Who wouldn’t cheat?

One of the dangers of high-stakes testing is the opening for fraud, and yet another “miracle” — this time in Atlanta — has been exposed as massive cheating.

High-stakes testing and merit pay assume that the problem in education is that teachers have no incentive to do well. As a result, they give teachers goals to meet “at any cost,” assuming that teachers will just get better at their jobs.

If, however, the teachers are not actually prepared, trained, or gifted enough to achieve the “at any cost” goals, they will meet the goals by other means.

When one looks at the distribution of good teachers and bad teachers over, say, Washington, DC, one sees a concentration of the “highly effective” teachers in rich areas, and a dearth of “highly effective” teachers in poor areas (PDF). Simply changing the incentives will not make the ineffective teachers better.

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It’s not just how teachers learn; it’s what they learn

I have been thinking recently about how to change teacher training and certification programs. Kevin Carey points out that the onus should be on the Stanfords and Harvards of the world to create and pilot high-level teacher training programs. Meanwhile, Dana Goldstein, taking issue with Joel Klein’s suggestion of the awfulness of certification programs, notes that more traditionally-certified teachers at high-needs schools feel satisfied with their preparation than alternatively-certified teachers.

Let’s try putting some of this data together:

• Education majors learn the least general knowledge in college (less than business majors!).
• Teachers from traditional certification programs feel more satisfied with their preparation than alternative-certified teachers
• Nevertheless, teachers perform the same regardless of how they were certified. (PDF)
• Satisfaction and self-confidence are not necessarily great indicators of relative skill and success. (See the Dunning-Kruger effect)

To respond to Goldstein, it seems entirely possible that the certification programs are bad, but teachers still feel satisfied with them. Furthermore, it is likely that lax certification (such as setting low bars for content knowledge and student-teaching hours) is actually preferable for prospective teachers.

The general point, then, rather than to nitpick between traditional and alternative programs, is that there may well be something wrong with the content that we require for teachers, rather than merely the method with which it is administered. Maybe our focus on skills-based learning is misguided; maybe our relentless focus on pedagogy is less important than content; maybe we need to focus less on “relating to students” and more on actually knowing the content material being taught.

In all the discussion of education reform, very little has been said about the actual stuff that teachers learn. Most education schools are clones of one another — teaching largely the same content in largely the same way. The content is cursory; middle school humanities teachers relearn middle school humanities, rather than deepening or broadening their knowledge. Pedagogy is largely abstract, with limited chances for application. Student-teaching experiences vary widely.

Education reformers often critique poorly-designed state curricula for K-12. It seems natural that they should critique poorly-designed curricula for teachers as well.

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Would you work harder if you got paid more?

Like Ezra Klein, I am unsurprised that the much-touted idea of “merit pay” turns out not to work that well, according to the latest study from Vanderbilt (here).

I’m also with Klein on the general point of overall teacher salaries, as opposed to specific teacher salaries. (It would stand to reason that more talented people would go into education, if salaries averaged those of investment bankers.) At the same time, though, I want to hazard us against believing that economic incentives are magical and that Klein’s broader incentive structures may not be as attractive as they appear.

Take investment banking — an analogy that Klein uses. Investment bankers receive performance bonuses, which are directly tied to performance. And yet, I don’t think anyone would call investment banks “well-run” in the wake of the financial crisis. I would further hazard that few would say that compensation at investment banks are well-designed for optimal outcomes (see: Lehman Brothers).

Furthermore, overall salaries in i-banking are quite high and attractive, despite the fact that i-banking requires enormous time investment and sucks your soul away. Does this give us an optimally functioning system? Not at all! In fact, I would guess that the exorbitant period for i-bankers (1980s-present) was no more productive for the stability of banks or society than the period preceding it.

This is not to say that merit pay is bad, per se, simply that it does not solve many of the problems in education. In fact, even increasing overall pay (ex: Illinois — $58k average teacher salary — ranked #1 in salary comfort index — ranked #37 in ACT score) will not necessarily produce better results, attract better talent, or train better teachers.

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What’s the bonus for being right the whole time?

James Kwak has a post up at Baseline Scenario explaining his disdain with Richard Posner (I don’t have a huge problem with Posner, since he strikes me as intellectually curious, but this is beside the point) Kwak brings up an important point about the way that we frame debates, and specifically people who change sides:

Wait a sec. Being wrong for decades gives you “enormous credibility”? So if, say, James Inhofe were to admit that he is wrong and that climate change is occurring, then he would suddenly be an important voice on what to do about it? If James Gilleran (former director of the OTS) were to write a book about the problems with lax regulation and what needs to change, would you buy it?

To answer Kwak’s rhetorical question, yes. This happens all the time. Richard Posner changes his mind, so he gets a fawning profile in the New Yorker. Alan Greenspan admits he made a mistake, and the whole world turns and listens. Diane Ravitch, one of the architects of No Child Left Behind, says that No Child Left Behind was a failure, and she gets attention (including from me).

What about the people who were right the whole time? What “expertise” or “credibility” do they get for it? The anti-Iraq-War contingent, that ~20% of Americans who were against the war from the beginning, are still the “far left,” not to be trusted on issues of the national security by the Beltway elite. Obama still has to trot out Gates and Petraeus to defend his policy, since they were a part of the Bush team. The folks who tried to stop the reckless deregulation of financial markets are still relegated to the sidelines, while Wall Street insiders like Tim Geithner or previous deregulators like Larry Summers are running the show. Teachers’ unions, who at the time were the biggest opponents of NCLB, have found themselves as the biggest target for education reformers.

Apparently, being right after being wrong is more “credible” than being right the whole time. What is it that Thoreau said? “An efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or not. The inefficient offer their inefficiency to the highest bidder, and are forever expecting to be put in office.”

And then we put them there.

(Side note: I’m looking forward to 13 Bankers, the new Johnson/Kwak book coming out at the end of the month.)

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The myth of “accountability”

With all the talk of education reform, in the form of President Obama’s overhaul of the No Child Left Behind policy, I should have a strong opinion one way or the other. Honestly, though, without specifics, I can’t muster enough emotion about the policy itself.

For those unaware, the overhaul of NCLB would include a change from the “pass/fail” system of school rating, a break-away from tying school ratings solely to math/reading test scores, and an attempt to incorporate a broad set of national standards, along with better rating systems for teachers and administrators. Which is fine, I guess.

I’m not wild about expanding Renaissance 2010, ex-Chicago Public Schools CEO and current Ed. Secretary Arne Duncan’s project to “turn around” chronically low-scoring Chicago Public Schools. In the elementary schools, some turnarounds have worked, but at the high school level, the only things that have changed are attendance numbers and crime. The problem with any turn-around program is that the total teacher (and administrator) quality pool remains the same. You can fire teachers from one job, but they will inevitably migrate to another job. When you employ teachers for a turn-around, you’re pulling from the exact same pool all over again. The odds of getting a much better teacher to replace an average or below-average one in the city of Chicago are slim.

Many reformers get hung up on teacher tenure or breaking the teachers’ unions as the thing that will save schools. Well, every silver bullet that has come to save public education has failed. The Milwaukee school voucher miracle turned out to be a statistical anomaly, eventually equaling out achievement gains from the first few years (MCLP longitudinal study in PDF). The Houston testing miracle was just fraud. Ever more extensive testing regimens do little or nothing to improve scores in urban districts. 8 years of NCLB have resulted in flat growth for national testing (check the NAEP for the data). School choice, at least in Chicago, has produced mixed results, and no additional injection of “choice” will make things any better. Unless we’re providing opportunities for every school to improve, we’ll just be moving the problem around.

There’s no reason to believe that firing and replacing teachers will be any more effective than previous plans. The charter experiments have gone similarly; some charters are good, most are average, some are below-average. Hating on teachers may be in vogue, but what will happen when the next round of reform doesn’t yield the results we want?

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Chutes too narrow

In the education blogocommentarisphere, everyone and their mom is talking about The Atlantic‘s new piece about Teach for America and what makes a good teacher. The blurb makes it seem as if the article will begin to have data-based metrics on teacher quality. This is great!

For years, the secrets to great teaching have seemed more like alchemy than science, a mix of motivational mumbo jumbo and misty-eyed tales of inspiration and dedication. But for more than a decade, one organization has been tracking hundreds of thousands of kids, and looking at why some teachers can move them three grade levels ahead in a year and others can’t. Now, as the Obama administration offers states more than $4 billion to identify and cultivate effective teachers, Teach for America is ready to release its data.

Oh boy, I can’t wait! Tell me, please! What makes a good teacher? Let’s see what you’ve got!

What did predict success, interestingly, was a history of perseverance—not just an attitude, but a track record.

OK, perseverance. I guess I didn’t need a study to tell me that. What else?

In general, though, Teach for America’s staffers have discovered that past performance—especially the kind you can measure—is the best predictor of future performance. Recruits who have achieved big, measurable goals in college tend to do so as teachers. And the two best metrics of previous success tend to be grade-point average and “leadership achievement”—a record of running something and showing tangible results. If you not only led a tutoring program but doubled its size, that’s promising.

Wait, that’s it? I mean, that’s all? Past performance + Perseverance = Good teachers? Doesn’t past performance + perseverance = good at most things?

For all the hype of the article, it seems that its conclusions are as slim as the existing metrics. On that note, there are plenty of metrics that show us good teaching — students in classes taught by National Board Certified teachers get the equivalent of one extra month of instruction each year, for instance. National Board Certification requires a wide variety of hoops to jump through, as well as a rigorous video review (described by Gladwell here). Instead of discussing existing rubrics or analysis of relationships between teacher behavior and student performance, the article reads like a Teach for America press release.

The value of the Teach for America data is supposedly its quantitative nature, as well as its thoroughness. Data collection within the organization, however, can be spotty, differing from region to region and class to class. Additionally, many of the teachers submitting more in-depth data may already be a self-selected group of more motivated teachers, or at least teachers with more commitment to the organization.

(Disclosure: I am a current corps member in Teach for America.) I admire much of the organization’s mission, but to put it bluntly, it is not a valid model for most educators to follow. For all its publicity and policy clout, TFA only comprises a tiny fraction of teachers in the city of Chicago or any other metro area. To write an article about educational reform with such a narrow focus on Teach for America misses the broader trends in both teacher evaluation and teacher performance.

One suggestion I consistently put forward: Teachers need to take ownership of their performance, by which I mean teachers must evaluate each other formally. In union negotiations, parents and administrators should push for teacher evaluations done by a set of standards and training for teachers to evaluate each other, along with a rigorous review process akin to an electricians’ union. We know the metrics; we just need someone we trust to measure us.

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