Thursday, May 15, 2008
Sweep The Leg Johnny!
I don't mean to do Eduflack's job for him, but I will point out that articles like this are simply brutal:
In 2004, Providence named a beloved biology teacher, John Wemple, Teacher of the Year. In the spring of that year, Amgen Corp. gave Wemple a $10,000 award for science teaching excellence. But shortly after, Providence laid him off from his job at Classical High. He’d been “bumped” by a teacher who had the right, thanks to state law, to displace a colleague with less seniority in the system. Wemple’s widely acknowledged merit counted for squat. A tony private school snapped him up.
If I were a strategy guy for the teachers' unions I'd be trying hard to figure out an exit strategy on bumping and also on what to do about teachers who aren't teaching for sustained periods of time. The greater data and transparency means these provisions are simply not tenable for much longer. And, this is a case where if they're not careful the teachers' unions are going to win a few battles but lose the war.
Unless he has nothing else to do but fight with commenters on my blog, I'm starting to think that Greg Anrig might be wishing he'd never taken me to that room at the Vista...
Update: Blaine to the rescue?
Bowing to pressure Eduwonk now has a Facebook page, just launched today. If you're on Facebook it's easy to find and a new way to stay in touch, complain, or otherwise waste time. There is also RSS from the blog.
Kevin Johnson's mayoral run is shifting into high gear...big eduangles here.
Jonas Chartock, of Texas charter school fame, is off to head up the highly regarded authorizing outfit at SUNY. It's a great catch for them.
Wow. Fordham has basically gone from one extreme to the other.
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.
That "I don' t give a crap" guy romps to victory in yet another teachers' union election.
Andrei Cherny will be on Colbert tonight pitching his outstanding new book "The Candy Bombers."
Greg Anrig Set Me Up!
I was clearly told there would be no more of this! Or this either...
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.
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?
John Merrow's WSJ op-ed has the chattering class chattering...
It's getting a little dicey at Locke High School in LA, the school transitions to Green Dot in a few months.
The Consortium for Chicago School Research needs a senior analyst.
Still More Determinism
I'm tellin' ya, it's the hot thing!
Update: See this, too.
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).
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.
This Gadly piece by Checker Finn is well worth checking out.
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
Reading Guru and Reading First insider Reid Lyon speaks on the recent evaluation in this new interview.
...on Christmas Eve in the trenches, but this news from Cleveland is nonetheless encouraging...
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.
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...
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!
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
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!
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
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.
Greg Toppo catches school lunch fever and is now part of the Eduwonk school lunch cult.
In our last installment we visited with Richard Whitmire with a brookie. Today it's David Saba, head of the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence with a brown trout caught in Idaho. It's timely to highlight David because just this week Missouri, which is not a small state, signed onto ABCTE. Previous editions through here.
Inflation!
$81 million is a manufactured crisis? What the hell does a real one cost in this economy?
More seriously, the UFT is pretty far out there on this age discrimination issue, the TNTP data say otherwise. Seems like a good story for some reporter up there to sort out...good marketing demographics, too!
Still, to buy at least some of the UFT’s argument you have to believe that NYC Chancellor Joel Klein actually wants to hurt rather than improve teacher quality in New York City. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me though I suspect there is some elaborate conspiracy theory that explains it.
No idea what this post is about? Background here.
Over at Washington Monthly Greg Anrig declares the school voucher movement dead. I'm pretty skeptical of vouchers as a policy reform, but this is too tidy and I suspect he'll regret writing:
From all appearances, then, the voucher movement may not long outlive its founder, Friedman, or its most vigorous advocate and funder, Michael Joyce, who both died in 2006. How did one of the conservative policy world's most cherished causes crumble so quickly?
I've actually been struck at how fast, since 1990, vouchers have expanded. Multiple statewide programs, a federal one, etc...Considering that it is an idea that cuts against the grain of a cherished public institution and is opposed by an array of influential groups, that programs have even passed in so many states strikes me as noteworthy. And, there is that small issue of the voucher movement winning a major church state victory at the U.S. Supreme Court...
Where vouchers have not delivered as promised is around dramatically changing student achievement or school district behavior. There is a lot of cherry picking out there in terms of what studies people cite, but overall the results are not as grim as critics claim but nor are they nearly as encouraging as voucher proponents would have you believe. I think the best you can say is very modest measurable improvements.
All that said, while I wish the energy that was now going into vouchers were put into expanding parental options through public charter schooling, public choice plans, incentives to better integrate school districts, and the like, politics is a funny thing and I sure wouldn’t count the voucher movement out at all. If for no other reason than there are a lot of groups out there working hard on the issue and today’s political environment will eventually change, the issue is not dead. Add into that stew the persistent underperformance of urban schools and the general trends in American society and I think we’ll be having this debate for some time.
Besides, where former voucher enthusiasts Sol Stern, Chester Finn, and others are recalibrating their ideas are not in terms of vouchers themselves but the relationship between vouchers and other policies. Anrig conflates the two here and in the process misreads the environment.
Meanwhile, speaking of Sol Stern, Greg Forster is pushing back on newly converted voucher skeptic Stern. Background on all that here. I've been stunned that throughout the whole Stern debate it's rarely been pointed out that a lot of people, E.D. Hirsch chief among them, have been saying basically the same thing about choice and curriculum for years.
The interim federal evaluation on Reading First is now out (pdf). Critics, advocates, everyone, to the barricades!
A few thoughts. First, the study is hardly good news but also hardly that surprising. It's a huge program, varying degrees of implementation fidelity, etc...Still, given the other politics around it the study is a political problem for the program's supporters and does also beg a closer look at implementation. That newer grantees seemed to generate better results is interesting and one thing in particular worth looking at more closely. If there is a weakness in the study it's that we can't really account for the variance among sites in how they implemented the program and even how aggressively they wanted to do so. But, as with after-school programs, for instance, variance that results in indiscernible effects is nonetheless a problem in a program of this size and cost. It’ll be good to see the next evaluation later this year. And you also want to look at the CEP evaluations of Reading First.
Ironies: Those who say single studies shouldn't be determinative (and they're right) will nonetheless jump all over this. It's almost as though there is a disconnect between the political and research process or something... Perhaps this will finally put to rest the idea that Russ Whitehurst cooks studies at IES? And, per the CEP evals, should what educators say only matter when it coincides with various political ideologies? And, as a macro issue, shouldn't people hope this program works and not be gleeful when the evidence comes back mixed like this? It's about teaching kids to read for God’s sake!
He’s Gone, But Weir Still Truckin?
Maybe it’s because Springsteen is in town and music is on my mind but I’ve been meaning to blog about this article in NYT describing the new deadhead study center of Grateful Dead artifacts. It’s led to plenty of jokes, in so many words even the article basically wonders whether any bongs are going in. But there is a serious side here. It's about the strangest of places, as they say...
Like many people the Grateful Dead exposed me to all sorts of music. When I first started listening to the Dead my music tastes rarely got more edgy than The Smiths or U2. Basically, the usual panoply of The Who, The Stones, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and Neil Young defined major poles of my musical map. But the Grateful Dead opened me up to the great mosaic of American music and its history. My ipod has more than 8,000 songs on it today because of them. I’m into jazz, blues, folk, bluegrass, and classical in large part through their influence.
And I know I’m not alone on this path. So, the jokes are funny, but it seems to me that the forty-plus year experience of this uniquely American band is worth conserving for education as much more than a lark. For my part, if a lifelong appreciation for American music isn’t enough, my wife is also grateful that I learned how to make fabulous grilled cheese sandwiches somewhere along the way...
The Mind Trust* in Indianapolis does actually award those fellowships. *I’m on the board.
The Connecticut NCAAP takes a victory lap (pdf) on their pro-No Child Left Behind legal victory. I'm telling ya, this is interesting!!!
State NAACP President Scot X. Esdaile: “It’s time to stop the shenanigans and focus on eliminating the achievement gap and properly educating all Connecticut’s children.”
Elizabeth Green is still on the case. In terms of the direction this is going I think it might be a bad sign for the UFT that vendors are selling t-shirts in Times Square that say "Fire 'Em All And Let Randi Sort 'Em Out"...
The conservative union-busting NYT ed board is on the case, too. Here's the problem with the data that the TNTP report (pdf) put on the table, there is really no media outlet making the case for the union because absent some changes there isn't one. And it can't be that they're all shills for Klein (or for Tim Daly)...they need a deal to get through this.
The Law Won
So another anti-No Child Left Behind lawsuit fizzles...The judge's opinion is here (pdf). Big win for the Connecticut chapter of the NAACP and the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights. I must have crummy news judgment because it seemed to me that civil rights groups siding with the Bush Administration to fight attempts to weaken the No Child law was, you know, interesting and counterintuitive. But it got very little attention.
Meanwhile, though he's breathlessly covered the various lawsuits on several occasions before now, in the wake of this decision we just get radio silence from Timesman Sam Dillon...too sad to write?
What once seemed a crazy prediction, -- that the lawsuits and state rebellions would add up to nothing -- now seems pretty spot on.
What's a states' rights progressive to do?
Update: He gets knocked down, but he gets up again! You're never going to keep him down! Two days after the ruling, Sam's back in the saddle! He's still hopeful that the other lawsuit will pan out. But, the odds there look long, too.
Cory Booker is attracting some serious venture philanthropy to Newark. The cool thing here is that the new fund is set up to work with all charters in Newark and work collaboratively with the school district. And Governor Corzine is on board. And I know, I know, this could destroy the public schools in Newark...
It's throwdown time in New York again. Elizabeth Green has the goods along with Jennifer Medina at The Times. Primary source you must read: The long rumored The New Teacher Project report (pdf) on excessed teachers (meaning those that no school wants to hire who are in what is formally referred to as the "Absent Teacher Reserve" pool) is now on the street. The big takeaway is that this is, right now, about a $40 million annual problem. And even in Gotham that's a lot of clams.
This is the problem that everyone knew was coming. During the last round of contract negotiations a "mutual consent" provision was instituted that basically curtailed what is known as bumping or seniority provisions and meant that schools had to want the teachers who were teaching there rather than teachers being able to unilaterally insert themselves in a school. It's a good reform but it does mean that there is a pool of teachers who can't find jobs. But, as the TNTP analysis shows, this is not a problem of great teachers caught in an unfair system but rather a system that seems to be introducing a healthy level of talent sensitivity into hiring.
But, while the mayor and the chancellor have the data on their side (as they did with the process that led to mutual consent in the first place) the politics here are awful. That's because UFT President Randi Weingarten is poised to become head of the American Federation of Teachers. She's blown hot and cold on reform lately. The teacher evaluation provisions recently put into the New York code are a disaster but she's also championed a pay for performance pilot and opened some charter schools and invited Green Dot Public Schools into the city. Just yesterday at a panel at the Milken Global Institute annual forum philanthropist Eli Broad said she could be the “second coming” of Al Shanker. But she has to be careful not to be seen as presiding over a mass firing of teachers a few months from her election or, conversely, damaging her public brand as a reformer by digging in on an issue where the evidence simply does not support a hard line position at all. That's why there needs to be a deal. TNTP has put some fair ideas on the table that hopefully, after the theater that is par for the course with this stuff is over, will be a way through.
Apparently this sort of sentiment may be a bridge too far in Washington...important to remember that at some of these schools fewer than one in four students is at grade level. Not a polite thing to say but the reality is that you might not want all these teachers to migrate with them to new schools....but remember, it's all about the kids!
Footenote On TFA
In yesterday's New York Post I review the new Donna Foote book on Teach For America. Her book, "Relentless Pursuit) is important because it has some original reporting on TFA's early years and their training programs that hasn't been written about elsewhere. And it shows that TFA itself is as tenacious as its teachers.
Didn't get enough J.B. Schramm when he was guestblogging here, you can check out College Summit in a new PBS show.
KIPP has their report card online now. Worth checking out. Don't let the registration deter you, easy and free and allows you to customize.
NASBE -- my special interest group! -- is hiring for a secondary school reform position.
The