Positive Reinforcement

The ES on-line discussion on positive incentives continues today (here). Join Michael Barber, Sandy Kress, Dominic Brewer, Andy Rotherham and myself in discussing the role of positive incentives in our school system. While the conversation started off focused on positive incentives and school reward programs, we quickly broadened the scope. This is in recognition that positive incentives need to be a part of a more comprehensive education reform approach. These thought leaders saw strong ties between school rewards and performance pay. For performance pay approaches to be successful and sustainable, there needs to be significant improvements in teacher evaluation processes. The discussion has touched on national standards, quality assessments and measurement tools, school autonomy, serving special need populations and how these issues relate to positive incentives. Sandy informs us about the new Texas accountability system just adopted by their Legislature and the role of positive incentives in it. Michael and Sandy discuss the importance of positive incentive in media relations. Plus as a bonus, Michael provides some marital advice. I started applying his sage words this morning in my house. So join the discussion and get your questions answered as well.

Charter Schools and Budget Battles

ConnCAN sent out an alert last Friday about Connecticut's Governor Rell's latest budget, which includes substantial cuts to the state's charter schools. Nevermind that Connecticut's charter schools already receive less per-student than traditional public schools and face caps on the number of students they can enroll. Or that, according to this report, they have greater student achievement gains than traditional public schools. Still, charter schools are singled out for cuts in the budget.

And Connecticut charters are not alone. Charter schools in Washington, D.C., which educate 36 percent of the city's public school students are facing cuts to their facilities funding - cuts the traditional public schools are not facing. Earlier this year, charter schools in New York faced a similar fate. And the New Hampshire legislature is debating a proposal to cap the number of students enrolled in charter schools (and I thought the state motto was "Live Free or Die"?) below current enrollment levels, meaning some students would have to leave their schools.

States are facing hard times right now, and Governors and state legislators must make difficult choices, including cutting public school budgets. But, these cuts should not hurt some public schools (and charter schools are public schools) more than others - as part of the public school system, charter school students deserve the same levels of public funding and support as their traditional public school counterparts. It will be a sad day if Governors and state legislatures across the country decide to use charter schools, and the disproportionately low-income and minority students they serve, as an easy out for difficult budget decisions.

Diplomas and Dropouts

Postsecondary institutions with similar student bodies do not achieve similar outcomes. Even among the most competitive institutions, where entering students must be in the top 10-20 percent of their high school class and score above 655 on each section of the SAT or above 29 on the ACT, graduation rates vary widely. These institutions accept only about 30 percent of their applicants, yet completion rates range from 60 to 97 percent. This the variance for the top high school students attending the most presitigious colleges and universitieis; it gets much worse for less qualified students and less prestigious institutions.

These differences show that improving graduation rates is not just about lack of money, student motivation, or adequate high school preparation; institutions matter too. Read this article to find out more about institutional differences, and read Kevin Carey's suggestions on how institutions can improve.

Dancing Around the Elephant in the Room

A few weeks ago,  conservative education historian / contrarian Diane Ravitch was asked to judge a "best education reform idea" contest. The first entry came from the "Center for Union Facts," a sort of clearinghouse for union-hating agitprop. The "Center" proposed to--and I'm not paraphrasing here--"demonize" teachers unions. With billboards and radio and stuff. Ravitch noted that the highest-performing state in the nation is, by a wide margin, the strong union state of Massachusetts, and that the highest performing nation in the world is heavily unionized Finland, and concluded that the "kill the unions and everything will be great" strategy of education reform didn't seem to hold much water.

This set off a lengthy roundabout on the right side of the edublogosphere featuring a wide range of opinions, everything from "No, teachers unions are always terrible and must be stopped" all the way to "Yes, teachers unions are always terrible but it's possible to have a good school system anyway, although not as good as it could have theoretically otherwise been." 

At no point did anyone note the other thing Massachusetts and Finland have in common: they're both chock-full of socialists. 

Seriously, who thinks this is a coincidence? Massachusetts is a famous bastion of liberalism while Finland is a Nordic welfare state. According to the anti-tax Tax Foundation, Massachusetts has the fourth-highest corporate income tax rate and the second-highest unemployment insurance taxes. According to the pro-health Kaiser Family Foundation, Massachusetts is one of a minority of states to extend federal SCHIP health insurance benefits to tens of thousands of students from families with income above 200% of the federal poverty line. Finland, meanwhile, cheerfully provides universal daycare, healthcare, and massage therapy for all I know. It's so egalitarian that taxes are 150% of income and everyone is legally required to be friendly, Lutheran, and of equal height. 

Which is not to say that teachers unions aren't sometimes--even often--barriers to smart policy. Bob Costrell, who was there, convincingly recounts the Massachusetts teachers unions' opposition to MCAS exit exams. Readers of this blog know that I disagree with teachers unions--particularly the NEA--on a host of policy issues including teacher pay, certification, schools of education, Teach for America, and No Child Left Behind. 

But I've also been to Finland, and my best guess is that Finnish success is a function of four main factors: fair distribution of school funding, a strong social safety net combined with high-quality family services for all, an unusually smart and well-trained teacher workforce, and a standard, high-quality national curriculum. American teachers unions are, as a rule, in favor of the first two of these things and may yet come around on the fourth.   

In other words, strong unionism may make it harder to implement good education policies, but it may also be the natural outgrowth of political and social attitudes that make children easier to educate. That doesn't mean we can't have it all--without it all, the odds of really making a dent in the achievement gap are long. But that means engaging teachers unions, not pursuing futile dreams of tearing them down.  

Mine News

Newspapers, and to a lesser extent magazines, are in a downward spiral. Readership is down so they cut staff. Quality suffers so readers quit subscribing. Advertisers see dwindling readers and go elsewhere. There's a debate about where this all leads--Are we just going to rely on a mass of citizen of bloggers/ journalists? Will the government or private foundations have to step in to finance a dying industry?--but the downward spiral is not likely to stop until news outlets begin to think less about their medium and more about delivery of their content.

Increasingly we rely on RSS feeds, Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, and blogs to get our news. I don't read one newspaper in the morning; I read six, sometimes more, but only the sections and articles I care about. In other words, it's not that I'm not reading, it's that I don't count any single outlet as indispensable. If one starts charging for features that I want or need, I will take my eyes elsewhere.

Some traditional media outlets are experimenting with hybrid blends where they charge for some content and not for others. Others give free preview periods, presumably to drum up interest, where users can view the article(s) during that time only. Both of these routes are destined for failure, because all it takes to subvert them is one enterprising person who copies it, emails it to their friends, or posts it on their blog. The New Yorker blocked an article on Steve Barr, the founder of Green Dot charter schools, but the author made it available elsewhere. Mother Jones gave a free preview for Dana Goldstein's sensational article on Democrats and education. The magazine has it blocked now, but Google cached the entire thing.

As bad as those experiments are, one from Time has promise. It's called Mine Magazine, and it lets users select their favorite (Time Inc.) magazines, has them answer a few questions, then signs them up for their own personalized magazine. The first 31,000 "subscribers" got a free print edition, and the first 200,000 got an online version. This trial run has only one sponsor, Toyota, but there's no reason it couldn't be rolled out on a larger scale with more participating publications and advertisers. My personal magazine would have exercise tips from Men's Health and Runner's World, recipes from Gourmet or others, news from the New York Times and Washington Post magazines, and the articles (yes, articles) and jokes from Playboy. It would have sports stories from Sports Illustrated and ESPN, but also from non-traditional sports outlets like The New Yorker. I currently pay for none of these, and probably won't in the future, but I have to think advertisers would pay for the cost to publish Mine Magazine if they knew my demographics and knew I'd read it.

We're not going back to a world where the majority of people subscribed to their local daily newspaper. Most of us have our own personalized information-gathering system already; media outlets who fail to see that will continue their decline.

Think Positive

You get more flies with honey than vinegar. In Psychology 101 you learn that people are more responsive to positive reinforcement than negative reinforcement or punishment. While both positive incentives and punishment can be effective at modifying behavior, punishment tends to lead to other negative responses like anger and resentment. Yet, much of our current federal education policy emphasizes the negative. And, as Psych 101 predicts there has often been a lot of anger and resentment about the law. NCLB requires states to develop an accountability system that has both sanctions and rewards. Specifically,

“Each State accountability system shall … include sanctions and rewards, such as bonuses and recognition, the State will use to hold local educational agencies and public elementary schools and secondary schools accountable for student achievement and for ensuring that they make adequate yearly progress in accordance with the State’s definition.”

Yet, the focus of NCLB has been on failure – student failing to achieve proficiency, schools failing to make AYP, interventions and sanctions. States have spent little time if any on the positive incentive side of the discussion. Why have educators ignored this basic lesson of psychology?

The Department of Education's $5 billion in "Race to the Top" and innovation funds has reignited a discussion of the role of positive incentives in motivating and supporting school reform efforts. With this boost in funding, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has a chance to reward what he refers to as "islands of excellence" in school achievement and build on those proven success stories. Join us starting tomorrow through Friday (June 3–5) for an online discussion on how policymakers can use rewards and positive incentives to encourage excellence in schools. This discussion will feature: Education Sector's Andrew Rotherham and Robert Manwaring, and experts Sir Michael Barber of McKinsey & Company; Sandy Kress, a key architect of NCLB; and Dominic Brewer, associate dean and professor at the University of Southern California. Submit your questions starting June 3, and join the conversation!
More info here.

The Condition of Education: Master's Degrees in Education

Over the last decade, the number of teachers in this country has increased faster than student enrollment. This is due almost exclusively to class size reductions at the elementary level: while the student/ teacher ratio in secondary schools was almost identical in 2006 to what it was in 1990, in elementary schools it has fallen by 14 percent. Since teacher salaries are by far the largest expenditure in schools, the drop in class size equates to a sizable sum in total expenditures on schools. None of this is new to someone who follows education policy closely. What is new is that teachers increasingly possess not just the traditional bachelor's degree, but many more now possess Master's degrees in education. That has significant consequences for the field.

The Condition of Education published a chart showing common undergraduate degrees awarded in 1996-97 and 2006-07. Of engineering, visual and performing arts, psychology, health professions, education, social sciences, and business, education was the only field with flat growth. A grand total of 525 more students graduated with bachelor's degrees in education in 2007 than did in 1997, a growth of 0.5 percent. This compared to 101,597 more business students, a growth rate of 45 percent.

For Master's degrees the story is the opposite. Education had the highest growth rate of all fields, with 62 percent more graduates in 2007 than in 1997.

At first blush this might seem like a good thing--more qualified people entering an important profession is a good thing, right? The trouble is that the research on the value of a Master's degree in the classroom has consistently shown little to no effect. In other words, these degrees are little more than additional credentials, credentials that cost districts around the country a lot of money. How much money? Below are the salary schedules for teachers in Santa Ana, California and Omaha, Nebraska. Scroll over the dollar signs to see how each of these districts has opted to compensate teachers according to their years of service and credentials.

Fortunately most districts pay their teachers more like Omaha than Santa Ana. Santa Ana's mountain is an extraordinarily strong incentive for teachers to earn a Master's degree, a degree that has been shown to matter little in educational effectiveness. Yet, even Omaha's more modest bonus for Master's degrees is an incentive that costs the district millions of dollars each year (not to mention the fact that most districts subsidize the cost of teachers going back to school to earn those same higher credentials).

At a time when district budgets are under strain, the Master's bonus should be reconsidered. If you want to learn more about how this can be done and the impacts of the way districts structure their salary schedules, read my recent report on the topic here.

More on the "Condition of Education" here, here, and here.

Words of Wisdom

As Frank Bruni notes, giving a good commencement speech isn't easy. For every brilliant address from the likes of David Foster Wallace, you get a lot of Joe Biden, or worse. Yet the form endures--people like getting advice that they can reflect back on years later and say, "You know, in retrospect, that made a lot of sense. Maybe I shouldn't have ignored it and learned it all the hard way on my own." 

But only about 40 percent of people earn college degrees in this country and only a subset of those attend commencement ceremonies. Most people go straight to the workforce--what about them? Well, you could do much worse than recall what Jason Isbell's father told him as he set off into the world to make his way as a musician. These are the lyrics to "Outfit," from the Drive-By Truckers' tremendously good 2002 album Decoration Day:

You want to grow up to paint houses like me, a trailer in my yard till you're 23
You want to be old after 42 years, keep dropping the hammer and grinding the gears

Well, I used to go out in a Mustang, a 302 Mach One in green.
Me and your Mama made you in the back and I sold it to buy her a ring.
And I learned not to say much of nothing and I figured you already know
but in case you don’t or maybe forgot, I’ll lay it out real nice and slow

Don’t call what your wearing an outfit. Don’t ever say your car is broke.
Don’t worry about losing your accent, a Southern Man tells better jokes.
Have fun but stay clear of the needle. Call home on your sister’s birthday.
Don’t tell them you’re bigger than Jesus, don’t give it away.

Six months in a St. Florian foundry, they call it Industrial Park.
Then hospital maintenance and Tech School just to memorize Frigidaire parts.
But I got to missing your Mama and I got to missing you too.
So I went back to painting for my old man and I guess that’s what I’ll always do

So don’t try to change who you are boy, and don’t try to be who you ain’t.
And don’t let me catch you in Kendale with a bucket of wealthy-man’s paint.

Don’t call what your wearing an outfit. Don’t ever say your car is broke.
Don’t sing with a fake British accent. Don’t act like your family’s a joke.
Have fun, but stay clear of the needle, call home on your sister’s birthday.
Don’t tell them you’re bigger than Jesus, Don’t give it away.

Don’t give it away.

Turns out good advice is good advice whether you're Polonius or Wallace or a housepainter in Alabama who wants a better life for his son.