In the room for debate on “Why Blame the Teachers?” a high school teacher offers this:
“…college graduates are not going to be attracted to a profession that only encourages short stints. The majority of teachers did not choose their profession because of the vacation time, or the salary, or because they thought it would be easy. They chose teaching because they wanted to make a difference in children’s lives in the long term. Those teachers that entered the profession for the more mundane reasons don’t actually stay for very long.”
This very well may be true. This means that either teacher quality will suffer as a result of getting rid of LIFO or school will have to pay teachers more to compensate them for the now riskier profession. On the other hand, a little bit of this may be worth it. If this means on the rare occasion when layoffs happen they go to worst 5% of teachers (worst obviously measured with some error) then it may be worth the slight drop in overall teacher quality that results. After all, the net effect on teacher quality will be the decrease in quality from risk aversion but also the increase in quality by trying to get rid of the worst instead of just the newest teachers. But the fact of the matter is, whether LIFO or some other layoff policy is best may very well depend on local labor markets and other factors. Sure, if you have to pick one policy for all schools, LIFO is probably not the way to go. But the need to mandate policies like this at broad levels is one of the problem with the public education system: it does not allow flexibility and adaptation.
The real problem isn’t deciding which layoff policy to use. After all, the right one today may be the wrong in five years. And the right one in Town A may be the wrong one in Town B 30 miles away. The real problem is assuring that the people who run schools have the freedom to choose policies that best cater to their specific local labor market, and that they have the incentives to do so in a way that maximizes the educational value of taxpayers money. If schools are allowed freedom and accountability, then if a school gets rid of LIFO but the best employees value it, then the other school down the road can adopt it and lure talent away, and if the loss in talent causes the schools quality to suffer then they will be pressured to adopt it again.
It may also be the case that with the threat of change in the air a school system that promises stability will be able to lure the most talented teachers, and that a school that can promise tenure for life, LIFO, and no standardized testing will outperform all the rest in some places.
The problem, I think, comes because we can not provide local monopolies like school districts freedom without accountability. Yet without freedom, we must centrally plan. The education reform movement is hard at work finding good ways to measure success, and determine universal and objective rules for how people should be hired and fired, and figuring out what kinds of certifications should be required, etc. The other camp, (I don’t know what to call them but surely they don’t wish to be called anti-reform) scoffs at how difficult this proves and instead thinks we should have… um, smaller classrooms? Actually I’m not really sure what the alternative is other than to convince people of the limitations of education and talk them into applauding the system that we have.
While I applaud the work of the reformers and think it is a drastic improvement over the status quo, I am increasingly worried they may not be able to find the perfect set of rules that allows centrally planned education systems to succeed at the varied and difficult tasks we require of it, and that anti-reform critics may be, in part, correct. Unfortunately for anti-reformers, this does not mean we simply learn to love the status quo, but instead we need the freedom and experimentation that markets and choice provide. This doesn’t necessitate a fully privatized education system, and can include charters, public school choice, and vouchers. It’s also important to remember that, as Rick Hess emphasizes, choice by itself also does not guarantee success. But competition can allow reformers and anti-reformers to test their policy recommendations out and see what works, and it can allow space where the right rules for the right places can evolve.
I hope the reformers succeed in developing better measures and policies so that public education can thrive. I sincerely do. In the meantime, we should be continuing to push for more choice and competition, and work hard to understand the conditions under which that can be successful.
7 comments
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Monday ~ March 7th, 2011 at 11:47 am
Nick Bradley
I understand your argument, but couldn’t the opposite be true?
In the article linked below, Noah Millman makes that case.
Compensation is very back-loaded in union teacher contracts through generous pensions and strong seniority rules for raises. As a result, there is a steep barrier to entry for young potential teachers. If you flattened out the seniority tables and paid more in wages and less in benefits, more young teachers would join the profession for a short period of time, then leave it.
After a few years of teaching, skill growth slows down. Leaving the private sector and teaching for a few years would yield enormous results and would be very attractive to potential teachers. It would be especially attractive for professional women in their child-rearing years — they can take a pay-cut in exchange for flexible working hours while they have young children — then rejoin the workforce when the kids are older.
http://theamericanscene.com/2011/03/03/teachers-and-incentives-positive-and-negative
Monday ~ March 7th, 2011 at 2:29 pm
Jeff
I would have thought this was obvious, but the other alternative to ‘school reform’ isn’t to applaud the status quo. Instead, the other alternative is to address the issues that appear to make the biggest difference in educational outcomes (like minimizing the percentage of poor children in schools so that they are spread thinly and evenly) rather than the issues that are salient in economic theories derived a-priori (like school choice and better indexes of teacher quality). As James Heckman, who has actually studied these things, has written, “gaps arise early and persist. Schools do little to budge these gaps even though the quality of schooling attended varies greatly.” This implies that factors other than policies for firing teachers are most important for driving results. It’s possible that you are unaware of these things, but I suspect you are simply too dogmatic to even acknowledge them.
Monday ~ March 7th, 2011 at 3:21 pm
Adam Ozimek
I tweeted a link to that Heckman paper the other day, so yes, I did acknowledge and promote it. And if the quality of k-12 doesn’t matter then we should replace all k-12 teachers with minimum wage workers, right?
Monday ~ March 7th, 2011 at 4:26 pm
Jeff
I’m just a crotchety old Luddite who doesn’t tweet, so I apologize for missing that and falsely accusing you of not acknowledging the paper. However, the paper isn’t primarily what I was talking about you not acknowledging; it was that while teacher quality may help on the margin (and I expect it does) it isn’t at the top of the list of factors that influence educational outcomes. If you want to break unions for its own sake (or out of fealty to libertarian dogma) then ‘education reform’ is a convenient cover, but if your real goal is to improve educational outcomes, then you should look at that and work on the issues that appear to have the biggest impact on them. In other words, that the data suggest teacher quality is not the most important driver of results is what you don’t seem to be willing to acknowledge.
While you may have tweeted that paper, the ideas and implications in it do not show up in your blogging. In addition, that the conclusion you draw from those ideas, when pushed, is that we should fire all teachers and replace them with minimum wage workers, is both telling and invalid.
For those who are less versed in statistics and methodology, the research suggests that variations in teacher quality within the range that exist does little to change the gaps in outcomes between poorer and better off students. This does not imply that replacing all teachers with workers who could be substantially worse would have no effect. (In fairness, it also doesn’t imply that replacing all teachers with workers who would all be substantially better than the best teachers today wouldn’t work; but then, strategies to better weed out the worst performing 5-10% and replace them with teachers from the middle of the distribution would not do that.)
Monday ~ March 7th, 2011 at 3:42 pm
BSE
I don’t buy it. It’s true that markets are better at aggregating information, but the real issue is that its difficult to figure out who is actually a good teacher. In a simple model in which quality is proportional to experience, than LIFO is a rough proxy for quality.
That’s not the world we live in, perhaps, but its not clear that simply getting rid of LIFO and introducing competition is improving matters. Consider: if parents have difficulty judging the quality of their child’s education (or do not fully internalize the benefits of their child’s education: note that they clearly don’t), than a for-profit school has the incentive to hire cheaper, less experienced teachers regardless whether quality is proportional to experience at all. Quality goes down.
In the long run, the only way we are going to be able to improve teacher quality is to make sure that more qualified people wish to become teachers. That is: maybe we should pay the teachers more. This is a system that is plagued by informational asymmetries and externalities, so there’s no reason to think the market will be efficient (quite the contrary, in fact). It is, however, easy to encourage better teachers: pay them more. Higher pay => higher average teacher quality in the pool of potential teachers => even if you pluck teachers out of the pool randomly the average teacher will be better than before.
We’ve been spending the last few decades spending “more money per student” in various guises, but why haven’t we spent more money per teacher? That seems the place to go.
Of course, a way to pick out better teachers, even if it is imperfect, would also be helpful.
Monday ~ March 7th, 2011 at 4:04 pm
Adam Ozimek
After the first few years, experience doesn’t matter. So no, LIFO is not a rough proxy for quality.
Parents having difficulty judging the quality of their child’s education does not mean quality will go down. You need them to be worse than current schools are at judging the quality of their child’s education. But it’s not just that, because without competition you can have a school fully aware that a teacher is bad or a child isn’t getting a good education and yet they can’t or won’t do anything about it. Parents, in contrast, are much more likely to act on that knowledge, and when there is competition, they are much more able.
The question is how much return in quality you’ll get if you raise teacher salaries. Under the status quo I’d venture not much, since most of the “qualifications” and credentials that schools now pay for aren’t related to education quality, I’m not sure why allowing them to buy those with more of these meaningless qualifications will do. Will higher salaries just buy more teachers with masters in education? Because I don’t think that will buy very much quality per dollar spent.
Monday ~ March 7th, 2011 at 5:00 pm
blokeinfrance
Maybe we should incorporate Roman Catholic Canon Law into the Constitution?
Alright, never happen, but…
Canon Law insists that parents should educate their children. It’s an obligation.
So schools and teachers are merely subcontractors.
Two effects, one big, one small.
1. Parents are reminded to take their responsibilities more seriously.
2. Sub-contractors work harder when their employment is more precarious.