The NEA Wants Your Stories

I subscribe to the NEA's email list, and the latest one had this eye-catching opening:

Have You Been Caught on YouTube?
A student videotaped a teacher at Malibu High School who lost control of the class and raised his voice while students laughed at him. Another video showed an angry high school teacher forcing a student to stand for the National Anthem by yanking his chair out from under him. Outrageous classroom moments are being captured on cell phone cameras and broadcast on YouTube for the entire world to see. Has this happened to you or any of your colleagues? Share your story and be considered for an upcoming NEA Today article.

They direct you to a discussion board that's a little more on message, but I really don't understand why the NEA would want to collect stories about poor or violent teachers caught on tape.

The Math of Merit Pay

Bured in yesterday's Ed Week write-up ($) of McCain's speech was a quote that nicely sums up the common concerns over merit pay:

Bettye Oldham, a retired teacher from Cincinnati, said she had mixed feelings about the merit-pay proposal.

“I think it’s a good idea if it’s run correctly,” she said. “But you can’t judge teachers the way you can judge manufacturing companies.” Some students come to school with “issues that prevent them from learning,” she said, which can make it harder for teachers to reach them.

I picture what Ms. Oldham might look like, and I can see her mulling the pros and cons of merit pay. She's probably worried that it would reduce teachers to nothing more than cogs on an assembly line, but also understands the implicit logic that good doctors and lawyers make more money than bad ones. Teachers, on the other hand, are paid only by credentials--all teachers in the same district with a bachelor's degree and 12 years experience, for instance, are paid the exact same amount no matter their talent or specialty area.

Merit pay seeks to measure some of the work teachers do. While the precise math is a little too complicated for this blog, in essence it looks like a fairly straightforward algebra problem:

Student achievement = age + prior achievement + student demographic information + teacher quality + measurement error

A common argument against merit pay, and the one repeated by Ms. Oldham, is that there are too many human elements for the measurement of teaching. But that argument overlooks even the simple version of the merit pay equation. Race, income and prior achievement are all factored in, and the error term captures all those things that are not predictable--a student's situation at home, whether they had a good breakfast, whether it's too hot or cold, etc.--all things that surely affect the student's score but are not measurable.

It might seem a little too whiz-bang to trust the capabilities of modern statistical computer programs, but mathematicians far greater than I are working to refine the exact statistical equations. We've made giant strides in our ability to compute the value an individual teacher adds to student learning. Let's not let fear of complex, modern math get in the way of promising reform.

Update: Fred Klonsky responds with the "human element" argument. He's making my point for me though, because it really goes back to a fear of assessment of teachers' work. We are comfortable measuring a baseball player's batting average, even if they had a bad breakfast, a rough flight the night before, or an argument with their spouse. In fact, their results are published the next morning in your daily paper. I can't imagine A-Rod explaining poor results on the field with his off-field Madonnna shenanigans. There are "human elements" to everything in life.

Un-Advanced

John McCain spent a lot of time in his NAACP speech in Cincinnati yesterday talking about the many teacher reforms he'd put in place--performance pay, a greater role for principals in staffing matters, and peer evaluations, among them. If McCain's education advisors had been on the ball, they would have told the presumptive Republican presidential nominee that those very reforms are already in place in Cincinnati, with the blessing of the local teacher union, no less. The question is, What have the reforms wrought there?

Where's Rick, Someone Call Rick

"All I can say is that President Weingarten's early signals do no credit to Al Shanker's legacy."

McCain Speaks

In his long-awaited (if you're an education policy person, which admittedly narrows the field somewhat) education speech, Senator McCain said:

We should also offer more choices to those who wish to become teachers. Many thousands of highly qualified men and women have great knowledge, wisdom, and experience to offer public school students. But a monopoly on teacher certification prevents them from getting that chance. You can be a Nobel Laureate and not qualify to teach in most public schools today. They don't have all the proper credits in educational "theory" or "methodology" -- all they have is learning and the desire and ability to share it. If we're putting the interests of students first, then those qualifications should be enough.

I'm generally sympathetic to policies aimed at opening up the teaching profession, because it seems clear that success in the classroom is a function of multiple factors (experience, subject matter knowledge, pedagogical skills, training, work ethic, verbal ability, general smartness, innate talent for teaching) some of which are given undue weight under the current system and some of which are basically ignored. The world's greatest teacher would have all of these qualities in spades, but of course such people are few and far between and it's apparent from the track record of initiatives like Teach for America and some of the better alt-cert programs that people can be reasonably successful with less of some things (experience, training) if they have enough of the others.

That said, I hate this sentence: "They don't have all the proper credits in educational "theory" or "methodology" -- all they have is learning and the desire and ability to share it." Putting words like theory and methodology between contemptuous quotes (shouldn't we invent a new punctuation mark to distinguish those from regular quotes?) is ridiculous. Teaching is an extremely complicated endeavor. A teacher's ability to share knowledge (which is in itself an extremely reductive conception of what teaching actually means) is naturally going to be improved by a solid understanding of theory and methods. Of course some ed schools teach those things badly or over-emphasize them, but that's no reason to dismiss them out of hand.

This is garden variety anti-intellectualism and doesn't speak well of Senator McCain's approach to policy or other matters. One could imagine, for example, that having a lot of knowledge about war and a desire to conduct wars but lacking a larger theoretical understanding of geo-politics and the methods of statecraft might lead one to actively support a ruinous foreign war and then continue to support it even after its ruinousness has become obvious for all to see.

In theory.

Realism and Anonymity

Thoughts on a couple of recent blog-related discussions:

First, I endorse Eduwonk's take on NAEP scores and their meaning in relation to recent state-specific assessment results. The recent dramatic test score gains in New York and now Maryland have produced a spate of circular reasoning on the part of the "NCLB is a conspiracy to destroy public education and pave the way for Wal-Mart to take over the schools" crowd. That argument holds that the pace of improvement and narrowing of class-based achievement disparities envisioned under the law are absurd and unrealistic--thus, the conspiracy. As evidence, they note that such improvement has never happened before. Now that it's actually happening, the argument is, apparently, that it can't actually be happening, because it's never happened before. Or something.  

Second, it's clarifying to read Eduwonkette's back-and-forth with Jay Greene. The basic problem is that she's jumbling up a discussion of peer review with a discussion of motive and and anonymity. Here she puts blog posts, think tank publications, and academic research on a single continuum of "credibility," asserting that peer-reviewed research is most credible, think stuff less so, and blogs least of all.  But this misses the obvious point that credibility and the processes used to ensure it are highly dependent on purpose. 

The purpose of academic research is to inform, to add to a collective body of knowledge. As a result, credibility assurance processes have been developed that make sense given that purpose, primarily peer review and transparency of sources and methods. Motive and authorship aren't as important--when I read an article in an academic journal, I'm less concerned with who did the work than how they did it, where the data came from and what methods were used for analysis. It wouldn't really bother me if authorship were attributed to "An assistant professor at Columbia University" as opposed to an actual named person; the format of academic research is such that the things I need to know to judge credibility are right there in black and white, or embedded in the journal's publicly stated peer review process.

The purpose of blogs, by contrast, as with all opinion writing, is to persuade. And the motive to persuade always comes from somewhere--agendas, convictions, ideologies, etc. Unlike academic research, opinions and arguments can't be evaluated purely on their own terms. And this is reflected in the credibility-assurance practices of organizations that are in the business of publishing opinions. Op-eds in the Washington Post, for example, always have a little blurb at the end telling the reader who the author is. There's a reason: Imagine if you read a column arguing that climate change isn't such a big problem after all, written by Jane Smith. If you saw that Jane was a p.r. flack for ExxonMobil, you'd take it one way. If you saw that she was the president of the Sierra Club, you'd take it another, and for good reason. Same words, different meaning. 

Motives and affiliations matter, particularly in the realm of opinion. That's why respectable publications like Education Week don't publish anonymous op-eds. Heck, they don't even publish anonymous letters to the editor. Why they've abandoned this logical, time-honored standard when it comes to their officially-endorsed blogs, I really don't understand. 

McCain Goes Virtual for Education

Today, during his speech to the NAACP, presumptive Republican nominee John McCain released his education plan. And, for a man who only last week was learning to go online (sorry, couldn't resist), it's a strong start.

John McCain Supports Expanding Virtual Learning By Reforming The "Enhancing Education Through Technology Program." John McCain will target $500 million in current federal funds to build new virtual schools and support the development of online course offerings for students. These courses may be for regular coursework, for enhancement, or for dual enrollment into college.

John McCain Will Allocate $250 Million Through A Competitive Grant Program To Support States That Commit To Expanding Online Education Opportunities. States can use these funds to build virtual math and science academies to help expand the availability of AP Math, Science, and Computer Sciences courses, online tutoring support for students in traditional schools, and foreign language courses.

John McCain Will Offer $250 Million For Digital Passport Scholarships To Help Students Pay For Online Tutors Or Enroll In Virtual Schools. Low-income students will be eligible to receive up to $4,000 to enroll in an online course, SAT/ACT prep course, credit recovery or tutoring services offered by a virtual provider. Providers could range from other public schools, virtual charter schools, home school parents utilizing virtual schooling resources or district or state sponsored virtual schools. The Department of Education would competitively award the funds to a national scholarship administrator who would manage the student applications, monitoring, and evaluation of providers.

I'm pleased to see Senator McCain up the ante on the $120 million virtual schooling innovation fund that I proposed last year. One important emphasis that is missing from Senator McCain's plan is a focus on innovation. While his fund as proposed would likely spur the development of more virtual learning experiences, it would not capitalize on digital learning's unique potential for rapid innovation and improvement. I guess it's ok for the federal government to provide scholarships, but a much more highly leveraged federal role would research how digital learning could improve instruction and then, importantly, rapidly spread these improvements. As I recommended in my report Virtual High Schools and Innovation in Public Education:

Each grantee would have to develop a plan to pilot test, evaluate, and replicate a project in one or more virtual school programs within two years. Over time, grantees with the strongest records of having their innovations adopted by others would get preference for additional funding. All materials, methods, technologies, and data developed through the fund would be available for adoption via a public and freely available open source model.

Senator Obama, who has leveraged the Internet extensively in his campaign, is largely silent on these issues. Perhaps he will consider enhancing his education plan.

Too Weird for The Wire

A little over four months ago, after weeks of dutiful episode summaries and commentary, I posted a short piece about the final episode of The Wire, promising to follow up with more. Alas, I never got around to it, and the guilt has been haunting me ever since.  So, as a gesture of contrition to our loyal readership, I've written a whole magazine article in this month's Washington Monthly about a group of drug dealers from West Baltimore--essentially the real-life guys from The Wire--who are defending themselves against a massive federal drugs/weapons/conspiracy/murder indictment using constitutional fundamentalist legal theories developed by white supremacists, gun nuts, Timothy McVeigh militia / patriot crazy people, etc. Featuring cameo appearances by Geraldo Rivera, Toby Keith, and former heavyweight boxing champion Hasim Rahman, plus some really terrible rap lyrics. 

Set The Research Free!

While Jay Greene and Eduwonkette are going back and forth about peer-reviewed versus think thank research, I’m wondering how you get your hands on all this great, peer-reviewed research in the first place.

Last week, the journal Nature announced that it was offering researchers the option of making their publications available for free online. This allows people beyond the elite world of academic institutions to gain access to this research - a smart move for researchers who want their work read and utilized beyond the small world of academics who subscribe to these journals. As a field that seeks to provide information to people outside of academia—teachers, school leaders, non-profit organizations—the education research world should be a leader in providing free, online access to academic articles. Instead, much high-quality, peer-reviewed research is locked away in a multitude of expensive journals with little attempt to make the research affordable or easily accessible.

Yesterday, for example, I tried to access an article in a peer-reviewed education research publication. I tried getting the article through an education research database that Education Sector subscribes to—a database that is supposed to provide us with full text articles from this particular journal. But, as it turns out, there is a 12-month delay in getting articles from this journal. In order to get access to the most recent research, I would need to pay $30 for one article, which may or may not provide what I need—I don’t know because I only have the abstract on which to base my purchasing decision.

Note to academia: this is not an effective method for getting people to read or use your research.

I guess I’ll just have to turn to research from another think tank or policy organization—it may not be peer reviewed, but it’s accessible. And in a world with online access to nearly everything, that just may be more important.

First Come First Serve

Per below, the comments on today's student debt column are really a must-read, here's one:

Senior Citizensin Student Loan Debt and credit
I have rearely , if ever, seen anything written about the plight of many senior citizens who carry old student loan debt. I graduated university in 1985 [ some loans dating from ‘81]. My loan debt ballooned because of the interest,yes, but more importantly, I had a family crisis [ terminally ill child]and I was physically and emotionally unable to begin to address the issies. I WAS in contact with the banks and the USDE. At one point [ late 80s] I eas even willing to collect soda cans and bottles [ that’s all I could do because I was homeless] but I was told “that’s not good enough.” It wasn’t until I get good jobs inthe late 90s and 2000 that I could begin to pay anything. Now I am living on ONLY Social Security; I AM paying on my loans, but the staggering sum of interest accrued is enough to send me to cardiac arrest. I wish there were some relief! If there is any will someone PLEASE tell me!

Dee DeMusis, at 10:35 am EDT on July 14, 2008

Now, I know for a fact that there are journalists out there who read this blog. Come one--this piece writes itself! You've got impoverished senior citizens AND the health care crisis AND uncaring student loan companies, all wrapped up in a compelling personal story that provides a fresh angle on a hot issue. Your lede's already written! Track this poor woman down and take the rest of the week off, your work is done!

Fat Cats

Kevin pre-empted my post on today's DC Examiner, but there's even more to it than Kevin described.

Today's story gave us the base salary and other compensation for eight local superintendents, including Jack Dale, superintendent of Fairfax County. Dale will make $292,000 in base salary this year, plus a $62,000 retirement contribution. He runs an agency responsible for educating 165,000 students with 13,090 teachers and 26,778 total staff members with a budget over $2 billion. Just down the road from Dale and Fairfax County schools is George Mason University. Its president, Alan G. Merten, made $642,500 ($) in total compensation in 2006-7 including a car and a house. Merten's school educates 30,000 students a year and has a $750 million budget. Who's better paid, Dale or Merten?

The Examiner piece also provides its own rebuttal. It lists eight local superintendent salaries, and all earn total compensation packages between $250 and $350,000. Eight separate school boards determined the appropriate compensation level for their chief executive, and they all offered salaries in this range. This suggests the salaries were market-based.

The story today wasn't an isolated incident. The New York Times ran a piece last week along the exact same lines. It chronicled the severance package of Barbara Trzeszkowski, employed in Keansburg, New Jersey for 38.5 years, first as a long-time teacher and then as superintendent. Keansburg is known as an "Abbott district," so-called for its eligibility for state funds targeting extremely needy schools. Buried in the article mainly critical of her financial windfall was this quote:

Joe Hazeldine, who was chairman of the Keansburg school board and a member of the personnel committee at the time Ms. Trzeszkowski’s most recent contract was negotiated, defended it recently from his home in North Carolina. He said Ms. Trzeszkowski was “worth every single penny she earned, if not more.”

“She’s a remarkable administrator,” Mr. Hazeldine said. “She took Keansburg from the bottom of the Abbott districts to the top. Our college acceptance rate quadrupled. We had kids going to Ivy League schools. That doesn’t just happen. How do you put a price on that?

In education, apparently, we must.

Shameful

One of the things you learn when writing for newspapers and magazines--something that's not at all obvious otherwise--is that the process by which a finished package of article and headline comes together actually consists of multiple, semi-connected parts. Basically you come to an agreement with your editor about the essential thrust and structure of the piece, write it, work with the editor on modifications etc., until it's finished. Then, in an entirely separate process, somebody, often a separate third party, comes up with the title and accompanying blurb--the "hed" and "dek" in publishingese. Then if you're lucky enough to get your piece on the cover, somebody--possibly another person--comes up with another headline, accompanying blurb, etc. Oftentimes you don't even find out what your article is going to be titled until it's published.

This process can produce some strange juxtapositions, particularly when the various parties involved are working from different imperatives. The editor, if she's good at her job, will be concerned with matters such as clarity, logic, concision, fairness, persuasiveness, and accuracy. The headline-writer, by contrast, tends to be more focused on coming up with something pithy and attention-grabbing. And this is doubly true, or more so, for the cover headline-writer, where degrees of grabbiness translate directly into circulation and sales.

Unfortunately, the system can sometimes go awry and result in a "telephone"-like iterative process of escalating sensationalism, as with this piece in today's DC Examiner, which looks at how much money the superintendents of the area's large public school districts are paid. Basically, they do pretty well in the grand scheme of things, making $200,000 to $400,000 per year plus benefits. Which isn't nothing, but as the article notes, these are immensely difficult jobs that involve running some of the largest school districts in the United States. There's not a single quote in the article from anyone who thinks they're overpaid. And as an accompanying sidebar notes, their salaries are chump change compared to what the leaders of big, locally-based private corporations make, i.e. the $31 million pulled down by the CEO of Lockheed Martin.

The hed for this article is "Packages for schools chiefs full of bonuses, lucrative retirement" along with a semi-compensatory dek: "Benefits commensurate with job's long hours, criticism, officials say." This teeters on the edge of sensationalism but I can sort of live with it. The cover, by contrast, is a whole different story: "Fat cat edu-crats: High pay, lavish perks enrich schools chiefs"

That's just shameful. It's journalism of the lowest order. It does a disservice to the author and frankly embarrasses everyone involved with the Examiner, which is a free paper distributed in boxes around the DC metro area. The vast majority of passers-by who glance at that cover aren't going to flip through to page 4 to read the whole article with the lack of criticism, the Lockheed comparison, and all the rest. They're just going to mentally file it away as one more piece of evidence that public education is inefficient and ridiculous, that the government is over-taxing them and wasting their money on feckless bureaucrats. They'll be a little more filled with unjustified anger toward the public sector. They'll "know" one more thing that's actually wrong. All so the Examiner can sell a little more advertising, never mind the truth.

Indebted

One of the real flaws in the way news is perceived and communicated lies with the way people think about change in the short- and long-terms. There's a bias toward volatility -- important things that yank around a lot, up and down, tend to garner more attention than things that don't. The stock market is a perfect example; while the long-term trend is upward, on any given day the major indices can rise or fall, leading to daily news stories seeking to explain why. Ninety percent of the time this is total b.s.--absent some kind of huge and obviously meaningful financial event, nobody can accurately interpret the collective meaning of the millions of discrete decisions that play out in terms of equity prices. But the stories get written anyway, as do larger stories about the economy, which, being cyclical, tends to always be changing one way or another (it's doing great! now it's tanking! now it's doing great again!).

Steady long-term trends, by contrast, get much less attention--paradoxically, because they're actually more important. A trendline with a constant slope is hard to write a story about, because the "news" today is exactly the same as the news yesterday--so why write about it today? It's not so much change that's newsworthy, in other words, but change in change. The problem is that this logic plays out, day after day, year after year, and one day you look up and the world has become a very different place without anyone seeming to notice--perhaps in a better way, perhaps not.

So it is with college prices and student debt. Every year The College Board puts out a report on college prices, and every year it says exactly the same thing: they're up, a lot, faster than inflation or family income or anything else one might reasonably compare them against. And the impact of this is clear: students have to borrow more money to go college--a lot more. From 1997 to 2007, total student debt increased by 61 percent after adjusting for inflation, to nearly $60 billion per year. This increased reliance on debt has allowed both institutions and public policymakers to avoid making hard decisions about efficiency and affordability in higher education--the subject of my new column in InsideHigherEd.

Update: For those of you who haven't clicked through and read the actually column yet -- and really, what's keeping you? We all know reading blogs is the same as working -- the comments below the column itself are fascinating, there are some truly harrowing student debt stories in there, go check them out.

iStan, High School Football, and Data-Driven Reflection

It looked like a makeshift MASH unit from the outside. But inside it was filled with flat-panel monitors displaying patient vital signs, a real-time video feed, and in the middle of the room, a surgical table. iStan, a life-like, sensor filled mannequin, occupied the middle of the table and waited for a team of medical students to diagnose and treat his condition.

Welcome to the state-of-the-art in medical education.

iStan is used by medical and nursing schools to simulate patient interactions and responses. At the table, a medical school instructor told me how he uses both the sensor information (patient vital signs, drugs given, airflow, gas mix in lungs, etc.) and lab video to have detailed discussions with med student teams after a simulation. They can pinpoint who was doing what at any moment (did you really clear the airway?) and show the consequences through the patient's reactions. It's a powerful teaching tool.

Interestingly, this data-driven reflection is also the state of the art in the US Army. It has "instrumentalized" many of its war games and other performance exercises -- using video and sensors to gather multiple sources of data about what is happening and when. As in the medical school simulations, this extensive data can illustrate multiple interactions among team members in a complex situation, leading to very rich "after action" reflective conversations about what happened, why, and how to improve. In both the military and medical education, technology has enabled instructors to use immense amounts of descriptive data to generate powerful and reflective teaching opportunities.

Can we take these concepts to K-12? Actually, we already have. Go visit your high school's football coach and ask him how he uses practice and game video with his team to break down each component of a play.