The Unions Come Clean

Over at EdWise, Leo Casey finally reveals the answer to the Master's degree mystery. It's well worth reading, because Leo describes exactly what's wrong with teacher policy today. But first, a few house-cleaning items:

Leo alleges that the Clotfelder, Ladd, and Vigdor (CLV) study cited in the previous post refutes the findings and recommendations in the Education Sector paper Frozen Assets. Nonsense. Frozen Assets said, "while salaries for teachers typically increase throughout their careers, research suggests that teacher effectiveness in the classroom does not increase on a similar trajectory."

That is precisely what the CLV study says:

Compared to a teacher with no experience, the benefits of experience rise monotonically to a peak in the range of 0.092 (from model 4) to 0.119 (from model 5) standard deviations after 21-27 years of experience, with more than half of the gain occurring during the first couple of years of teaching.

The study found that teachers gain more effectiveness in the first two years than in the entire rest of their career. Yet experience-based salary schedules increase pay on more or less a straight line from year 1 to year 30, i.e. not a "similiar trajectory."

Leo notes that in states like New York, Master's degrees are required for teachers to gain full certification, so it's reasonable for unions to want teachers to be paid for the credential. Sure--except last time I checked, which was when I worked on education policy for a state legislature, teachers unions wield a great deal of influence over education policy in state legislatures. Or is all that lobbying money being wasted? That's why I originally asked why unions don't go to the "bargaining table and/or state legislature" to fix the Master's degree problem.

But then Leo actually does give the answer, which is worth quoting in full:

There is, morever, an important educational reason for teacher unions to support the retention of the Masters degree requirement, beyond the concerns of fairness and reasonableness. Teacher unions are avid supporters of the full professionalization of teaching, and we understand that every profession needs a rigorous induction process, including a full foundational education. All of the significant and powerful professions in American life, such as law and medicine, require a graduate education as an entry gate-keeper into the profession. Our problem is that far too many undergraduate and graduate teacher preparation programs in schools of education fall far short of professional teaching standards, and do precious little to prepare novices for the challenges of teaching. If teaching is to advance as a profession, and if the quality of American education is to be improved significantly, the quality of teacher preparation programs must also be dramatically improved. Rather than eliminating the Masters degree requirement for teaching licensure, we must make it a more meaningful and useful part of an essential teacher education. That option may not be a prohibitive favorite at the races, but it certainly beats a bet on a dead horse.

If, in the future, you're ever trying puzzle through why a particular teacher policy issue is so irrational and hard to resolve, go back and read this paragraph. The "professionalism" agenda is so vital that it takes precedence over "concerns of fairness and reasonableness." Sure, the teacher preparation programs are doing a bad job (not just at providing in-service Master's degrees; Leo helpfully expands the indictment to preparation of novice teachers as well). Sure, the prospects for improving them seem grim. Sure, this sucks for teachers. But there are more important things to consider.

The professionalism agenda is an artifact of the iron triangle of teacher policy that exists in every state, with teachers unions, schools of education, and state certification boards sitting at the vertices. There's nothing wrong with professionalism as an idea, but in the case of education, research keeps showing that the tools of teacher professionalism--degrees, state certification, most professional development programs, etc.--have little or no impact on teacher effectiveness. That shouldn't be surprising, since the various processes and organizations in questions have been deliberately disconnected from any objective evidence of student learning.

Without being so grounded, they have inevitably become completely self-justifying. Therefore, the only defense against charges of ineffectiveness is to defend the idea, institutions, and processes of professionalism as ends unto themselves. Just as student interests in education are too often subordinated to adult interests, teacher interests are too often sacrificied to larger organizational interests.

Mystery solved.

Update: Sherman Dorn provides an interesting historical perspective on the meaning of professionalism and how it relates to teaching and public education.

Teacher Voice on Master's Degrees

AFTie Ed responds to the posts below on Master's degrees, just after I chided union blogs for non-responsiveness. My bad. His arguments, as near as I can tell, are as follows:

1) Unions like the AFT are supporting progams right now in places like New Mexico that expand the kinds of professional development for which teachers can receive salary increases beyond Master's degrees.

Good point, that's certainly true.

2) "The purpose of the Master’s degree is to provide a teacher with appropriate professional development. The effort to achieve this development and the results from it are what justify the increase in compensation that teachers typically accrue from it."

Ed doesn't dispute the research findings that there are no "results" from Master's degrees (although he only concedes that the degrees are "imperfect"). So all we're left with is rewarding teachers for "effort"--even though it's wasted effort. If that's the policy, why not at least let teachers themselves decide what kind of unrelated-to-effectiveness-in-the-classroom activity we're going to pay them for? Running a marathon takes a lot of effort (and less money out of pocket), why not give them a permanent salary bump for that? What's the difference?

3) "it’s just a good idea to try to link pay to professional development."

Even professional development that doesn't work?

4) Questions like that are the equivalent of "when did you stop beating your wife?"

Well, that sort of depends--and let me stress that Ed put this metaphor on the table, not me--on whether you are beating your wife, doesn't it?

5) Reallocating money currently being squandered on Master's degrees for better purposes would be a "tremendous political trap."

Huh? Why? Seriously, what are the political pitfalls here? It would be good for everbody except for ineffective graduate education programs, and last I checked they don't have some kind of wealthy PAC (although that would be sort of fun) or bigfoot lobbying organization. Help me understand.

Update 1: Sherman Dorn responds here, and makes the point that education schools ain't exactly thrilled about teaching students who don't want to be there. Fair point. It's also worth noting that education schools don't get to keep all that money that pours in from in-service teachers. Ed schools are the financial breadbasket for a lot of universities, taking in large amounts of revenue that then gets distributed elsewhere in the university. At one point, both of my parents were teaching at a public university, one in the computer science department, the other in the school of education. One of them taught twice as many classes as the other and got paid half as much. Any guess which was which?

Update 2: In an update to his previous post, Ed says I'm quoting him out of context, because what he really meant was...actually, he doesn't explain that. Okay, I'm happy to let readers draw their own conclusions on this one.

Radio Silence from Teachers Unions

After near 24 hours, no response yet from my challenge to teachers union bloggers to defend the indefensible--spending billions of dollars of taxpayer's and teachers money on Master's degrees that don't improve teaching. (It's possible ,of course, that Leo Casey is simply in the middle of composing an 8,000-word response and has been held up because he misplaced his copy of "The Quotable Herodotus.")

Let me also officially extend the challenge to anyone from the teacher education community who wants to weigh in. The more the merrier. In the meantime, here are some selections from the Quick&Ed mailbag to tide you over. One former teacher wrote:

It's not only that Masters degrees add no value for high cost, they also are a real pain in the [butt] for teachers themselves, which is why I can't figure out why the unions defend this. As a young teacher, you have to spend money and significant time away from your family AND YOUR JOB to take those classes --- time you could be spending to grade papers, communicate better with parents, help individual kids after school, hone lesson plans, learn from or collaborate with colleagues ... NO ONE benefits from this.

And from a current graduate student:

I am so glad someone finally said this out loud.

I am currently a part-time M.Ed. student, and because my current class (History of American Education & Social Policy) is a requirement fulfillment for both students like me and those teachers who are getting their Masters in Curriculum & Instruction, Elementary Education or Administration & Supervision, I have begun to notice a dividing line between those who are there for the general advancement of personal knowledge (like me) and those who are there because it’s a next step (teachers).

I have the hardest time in the class, where I am so excited to be every Wednesday, understanding why these teachers would choose to spend $2,500 per class to get a degree that they don’t really want or feel that they need. They have said “My principal thought this was a good idea” – they know that it’s not truly going to help them on a day to day basis, but they’re doing it anyway. I don’t want to say that the teachers in my class are greedy or just in it for the pay bump, but there seems to be a disconnect between the passion for learning that they want to impart on their students and their own passion for educating themselves (and I’m certainly not saying that the non-teachers in our class are purely in it for knowledge’s sake – I’d be lying if I wasn’t expecting my degree to give me a pay increase down the line).

I know that I would never make a good teacher, so I am truly grateful for those men and women who are. But why would the union promote actions that aren’t furthering the purpose of providing a great education to those in their member’s classrooms? I just find that really incongruous.

This raises an important point, which is that schools of education do a lot more than train teachers. They also teach about education, and it's perfectly reasonable to think the an in-service teacher would want to learn more about their profession, and could get a great deal out that experience.

The problem is that the current system doesn't allow teachers to make that choice. Instead, it requires them to go back to school, whether they want to or not, in order to get the maximum possible salary. Since teachers aren't paid very well, a lot of them have no option but to slog through a master's degree program that often has little or no connection to either their personal interests or their professional effectiveness.

Again: why do unions, who represent the interests of teachers, not only put up with this, but actively promote it?

The Dark Side of Freakonomics

There's an excellent article($) by Noam Scheiber in this week's New Republic about how the Freakonomics ethic of cleverness is ruining the economics profession. As someone who loved the book, it gave me a whole new perspective on things. Plus, there's an edu-connection, as Scheiber explains how well-known education articles by Alan Krueger and Caroline Hoxby have given rise to a generation of young economists trying to get ahead professionally by finding every-more obscure instances of "clean identification" to answer increasingly trivial questions.

The article also has the funniest chart footnote I've read in a while (admittedly, the bar isn't high): "Standard errors available upon request."

A Question for Teachers Unions

Here's something I've been meaning to ask my teachers union friends in the edublogosphere: Why do you support tying salary increases to Master's degrees, when all the research says that Master's degrees do your members no good?

It makes a certain kind of sense for unions to support things like seniority raises, tenure, bumping rights, generous retirement benefits, etc. I may not agree with the union position on all of these issues, but the union position is at least rational from the perspective of representing the interests of some or all union members.

Master's degrees are different. Teachers get those other benefits automatically in return for doing their job. Master's degrees exact a significant cost from teachers, both in time and money. To get one, you have to pay tuition, go to class, and spend a lot of nights and weekends away from your family. Since teachers don't get paid very well and many of them have children, these costs are considerable.

Yet if there's one thing that all the research studies out there agree on, it's that there is no relationship between having a Master's degree and classroom effectivenes. In fact, the latest large-scale study on the issue found--incredibly--that teachers who go back to get a Master's degree after starting teaching are actually less effective than those who don't. From "How and Why Do Teacher Credentials Matter for Student Achievement?" by Clotfelder, Ladd, and Vigdor:

The estimates indicate that the teachers who received their [Master's] degree prior to entering teaching or any time during the first five years of teachers were no less or no more effective than other teachers in raising student achievement. In contrast, those who earned their master’s degree more than five years after they started teaching appear to be somewhat less effective on average than those who do not have master’s degrees. Whether this negative effect means that those who seek master’s degrees at that stage in their career are less effective teachers in general or whether having a master’s degree makes them less effective cannot be discerned with complete confidence from this analysis. The observation that the earlier master’s degree has no effect, however, suggests that the negative sign is more attributable to who selects into that category than to any negative effect of the degree itself.

So Master's degrees either reward teachers who were already worse, or they make them worse.

Given this, why don't unions go to bargaining table and/or state legislature and change the salary schedule so that all the money that currently goes to support salary bumps for Master's degrees ($8.5 billion nationwide according to this estimate) is reallocated for other purposes, like increased minimum salaries, lower health insurance co-pays, or what have you? That would be a net gain for union members, because they wouldn't have to expend the time and money that Master's degrees require.

Alternatively, why don't unions go to the local university--I'm guessing that for any given school district, most in-service master's degrees are earned at relatively small number of local colleges and universities--and say something along the lines of "Hey, in exchange for our time and money, could you give us something that actually helps us be better teachers?"

Leo Casey? AFTie John? Anyone?

Rankings Revolt?

Last week's article in Time about a group of private college presidents trying to foment an anti-U.S. News & World Report rankings revolution has prompted a spate of follow-up, including this piece in the Yale Daily News. Yale President Richard Levin struck a note a note of skepticism:

Levin said that although he disagrees with the magazine’s misleading use of quantitative measures to evaluate schools, he would not support a movement to eliminate college rankings completely. “If the letter says abolish any attempt by the press to characterize strong versus weak colleges, I would be opposed to that,” Levin said. “Schools have to be accountable, and it’s part of our tradition of free press to have external evaluators of the performance of our schools.”

On the one hand, this is refreshing. Condemnation of U. S. News is a mandatory part of polite conversation in higher education policy circles, the kind of "of course we all agree" thing you say as a preface to some other point. That's because higher education likes to operate on the polite fiction that every college and university is equally good in its own special way, that there's a fine college out there for every student, and that the whole admissions process is--or should be--just about finding the right "fit" between sui generis colleges and equally unique students. The whole idea of evaluating institutional quality on a common scale or in a comparable way is felt to be a betrayal of some higher ideal.

This is, of course, nonsense, and it's good to hear a college president say so publicly, and to even utter the "A-word"--accountability--in the process. It doesn't happen very often.

On the other hand, Yale's interest in the U.S. News rankings is obvious. It would be weird for them to boycott a rankings system that annually tells the world something that they surely believe is true: Yale and its Ivy League ilk are the greatest. While the U.S. News rankings are based on a complex, multi-variable formula, they're best understood as a relatively straightforward process of determining degrees of difference from Yale, Princeton, and Harvard. The more like them you are, the higher you're ranked.

The problem is that most institutions, particularly public institutions, aren't meant to be like Ivy League schools, and it's silly to rate them in that way. So if Yale really wanted to help topple the U.S. News regime--which can't be accomplished by a boycott, since it's a free country and U.S. News can publish whatever it likes, plus most of the data used in its rankings are publicly available and can't be witheld by colleges even if they wanted to--then Yale should take the bold step of proposing and then participating in some process whereby it publicly discloses how well it teaches its students and how much they actually learn while they're in college. That would be a revolution.

Limits of Evidence from Abroad on Vouchers

Andrew Coulson responds to my response to his argument that foreign voucher programs show that vouchers will expand the supply of high-quality schools serving poor kids. His arguments still aren't convincing.

Coulson admits that Chile's voucher program, while expanding the number of private schools, has done so much more for upper-income and middle-class, rather than poor, children. But he blames this on details of the program and promises that, in time, as the number of private schools grows, they will eventually serve more poor children. Leave aside that it's not clear this would be desirable, since poor students in Chile's private schools perform less well than those in its public schools. Chile's voucher program has been in place since the early 1980s; at some point believing Coulson's promise that, if we just wait a little longer for the market to work, we'll finally start to see quality private schools serving poor kids in Chile, becomes an awful lot like believing the Bush administration when they say things will eventually turn around in Iraq. There's another novel aspect to this argument, in that voucher proponents often argue--and I think that this is one of their most compelling claims--that we need to give kids more choice NOW because they can't afford to waste time in failing schools while we try to fix the existing system. But Coulson is arguing that, well, maybe the kids need to wait a little longer for the market to work. Doesn't this "wait a little longer and maybe it will work" argument sound oddly familiar?

Coulson doesn't even engage with my argument that the situation of the Netherlands is fundamentally different from that of the United States in ways that make it unhelpful as an example here. Unlike the U.S., several European countries have systems of separate public schooling for children from different religious groups, because of the history of religious strife in this country. The way the Netherlands happened to structure this system in the early 20th century resembles what we would call a voucher. But that does not mean that introducing vouchers into the American system today will produce a significant number of new, high-quality choices for poor kids.

Coulson argues that my unfamiliarity of voucher programs in Denmark and Sweden should somehow disqualify me from talking about school choice policy in the United States, despite the fact that I've spent a significant amount of my professional career studying voucher, charter and other choice issues in this country. This is silly on its face: Exactly how many countries should one know about choice in to be qualified to comment on it? Moreover, it's disingenous: Coulson knows a lot about choice in Denmark, Sweden, etc. because he's spent a lot of time trying to find examples that will support his ideological support for vouchers, not because he's seeking a comrehensive understanding of the world's experience with educational choice from some neutral scholarly position.

I don't mean this as an attack: Questions about the role of choice and diverse delivery models in public education are both empirical and ideological questions. The ideological questions are just as important as the empirical ones, and we shouldn't shy away from them in the name of being evidence-based. But that ideological component also means that Coulson and I will never be able to come to an agreement, based on evidence, about certain issues related to vouchers, because we have very different views about the ultimate goals of educational policy. He's much more interested in expanding choice, whereas I'm much more focused on expanding the supply of high-quality schools serving poor kids. Sometimes those goals support each other. But they are not the same thing and it does not do to pretend that existing evidence shows choice alone will create significant numbers of high-quality new school choice options for poor kids.

Grad Rates: Woo!

My alma mater's loss to Georgetown Friday was pretty heartbreaking, but I'm pleased to note, via Kevin, that we smoke them in the grad rate department. When I was a young Commodore in the late 1990s and frequently watched our football and basketball teams getting trounced by the rest of the SEC (note: nothing sucks like a Big Orange), at least we knew our graduation rates dominated the league (admittedly, that's not a particularly high bar and pretty thin consolation). And we still did smash George Washington University and their charter-hatin' ways a few weeks back, so I can deal.

The Grad Rate Tourney Bracket

Turns out Georgetown is for real, at least on the hardwood. But graduation rates? Not so much. For a look at how the March Graduation Rate madness played out, see yesterday's Washington Post Op-chart here, from New America's Lindsey Luebchow and yrs truly.

AP Audits

Two things I don't get about Sunday's front page WaPo story about the College Board's initiative to audit the syllabi of courses schools are calling AP, in order to weed out classes that are AP in name only. First, I don't really understand why this is front page news, particularly since its not actually, um, new: Schools were able to begin submitting syllabi in January of this year. Second, I don't understand why the College Board needs to audit the syllabi. I don't doubt that some schools slap an AP label on courses that aren't really that rigorous and don't prepare kids for AP tests. But AP is, you know, a test. The College Board already knows how many students from each school are taking the tests, and how they are doing on them. Shouldn't that information be enough for them to identify schools where very few of the kids taking AP classes take the tests or where those who do are bombing? Isn't the point of test-based accountability that you can use student performance information to make judgements about whether or not schools are doing what they should be doing without getting into labor intensive and potentially micromanaging things like evaluating everyone's curriculum?

Time Marches On

The NY Times reports on the growing movement to extend the school day. Mass Gov. Patrick has proposed doubling the funding for the state's existing "extended learning time" initiative. That means twice as many participating schools- up to twenty- next year in Massachusetts. And hopefully it also means doubling efforts to evaluate the program, which is high stakes at this point as attention to the issue grows at the local and federal levels. Not everyone agrees- some parents, mostly the more affluent ones, are concerned that it will cut into family time and stress out the kids. Others are more concerned about burn-out among teachers, a likely challenge even for the best planned initiatives. And everyone agrees it is expensive. But the movement is afoot. Spitzer's on board, now proposing an extended day as one of five options for NY's low-performing schools, and many other states and districts are not far behind.

Child Care Quality Counts

New analysis from NIH's longitudinal Study of Early Childhood and Youth Development finds that children who were in higher-quality early childcare had better vocabulary achievement at grade five, but children who had been in daycare had more negative behavior ratings in sixth grade. The differences are quite modest, but this finding is noteworthy because studies of the impact of early childhood experiences on children's achievement often see strong impacts in the early grades that fade out in later grades. NOTE: This post has been updated for clarity.