Rick Hess on Recruiting the Teachers of the Future

May 22, 2009

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

The new edition of Education Next is online, and Rick Hess has a very interesting article on modernizing the teaching profession. Rick notes that we need to update bedrock assumptions-such as assuming that the dominant model of teaching recruitment should rest on recruiting 20 year olds into colleges of education and then expecting them to teach for the next 30 or 40 years. Lots of interesting suggestions on technology, compensation and alternative certification.

Great article, well worth reading.

1 Comment | teacher pay, teacher quality | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Research Round-Up

February 10, 2009

The U.S. Department of Education released a study on how alternatively certified teachers affect student achievement.  The bottom line is that they find: “students of teachers who chose to enter teaching through an alternative route did not perform statistically different from students of teachers who chose a traditional route to teaching.  This finding was the same for those programs that required comparatively many as well as few hours of coursework. However, among those alternative route teachers who reported taking coursework while teaching, their students performed lower than their traditional counterparts.” 

I’m sure that the headlines will be:  “Alternative Certification Fails to Improve Student Achievement.”  But they will have it backwards.  The real headline should be: “Years of Teacher Education Coursework Yields No Benefits for Student Achievement.”

Besides, the real question is whether the alternatively certified teachers are better than the traditional certified teachers districts would have hired if they were constrained to hire only certified teachers.

And in other research news, the forthcoming issue of Education Next has an article by Paul Peterson and Matthew Chingos comparing student achievement in Philadelphia’s for-profit managed schools versus district-managed schools.  The find: “the effect of for-profit management of schools is positive relative to district schools, with math impacts being statistically significant. Over the last six years, students learned each year an average of 25 percent of a standard deviation more in math — roughly 60 percent of a year’s worth of learning — than they would have had the school been under district management. In reading, the estimated average annual impact of for-profit management is a positive 10 percent of a standard deviation — approximately 36 percent of a year’s worth of reading. Only the math differences are statistically significant, however.”

Leave a Comment » | research reports, teacher quality | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Education Next Ranks the Blogs

November 21, 2008

Mike Petrilli has a piece in the new issue of Education Next that ranks some of the most prominent education policy blogs.  The JPGB (that’s Jay P. Greene’s Blog) was ranked 10th according to Technorati’s authority measure, which counts the number of links to a web site in the last 180 days.  JPGB came in just behind Flypaper, to which Petrilli contributes and which was started at about the same time as JPGB.

But Education Nextis part of the dead wood media and the numbers are out of date.  They’re like so two months ago.  Rob Pondiscio over at Core Knowledge has more current numbers and added some other blogs to his list based on what was in his bookmarks.  Here is what he found:

Blog                Technorati Rank       Google Rank

Joanne Jacobs              217                    6
Eduwonkette               167                    6
Eduwonk                     146                    7
Campaign K-12           125                    6
The Education Wonks  119                    6
Flypaper                       95                     5
Jay P. Greene          93                 6
The Quick and the Ed  87                      6
Matthew K. Tabor         85                     6
Core Knowledge     84                  5
This Week in Education  79                   5
Edwize                         74                     6
Intercepts                   69                      4
Schools Matter           68                       5
Bridging Differences   66                      6
D-Ed Reckoning        56                        5
Edspresso                  46                        5
NCLB Act II                40                        5
Sherman Dorn           39                        5
Eduflack                    29                        5
Swift and Change Able 27                     5
Thoughts on Education Policy 25          4

UPDATE:  I’ve added the Google Page Rankings, which you can identify for any web site here.  Unlike Technorati, which just counts links to a site, Google Page Rank weights links by how many links the other sites receive.  This seems like a better approach but unfortunately the Google Page Ranks are only provided on a 1 to 10 scale.  Using it, Eduwonk is the king of the education policy blogs, not Eduwonkette.

2 Comments | blogging | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Looking Abroad for Hope

November 5, 2008

hope

HT despair.com. Looking for a Christmas idea to suit the new reality? Why not a despair.com gift certificate - ”For the person who has everything, but still isn’t happy.”

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Looking around for something to give me hope this morning, I find the best place to turn (for today, at least) is outside the U.S. Specifically, I turn to the recently released study in Education Next by Martin West and Ludger Woessmann finding that around the world, private school enrollment is associated with improved educational outcomes in both public and private schools, as well as lower costs.

Well-informed education wonks will say, “duh.” A large body of empirical research has long since shown, consistently, that competition improves both public school and private school outcomes here in the U.S., while lowering costs. And the U.S. has long been far, far behind the rest of the world in its largely idiosyncratic, and entirely irrational, belief that there’s somthing magical about a government school monopoly.

And private school enrollment is an imperfect proxy for competition. It’s OK to use it when it’s the best you’ve got. I’ve overseen production of some studies at the Friedman Foundation that used it this way, and I wouldn’t have done that if I didn’t think the method were acceptable. However, that said, it should be remembered that some “private schools” are more private than others. In many countries, private school curricula are controlled – sometimes almost totally so – by government. And the barriers to entry for private schools that aren’t part of a government-favored “private” school system can be extraordinary.

That said, this is yet another piece of important evidence pointing to the value of competition in education, recently affirmed (in the context of charter schools, but still) by Barack Obama. Who I understand is about to resign his Senate seat – I guess all those scandals and embarrasing Chicago machine connections the MSM kept refusing to cover finally caught up with him.

Leave a Comment » | competitive effects, methodology, money myth, politics, research reports, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Paying the Pension Piper

October 27, 2008

According to an analysis of public (including teacher) pensions by Northern Trust reported in the Washington Post, those pensions lost 14.8% of their value for the year ended September 30.  They have almost certainly lost more during October in line with the continuing drop in stock prices. 

The decline only compounds a serious problem.  Even before this year’s market fall many teacher pension plans were under-funded.  According to the Post, the GAO concluded that 27 out of 65 large public pensions were inadequately funded as of 2006.

The problem, according to pension administrators cited in the article, stems in part from “an increase in pension benefits.”  That is, when the market is doing great and pension funds are flush, state policymakers are tempted to accede to teacher demands to raise benefits.  But when the market drops, the pension benefits cannot be cut.  It’s a one-way street.  Pension benefits may be increased but it is illegal to decrease them.

So, guess who is going to have to pay the pension piper?  Taxpayers.

UPDATE:  Teacher pensions also distort the labor market for teachers by having “spikes” and “valleys” in benefits.  That is, teachers leave a large amount of money on the table if they leave their positions too early and they actually begin to lose pension benefits if they remain in their job too long.  The net effect is to keep some teachers who have lost their fire for teaching in the profession too long and to drive effective and experienced teachers out of the profession too early.  See a great piece on this by my colleagues Bob Costrell and Mike Podgursky in Education Next.

Leave a Comment » | teacher pay, teacher quality | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Next Entries »
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 940 other followers