is linked to "performance." Not a bad idea per se -- I'm certainly among those who think that K-12 teacher pay should be linked to perforamnce. But then the article describes the performance measures being used:

These payments aren’t just bonuses for a good year, but are tied to specific metrics. [A compensation consultant] said he has seen incentives based on increases in the applicant pool or in SAT averages, progress in recruiting faculty talent, growth in endowments, successful completion of a fund raising campaign, and increases in graduation rates.

Another article also notes the reaction at Vanderbilt University to a recent WSJ story$ detailing the large compensation pacakage enjoyed by President E. Gordon Gee:

Gee enjoys immense popularity among students and faculty members at Vanderbilt where he has overseen the successful completion of a $1.25 billion fund-raising campaign two years ahead of schedule, a 50-percent spike in applications and corresponding increase in selectivity, a doubling in research funding, a tripling in financial aid for undergraduates, a 50-percent increase in minority enrollment, and a 100-point increase in average SAT scores. Gee has also personally involved himself in recruiting faculty members — and has helped attract stars, most recently in literary and African-American studies.

As these articles make clear, presidential performance in higher education is primarily defined by success in very specific areas: raising money, attracting a greater number of more academically qualified applicants, and boosting the university's standing in research and academia.

In other words, boosting institutional wealth, fame, and exclusivity. This shouldn't be a surprise--as a recent Education Sector paper notes, these are precisely the elements that drive the influential U.S. News college rankings. The rankings create an incentive structure, and universities respond in a rational way be aligning their resources and priorities accordingly.

What's left out of this equation is any measure of--and thus, focus on--education and learning that occurs in college. Presidents are being payed for higher student SAT scores. What other industry measures performance by what the customer brought with them when they walked in the front door?

The Dedication of Teachers

Sometimes we here at the Quick and the Ed get accused of not giving teachers enough credit for their dedication to their students, hard work, and the excellent results many accomplish. I don't think that's true--it's knowing how hard so many talented teachers work that makes us all the more angry when the system doesn't support them. This is also a personal matter for me: with a dad who's a high school principal and sister and brother-in-law both teachers, I see the incredible sacrifices educators make on a day-to-day basis.

Take my sister, Rachel Kurtz. She teaches high school English in Washington County, Maryland. This year she also volunteered to advise her school's student government. Last week was homecoming week at Rachel's school. Like many American high schools, homecoming week is also "Spirit Week"--there are different themes for each day and students can earn points for their class by dressing up for the themes. Rachel was disappointed by how few students were dressing up for the themes and how little school spirit they showed, so on Thursday she promised the student body that, if they doubled the number of students in each class who dressed up the next day, she would dye her hair blue. The kids did, and so did she. Here, for your viewing pleasure, are the results.

I know some readers may be skeptical of the educational value of Spirit Week. But this is just the most visible reminder I have of the dedication my sister and countless other teachers show their kids in so many ways that contribute to student learning and better life outcomes for those kids.

I am proud of you, Rachel.

The Wire Episode 4 - Reckless with Rookies

Last night we witnessed an obvious outrage—Top brass assigning a rookie homicide detective to a tough case because they want it stalled until after the municipal elections. “We’re pulling a veteran off a pending case and giving it to a rookie so as NOT to make timely progress on said case?” Normally, we learn, the division simply would never think of doing such a thing. “You won’t catch anything as a primary for the first few months,” Kima is told when she shows up to her new job. “Give you time to learn the basics.” The message is clear: Assigning a rookie to do a tough job before she is ready to handle it is a practice so stupid as to be generally unthinkable.

Clearly, the writers are using this plotline to comment on what's happening way over in the education subplot: Where is the same sense of surprise and outrage when rookie educator Prez gets assigned to teach children in West Baltimore—some of the most educationally needy youngsters in our society? In fact, after seeing so many awful “white knight urban teacher” movies, I applaud The Wire’s writers for being relatively honest that, however well-intentioned and hard-working Prez might be, he’s just terrible at his new job. I don’t have the space here, but I would love to see someone list every major teaching blunder Prez has committed in just the past two episodes.

And make no mistake: His students will pay the price in lost learning. Over the past ten years, “value-added research” has revealed that, in general, students assigned to rookie teachers make considerably less academic progress during the course of a full year than do their peers assigned to more experienced educators. Most novice teachers then experience a steep climb in effectiveness over the next 3-5 years. In a few speeches and some writing, I’ve referred to this phenomenon as a “learning tax,” one that pays for a long-term social good—helping new teachers get better—at the cost of lost learning for some kids.

By the way, I’m not attacking Teach for America—research shows that all of this is as true of credentialed teachers with degrees from an education school as for new teachers who enter, like Prez, through alternative routes. As long as most teachers learn on the job, some kids are going to have to be the guinea pigs.

But if we’re really having an honest national conversation about what it will take to close achievement gaps, why is no one asking an obvious question: If it’s unthinkable to assign a rookie homicide detective to a tough case, why is it okay to assign a novice teacher to educate kids who are behind academically and who face significant educational (and social) obstacles to begin with? In fact, some federal data suggest that poor and minority kids get more than their fair share of novice teachers! (Call that a “regressive learning tax,” since those kids can least afford to pay it.) No Child Left Behind (NCLB) required states to measure such inequities and come up with plans to fix them, but most states have all but ignored the requirement. That's a shame, and one reason I cringe when people say the education system already is doing all it possibly can to close the achievement gap; in reality, beyond some tougher pushing and prodding via NCLB's accountability system, we're not even really trying very hard yet!

Sure, it might not be politically feasible to simply outlaw the practice of assigning rookie teachers to low-income and minority kids. But can’t we at least try to do that for our most disadvantaged kids living in very tough neighborhoods like West Baltimore? Or, if that’s not politically feasible, why not at least insist that disadvantaged kids who do get rookie teachers NEVER end up with a novice or weak teacher the following year, since research shows that getting several ineffective teachers in a row deals a crushing blow to long-term academic growth from which very few kids ever recover? But a dirty secret is that urban schools often do the just the opposite, practicing a kind of triage whereby academically stronger students get assigned to stronger teachers as they climb the educational ladder. So the system compounds disadvantage rather than confronting it.

p.s. Episode 4 also provided the solution to the “soft eyes” mystery from Episode 2, and it also turns out to be related to the rookie theme. Bunk tells Kima that soft eyes are the most important thing to have at a murder scene: “You have soft eyes, you can see the whole thing. You have hard eyes, you’re staring at the same tree, missing the forest.” So the “soft eyes” comment the experienced teacher made to Prez in Episode 2 was actually a kind of foreshadowing (or, since the term wasn’t explained until two episodes later, a kind of “retroactive foreshadowing”—who said The Wire is easy?). If Prez had had the soft eyes that seasoned teachers develop, he’d have seen what was happening between the girls in his class, and he could have intervened before the antagonism escalated into physical violence. As any good teacher can tell you, effective classroom management depends on seeing everything happening in the classroom, whether it’s related to your lesson plan or not. “Soft eyes, grasshopper.”

--- Guest blogger Craig Jerald

The Wire Week Four: Social Promotion

Week Four of The Wire brings the issue of social promotion front and center, as Bubbles enrolls his nephew Sherrod in middle school. Having been absent for the previous three years, and having grown up in family conditions that we can only guess at, but currently include living in an abandoned basement with his heroin addict uncle, Sherrod is understandably far behind academically, particularly in math.

But when Bubbles suggests that Sherrod should be put in a class with students at the same level of learning, assistant principal Donnelly basically says no, it's way too disruptive to put older students in a younger class, and we don't have the resources to do anything else for him. He looks like an eighth grader, he's as as old as an eighth grader, so he's an eighth grader, on the way to high school.

Social promotion has been a hot-button political issue in places like New York City, where Mayor Bloomberg and Chancelor Klein implemented policies that prevent students who don't score at a certain level on standardized reading and language tests from being promoted to the 4th grade. They subsequently added another requirement for promotion to the 6th grade, and just today announced that henceforth there will be no more social promotion to the 8th grade.

So would Sherrod be better off in New York than in Baltimore?

Probably. But it depends on more than just what grade level he's assigned. The debate over social promotion often gets framed as "Should we hold underperforming students back a grade, or not?" Opponents of Bloomberg-like policies note that holding students back screws up their self-esteem as well as the dynamics of classrooms full of younger children. Proponents argue that students who already can't handle the work in one grade will be even less likely to succeed in the next. Research is published supporting both camps; you can find one recent study based on Florida data supporting Bloomberg-like policies here.

But the real issue is this: A student who can't read at grade level is like a ball rolling downhill. The longer you let it roll, the faster downhill it goes. The paramount issue is to stop the ball from rolling.

If you can do that by holding students back a grade and giving them the extra help they need to catch up, that's a good idea. If you can do that by promoting them but then giving them the extra help they need to catch up, that's a good idea too. The important thing is giving them the extra help they need, whatever it might cost and whatever it might be. And the even more important thing is doing everything you can to prevent them from getting to that crisis point in the first place.

Socially promoting someone like Sherrod and then simply sticking him in a class taught by an ineffective, poorly-trained rookie teacher like Prez is clearly a terrible thing to do. Putting him in a class full of 5th graders probably wouldn't work much better. He needs a school system that recognizes him as the high-probability educational and social disaster that he is, and takes immediate steps to change his trajectory.

The Bloomberg proposal includes extra time on weekends and during the summer for students, as well as extra money for literacy specialists, guidance counselors, etc., in middle schools. Whether that's enough to help academically at-risk 7th graders I don't know. But it's clear that without an intense focus of attention and resources on students like Sherrod, the results will be grim.

George Will, Wrong Once Again

George Will, to his credit, has a mild interest in education policy, which is more than most nationally prominent columnists can say. The problem is that his columns are nearly always based on a few tired, outdated, and/or foolish ideas about finance and schools. To wit, yesterday's column in the Post, focused on the "65 Percent Solution."

The "solution" is to mandate that all 15,000 school districts nationwide spend at least 65% of their money in a series of federally-mandated accounting categories labelled collectively as "instruction." I won't go into all the many reasons why this is a remarkably bad idea, you can see previous posts and op-eds here, here, and here. Or if you don't believe me, see Jay Greene in the National Review call the idea "horribly wrongheaded" here, or Gerry Bracey's lengthy takedown here.

For those of you who aren't full-time education policy wonks, Jay Greene and Gerry Bracey are about as likely to agree on education policy as Donald Rumsfeld and Cindy Sheehan are to agree on troop deployment in Iraq.

In addition to rehashing previous wrongheaded arguments, Will also casually maligns a federal agency with a well-deserved reputation for objectivity, neutrality, and fairness: the National Center for Education Statistics:

But in July the National Center for Education Statistics, part of the U.S. Education Department, undermined this national effort. A report on expenditures for public elementary and secondary education for the 2003-04 school year contained this finding: "The percentage of current expenditures spent on instruction and instruction-related activities was 66.1 percent in 2003-04 for the nation as a whole" (emphasis added). Seasoned students of government verbiage noted the suspiciously vague phrase "instruction-related activities."

Opacity is a sign of insincerity: Government language becomes opaque as the government's conscience becomes uneasy. When no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were found, the U.S. government began speaking foggily of finding "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities."

In other words, because the administration whose election he supported made up a bunch of stuff about WMDs, any other federal agency that releases information contradicting his poorly-conceived ideas is similarly suspect.

His complaint also highlights one of the (several) glaring flaws in the "65 percent solution" -- it's an entirely made-up standard. The number has no meaning or relationship to anything, it's just a multiple of five that was somewhat higher than another number with no relationship to anything. That's why it was no suprise when Standard & Poors found no link between the percent of money spent in the categories in question and actual student learning in the classroom.

Will does make one important point, albeit inadvertantly, when he notes that the "65 percent solution" initiative has actually been very successful, with a signficant number of states adopting it and more on the way. Despite the fact that absolutely everyone--left, right, and center--with a shred of knowledge about education hates this idea, politicians are happily adopting it just the same. There's no better evidence of the marginalized state of education policy than this.

Humorless Feminism Alert

Writing for National Review online, Judith Kleinfeld quotes selectively from the transcript of a recent Education Sector debate on the boy crisis to criticize my arguments against the "boy crisis" hype. Here's a quote from Kleinfeld's piece:

The moderator, Ruth Wattenberg, editor of the American Educator, opened the discussion with a statement from a time warp, “I promise no matter how aggressive or disruptive [the two male panelists] get, I will not neglect Sara [the author of a report dismissing the problems of boys].”

Sara Mead testily replied, “I hope I’m not being called on first because you don’t think I can hold my own!”

There you have it. It’s still all about women. It’s still about men oppressing women. They just don’t get it. “Change blindness” — that’s what psychologists call this dangerous cognitive error.

Wow! The NRO crowd must take that "humorless feminist" stereotype seriously. Cuz, even allowing my brilliant comic timing may not be so clear in transcript, it boggles the mind how anyone could see this exchange as anything other than a joke--maybe a relatively lame one, but a joke nonetheless.

Kleinfeld has to seize on this silly exchange because the actual reasons that I argue we should be cautious embracing "boy crisis" hype have nothing to do with "men oppressing women." Rather than falling, boys' achievement has actually increased over time on a host of measures. There are some places where that's not the case, and even where it's rising, boys' achievement isn't rising fast enough or as fast as that of girls. But that doesn't discount the fact that boys are doing better than in the past in many ways.

More significantly, I'm concerned that generalized fears about a boy crisis distract attention from the groups--students with disabilities, poor and minority youngsters of both genders (although the problems facing boys in these groups are more pronounced)--who suffer from much more significant educational gaps. And I'm concerned that a lot of explanations and solutions being peddled for the boy crisis are based on ideological agendas, misinformation, and little hard research--exactly the recipes for goofy educational practices and bad curricula that have been undermining our education system for years. There are perfectly good reasons to be concerned about the impacts of the boy crisis hype and some of its practitioners' recommendations for boys, leave girls out of it for a moment.

Its been fascinating--and disappointing--to me to see how conservatives, who are generally skeptical of conferring victim status, and critical of untested new educational ideas, seem to embrace both so uncritically when the "victims" are boys and the education "innovations" include single sex schools and implementing gender stereotypes in the classroom.