SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Sunday at the Movies (Merit pay)

Here’s the ineffable Chris Christie, this time speaking on merit pay. Always watchable, always thought-provoking.

Faculties of Education: Part of the problem, not part of the solution

My first teaching gig was when I was 18 years old. Armed with a letter of permission, I taught from May to September for a couple of summers in a small, one-room schoolhouse down the bay from Parry Sound (there were no roads in this small community and the students and I were transported back and forth to school in the school boat). This experience got me hooked on teaching, and I subsquently finished my university degree, completed teachers’ college, and got a job teaching grade 5 in North York.

Looking back, I realize that I probably did a better job in the one-room schoolhouse than I did in North York, at least at first - because teachers’ college had filled my head with virtually no useful information and lots of harmful information. The year I spent at teacher’s college was a total waste of my time and taxpayers’ money. And I am not alone in this belief: when the Ontario College of Teachers surveyed the province’s teachers about the source of their teaching skills, courses at a faculty of education ranked dead last - well below common sense and lessons from their families (see Table 4.1).  

The educators who are expressing outrage over yesterday’s posting are assuming that teacher training adds to teacher effectiveness. When I say that I don’t think teacher training is adding to teacher effectiveness, that is not to say I don’t think good teacher training could add to teacher effectiveness - in fact, I know it can and should. What I am saying is that I don’t think Ontario teacher training adds to teacher effectiveness. What’s more, my opinion is that the problems with teacher training are so entrenched, what with tenure and institutional inertia, that I doubt existing faculties of education can be reformed in my lifetime. I believe that alternate (and better) paths to teacher certification should be authorized.

Checking the unnecessary box of teacher certification

This is the second-last in the Education Matters series about the importance of good teachers - and how to attract and keep them. Today's excerpt (pp 105-107), while a bit wordy, deals with the misguided policies concerning teacher certification.

• Jane was accepted to the college of her dreams due to her hard work (a high GPA and lots of AP classes), stellar SAT scores, and a magnetic personality that came through in her interviews. Her university experience dunfolded much as she hoped - she made lots of new friends, became editor of the school newspaper, acquired a long list of professors eager to recommend her for any job she chooses to pursue, and graduated near the top of her very competitive class.
• Since she was a little girl she has dreamed of becoming an engineer and she was excited when she was offered a position in a mid-sized firm. But as graduation approaches she is getting cold feet. She is thankful for all the advantages she has had in life and feels compelled to give something back. She likes the challenges that her new firm has promised and likes the idea of earning a corporate salary, but to Jane money isn't everything.
• Sometimes Jane envies her roommate, Alice, who after graduation will start her first year teaching in a public school. Thorughout their four years living together, Jane always considered Alice's education school course work to be less than rigorous, and that didn't appeal to her competitive nature. But Jane finds the idea of helping kids very appealing, especially if she can work with disadvantaged students. She is passionate about mathematics and wants to instill that passion into young people who are likely to believe math plays no meaningful role in their lives.
• After some careful thought, Jane decides that she's willing to give teaching a try. At worst, she will work helping kids for a few years, and if she doesn't like it she will surely find another engineering job without too much difficulty. Or, perhaps she will love it and decide to make it her career. She meets with a principal in a local middle school who would love to make her an offer.
• There's only one problem. According to the public school system, Jane isn't qualified to teach mathematics. Her mastery of the subject, strong interpersonal skills, obvious talent, and her desire tdo not compensate for her lack of a teaching degree. She is simply not allowed a chance unless she goes back and earns a certification. Disappointed, Jane takes the job at the engineering firm and eventually makes partner....
• Before someone can become a public school teacher he or she must earn a license, usually by graduating from a college of education. It seems like a simple enough requirement: no one should teach in a public school before he or she has been exposed to the pedagogical training necessary for success in the classroom. However reasonable it seems on its face, that requirement has failed to keep bad teachers out of the schoolhouse door, and it unnecessarily eliminates many potentially excellent candidates....
• The reality is that what teachers are learning in those colleges doesn't translate into effective instructiion in the classroom. In fact, few seem to believe that teachers leave their college programs more prepared to teach than they would have been without the experience. Why, then, should we continue to insist that people check this unnecessary box before they enter a classrom?

Mrs. Crackerjack and Mr. Dud

Everyone agrees, I think, that there are some great teachers and there are some real duds. Yet teachers' skill and degree of effort are ignored on payday. Quoting from Teachers Matter (pp. 69-72)...

• The structure of the salary system determines the incentives that employees consider when they go to work each day. Unfortunately, in education the single salary schedule is completely at odds with what modern research suggests is even reasonable practice. At best, the current system misses an important opportunity ot maximize teacher quality by using the salary system to encourage teachers to engage in practices and behaviors that benefit students.
• Thoughtful employers can use the salary structure to solve what economists called the 'principal-agent' problem. At its core, employers (principals) and employees (agents) tend not to share the same goals. In the private sector, the employers prefers a very high level of production in order to maximize his profits. But such higher earnings come from the hard work of employees who don't personally benefit from putting forth high levels of effort and thus have little incentive to work as hard as they can. The employer can require that individuals put forth at least some minimally set amount of effort in order to keep their jobs, but the situation is complicated by the fact that the employer cannot truly observe the worker's effort level. Lacking the abilty to monitor effort, the employer's response is to adapt a pay structure that aligns his employees' incentives with his own. For instance, an employer might adopt some sort of profit-sharing agreement, which would provide the employee with an incentive to increase profits for the firm.
• Of course, the above is a simplistic description of a long-standing problem in economics. There are several important issues related to solving the principal-agent problem that are not to be discussed here. But what this framework helps us understand is that the structure of the compensation system almost certainly has implications for an employee's actions. The uniform salary structure based on credentials and experience used by the current public school system has clear incentives imbedded within it. The system's success requires those incentives to be related to the outcome in which society is interested....
• The current system rewards teachers for acquiring meaningless degrees, and teachers respond to that incentive by earning meaningless degrees - representing not only a faillure to improve education, but a huge sum of lost time and financial resources.
• What's even more distressing is that we fail to reward any attribute, behavior, out outcome that is linked to student achievement. Teachers receive no additional compensation for doing a good job. They earn no more money if they work hard into the night grading papers or preparing lesson plans. Effective senior teachers are not compensated for mentoring their struggling junior colleagues. Additional effort in the classroom, or attaining superior results, does nothing for a teacher's bottom line, and conversely, a teacher doesn't find herself earning lower pay if her students consistently struggle.
• For many teachers, this systemic failure is unfortunate but inconsequential. Many great teachers work tirelessly to help their students despite the fact that they are not directly compensated for doing so. Teachers might be motived by the hope of standing out among their peers, or they could just place a high personal value on the success of their students - after all, a big reason that people go into teaching in the first place is that they love kids and want to help them succeed.
• Nonetheless, expecting teachers to put forth their maximum effort level out of the goodness of their heart without any direct financial reward is an odd system indeed. It is also unjust for a system to treat great teachers the same as it treats mediocre ones.

Ted-Ed

There's a cool new site, with interesting teaching videos. Here's the intro page.

Teachers are not all built out of ticky-tacky and they don’t look just the same

Following on from yesterday's posting, the newfound ability to conduct value-added evaluations of teachers begs the question of what should be done with this knowledge. At present, perhaps partly due to ignorance of these new statistical capabilities and perhaps partly due to system constraints on firing poor performers, virtually all teachers receive the same "satisfactory" ratings. Here is a relevant excerpt from Teachers Matter (p. 46).

• We must keep in mind that public schools do not operate in a market environment. An employer in the private sector pays a price for getting rid of effective workers: he earns smaller profits. Public schools, however, don't face the market's wrath. On the contrary, since students are assigned to public schools based on their residential address, the enrollment that drives public school revenues is not altered substantially if the school's performance declines. A principal who wants to get rid of a teacher despite his effectiveness in the classroom need have little concern about the effect her decision will have on the school's bottom line or her own job.
• Many education reformers envision a day when school choice forces public schools to confront robust market forces just as a private company does. Even with the recent dramatic expansion of charter schools across the nation, market incentives will not be strong enough to hold subjective evaluations in check. Nor are they likely to be so powerful anytime in the near future.
• Subjective evaluations work well in the private sector because they hold stakes for both the observer and the observed. Likewise, an effective evaluation system for public school teachers that hinges on principal discretion must hold stakes for both parties. Absent market forces, the best way that public school have found to mimic the market's discipline is policies of accountability. A wide body of research shows that public schools respond to the incentives imposed by accountability policies focused on evaluating overall school performance.

As usual, the absence of market forces leads to distorted incentives and systemic problems. Tomorrow, I'll look at the effect of the absence of market forces on teacher compensation and the anti-excellence pressures that result.

Moneyball and CompStat: Implications for Education Policy

I have been reading a very important book entitled Teachers Matter: Rethinking how public schools identify, reward, and retain great educators, by Marcus Winter. I propose to do a series of posts that excerpt from this book, showing how Dr. Winter develops his argument. Today's excerpt (pp. 1-2) examines the potential of data-driven teacher evaluation and compensation. As you read, bear in mind that most current administration systems hire and compensate teachers on the basis of factors (like experience and qualifications) that are unrelated to teacher effectiveness.

• In his 2003 book Moneyball, Michael Lewis explained how in recent years the Oakland A's managed to post one of the highest winning percentages of any team in Major League Baseball despite consistently having one of its smallest payrolls. The A's trick, it turns out, was a data-driven assessment for identifying players who would contribute to a team's success. Instead of relying on the traditional subjective analysis of baseball lifers and the usual array of official statistics, the team's general manager, Billy Beane, hired a group of numbers geeks to develop statistical models that could better predict a player's ability to produce runs in the future. Bean's insight, which was already percolating among baseball outsiders, was that a team with better information about player quality has an advantage on the field. Data analysis didn't ensure you'd win the World Series, but, all else being equal, it gave you a better opportunity to do so.
• In hindsight, it's surprising that the smart people working in baseball before Beane came along thought that scouting reports correctly identified the best players. Scouts' eveluations were often based on little more than viewing a few of a player's at bats. Nonetheless, for little more reason than clinging to tradition, clubs simply did not bother to improve upon these clearly incomplete measures of a player's worth for many decades. Failure to distinguish correctly beween the most and least effective players cost cost teams millions of dollars each year as they overpaid for mediocre talent.
• As in baseball, many features of the current system for employing public school teachers seem reasonable on the surface. For example, it seems self-evident that experienced teachers and teachers who have earned advanced degrees would be more effective than their junior colleagues.
• Sports franchises have recognized that they can use data to identify inefficiencies that will save them money and increase their performance. Policy makers have used advances in the development and use of data to save lives.
• In the early 1990s, New York City was a pretty difficult place to live. Crime was out of control, and it appeared that there was little that could be done about it.
• Then came CompStat. Adopted by Mayor Rudolph Giuliana under the guidance of his police chief, William Bratton, this revolutionary data system tracked crime precisely. The influx of data allowed the NYPD to focus its efforts on the most troubled neighborhoods, and to hold precinct captains accountable when things went wrong.
• Looking back, you have to wonder why it took so long for the police to adopt CompStat. Identifying the areas where crime is persistent would seem essential to anticipating it. Once technology was capable of maintaining and analyzing information about street crime, the obvious next step was to put such data to good use. Public schools are only now beginning to learn the fundamental lessons of Moneyball and CompStat.

Sunday at the Movies (Follow-Up to Teacher Bully Story)

You may recall a posting a week or two ago about how a parent bugged his son's wheelchair and discovered the cruel treatment that his disabled son was receiving - along with the difficulty the father was experiencing in getting the school board to respond appropriately. The story went viral on YouTube, and here's a follow-up video that speaks to school boards' unwillingness or inability to fire bad educators. YouTube link. H/T MW

And now a word from our sponsor

It’s been a while since we’ve plugged our various services, and I thought that we might have some readers who are unaware of them or have forgotten that they exist….

Remedial program for students who are struggling with reading:  Stairway to Reading

Help for students who are struggling with math: Stairway to Math

Personalized help for parents with a question about how to help their children: Ask Aunt Malkin

Resources for parents of preschool and kindergarten children: Schoolproofing Your Child

Assorted resources for parents, including placement tests: Resources for Parents Whose Children Need Help

Free copy of How to Get the Right Education for Your Child

Newsletter archives containing informative articles sorted according to topic

Assorted resources for teachers: Resources for Better Teaching

Searchable database on student achievement and school board spending in Ontario: Sunshine on Schools

There’s lots more as well. To ask about something else, just leave a comment and I’ll get back to you asap.

Damned if they do and damned if they don’t

GUEST BLOG BY LOU D’AMORE, ONTARIO EDUCATOR

The longer I remain in the teaching profession the more I realize that a very small number of students use up the great majority of the available resources. These few students, who have an established history of negative behaviour which our system tolerates and never truly deals with, are the same students who take up most of our teachers’ time and energy. The cost of “educating” these individuals is very high and the added value is very small. Meanwhile, the chaos they cause in our schools is debilitating and it weakens teachers’ efforts to teach the majority.

Such is the case with the ever-increasing number of false accusations being made against teachers these days. I teach in a high-needs school, and this year, a boy in grade 3 accused TWO male teachers of physically assaulting him. They were off school for more than two weeks before proven innocent. The boy ? Well, he was “unconsequenced” (yes this is an education buzzword).

Three years ago, a boy in grade 5 accused me of slapping him across the face while he sang in my choir at an Ash Wednesday service held in our church. It didn’t matter that the church was filled with 400 people who saw nothing; it didn’t matter that I had a 32-year unblemished history of positive teaching experience; it didn’t even matter that the boy (on medication for his behaviour) was being questioned by his psychologist when he reported the “attack” (the psychologist had been called in because the boy was lighting fires in our school) – none of this mattered because the Children’s Aid was still called and I was kept out of my teaching position for eight weeks! It was personally devastating.

The lawyers were called in, the Children’s Aid investigators were called in, my union reps became involved, substitute teachers were called in to replace me, and pretty soon a minor economic stimulus had been unleashed.

Armed with a Children’s Aid report stating that my accuser’s story was “inconsistent and not credible”, I finally returned to work.  I was encouraged by my union to ask that my accuser be “consequenced”. We met with my superintendent and we argued that as teachers we are responsible for teaching basic morality and, because this boy had lied, it was our responsibility to make him understand the damage he had caused. The superintendent threatened to end the meeting right there – he wasn’t going to stand by while we accused a poor innocent child of lying. He forbade  any kind of meeting with the boy or any kind of reprimand. Apparently, what happened between the boy, Children’s Aid, and me, was irrelevant to my school board.

The details of my ordeal are very disturbing, and more so because I’m convinced that this same nightmare is happening to many other teachers. Union officials, Children’s Aid and the lawyers I talked to all admit they are seeing more of these cases. They can even see patterns – apparently, music, French and substitute teachers are the most common victims.  The great majority of accused teachers are found to be innocent.

We need to ask our politicians to mandate our school boards to keep track of these false accusations and require a report on the costs incurred to resolve these cases. Tax dollars earmarked for the classroom are being wasted carrying out these teacher witch-hunts and we should all know the extent of the problem so it can be fixed.

I can tell you that the school boards are very secretive about investigations on their teachers – best to pay the hush money and protect the corporate image. No one in the system wants to draw attention to the problem. Accused teachers are isolated and discouraged from telling their story.

I am somewhat encouraged by a teacher who recently came forward to tell how she became the subject of a false accusation. The CBC ran at least two articles about her on consecutive days. Three years ago, when this happened to me, I spoke to the CBC and they weren’t interested in doing any sort of story. Perhaps the CBC is realizing that these accusations on teachers are not isolated events but rather, a growing problem that is beginning to cripple the education process.