Starving the Schools Into Submission, Cont'd

Mike Petrilli responds to the post below and comments from Eduwonk about the Petrilli/Finn/Hess strategy to catalyze a new era of education reform through the financial immiseration of the K-12 school system by concluding:

...if you want taxpayers to provide extra resources, let’s see some serious reforms. And that means not accepting the status quo as a given.

Again, I think Mike is having trouble adjusting the realities of the world we're living in today. The last 25 years have been times of plenty in America, at least for people in the upper strata of the economy. From 1983 to 2007 we had only three mild, short recessions and a great deal of real growth. More overall wealth meant more money available for public services. As a result there have been few if any severe, lasting cuts to funding for K-12 education. Most of the salient arguments have been about whether to give the schools more money. When those proposals were debated, many people made arguments more or less like the one Mike makes above: historically, the public school system hasn't shown very much upside resource sensitivity, in the sense that new dollars haven't led to a commensurate increase in student learning. Therefore new investments should be contingent on reforms to ensure that the new dollars actually make a difference. It's a valid argument and one with which I generally agree. There's also evidence to back it up: As I've noted elsewhere, in the early 1990s Massachusetts reformed it's funding system and spent new money while simultaneously putting in place an ambitious system of standards and accountability. Ten years later, it had vaulted ahead of other states in posting the best test scores in the nation.

But that was then. We are now dealing with a set of circumstances that few people alive today have experienced first-hand. Did Mike see the terrifying unemployment graph in the New York Times this morning? Here it is:

That's the picture of a 747 in free fall with a lot air yet remaining before the ground. It's far from obvious that the TARP program is working. The stimulus bill hasn't been passed. The Fed can't drop interest rates any lower. We're in deep trouble; the only question is how bad for how long.

State and local tax revenues, which fund over 90% of public education, are going to take a huge hit. So the question on the table is this: do we pass a stimulus bill that includes state and local revenue sharing, in which case public services like K-12 education will experience serious budget cuts, or do we not, in which case public services like K-12 education will experience extremely serious budget cuts. That's the choice that Petrilli characterizes as a matter of "extra resources." In blithely transferring the logic of how best to spend more money to the present day, Petrilli, Finn, and Hess are asserting that the optimal circumstances for education reform can be found among varying degrees of fiscal pain, as if marginal changes in funding are indistinguishable regardless of where they fall relative to current norms.

This is also a good time to make another point about school funding. It's often observed that spending on K-12 education has increased much faster than inflation over time on a per-student basis. This is true. It's also true that some of those dollars have been spent in strategically ineffective ways, particularly in hiring more teachers rather than better teachers. But a lot of the money was spent simply doing what a decent society does--transferring some of the wealth created in the private sector to public sector employees whose efforts make the private sector growth possible in the first place. I've suggested that education could be more productive with technology, but that argument holds much more for secondary and post-secondary grades. Younger children in particular will always need real live teachers to learn. Some of those children will go on to create vast fortunes and it's not unreasonable that a small fraction of that wealth be enjoyed by their teacher, or the person who teaches their children. From 1983 to 2007, real GDP per capita in the United States increased by almost two-thirds. Educators deserved to share in that growth, and I'm sure many could plausibly argue they should have shared more.

Science Magazine Enters the Arena

I recommend the January 2, 2009 issue of SCIENCE, containing a special section on education and technology. With articles on subjects such as cognitive tutors, open education resources, and technology and testing, it's a worthy read (pesky subscription required, view overview and article abstracts). More importantly, the edition represents a welcome commitment by the magazine to increase coverage of scientific research and science issues in education. As editor-in-chief Bruce Alberts concludes in his opening editorial, "we now recognize that we must look at the 'art' of education through the critical lens of science..."

The School Poverty Gambit

In National Review Online, Mike Petrilli, Checker Finn, and Rick Hess argue that any kind of stimulus-driven state revenue sharing program that prevented painful budget cuts to the public schools would be bad for students, because what the public schools really need right now are painful budget cuts:

There’s scant evidence that an extra dollar invested in today’s schools delivers an extra dollar in value — and ample evidence that this kind of bail-out will spare school administrators from making hard-but-overdue choices about how to make their enterprise more efficient and effective...Education, then, cries out for a good belt-tightening. A truly tough budget situation would force and enable administrators to take those steps. They could rethink staffing, take a hard look at class sizes, trim ineffective personnel, shrink payrolls, consolidate tiny school districts, replace some workers with technology, weigh cost-effective alternatives to popular practices, reexamine statutes governing pensions and tenure, and demand concessions from the myriad education unions...Team Obama and its Congressional allies could...require the various education interest groups to “take a haircut,” just like auto workers, investors, and shareholders have had to do. As the auto bailout required the U.A.W. to forfeit its beloved “jobs bank,” states taking federal dollars could be required to overhaul their tenure laws, ban “last hired, first fired” rules, experiment with pay-for-performance, make life easier for charter schools, and curb unrealistic pension promises.

So, a combination of regulatory malpractice in DC along with greed and incompetence on a world-historical scale on Wall Street creates the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, pushing the already-shaky American auto industry over the brink. Republican senators from non-union states see this as an opportunity to destroy the U.A.W., which bears a significant but ultimately (having not caused said economic crisis nor designed and marketed cars people don't want to buy) minority share of the responsibility for the auto industry's woes. And Hess, Finn, and Petrilli say "Hey, good idea, and while we're at it, let's go after the teachers unions too!" Investors and shareholders are being forced to take a haircut because the greedy, incompetent companies they own drove themselves into bankruptcy. Teachers are supposed to take a haircut because--just because?

Underlying the larger argument is the idea that the public schools will implement a whole suite of needed reforms if only we can put them under sufficiently terrible financial stress. I am aware of no evidence to suggest that this will work. It's true, as the authors note, that funding for public education has grown faster than inflation over time and that the system hasn't had to deal with a debilitating financial shock in a long time (Most people, I suspect, consider this to be a good thing.) But there have been recessions and financial crises and plenty of marginal changes in the rate of education spending growth. There have even been budget cuts, once you start to break down the numbers at the local level. Are there any examples--any?--of a state or school district that has ever responded to a fiscal crisis with reforms that actually benefitted students in the long run? Overall spending differences also provide some useful information here. Which state has better education policies and results: Mississippi or Massachusetts? 

Or to put it another way, Petrilli et al seem to think that because more money won't make a bad school system better (which is often true), less money will do the trick. In reality, the most likely consequence of massive school budget cuts--besides taking a lot of money out of the hands of middle-class workers who will respond by reducing consumption and driving us further into a Depression--is to cause everyone to hunker down in survival mode and make school reform harder. Successful school models, e.g. KIPP, often require extra resources to implement. Ditto grand bargain proposals like the Michelle Rhee tenure-for-merit-pay plan. The idea that the public school establishment can be impoverished into submission is unsupported by evidence and too clever by half. 

The Nature of Teaching

Before the holiday, Chad posted an item about a November '08 NBER study by Tom Kane and others titled "Can You Recognize An Effective Teacher When You Recruit One?" Their conclusion: not really. Even though the study included "a number of non-traditional predictors of effectiveness including teaching specific content knowledge, cognitive ability, personality traits, feelings of self-efficacy, and scores on a commercially available teacher selection instrument," they were still only able to predict about 12 percent of subsequent teacher effectivness, leading them to conclude:

...schools and school districts wishing to increase the effectiveness of their teacher workforce may be aided by the systematic use of a broad set of information on new candidates, and particularly if they gather information outside the realm of traditional teaching credentials. Nevertheless, our results are also consistent with the notion that data on job performance may be a more powerful tool for improving teacher selection than data available at the recruitment stage.

They're being charitable. 12 percent isn't very much. It's 12 percent. And that amount is consistent with (and in most cases, larger than) pretty much every other similar study that's been conducted. They all point to same the conclusion: the nature of the teaching profession is such that you simply can't predict ahead of time with any degree of accuracy who's going to be a good (and bad) teacher. 

Chad's post produced pushback in the comments section, and in general this whole line of reasoning (popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in a recent article) has been attacked by people who are in the teacher preparation and certification business. I think they're wrong, and in being wrong they're putting parochial concerns ahead of the larger best interests of the teaching profession.

The success of an individual in any given job is generally a function of three things: 1) Personal qualities like intelligence, motivation, diligence, creativity, discipline, organization, inter-personal skills, work ethic, etc.; 2) knowledge and skills related to the job; and 3) the nature of the organization in which they work. But the relative importance of these three factors in terms of success varies widely among professions. Once you get past a fairly minimal level of competence, there's very little difference between the best McDonald's cashier and the worst. It's a simple job requiring little training and there's no way to be great at it. 

Some jobs are more complex and important but still highly dependent on knowledge and skills. My uncle, for example, repairs commercial air conditioning units for a living. It's complicated work. You could plunk a Nobel-prize winning physicist down in front of a huge broken HVAC unit and, unless he had the right training, he'd have no way to fix it. Nor would he be able to figure out how to fix it on his own. And if he did receive the right training, it's unlikely that he'd be much better at HVAC repair than my uncle, despite his (presumably) genius I.Q. HVAC units are a lot more complicated than cash registers and as such people who repair them are more well-paid, but once you learn to fix them, they're fixed--they can't really be fantastically well-fixed. 

Other professions are different. A good friend of mine, for example, finished her law degree at Georgetown a few years ago and is now practicing appellate law. It turns out that she's really good at this. But while she couldn't do her job without the knowledge she learned in law school, that knowledge isn't what distinguishes her from other lawyers. It's her personal qualities--she's an unusually smart, analytic, creative and hard-working person. And not coincidentally, law is a profession where there is huge variance in effectiveness, where greatness is absolutely possible, and great lawyers are paid and recognized as such. The same is true in professions like medicine, journalism, business and the arts. In every case, knowledge and training matter, but it's the relatively large influence of personal qualities that leads to the possibility of greatness and all that entails. 

The most important conclusion to draw from Kane's research is that teaching is one of those professions too. Gladwell built his article around the non-predictability of teacher effectiveness, and that's gotten a lot of attention because it has implications for certain concrete policy issues like teacher certification. But the larger, more important point is that that non-predictability flows from the large variance in teacher effectiveness. Some teachers are much, much better than others, as is always the case in professions that depend highly on personal qualities--as I've defined them, or in terms like "expert thinking" and "complex communications" (per Murnane and Levy), or something else. Yes, these qualities can be improved and inculcated to an extent, and the quality of the school in which people teach matters too. But think back to the best teacher you ever had. How much of their success compared to the worst teacher you ever had was a function of what they learned in graduate school? And of course there's the obvious example of higher education where there are also great teachers and terrible ones and huge variance in effectiveness in a profession where little or no formal teacher training or certification is required.

The problem with the teaching profession as currently organized is that it puts too much emphasis on the things that matter less (note: I'm not saying they don't matter at all), i.e. knowledge and skills, and not enough emphasis on the things that matter more, i.e. personal qualities like intelligence, work ethic, etc. By contrast, my friend wouldn't have gotten a job as an appellate lawyer if she hadn't clerked for a federal judge, and she wouldn't have gotten the clerkship if she hadn't graduated magna cum laude from a Top 20 law school, and both of those things--the grades and the admission to Georgetown--were in turn a function of the personal qualities that make a great lawyer. The legal profession is organized to select and filter for the things that matter in lawyering in a way that the teaching profession--where ideas like "Top 20 school" and "magna cum laude" mean very little--is not. And that applies not just to hiring but everything that happens afterward--great lawyers are rewarded and recognized and credentialed in all kinds of meaningful ways that teachers aren't. 

In other words, people who insist on maintaining the primacy of knowledge and skills in the teaching are standing in the way of a goal they often profess to hold dear: elevating teachers to the ranks of true professionals. It's understandable, in a way--there's a lot of institutional and professional prestige in the current way of things, and moving away from it involves an idea that seems contradictory--that there are severe limits on the extent to which good teaching can be taught. But that's what the data show, and the sooner our attitudes and policies reflect that, the better off teachers will be.

Barista Training in Chicago

From the Chicago Sun-Times today:

Chicago public school bureaucrats skirted competitive bidding rules to buy 30 cappuccino/espresso machines for $67,000, with most of the machines going unused because the schools they were ordered for had not asked for them, according to a report by the CPS Office of Inspector General.

And apparently these machines weren't intended for the teacher's lounge:

"We also look at it as a waste of money because the schools didn't even know they were getting the equipment, schools didn't know how to use the machines and weren't prepared to implement them into the curriculum," Sullivan (the Inspector General) said.

A new barista training program, perhaps?

The Situation Room

Presuming all goes well and I'm not bumped for someone more photogenic and/or an international crisis of some kind, I'll be on CNN's The Situation Room today between 4:15 and 4:45, where they're using Malia and Sasha Obama's first day of school as an excuse to talk about the DC public schools they won't be attending, why said schools are so bad, Michelle Rhee, etc. CNN didn't ask but in case anyone's wondering I think the Obamas are perfectly justified in sending their children to the best schools they're able to find and afford. I also hope that they and the many other political and business leaders in Washington DC who are similarly fortunate feel a commensurate special responsibility to help give all of DC's schoolchildren the opportunity to attend a public school of similar high quality.