The Performance of Performance Pay

With Barack Obama winning an historic race for the presidency this week (and the nation exhaling in wonder and relief at his victory), Jim Guthrie and Patrick Schuermann at Vanderbilt's Peabody College offer a timely reality check in Education Week on performance pay for teachers, a reform that has cycled back onto the education agenda after two decades of dormancy and that the President-elect has endorsed.

Guthrie and Schuermann write that some 10 percent of the nation's school systems employing at least 20 percent of the nation's teachers are now paying teachers on the basis of their performance "in some form or fashion." But in a helpful taxonomy of "what we do no yet know" about performance pay, they point out that there's no compelling research evidence on "the power of financial awards in promoting more-effective teaching and elevating student performance" and that there's no evidence on "the long-term effect of performance awards on the supply of effective teachers." In other words, the rationale for teacher performance pay hasn't been proven. Nor, they point out, is there clear evidence suggesting the "effects of group awards relative to individual performance" or the "preferable mix of financial and nonpecuniary awards"--important second-order questions.

There is, of course, a strong logic to rewarding good teaching and good teachers and Gutherie and Schuermann are sympathetic to the potential of performance pay to strengthen the public school teaching profession. On its face, public education's wide use of a "single salary schedule" to pay teachers strictly on the basis of experience and credentials is more than a little irrational. Guthrie and Schuermann advocate carefully constructed experiments to help answer key questions about performance pay's effectiveness, and they are right to do so. But their study of the performance-pay research makes clear that policymakers' rush to introduce performance pay for teachers isn't necessarily going to make the teaching profession any stronger, and that the Obama administration would be wise to help answer the big questions about performance pay, rather than assume the answers already exist.

FERPA and the student "team"

More and more, information about student learning is going digital. Many systems provide online, real-time access to students and parents about student performance. Having access to student information makes it easier for parents to identify problem areas and help hold students accountable. But we know that parents are not the only non-school actors contributing to a child’s learning. Tutors, coaches, care-providers and mentors are all involved in keeping a student on the path to success. Access to information about the student’s school-based learning could significantly enhance their ability to intervene effectively. FERPA (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) prevents schools and teachers from sharing personally identifiable information about student learning with anyone outside of the institution except parents. But parents can consent to release records as long as they:

1. Specify the records that may be disclosed;
2. State the purpose of the disclosure;
3. Identify the party or class of parties to whom the disclosure may be made.

The Supplemental Education Services program addresses the issue of providing personally identifiable student information to SES providers (tutors) by requiring that parents provide written consent for the LEA to release existing student information that pertains to specific achievement goals set for the student. However while SES providers are required to provide progress reports to parents and schools, schools are not required to provide any updates to SES providers after the initial agreement. While I wonder how a tutor can be an effective supplement to the classroom with no idea what’s going on there, the practice does avoid the cumbersome problem of requiring teachers to get written parental consent any time they release student information (a quiz grade, for example) to a tutor. There might be a better way.

FERPA’s regulations provide at least two potential methods to make it easier for parents to allow other members of their child’s learning “team” to be informed about student learning. It’s not clear that parents can only consent to release records that already exist. Parents could consent to release a class of records, for example quiz grades or attendance, to specified recipients going forward for a specific period of time (such as the length of a semester). This is not a widespread practice, but it’s not impossible under the law, and with support from the Department of Education it could become more prevalent.

Technology also provides an easier way to get parental consent to release existing information. FERPA regulations allow for written consent in electronic form so long as the school or educational agency uses a “reasonable method” to authenticate the parent’s identity. In the case of grades, for example, a “reasonable method” may be as simple as a PIN number or password. Within online grade-books and other software, electronic consent could make it relatively easy for parents to act as a gatekeeper for student information that comes from the classroom, quickly and easily passing it on to a tutor or mentor who can then provide better intervention and support for the student.

Testing in the 21st Century

I know a lot of people are tired of testing, and some are tired of hearing about 21st century skills. But both are here to stay and both matter tremendously for education reform. Improving assessment is the very first bullet in Obama’s list of how to reform NCLB, and he intends to do it by creating new models for assessment that measure “higher order skills, including students’ abilities to use technology, conduct research, engage in scientific investigation, solve problems, present and defend their ideas.”

Easier said than done? On Monday Education Sector is going to release a paper I wrote about measuring 21st century skills (yes, 2 for 1! testing plus 21st century skills). At the same time we’re opening up a week-long discussion on our website to delve further into this topic--what should we measure? what can we measure? We hope you’ll join in with some good comments and hard questions.

What is Obama's Mandate?

Echoing Eduwonk, there's no use guessing who will be tapped as the next Secretary of Education. It'll be relatively low on the list of nominations, so things like whether Obama has the right balance of Chicago people, governors, Republicans, and other political calculations make the whole speculation moot. Other decisions come first, and those will shape who becomes Ed Secretary. Taking a look at the exit polls shows this election was about two things--George W. Bush and the economy. They do not suggest Obama won (or McCain lost) based on specifics of their education, health care, tax, or energy policies. Obama won pretty much across the board:

- he won both the rich and poor (and most of the middle)
- he won all levels of education
- he won whether voters had investments in the stock market or not
- he won voters who said race was an issue and those who said it was not
- he won both supporters and opponents of the bailout bill

On issues, the economy was by far the most important; it was more important than the threat of a terrorist attack or appointments to the Supreme Court. Sixty-three percent of voters identified the economy as the most important issue, followed by Iraq (10%), health care and terrorism (9% each), and energy policy (7%). Those numbers aren't even close, and Obama won all of them except terrorism. (Update: in 2004, the highest priority issue, moral values, tallied only 22% of the electorate. This year's 63% picking the economy as the number one issue was two points higher than 1992, about which James Carville said, "it's the economy, stupid.") So President-elect Obama's mandate is pretty clear: fix the economy. That isn't a simple matter by any means, but he'll be given wide latitude to fix it as he pleases, at least for a few months. We'd be silly to think that education is the primary issue on that front, especially K-12.

The best hope for the edusphere should be that he makes the college affordability argument as often as he did during the election. He could start with this or this.

Second First

The Education Trust's latest report on high school graduation rates begins by saying, "The United States is the only industrialized country in the world in which today's young people are less likely than their parents to have completed high school." That line became the lede in media reports in USA Today, CNN, the AP, Education Week ($), etc. Because of the AP's story, it got repeated in hundreds of local newspapers all across the country. That's unfortunate, because it's simply not true.

Last week Kevin showed the actual data to be less than convincing. What's also important is the sentiment behind the claim, the sense that our education system is in crisis and getting worse for each generation. If you want to change education in America, and if you want to rally a consensus behind your cause, it's a useful claim. No one likes to regress, and Americans like being #1.

The problem is there's only one "first generation to be less educated than their parents." So, if last generation was the first to be less educated than their parents, this one can't be as well. I was reminded today of a passage in the 1983 "A Nation at Risk" report that could easily be written today. It states:

Some worry that schools may emphasize such rudiments as reading and computation at the expense of other essential skills such as comprehension, analysis, solving problems, and drawing conclusions. Still others are concerned that an over-emphasis on technical and occupational skills will leave little time for studying the arts and humanities that so enrich daily life, help maintain civility, and develop a sense of community. Knowledge of the humanities, they maintain, must be harnessed to science and technology if the latter are to remain creative and humane, just as the humanities need to be informed by science and technology if they are to remain relevant to the human condition. Another analyst, Paul Copperman, has drawn a sobering conclusion. Until now, he has noted: Each generation of Americans has outstripped its parents in education, in literacy, and in economic attainment. For the first time in the history of our country, the educational skills of one generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach, those of their parents [emphasis added].

This isn't to say our education system doesn't have problems, but it does suggest we need a little historical perspective. We're fighting the same rhetorical battles that were fought 25 years ago, and we need to be honest about it.

Vote

Some days there's nothing to talk about except the thing that everyone is talking about, and today definitely qualifies. I've voted in every DC election since 2001 and this morning my polling place was by far the most crowded I've seen, despite the fact that the presidential election is a foregone conclusion and the only local race of note is for at-large city councilperson. In education, we often cite voting and jury duty as reasons for the public education system's being, the rare occasions when people from all walks of life are asked to come together on equal terms and render judgment on one another and the pressing issues of the day. Like Emily Parsons, I grew up in New York where voting was always done by machine, and, like her, I find the un-private DC system of optically scanned cards to be inadequate and mildly disconcerting. Former Notre Dame president Theodore Hesburgh was right to say that "voting is a civic sacrament" -- particularly, I suspect, for people like myself who don't regularly partake of traditional sacraments or other such rituals. There's something about the quiet moment inside a voting booth with the curtain just drawn behind you, standing in front of levers waiting to be chosen. It's serious; it reminds you of citzenship and country and the gift of democracy. And there's nothing quite like the satisfying "thunk" of pulling that master lever, hearing your small, vital act of will recorded within the machine, and feeling the light of the polling place pour in from behind you as the curtain opens and you turn to leave into what always feels like a better day. 

Update: Hendrik Hertzberg says more or less the same thing at the New Yorker--except, he being Hendrik Hertzberg and it being the the New Yorker, it's about ten times better written. 

Early Voters

Obama wins the crucial 5-17 year-old voting bloc. On this day of speculation and hype, that's about all the real election news you're going to get.

The Post story even quoted one ten-year old who cast his vote based on education policy:

Taylor Irwin, 10, is an Obama supporter who has been following the candidate's education plan.

"He said that he would increase the number of children that are eligible for early education," Taylor said. "I think it's important for children to get exposed to learning at an early age."

An education voter. That'll show EDin08's detractors!

Smoking

Politics is strange business. Here in DC we have a very popular mayor and a reform-minded schools superintendent who are, for the first time in living memory, putting serious political capitol and genuine reformist energy behind an effort to turn around a school system that's been universally regarded for many years as one of the worst in the nation. Have they been perfect? Of course not. But there undeniably is hope and progress, two things the district has sorely lacked. Yet the DC City Council has been growing increasingly antagonistic toward the mayor and chancellor, despite lacking anything resembling a coherent alternate viewpoint or education agenda of any kind. Instead, it's all about hurt feelings and disrespect. On Friday the Post reported the following exchange:

Council member Marion Barry (D-Ward 8), in one of several tense exchanges with Rhee, complained that she had provided more information to the media about the fund shift than to the council. Rhee said that was not the case.

"I disagree with that," she said.

"You keep disagreeing with that and you won't be around here too long," said Barry.

Under normal circumstances if you disgrace yourself and lose your job by getting busted smoking crack in hotel room with a woman who isn't your wife, and then get busted with crack again by park police in 2002, and then test positive for cocaine in 2006, you're looked on with a mix of pity and disdain--if you're lucky. Yet in DC Barry remains a potent political force, to the point where people with actual jobs have to waste an afternoon pretending to be polite while he talks smack. This is definitely one of the downsides of democracy.