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I recommend this very measured report from the Center for American Progress on what to do with and how to identify ineffective teachers. Nowhere does it mention sending teachers back to school for elaborate retraining and pointless credentialing, or other handouts dressed as reforms, nor does it deny the usefulness of standardized testing. They outline a set of broad guidelines and policies that should be adopted at the federal, state, district, and school level. This strikes me as a serious attempt to define a broad and moderate outline for addressing a serious problem, that if adopted has the potential to result in a fair and effective process for removing bad teachers.
This New York Times article on the intellectual about-face of a noted school reformer is getting a lot of attention. I have not read her book yet and it’s hard to glean from the article exactly what her alternative ideas are for fixing public schools, so it’s hard for me to really offer a substantive reaction to the story. But one statement of hers that I did find surprising was this:
Charter schools, she concluded, were proving to be no better on average than regular schools, but in many cities were bleeding resources from the public system…
All the research I’ve seen suggests that vouchers, charters, and other types of competition increase the performance of public schools. If they are “bleeding resources”, and yet increasing performance, then that seems like a positive thing to me. They are doing more with less, what is there to object to?
Given her level of expertise, I assume there is some research I have not seen on this issue supporting her claim, hopefully discussed in her book. Either way I found this claim surprising.
What should students be taught about unions? The California Teachers Association offers an anecdotal lesson in how they think it should be done. We begin in a 12th grade charter school classroom.”What is a labor union?” the teacher asks:
He calls on another student, who informs her classmates that unions protect the rights of workers. Her teacher beams his approval before talking about union benefits, contracts, negotiations, mediation and arbitration — and last but not least, strikes. Everyone, it seems, knows what a strike is….
“Do you know anybody in a union?” Wood asks. Most students shake their heads no and only a few raise their hands.
“… When you leave here, I want you to interview a family member or friend who belongs to an organized labor union. I want you to find out what union they belong to, what the union does for them, and why they joined a union.”…
“Find out how this union benefits the workers it represents,” says Wood. “How does it get information to workers? What techniques does it use to gain leverage on behalf of the workers it represents? Have these techniques proven to be effective”
Next, the teacher asked the students what happens when you set market prices above equilibrium, “Surplus!” they all yelled out. “That’s right,” he beamed, “and what do you call a labor surplus?”. Having been taught the important of looking at both costs and benefits in whatever class this was where there is enough time to spend a whole lesson on unions, the students did not hesitate with an answer: “Unemployment!”. He then asked the students to interview someone who was currently unemployed because unionization in their industry prevented them from working for companies who would gladly hire them at competitive wages.
If only. This teacher seems concerned with only benefits and not costs, only winners and not losers. This saddest part is that the teacher believes his discussion actually unbiased:
“When I teach about unions, I’m honest and keep my own personal bias out of it,” says Wood. “But when they ask questions, I explain about the good things my union does for me.”
You should not hold someone to a lower standard because they are an important voice for something you believe. This is Joe Stiglitz reviewing Naomi Klein and not holding her to a reasonable standard of truth because he agrees with her ideological cause. It’s important to call out people defending things you believe when they are loose with the facts, otherwise they can create a caricature of good ideas in the public mind, and become a strawman for opponents to distract debate with.
This is my problem with John Stossel. Yes, he’s often an eloquent voice for libertarianism, and he promotes those ideas to a broad audience. But while his perspective may differ from the typical TV newsman, his gross oversimplification of complex issues, unfortunately, often does not.
Take a recent piece of his from Reason, where he defends school choice. Like a lot of what Stossel says and does it’s peppered with statements that are distracting oversimplifications:
So when will we permit competition and choice, which works great with everything else?
Seriously, John? Everything else? You couldn’t have said “almost everything” or “many other things”? To a libertarian predisposed to believe in competition and choice, your minds eye will breeze over this sentence without distraction. But to a progressive, these sorts of gross generalizations about the limitations of competition and choice are exactly the extreme form of libertarianism they despise; to them, reading a statement like that is a distracting and off-putting jolt that detracts from the credibility of the rest of the article. To understand how this sentence feels to a progressive, imagine reading an article by a progressive who writes that “governments can always fix market failures and make everyone better off”. At that statement, they’ve lost you for good.
It’s because of glib statements like this that other libertarians have to constantly assure people that they don’t want the police to be privatized, and that they do believe in public goods, and there are limitations to what free markets can achieve.
Another example is his discussion of the Head Start program. He wants the reader to believe that Head Start has been proven to be a failure. I’m no expert on this, but the evidence is certainly more mixed than he portrays. For starters, the study he cites uses a single cohort of students from 2002-2003. With this one year sample Stossel insinuates that the 45-year-old program in it’s entirety has been proven ineffective.
The study Stossel cites criticizes Head Start because it’s impact fades quickly:
The study showed that at the end of one program year, access to Head Start positively influenced children’s school readiness. When measured again at the end of kindergarten and first grade, however, the Head Start children and the control group children were at the same level on many of the measures studied.
Of course, this type of fade-out is understood to be common amongst educational interventions, and also ignores potential longer-term benefits. Stossel’s clear-cut, absolute rebuke contrasts with this recent paper on Head Start by David Deming in the journal Applied Economics:
…some studies find evidence of fade-out for African American participants compared to their more advantaged white peers… if fade-out generalizes to all long-term impacts, the benefits of many of these interventions have been overstated. However, studies of model preschool interventions find dramatic improvements in long-term outcomes among program participants, despite rapid fade-out of test score gains.
In addition to the positive results of Deming’s study, his summation of the literature on long-term gains suggests that they are real:
The best evidence for the long-term impact of Head Start comes from two recent studies…Using different data sources and identification strategies, each finds long-term impacts of Head Start on outcomes such as educational attainment, crime, and mortality…
Now, the quick fade out of short-term gains is an important point. If we are going to spend more money on the program we demand to know if and how they will improve it to prevent the short-run gains from the intervention from being lost. This isn’t what Stossel does though. He instead uses these results to declare that Head Start has been proven a failure over it’s 45 year life. How is someone expected to believe that the rest of his article makes accurate claims?
I’ve always felt there’s an inherent tradeoff we face with greater federalization of education. On the one hand, higher degrees of federal government involvement could almost certainly improve education in our worst performing states. I’m sure federal standards and incentives could improve states with governments too beholden to teachers unions that go to outrageous lengths to limit charter schools (I’m looking at you, New York), and states that set low bars for standardized testing.
On the other hand, more local autonomy allows schools and districts to better tailor the education to their local populations. For instance, federal standards for vocational education could restrict local districts abilities to custom tailor their vocational education programs to better match the local supply and demand for vocational work, which is vastly different in different parts of the country. Is it so hard to imagine a federal vocational standards board mandating a nationwide “green jobs” program, or an “organic, sustainable, urban agriculture” program?
In addition, local autonomy makes schools to be more accountable for their performance. Less local autonomy means less blame (or credit) that can be laid at the feet of the local school districts, administrators, and even teachers, for the failure (or success) of a school.
A new paper by by Torberg Falch and Justina Fischer provides some new evidence on the effects of decentralized government on school performance. They use an dataset of standardized test scores as the measure of education performance, and the percent of local government spending relative to national government spending as the measure of government decentralization. The data are for 25 OECD countries from 1980 to 2000. They find that a 10% increase in decentralization increased test scores by 0.7 standard deviations. Interestingly, they also find that the total size of the public sector has a negative impact on scores.
There’s an obvious generalization problem with these results: areas with more local autonomy are probably areas that demand more local autonomy, which are also probably the places with the local knowledge and institutional capital to successfully manage a local school system. You can’t conclude from these results alone that public school performance can be improved by exogeneously granting more local autonomy. It does suggest, perhaps, that you can improve public school performance by granting local autonomy to those areas that demand it, and that taking that autonomy away could reduce public school performance. This is important to consider as we move towards an increasingly federalized education system.
It’s not hard to persuade the persuaded. Nevertheless, I found Caitlan Flannigan’s takedown of the disturbing nexus of local food and progressive school reform to be spot on. Like the broader green school movement I wrote about recently, these moves to indoctrinate students into the social fad of the moment seem destined to contaminate not just the obvious subjects, like health and science classes, but the entire curriculum. At Martin Luthor King Jr. Middle School, for instance, Flannigan found:
In English class students composed recipes, in math they measured the garden beds, and in history they ground corn as a way of studying pre-Columbian civilizations. Students’ grades quickly improved at King, which makes sense given that a recipe is much easier to write than a coherent paragraph on The Crucible.
Flannigan aptly describes the movement as driven by an:
agglomeration of foodies and educational reformers who are propelled by a vacuous if well-meaning ideology that is responsible for robbing an increasing number of American schoolchildren of hours they might other wise have spent reading important books or learning higher math (attaining the cultural achievements, in other words, that have lifted uncounted generations of human beings out of the desperate daily scrabble to wrest sustenance from dirt).
Tyler Cowen talks about how the disaster in Haiti could transform it into a better place to live:
Arguably the new regime in Haiti will operate much like the federal states in Mexico. Corrupt and a mess, but oriented toward a certain kind of progress, if only to increase the returns from corruption…
…The surviving Haitians, in time, might be much better off.
In support of the general idea of the positive transformative ability of disasters, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan praises the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans’ schools:
I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina. That education system was a disaster, and it took Hurricane Katrina to wake up the community to say that ‘we have to do better.’ And the progress that they’ve made in four years since the hurricane is unbelievable.
As notes of caution, Tyler makes sure to point out he is not saying that “the future gains will, in moral terms, outweigh the massive loss of life and destruction”, and I doubt anyone would claim that Hurricane Katrina has had a net positive impact on New Orleans overall. Still, in the midst of terrible tragedy, any glimmers of optimism are certainly welcome.
The president of the American Federation of Teachers has proposed a set of policies for changing the way that teachers are paid. Some of it sounds good, some of it laughable, and some of it suspicious, but overall this sentiment is very encouraging:
“Our system of evaluating teachers has never been adequate,” she said, adding that for too long it “has failed to achieve what must be our goal: continuously improving” teaching.
The proposals, from the AFT website, include setting standards for what teachers should “know and be able to do”. To me, this sounds like more certification and education requirements, which the evidence shows does not impact teacher ability.
In addition, they propose that teacher assessments should be based on a variety of metrics including in-class observations, self-evaluations, portfolio reviews, and assessments of lesson plans, students’ work, and “other projects”. My first reaction is that self evaluations are a laughable means by which to judge teachers, but that more measurements are probably a good thing.
They also want test scores to be used only to compare scores of students from the beginning of the year that they are with the teacher to the end of the year. Allowing the teachers to administer their own baseline tests provides them with terrible incentives. I’m not sure why this measurement would be better than comparing to students’ previous year’s scores except that it allows teachers to influence their own baseline.
Another reform includes hiring Ken Feinberg, Obama’s Compensation Czar, to oversee develoment of a new process for removing bad teachers.
Overall I find it encouraging that the reform proposals of one of the nations largest teachers unions recognize that it needs to be easier to fire bad teachers, and that some form of standardized testing is a good thing.
One argument against school vouchers is that, unlike charter schools, the lack of oversight will allow ideological and overly niche schools to thrive. This will mean more children will receive an education lacking in either general breadth or something else, depending on the niche of the voucher school. I find this to be probably the most compelling argument against vouchers; I have a hard time imagining ideological elementary schools not arising and becoming popular, and in some areas even crowding out unideological schools in general. Given the other benefits of vouchers, I don’t find this a sufficient reason to oppose them, but I do believe it to be a potential cost.
Of course the counterargument to this is that current public and charter schools are already ideological, that teachers tend to be liberal overall, and that leftist ideology is already pervasive in public school curriculum. An article today on the burgeoning trend of Green schools is evidence in favor of this counterargument. These are charter schools that focus curriculum around environmentalism, and other “social justice” issues. Not only are they operating under public charter funds, but according to the article, “some of them [are] benefiting from state grants and mandates to incorporate environmental education into the curriculum.”
Curriculum includes things like recycling, environmental justice, and other issues related to the environment. It’s fair to say a well-rounded education should involve understanding these issues, but indoctrinating a particular ideological perspective should not be the focus of a child’s education. Furthermore, even if they were being even-handed about it in presenting different perspectives on environmental issues, which is almost certainly not the case, it’s as absurd to think that these issues should be the central component around which a child’s education is organized. Kid’s deserve a break from the constant reminder of the issue of environmentalism. But not even math class does not provide a respite from environmentalism; at the Green School in Brooklyn, students “walk the streets to map trees and trash cans, then incorporate their findings into mural sketches for geometry class.”
In addition to having and ideological slant when teaching traditional school subjects like math and general science, some schools also “emphasize the environmental sciences or teach skills that will prepare students for careers in renewable energy or other pillars of a greener economy”. This means teaching students to design energy-efficient buildings, and install solar panels. I would hope that even the economics think tanks that put out the absurdly optimistic reports on our future “green economy” would advise against taking their forecasts this seriously. It’s one thing to bend a child’s understanding of the world to your ideological convictions, but to force their skills to fit that mold as well? This is parents and administrators gambling children’s future incomes and on an ideologically driven fad, and it’s so obvious that one administrator quoted in the article is on the defensive about it:
“We’ve got some schools investing in the skills kids need to compete,” Mr. Betheil said. “No way is this a fad.”
Down the street the “No Limit Texas Hold’Em Elementary School” and “Future House Flippers High School” shuttered their doors, tearing down plaques containing the same mottos: “No way is this a fad”.
I also find it hard to believe that a wider ideological indoctrination does not take place at these schools. I’m sure there are plenty of multicultural and post-modern critiques of science, and constant reminders that what is being taught in standard elementary schools contains a Western, Capitalist, white male bias.
Global warming is real, pollution is an issue, and children should learn about it in all schools. But to build an education around those issues in the same way that many liberals build their lives around them is an extreme ideological corruption of education. It would be nice to see progressive critics of vouchers stand up against these sorts of schools in the same way that they would if “Heritage Foundation Charter Schools For Young Capitalists” were springing up across the country. Otherwise, it becomes apparent that the objection to vouchers is not that children will be indoctrinated to partisan ideologies in publicly funded schools, but that they will be indoctrinated to partisan ideologies other than their own.
It is a popular idea amongst economists, at least relevant to the non-economist population, that the purpose of higher education is simply to signal to employers the innate skills and qualities of the individuals. Contrary to the popular conception of the purpose of college as a place to learn necessary skills and and knowledge, the signaling theory purports that college is nothing more than a long test that tells potential employers something about your inherent intelligence and abilities.
One way to test this theory is to ask employers what they want colleges that their future employees may come from to focus on. If they want to those colleges to focus on teaching specific subject matter knowledge then that would be evidence against the signaling theory of education. If they want colleges to focus on testing students in things which in general are innate, like thing similar to I.Q. tests, then that would be evidence in favor of signaling theories; they only want colleges to be more accurate signals.
A recent article on how colleges are striving to be more “revelent” to future careers shines a little light on this issue. Employers are apparently telling colleges that they do not want students to be specializing, but rather learning broad skills. According to a survey conducted of employers by the American Association of Colleges and Universities,
89 percent said they wanted more emphasis on “the ability to effectively communicate orally and in writing,” 81 percent asked for better “critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills” and 70 percent were looking for “the ability to innovate and be creative.”
Communicating effectively and critical and analytical thinking are skills that can be strengthened and learned in college. On the other hand, are those things that are better learned in school or on the job? I think you can at least make the case that these are skills that are better learned in school, and so this is potentially evidence in favor of non-signaling theories of education, but I could be convinced otherwise.
Innovation and creativity, on the other hand, don’t strike me as the kinds of things colleges would be effective at teaching. If you’re not a creative or innovative person by the time you reach college, can anything they can teach you there really do anything about that? This is evidence in favor of the signaling theory.
Also notable is the absence of any desire of employers for specific subject matter knowledge. This does not bode well for non-signaling theories, since so much of what colleges currently do is teach subject matter.
The results of this survey are slightly suggestive of signaling theories, but they don’t appear completely damning or one sided. In either case, what employers want colleges to teach is probably the best battleground for these theories of education to compete. I would be interested to see how defenders and critics of the signaling theory of education interpret these results.
Alex Tabarrok thinks that in the future superstar teachers will teach classes online to thousands of students. What are the best examples of this for economics so far?
I have not looked closely at MIT’s openware courses, but I know Hausman’s graduate econometrics materials are available. Ken Train of UC Berkely has excellent video lectures, homework, and a free online textbook for his graduate econometrics class on simulated discrete choice and heirarchical modelling.
Are there excellent online econ courses I’m missing?
Teachers at W.H. Maxwell Career and Technical Education High School in Brooklyn were among those at 23 high schools citywide awarded a total of $3.5 million in performance bonuses on Thursday, even though the school received a D on its progress report earlier this week.
That’s from an article by Sharon Otterman at the New York Times on performance pay going to terribly performing schools. I had a mixed reaction to this article. To some extent, this is exactly what you’d expect if you want to create a systems that incentivizes teachers in lower performing schools. And of course, their being “terribly performing schools” is only true if you measure performance in a static sense. In a dynamic sense, these schools are performing great; going from a D to a C ranking, or a low C to a high C is improvement (I assume), and improvement where it is needed most.
On the other hand, there does seem to be an inherent unfairness in rewarding a school that may simply be getting it’s act together, while other schools that have had their acts together all along are not rewarded. This seems to be the angle the article is taking.
Unfortunately, from a pragmatic standpoint, I think this is probably a sort of necessary unfairness. If you simply adjust pay to static performance than you will incentivize teachers to leave bad performing schools to take jobs at good performing schools. One consolation could be that in the long-run, this won’t matter; schools will eventually reach a steady-state level of performance upon which they cannot improve.
However, does this incentivize schools in the steady-state to take a dive one year so they can improve the next and receive bonuses? From my limited understanding of NCLB, schools do not face consequences until they fail to make adequate yearly progress two consecutive years in a row (and if I am misunderstanding NCLB here please correct me). If this is true, then schools could take a dive every few years to let there scores fall to a low level, and then receive bonuses by bringing them back up, and do so without facing any negative consequences. Are there provisions of either the New York performance bonus law, NCLB, or other laws that would prevent a school from doing this?
Obviously there would be a coordination problem in getting all teachers to “take a dive”, but since the “Committees of teachers and administrators at individual schools decide how to distribute the money among the union members” there is an obvious enforcement mechanism to counter the apparent prisoners dilemma. And yes, you read that correct, only union members receive bonuses. Also, the bonus amount is also determined by the number of union teachers at each school, so that non-union teachers are apparently not counted. That’s the price of union approval for reforms I suppose.
My guess is that my simple understanding of both programs is incorrect, and schools can’t do this sort of thing. But it is interesting to think about the incentives that schools face when performance pay is weighted heavily towards dynamic rather than static performance. It also makes you think about the optimal strategies of individuals compared to the optimal collective strategies and the sorts of coordination problems that may arise. Designing an optimal mechanism would seem to be a tricky task.
H.T. Thad Pasierb
In a though provoking post Scott Sumner goes into detail about his difficulties getting students to really get Supply and Demand. He asks how other professors do it.
Here is my take:
I always start with auctions. I am not convinced that students can get what’s going on any other way.
Students, have a tendency to think of price in particular as given. I want them to get intuition about an environment where nothing is given. Where price and quantity emerge. This comes naturally from a repeated auction.
Its very easy for students to see that no one “sets” a price at auction. It depends on who is the room and what strategy the buyers take. The more buyers who really want something will provide a higher price.
Talking through the TV show Cash in the Attic , I try to make it clear that no one sets the quantity at an auction either. If people hear that you can sell a bunch of stuff at auction and make a lot of money makes you a lot more likely to rummage through your old stuff and bring it to auction.
So the auction helps them begin to understand that both price and quantity are determined by interactions between people.
There is much more, however, because not everyone at the auction is willing to bid the same amount. This helps us break a part the notions of value and price. Until I started relying heavily on auctions it was like pulling teeth to get students to see that no only are value and price fundamentally different concepts, but if everything every individual valued everything the same and that value was the price there would be no point to trade or economics.
Different values are a necessity for trade just as you must have different values to make an auction work. If I value my old radio at $10 and every other person in the world also values it a $10 what is the point of me trying to sell it and how do I do myself any good by taking it to an auction?
Individual valuation is a gold mine. Because then I just stack the individual valuations up on a bar graph and rank them from highest to lowest. Sometimes I even put a name beside each bar to indicate that this is a real person valuation.
I then step back and say this is a demand curve, of the famous “Supply and Demand” curves.
Because students have already played with Dutch Auctions it is clear to them that if they are five items to be sold then the price at auction will turn out to be the fifth highest valuation. It is also immediately clear that four of the people got a good deal. They paid less than their valuation. Immediately we have an emotional support for consumer surplus.
I go on to have them play with the supply and demand graphs but always with an eye to the auction. Every spot of a demand curve represents a person and how much she values that item.
If the demand curves shift you must be able to tell me a story about that woman. If the supply curve shifts what does it mean relative to that woman. How does the auction end now?
A point that I think I need to make more, to help students with future economics course or applications, is that nothing ever happens because of price. Nothing ever happens because of quantity sold. Price and quantity sold happen because of other things.
I try to keep that perspective in my class but I am sure someone will as them a “if the price goes down then what will happen to . . . “ question when they leave. I need to make sure they understand that this question makes no more sense than saying “if the auctions for Nolan Ryan Rookie Cards start settling at lower prices then what will happen to. . . “
Obviously, the second question immediately prompts one to ask, “wait a minute, what happened to make those Rookie Cards settle a lower price?”
