Which Teachers?

All the top consulting, legal, financial, and engineering firms keep a list of schools from which they recruit students each year. They don't attend job fairs at Directional State University, because (supposedly) DSU graduates aren't at the same caliber of those from Harvard, Yale, or other elites. What if you could test it, though? What if we could tell how well each educates their students and prepares them for the workforce?

Louisiana has been quietly doing just that for its graduates of teacher education programs. Starting with mandatory re-designs in 2000-2003, the state now has the capacity to track teacher effectiveness by their educational program. In other words, parents, principals, and policymakers are able to make some informed decisions about which teachers they would want in their classrooms. The most recent review came out this week, and here's the verdict on teachers entering the profession through The New Teacher Project:

The New Teacher Project prepared new teachers whose students, demonstrated achievement in four content areas (i.e., science, mathematics, language arts, and reading) that was comparable or above the growth of achievement demonstrated by children taught by certified professionals who had taught two or more years. Achievement of student learning in one content area (i.e., social studies) was comparable to the growth of achievement of students taught by other new teachers.

Compare that to results like this one:

The University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the Louisiana Resource Center for Educators each had one content area where student achievement was less than that of new teachers. In the content area of language arts, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette program performed at a level where there was evidence that new teachers were less effective than average new teachers but the difference was not statistically significant. In the content area of reading the Louisiana Resource Center for Educators program performed at a level that was statistically significantly less effective than new teachers.

These are very important findings, and they control for student, family, school, and classroom characteristics. The project's next step will be to attempt to answer the why of the results. And, hopefully in the near future, we'll see other states link student growth data with teacher education programs.

Eduwonk's take here. NY Times editorial board here.

Balance

A few years ago, while on vacation in Italy, my wife and I toured a winery in Tuscany and ended up spending an hour or so chatting with the in-house sommelier, a woman in her early thirties. After pouring a really terrific Vino Nobile de Montepulciano, she off-handedly mentioned that she had earned a law degree from a public university but had never practiced, deciding to pursue a career in wine instead. Tuition had been free, so it wasn't an economically hard choice to make. Part of me thought this was great, but another part started worrying about subsidy-induced overconsumption and the fact that some other student had been denied the chance for an expensive education that she had essentially wasted. Then I had another glass of wine and stopped worrying about it, because Tuscany is, in fact, just as nice as they say.  

College tuition in Finland is also free, even for non-EU foreigners. (Memo to students: if your college charges you full tuition to attend the University of Helsinki when you take a semester abroad, they're ripping you off.) This is widely seen as a bedrock principle and is unlikely to change anytime soon, at least for Finnish (and thus EU) citizens. But Finland also has a recently-established system of polytechnic institutions that are eager to grow in stature and compete with the more prestigous, long-established research universities. The national legislature is currently considering an ambitious shake-up of the whole postsecondary system that would give the institutions more license to raise private money and otherwise act in a more autonomous, self-interested way--to be more like American institutions, in other words. At some point, the tuition question will likely end up on the table.

From a policy perspective, there are basically three options: no tuition, market-rate tuition, or somewhere in between. Pure market rate tuition keeps low- and middle-income students out of college and reduces overall educational attainment. No tuition solves that problem but has side effects like legal expertise slowly dissipating in the Tuscan sun, as well as Finnish humanities students taking epic amounts of time to complete their degrees. It also makes universities wholly dependant on the economic fortunes of the state and the whims of politicians for funding.

The best solution, in theory, is somewhere in between--highly subsidized but not non-existent tuition, so students have a stake in their education and universities have multiple sources of revenue. The problem is that of three options, this is by far the least stable, because the various actors involved have fundamentally different interests, and public tuition policy becomes a 24/7 arena in which those interests constantly collide. Students, like all consumers, want the best possible value. Public policymakers want universities to produce the maximum possible number of well-educated graduates using some finite level of resources. Universities want as much money as they can get from everyone. From the standpoint of pure rational self-interest, it always makes sense for a publicly-subsidized university to raise tuition, as long as they keep it somewhere below the market rate. Since the distance between the subsidized rate and the market rate is generally quite large, there's a lot of potential for change--and thus, things to argue about. 

The only way to manage this is to maintain some degree of shared values among all three parties whereby everyone recognizes--and on some level, accedes to--the interests of others. This is easier to do in a country like Finland, a nation of 5.5 million people who are unusually homogenous and committed to egalitarian ideals. America is a more unruly and complicated place. Diversity and self-interest have given us a tremendously robust and successful higher education system (at least at the top end). But it also makes it hard to agree on important things. 

The Big Picture

One of the benefits of spending a whole week doing nothing but learn about a single foreign education system is that it forces you to consider the totality of things in a way that's actually very difficult in one's home environment. For example, I spend very little energy wondering how America's schools could be improved if we implemented a financing system whereby the federal government provides 80 percent of school resources, rather than the 10 percent it actually provides, because the odds of such a policy coming to exist in my lifetime are very low. That's just not how we roll in the United States. But of course the basic finance structure does matter, a lot, and--crucially--affects how much other things matter. Every piece of the system is contingent on other pieces and the overall design. 

This also underscores the absurdity of education policy arguments that go something like this: Country A is kicking our tail on some agreed-upon measure of achievement. Country A has Policy X, which is very different than our policy. Therefore, implementation of Policy X here in America will improve achievement. People say stuff like this all the time, and their arguments are generally given a lot of weight.

But they shouldn't be, at least not if they're presented in such in simplistic way. Take, for example, the issue of school time. There's a growing movement in America to invest a lot of resources in expanding the school day and otherwise increasing the amount of time students are educated. Inevitably, these discussions come around to the fact that countries like Korea and Japan have much longer school years than do we, provide all kinds of after-school tutoring, and generally do much than we do on international tests, particularly in math. Malcolm Gladwell made a version of this argument in his recent book and the school time people trot it out at every opportunity. It's one of those little nuggets of conventional education policy wisdom that everyone knows.

Yet two days ago I sat in a conference room at the Finnish National Board of Education and listened to an education official explain that Finland, which also kicks our tail in math, spends less time on math instruction, both in school and out of school, than does Japan, Korea, other Scandinavian countries, and the OECD average. And Finland has the highest math scores in the world. She didn't present this fact as a puzzle; she offered it as evidence of why Finland does so well. "Learning is efficient in Finland," she said, and this was her proof.

Does this mean that the school time movement is a fraud? Of course not. Long school days and years may indeed be good for Japan, given the nature of Japan, the Japanese, and the rest of the Japanese education system. It may be a good idea in the United States, or some parts of it, given who we are and all the other things we do. Or it may not; there's no way to know without understanding all of the parts and how they fit together. More on those parts and the big picture later this week and next.     

Duncan's Data

On Monday Alexander Russo asked for more information on how Chicago Public Schools have fared under Superintendent Arne Duncan, a likely Secretary of Education candidate. Eduwonkette gave a harsh review of the data, but the truth is a little more mixed.

Since Duncan took over in 2001, Chicago has made statistically significant progress in fourth and eighth grade math and fourth grade reading scores. They're up across all subjects and grades for low-income students, students with disabilities, and English Language Learners (ELL). Low-income students narrowed achievement gaps in all but fourth grade math, while students enrolled in special education and ELL students closed gaps in both eighth grade subjects.

To Eduwonkette's point, the racial achievement gaps have not narrowed as much as we'd like, but blacks are scoring higher in 3/4 categories and Hispanics on all four.

Do these data cement Duncan's candidacy or disqualify it? Neither, really, but probably more the former than the latter.

Another Californian Unemployed

California recently announced that over 26,000 had lost their jobs in the month of October. Its unemployment rate has risen to 8.2 percent, one of the highest levels in the country (only Michigan and Rhode Island are worse off). Yesterday one more fell victim to this trend. David Brewer the Superintendent of Los Angeles Unified, the countries second largest school district, was asked to step down after only two years on the job (LA Time Article). Of course he is better off than the other 26,000 newly unemployed in that he will be leaving with a $517,500 exit package. In fact, to pay for his severance package, it is likely that the district will have find several other educators will join him in the ranks of the unemployed as the district continues to face large budget deficits. Of course maybe he could fill one of the vacancies on the Schwarzenegger’s administration which has had difficulty keeping education advisors. The Governor has had four Secretaries of Education in 5 years. Currently, the Governor’s education advisory team, the Secretary of Education’s Office, is almost empty with the following openings – Secretary of Education, undersecretary, chief of staff, and K-12 assistant secretary.

Tier Ducks

The latest international test results are in, and they bring mostly good news for US educators. Yesterday's release was the fourth edition of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) since the original 1995 administration. Rather than use TIMSS merely for hyperbole, it's worthwhile to look at them more holistically.

First, TIMSS should not be used merely for rankings. While it's technically accurate to say the US had the ninth highest score in 8th grade math, for example, just that number alone does not do justice to the truth. Five countries (Chinese Taipei, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan) scored significantly above us, five countries scored about where we did (Hungary, England, Russia, Lithuania, and the Czech Republic), and 37 countries scored well below us (including places like Australia, Sweden, and Norway). Similar tiers exist across fourth and eighth grades for math and science.

The results are meant to show interesting across-time comparisons as well, and in that respect, we're doing quite well. Our scores have risen both in raw numbers and against the average. At the same time, we've also narrowed gaps in mathematics since 1995 for blacks and whites, whites and Hispanics, and low- and high-achievers:

• 4th grade white-black gap fell from 84 to 67
• 4th grade white-Hispanic gap fell from 48 to 46
• 8th grade white-black gap fell from 97 to 76
• 8th grade white-Hispanic gap fell from 73 to 58
  

Despite this progress, the biggest difference in the scores of US students is not between countries, but rather remains within our own. In fourth grade math, the effect size of US students attending high-income versus low-income schools is 1.4 times as large as the difference between US students and the highest performing country. In science, the effect size by income is three times what it is between the US and the leading nation. Income gaps continue to persist at levels higher than all others, and that should be the real story out of these results.

Edu-Jobs

If you're looking for a job in the education world, this might be a good place to start. It's the Public Charter Schools Job Board, and it lists openings nationwide for everything from teachers and principals to assessment specialists and chief financial officers.

Finland Cont'd.

As you'd expect, Finland's child care policies are more generous than ours; Matt Yglesias explains more here and here. Meanwhile, on the teaching front, all K-12 teachers are required to go through rigorous university-based training, in most cases through a master's degree. But only 10 - 12% of applicants to university teaching programs are accepted. In other words, the system seems to be roughly what you'd get if you locked Linda Darling-Hammond and Wendy Kopp in a room and didn't let them out until they'd struck a grand bargain about the nature of teacher selection and training. This raises some interesting path dependency-type questions about education; viz. the extent to which various generally admired aspects of the Finnish education system are contingent on the caliber of its teaching workforce and the resulting implications, or lack thereof, for American policy.

We're moving our way through the Finnish education system chronologically, starting with early childcare centers on Monday, lower secondary yesterday, upper secondary today, and higher education later in the week. The school we visited yesterday is in the part of town where many recent immigrants live and thus belies Finland's reputation for total racial / ethnic homogeneity. The biggest immigrant populations, we are told, come from Russia, Estonia, and Somalia. Oh, and Iraqi refugees of course, which is just wonderful to contemplate as an American.  

Meanwhile, I won 300 euros playing blackjack in the Helsinki Grand Casino last night. Gambling is awesome! Seriously, I don't know why people don't do it more often. 

Equality

Nordic countries are famous for their egalitarian attitudes and social policies, and so far the Finns have said nothing to contradict this. In the U.S., there's significant variance in funding between school districts. (Contrary to popular wisdom, this is not primarily a function of differences in local property wealth--state funding passed local funding as the single largest source of school revenue in the 1970s and roughly two-thirds of inter-district funding variance nationwide is a function of wealth differences between states, not differences within states. The richest states have roughly twice the taxable wealth per-student compared to the poorest, and this matches inter-state spending differences almost exactly.)  In Finland, we are told, funding is centralized and equitable; this morning the principal of a school we were visiting claimed that "It doesn't matter if you're rich or poor, you go to the same school." This kind of equality is a function of a lot more than funding, of course, extending also to a national curricula and an unusually high-quality pool of well-educated teachers. 

This can create conflict with the natural desire of parents to provide more to their children, as with the case of a famous Formula One driver (last week we were told that Finns specialized in certain occupations, including race car drivers, ice hockey goalies, and international diplomats) who wanted to pay for an extra teacher specifically to benefit his son, who attended the school we visited. The principal said no, that wouldn't be possible, causing the driver to rant about this $%^&ing communist system, etc. 

Now he's supposedly planning to come to America and drive for NASCAR. So there may be some self-selection at work here as well. 

Convicted

Earlier this year I wrote a long magazine story about four African-American drug dealers from West Baltimore--essentially, the real-life guys from The Wire--who, after being arrested and indicted on a raft of federal murder, drugs, weapons, and conspiracy charges, suddenly began using a bizzare constitutional fundamentalist defense that has origins among white supremacist militia crazy people. When the story was published, they hadn't actually gone to trial yet; I just assumed they would be convicted since their defense amounts to legal gibberish. Yesterday that's exactly what happened; all four were convicted on most of the charges, three of them for first-degree murder. 

The Ryan Leaf Syndrome

What do leaders in other industries do when they aren't certain about which credentials matter for success? If the markets for football quarterbacks and financial advisers are any indication, as Malcolm Gladwell argues they should be, education leaders must be willing to interview and try out many candidates for teaching jobs.

Making professional sports predictions based on collegiate (and sometimes high school) success is notoriously difficult. Gladwell uses the especially difficult case of NFL quarterbacks to make his point: NFL teams, despite watching hours of live game films and testing players' speed, agility, strength, and intelligence, still are pretty bad at predicting which quarterbacks will eventually be successful in the pros. They make horrible decisions based on their faulty decision-making that have real consequences for their franchise.

Take the case of Ryan Leaf, a wildly successful college quarterback for the Washington State Cougars. The San Diego Chargers traded three draft picks, a reserve linebacker, and a Pro-Bowl running back to move up one space, from second to third, just to have the right to draft Leaf in 1998. The Indianapolis Colts were drafting #1, and there was serious debate about whether they should opt for Leaf or the other top quarterback in the draft, a guy by the name of Peyton Manning. The Colts took Manning, the Chargers Leaf, and one became a household name. But before we knew which one it would be, the Chargers believed they had a franchise quarterback. They lavished Leaf with a four-year, $31 million contract and an $11 million signing bonus. Before beginning his first season, Leaf said he was, "looking forward to a 15 year career, a couple of trips to the Super Bowl, and a parade through downtown San Diego."

Leaf started the 1999 season well, becoming only the third rookie quarterback in history to lead his team to a 2-0 (preseason) start. But by his third game, Leaf managed to complete just one of his 15 passes. It went for only four yards, and he fumbled three times. He was benched after nine games in which he threw 13 interceptions compared to only two touchdowns. After bouncing around the league, Leaf was forced to retire in disgrace at the age of 26.

This is what happens when an organization bases their personnel decisions completely on what happened in the past. Leaf had all the tools--he threw the ball with speed and precision, had succeeded in major college sports, and had the body to withstand the demands of the National Football League--but he couldn't cut it, and his team suffered the consequences.

Contract that experience with how financial advisers are recruited. As anyone who's seen The Pursuit of Happyness or read Gladwell's piece understands, financial advisers have few input requirements. Instead, they're chosen through a highly competitive process. A wide open field of candidates--the guy highlighted in Gladwell's article regularly interviews at least 20 candidates per job opening--are whittled down based on work habits, not necessarily on their education credentials. Then, after an intensive review period, they are given an apprentice role. After another three or four years, the firm is finally in possession of what it considers high-quality financial advisers. This is a lengthy and expensive process, and it requires extensive human capital development and a comprehensive system for sorting high- and low-achievers.

If we apply these lessons to human capital development in education, we start to understand that the traditional teacher professionalization model is backward. We shouldn't even try to sort out the difference between the Ryan Leafs and the Peyton Mannings of the teaching world. Instead, we should break down barriers to entry, encourage high-quality applicants from diverse backgrounds, and use some initial criteria to sort applicants based on work ethic and intelligence, but then focus most of of our attention on what happens on the job. Until school districts have the data and political courage to do so, they'll be like NFL teams choosing between Tim Tebow, Sam Bradford, Colt McCoy, Graham Harrell, or Chase Daniel. They're all fine, but which one will be great and which one will be Ryan Leaf?

Reason to Worry

The Chronicle of Higher Education's Paul Basken reports today that student loan providers are worrying about the economic health of colleges. Private colleges that don't have a large endowment and are heavily dependent on tuition for revenue could face problems balancing their budgets in light of the recent tightening in the private student loan market. Students are having a harder time taking out the private student loans needed to pay tuition, meaning that they are likely to move to a lower cost public college, a 2-year institution, or just stop attending altogether. And if small private colleges can't meet their enrollment goals, they may be facing a serious financial problem.

But this situation isn't just the result of another credit crunch in need of a bailout. In fact, private loan debt was too easy to get for a while, meaning that many students who could not afford large, high-priced student loans were getting them anyway. In that sense, the recent restriction of private lending is a correction to the market (much like the reduction in subprime home loans). And, during the time of easy credit, many colleges engaged in some convoluted tuition pricing - raising the sticker price while providing lots of merit aid to recruit high scoring students.

Basken quotes Daniel Meyers, president of First Marblehead, a leading private loan company, as saying that "colleges are experiencing 'this very strange effect' where more than 1,000 institutions are 'all trying to charge $45,000 or $46,000 a year, most very unsuccessfully...and consumers have woken up to be much more discerning people'." More discerning consumers are not a bad thing - before the credit crunch, many students were able to take on a lot of debt for a degree that wasn't worth the price tag.

When we return to more normal credit markets, hopefully both lenders and students will have become more discerning consumers, with lenders doing a better job of assessing student risk factors and the value of degrees, and with students thinking critically about whether a particular college is really worth a $45,000 price tag.

Helsinki...

...is very dark this time of year. I knew this was true in theory, but having never ventured this far north in the winter before, I wasn't quite prepared for arriving at 3:30 PM, i.e. dusk, walking around the city at 4:30 PM, which might as well be 4:30 AM in terms of darkness, having dinner, going to bed, sleeping for eight hours, waking up, having breakfast, getting into a van, arriving at a day care facility for our scheduled tour, and it's still dark. It's a Fiddler on the Roof light pattern, basically--sunrise, sunset, all in the space of about six hours. That said, the people are friendly and as is always the case when you travel abroad, one's sense of possibility as to how things in America might be different is expanded, in terms of everything from public policy and cultural attitudes to food and bathroom fixtures.