Education Links

Courtesy Kyle Hughes of NYSNYS, here's a montage of footage from the debates over Gov. Andrew Cuomo's bill codifying the release of teachers evaluations

Citizens for Public Schools (CPS) believes the compromise reached by the Massachusetts Teachers Association and corporate-funded Stand for Children would avoid the worst aspects of Stand's proposed ballot question, which was a deceptive and destructive proposal that failed to address real obstacles to educational quality and equity. The compromise was passed by the legislature and signed into law by Gov. Deval Patrick today, June 29. In exchange, Stand said it would drop the ballot measure it proposed to put on the November ballot. "Stand for Children has become a vehicle for a few billionaires who want to control how we run our public schools," said CPS President Ann O'Halloran, who was the 2007 Massachusetts History Teacher of the Year. "I'm relieved that Stand was blocked from achieving its full agenda, but CPS and our allies must be prepared to resist similar efforts down the road. We need to raise awareness of this as a national problem, not just a Massachusetts issue."

Detroit teachers could go out on strike this fall as the result of a new contract imposed on the union Sunday by Detroit Public Schools Emergency Manager Roy Roberts. Although contracts are usually negotiated between DPS and the Detroit Federation of Teachers (DFT), the emergency manager law, Public Act 4, allows Roberts to bypass the collective bargaining process, unilaterally determining the terms of employment for DPS teachers. The union's previous contract expired at the end of June. Roberts is waiting for DFT to inform its membership before he makes details of the new contract public.

The type of clothing worn in a family's home, the language spoken and other cultural markers could influence whether special-education students receive taxpayer-funded private-school tuition, under a bill passed last month by the New York state Legislature. Education officials would have to consider a student's "home environment and family background" when deciding the best setting for special-education children under the bill. Currently, decisions about private-school placement have generally been based on academics and the child's disability.

In the case of the trigger, all the heated rhetoric about the merits of the trigger mechanism seems to be ignoring a critical issue: Whether replacing regular public schools with charters will produce better outcomes for its (current and future) students. This is, to say the least, an open question, especially in the case of conversion schools, and it's in many respects at the heart of the matter. Yet it often gets lost in the trigger controversy (and, I would argue, in the debate about charters schools in general, but that's a different issue). Conversely, and more importantly, whether or not current parents should be allowed, by majority vote, to fundamentally alter a public school is a very serious question, one that would seem to carry implications for public policy, both in education and maybe even in other areas as well.

Redistributing highly effective teachers from low- to high-need schools is an education policy tool that is at the center of several major current policy initiatives. The underlying assumption is that  teacher productivity is portable across different schools settings. Using elementary and secondary school data from North Carolina and Florida, this paper investigates the validity of this assumption. Among teachers who switched between schools with substantially different poverty levels or academic performance levels, we find no change in those teachers' measured effectiveness before and after a school change. This pattern holds regardless of the direction of the school change. We also find that high-performing teachers' value-added dropped and low-performing teachers' value-added gained in the post-move years, primarily as a result of regression to the within-teacher mean and unrelated to school setting changes. Despite such shrinkages, high-performing teachers in the pre-move years still outperformed low-performing teachers after moving to schools with different settings.

We've all become accustomed to this selective, exaggerated presentation of testing data, which is of course not at all limited to NYC. And it illustrates the obvious fact that test-based accountability plays out in multiple arenas, formal and informal, including the court of public opinion. Some of the errors found in press releases and other official communications, in NYC and elsewhere, are common and probably unintentional (e.g., all three of the mistakes I discussed in this post). In other instances, however, results are misinterpreted in such a blatant fashion as to be a little absurd.

As most people know, one of the big issues in charter school research, common elsewhere as well, is selection effects - the idea that applicants to charter schools are different from non-applicants in terms of unobserved characteristics such as motivation, social networks, family involvement in their education and whether or not they're thriving in their current school. Researchers who wish to isolate the effect of charter schools must address this issue by attempting to control for these differences between students, using variables such as prior achievement, lunch program eligibility and special education classification. When done correctly, this approach can be quite powerful, but it does entail the (unlikely and untestable) assumption that the two groups (treatment and control) do not differ on any observable or unobservable characteristics that might influence the results, at least to some extent.

About a week ago, Florida officials went into crisis mode after revealing that the proficiency rate on the state's writing test (FCAT) dropped from 81 percent to 27 percent among fourth graders, with similarly large drops in the other two grades in which the test is administered (eighth and tenth). The panic was almost immediate. For one thing, performance on the writing FCAT is counted in the state's school and district ratings. Many schools would end up with lower grades and could therefore face punitive measures. Understandably, a huge uproar was also heard from parents and community members. How could student performance decrease so dramatically? There was so much blame going around that it was difficult to keep track - the targets included the test itself, the phase-in of the state's new writing standards, and test-based accountability in general. Despite all this heated back-and-forth, many people seem to have overlooked one very important, widely-applicable lesson here: That proficiency rates, which are not "scores," are often extremely sensitive to where you set the bar.

I have been writing critically about states' school rating systems (e.g., Ohio, Florida, Louisiana), and I thought I would find one that is, at least in my (admittedly value-laden) opinion, more defensibly designed. It didn't quite turn out as I had hoped. One big starting point in my assessment is how heavily the systems weight absolute performance (how highly students score) versus growth (how quickly students improve). As I've argued many times, the former (absolute level) is a poor measure of school performance in a high-stakes accountability system. It does not address the fact that some schools, particularly those in more affluent areas, serve  students who, on average, enter the system at a higher-performing level. This amounts to holding schools accountable for outcomes they largely cannot control (see Doug Harris' excellent book for more on this in the teacher context). Thus, to whatever degree testing results can be used to judge actual school effectiveness, growth measures, while themselves highly imperfect, are to be preferred in a high-stakes context. There are a few states that assign more weight to growth than absolute performance (see this prior post on New York City's system). One of them is Colorado's system, which uses the well-known "Colorado Growth Model" (CGM).

Delegates to the National Education Association's Representative Assembly knew the news about their union's loss of membership would be bad, but it isn't clear that they knew it would be this bad. NEA officials said the union has lost more than 100,000 teachers and education support personnel since 2010, and it projects that it will lose even more in the future. By the end of its 2013-14 budget, NEA expects it will have lost 308,000 members and experienced a decline in revenue projected at some $65 million in all since 2010. (The figures are expressed in full-time equivalents, which means that the actual number of people affected is probably higher.)

You would think everyone would want to review the evidence before rushing to implement schemes that haven't been shown to work. But when folks like Michelle Rhee control the debate - a woman who crows about her changes to the Washington DC evaluation system when they had no discernible effect on student learning - politicians must feel they have to follow her lead. They need to urgently do something - anything! - to prove how much they care about kids.

Technical problems erupted as soon as Wyoming switched to online testing in 2010. Students were unable to submit their tests after spending hours taking them. At times the questions wouldn't load on the screen. And ultimately the scores were deemed unreliable. "We had so many poor kids who had to take the test again," said Gordon Knopp, technology director of Laramie County School District No. 1, the largest school district in Wyoming.

The Common Core standards, if they separate the learning of skills from content and understanding, point teachers in the wrong direction.

The virtual teacher has arrived - flickering away on a screen on a school bus, in a bunk bed or in the shade of a beach umbrella, and turning traditional education on its head.

Butts said that the staff plans to use the school to find new and different ways to make STEM education both exciting and feasible for young people, and looks forward to sharing those findings with other educators. "This is not a selfish kind of venture: This is something that we hope will be able strengthen STEM [education] across the Island," said Butts. During the question and answer period, many of the residents in attendance were skeptical. Some questioned the need for a charter school when Jericho High School, as well as several other nearby districts, produces great results in math and science.

Just now the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to uphold the Affordable Care Act, President Obama's signature health-care initiative-including a controversial provision that would require individuals to buy health-care insurance. But what does this provision mean for schools? It could be more connected than you'd think, as research shows health-care disparities help drive achievement gaps among students.

Educators across the nation are working hard this summer to begin developing updated curricula that will fit into the new Common Core State Standards, which will be fully applied in 45 U.S. states (Texas, Alaska, Nebraska, Virginia, and Minnesota have opted out of statewide participation) by 2015. Yet despite the hubbub about the new standards, which were created as a means of better equipping students with the knowledge they need to be competitive in the modern world, many teachers still have a lot of unanswered questions about what Common Core will mean for them, their students, and their schools. Luckily, the Internet abounds with helpful resources that can explain the intricacies of Common Core, offer resources for curriculum development, and even let teachers keep up with the latest news on the subject. We've collected just a few of those great resources here, which are essential reads for any K-12 educator in a Common Core-adopting state.

One pervasive reformy argument is that our entire education system may be instantly transformed to be more productive and efficient by instantly adopting untested reformy policies and/or untested solutions of sectors other than education. Further, that we must take these bold leaps of faith because the public education system itself is too corrupt, too bloated, too inefficient to provide any useful lessons! Perhaps the whole system can be replaced with you-tube videos. Or perhaps we can just fire all of the teachers with more than 10 years experience and pay the rest based on the test scores they produce! Or perhaps some other lessons of industry can cure the (unsubstantiated) ills of American public schooling!

In recent years, the casual observer of debates over public education policy might be led to believe that improving teacher quality and ensuring that low income and minority school children have access to high quality teachers has little or nothing to do with the equity or adequacy of financing of schools. The casual observer might be led to believe that there actually exists a sizable body of empirical research that confirms a) that high quality teaches matter, b) that money doesn't matter and c) by extension money has nothing to do with recruiting, retaining or redistributing teacher quality. These arguments, while politically convenient for those hoping to avoid thorny questions of tax policy and state aid formulas, are not actually grounded in any body of decisive, empirical research. Rather, to the contrary, it is reasonably well understood that while teacher quality does indeed matter, teacher wages also matter and teacher working conditions matter, both in terms of the level of quality of the overall teacher workforce and in the distribution of quality teachers.