Eduwonk.com

Cold And Hot!

2008-05-15T10:29:00.002-04:00

Wow. Fordham has basically gone from one extreme to the other.

Location! Location! Location!

2008-05-15T09:59:00.001-04:00

I hear they're not making any more land...so per the "exhibit 2" in this blog post, expect to see more of that sort of stuff.

Change We Can Believe In!

2008-05-15T09:42:00.004-04:00

That "I don' t give a crap" guy romps to victory in yet another teachers' union election.

Must-See TV

2008-05-15T09:30:00.003-04:00

Andrei Cherny will be on Colbert tonight pitching his outstanding new book "The Candy Bombers."

Greg Anrig Set Me Up!

2008-05-13T22:13:00.003-04:00

I was clearly told there would be no more of this! Or this either...

Research And Ideology

2008-05-13T16:16:00.003-04:00

The first part of this Greg Forster blog post is just more of the back and forth over Sol Stern's recent article on vouchers but the second part is an interesting discussion of how ideology and research intersect. It's worth checking out.

My view has generally been that part of the problem with the debate about vouchers is that people are using research findings about student achievement (that for practical purposes are pretty small effect sizes) as clubs in the debate. If you really think that people should be able to send their child to any school they want at public expense, a view I don't share, then what do you care about a few randomized studies in places like Milwaukee or Cleveland? Likewise, stridently anti-choice advocates are not really arguing an empirical point either. In both cases the viewpoints are ideological and also perfectly legitimate. The debate is really about how to organize education in our society.

But Greg offers an interesting addendum on that point, in terms of how people think about progress and what drives it.

The Peacock Is On!

2008-05-13T15:42:00.002-04:00

NBC's iCue is now up and running. It's a really impressive resource and a glimpse of the future on content. NBC's Adam Jones talks about the initiative here.

Who Lost Merrow?

2008-05-12T07:39:00.001-04:00

John Merrow's WSJ op-ed has the chattering class chattering...

Locked Down?

2008-05-12T07:35:00.003-04:00

It's getting a little dicey at Locke High School in LA, the school transitions to Green Dot in a few months.

Edujobs

2008-05-12T07:33:00.001-04:00

The Consortium for Chicago School Research needs a senior analyst.

Still More Determinism

2008-05-09T15:28:00.004-04:00

I'm tellin' ya, it's the hot thing!

Update: See this, too.

More!

2008-05-09T13:48:00.003-04:00

NCTQ has added more districts and states to its database on teacher contracts and policies. This is a great resource for analysts and researchers. For instance Jane Hannaway and I found it useful in this paper and it could be so useful it could even earn you some cash. (Disc: I was an advisor on this project originally and am on the NCTQ board).

Charter News

2008-05-09T13:28:00.003-04:00

It is charter school week so I guess it wouldn't kill me to do a post...

Credit Where It's Due One: The Department of Education hosted something of a charter school summit on Monday around issues of quality, philanthropy, and policy. To their credit everyone came and left with their First Amendment rights intact and it was a useful exercise. There will be some follow-on documents coming soon, apparently.

Credit Where It's Due Two: If you follow charters don't miss the new RAND analysis on Chicago (pdf). Looks at skimming (prior achievement), demographics, and achievement. Interesting tidbit around grade configuration as well. This report seems to have mostly flown below the radar, that's too bad, it's important.

Charters and Competition: New report out of D.C. on the competitive response to charter schools there. Not surprisingly competition doesn't play out in political or public marketplace the way it might in other sectors. But, the market share that charters have, 25 percent plus in Washington, has helped create the circumstances that are leading to real reform there.

Charters and License: Over at the deuce Kevin Carey makes the point that one of the benefits of chartering is the ending of the exclusive franchise.

Finn On Murray

2008-05-09T08:44:00.001-04:00

This Gadly piece by Checker Finn is well worth checking out.

Determinism Is In!

2008-05-09T08:41:00.000-04:00

It's the new black! First Greg Anrig declares vouchers dead and now disruptive innovation guru Clayton Christensen foresees an online education boom! Possible problem with both takes: Politics.

In the case of Christensen's analysis besides politics there is also the problem that most technology investments are marginal dollar investments and when money gets tight they're the first thing cut or not funded. Plus, not a lot of capital floating around for this sort of thing at the scale it's needed. That's part of why politics, interest groups, etc...play an outsized role in this field.

The Lyon's Den

2008-05-08T17:36:00.002-04:00

Reading Guru and Reading First insider Reid Lyon speaks on the recent evaluation in this new interview.

It's Not Silent Night...

2008-05-08T17:32:00.002-04:00

...on Christmas Eve in the trenches, but this news from Cleveland is nonetheless encouraging...

ATRs Are Back!

2008-05-08T17:26:00.005-04:00

We made it one day completely ATR free...but today, like a bad penny, or $18 million, or $81 million...they're back! TNTP puts out a call for progress that pretty well lays out the issues. All your links on the backstory are in the posts below.

Update: In a comment section below this blogger makes a good point worth repeating again: The ATR problem is an outgrowth of the last contract deal that the city and the UFT signed. But, while that's true, and as I mentioned in my first post on the issue it's a problem everyone saw coming, none of that makes it less of a problem today.

Different

2008-05-08T17:21:00.001-04:00

Another call for differentiated pay...this time from the chair of the MA state board, Paul Reville. It's almost as though it makes sense to align compensation with system goals or something...but we know that's crazy talk...

Class Size Reduction Expansion

2008-05-08T15:57:00.002-04:00

Interesting and well done WaPo article on budget pressures driving some school districts to slightly increase rather than decrease class size. Small classes are not a silver bullet and research pretty clearly indicates that it's a much weaker -- and more expensive -- strategy than some others, like improving teacher effectiveness. That's especially true where there are a dearth of qualified applicants for teaching jobs so reducing class size merely exacerbates quality problems. The research and evidence base here is pretty clear and it is what it is, so contra what a lot of the advocates it's not something that you get to agree or disagree with any more than you can agree or disagree with gravity. The bottom line is that teacher quality matters more.

But, there can be good reasons to lower class sizes even around this evidence base. For instance, with enough qualified teachers it can improve instruction if teachers change how they teach in response. Or, it can provide a competitive edge in the labor market for schools. And, some strategies, for instance giving high school English teachers fewer students so they can teach more writing but increasing class sizes elsewhere to make it work, are the sort of creative redistribution of resources that we need to innovate with in this field (Ted Sizer basically proposed a version of this years ago in the Horace books).

The thing is, those are deliberate strategies around class size. Adjusting them, one way or the other, in response to budget cuts isn't much of a proactive strategy. It seems to me that the class size advocates would get a lot further if rather than trying to argue with a pretty accepted evidence base or push for across the board class size reductions they instead put forward some ideas to enhance quality through reduced class size.

You Make The Call!

2008-05-07T14:55:00.001-04:00

You can read this gibberish, that's all too illustrative of the a lot of the problems with the national education dialogue today, or you can listen to the event itself where ES' new teacher survey was released. A lot of lively debate and questions that the discussants didn't get to live will be answered by panelists and posted on the event page in a few days. The irony here, of course, is that crazies like this could actually find a lot in this report to bolster their positions if they took the time to, you know, read it...

Waiting To Be Won Over

2008-05-06T16:34:00.003-04:00

Steve Farkas, Ann Duffet, Elena Silva, and I collaborated on a new national survey of teachers. A lot of interesting findings, AP has a few here but there is a lot more in there. Basically, something for all sides of all these debates to love and hate, for the most part teachers are waiting to be won over by the various points of view and ideas in today’s education debates. There is an event to discuss the report tomorrow morning in Washington.

Seven Different Kinds Of ATR Smoke!

2008-05-05T22:49:00.004-04:00

In Gotham, it's doomsday! This morning the UFT unleashed their rumored doomsday weapon in the debate over the absent teacher reserve (ATR) via Edwize and ATR chronicler Elizabeth Green.

Essentially they argue that the data that The New Teacher Project used in their report is wrong and that their data shows that the ATR problem is much less than TNTP would have you believe. The UFT argues that a lot of the teachers in question are actually teaching off-budget in schools. TNTP responds here and pushes back on the key points. (Update: The UFT responds to that here.) Read the entire thing but the punchline is that (a) the crux of the TNTP findings seem to stand-up although there may be some noise around the margins and (b) the UFT is using different criteria than TNTP did. To the extent that the dueling analyses become an issue, Eduwonk suggests getting an independent entity, for instance The Times or a panel of experts to put forward some criteria and then evaluate the data against it.

But, in the end, it’s not about the specific numbers per se, the buried lede is in the Green story:

For seven months, the administration has been holding private meetings with the union seeking some way to either fire or cut the pay of members of the pool. Such a change would be historic in city schools long ruled by union efforts to create air-tight job security. The meetings all ended in stalemate.

7 months? Wow, that must have been a good time...But this is the nub of the issue here and also where any compromise lies. The city won't stand for forced placements (meaning putting these teachers in schools over the objections of principals) and the union won't stand for just cutting them loose (TNTP recommends a period of time - different for novices and veterans- before that happens but it sounds like the UFT won't go for it regardless). So what's the deal -- read money needed -- to fix the problem?

School officials seem to think that they can wait this out and win it because this situation simply can't survive public scrutiny over time. They're probably right. Even taking the UFT's numbers (it's a crisis at fire sale prices, only $18 million! ) this would be, as they say, hard to sell at the Rotary Club. Paying people not to work, not temporarily but over time, when it’s documented like this just is not tenable anymore. The UFT is going to have to deal on this at some point and their position most likely gets weaker as time goes on.

Excess Of NYC

2008-05-02T11:07:00.004-04:00

This Daily News editorial pretty much gives the flavor of where things are today on the teacher debate in Gotham. But, rumors are flying about some sort of UFT data doomsday weapon that will undo the TNTP analysis. Readers anxiously await!

Incidentally, why does this issue matter? Because given the trajectory of contract/policy reform this will become an issue in other places, too, albeit on a smaller scale of course.

Also, Eduwonkette, who is quite close to all this so pay attention, raises two issues here that bear mentioning. First, she points out that many of the teachers in the excess pool have never had an unsatisfactory evaluation and puts the data in raw numbers rather than ratios and percents. That's true but not an especially powerful point because most teachers don't, even in the lowest-performing school. This TNTP report on Chicago (pdf) offers one look at that and by all accounts NYC is not materially different. Second, she raises the age-discrimination issue. At the top level it's a real one but there are relatively straightforward mechanisms, even in a weighted-student-funding system, to guard against that. My prediction is that the UFT suit on that will be unsuccessful and instead that a deal can be struck there anyway. Interestingly, however, despite these few qualms Eduwonkette fails to rise to the defense of the UFT on this one...the doomsday weapon could be the last hope!

She also mentions (or says that “we might expect”) that young principals prefer to supervise young teachers. I'd be very interested in seeing some actual data or evidence on that. Generally, when you talk to them, what good principals say they want is, not surprisingly, good teachers. Because of hiring rules in a lot of places you often see a trend where a principal prefers to take their chances on a new hire rather than someone from the excess pool just as a matter of probability, and while that might look like an age bias in the data it's not the same thing. Some evidence that disentangled those things to see if there truly is an age preference would be very interesting.

Lunched!

2008-05-02T10:58:00.001-04:00

Greg Toppo catches school lunch fever and is now part of the Eduwonk school lunch cult.