My friend and colleague, Marcus Winters, has a new book out on how to improve the quality of the teaching workforce. Teachers Matter is an excellent summary of the literature on how best to recruit, train, and motivate teachers. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in merit pay, credentialing, and teacher evaluation. It’s a particularly good book to assign for classes that cover these subjects. Check it out.
Teachers Matter
January 3, 2012
9 Comments | 
teacher pay, teacher quality, teacher union | Tagged: Marcus Winters, Teachers Matter | 
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Posted by Jay P. Greene
Marcus: RttT Is No Kabuki
December 16, 2009
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
In the past I’ve suggested, in response to Mike Petrilli’s cheerleading for it, that Race to the Top is just a bunch of kabuki. In today’s Washington Examiner, Marcus begs to differ:
Race to the Top has emboldened reform-minded policymakers like Bloomberg to push hard for their ideas. Just as importantly, the lure of earning federal dollars makes the reform position an appealing default for those policymakers whose primary interest lies outside education.
For instance, before Race to the Top, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger paid only brief lip service to education reform. After the grant competition was announced, the Governator called a special session of the state legislature and pushed for a series of meaningful reforms such as eliminating the state’s charter school cap, using data to evaluate student and teacher performance, and adopting a performance pay program for teachers.
I would argue back, but I’m not sure I can. Just last week I praised Bloomberg’s move to push the envelope on interpreting the state’s ban on evaluating teachers with test scores as “gutsball.” By doing so, have I already conceded Marcus’s (and therefore Mike’s) point?
I suppose I could argue that Bloomberg was a reformer even before RttT came along. Maybe he would have played gutsball on the teacher test score ban even without RttT. But it’s hard to think that RttT has nothing to do with his renewed boldness. After all, using test scores in teacher evaluations is an agenda set by RttT. And, as Marcus points out, Bloomberg staged the announcement of his gutsball move in D.C., not New York. Was Bloomberg pushing for this particular reform before? And could he have won on that issue if not for RttT’s covering fire?
I suppose I could argue that the use of test scores as “one element” in teacher evaluations will inevitably be nothing more than a symbolic victory. Trouble is, I’ve always argued that symbols matter. There’s no such thing as a merely symbolic victory.
I suppose I could argue that RttT is promoting bad ideas as well as good ones. And that would be true – but it wouldn’t establish that RttT is kabuki. Quite the opposite; the more we fear RttT for promoting bad ideas, the more we confirm that whatever it is, it isn’t kabuki.
It’s beginning to feel like I may owe Mike an apology. Stay tuned.
4 Comments | charter schools, money myth, politics | Tagged: Greg Forster, Marcus Winters, Mike Petrilli, Race to the Top, Washington Examiner | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
Everyone Wins in the Wall Street Journal
November 4, 2009
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
Today’s Journal has a hard-hitting editorial on Marcus’s new study showing that competition from charters improves regular public schools in NYC.
Opponents of school choice are running out of excuses as evidence continues to roll in about the positive impact of charter schools…State and local policy makers who cave to union demands and block the growth of charters aren’t doing traditional public school students any favors.
And where did you read about it first? Oh yeah.
1 Comment | charter schools, competitive effects | Tagged: Greg Forster, Marcus Winters, New York City, NYC charters, Wall Street Journal | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
Public Education and its Enemies
October 29, 2009
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
In the final scene of Shakespeare’s Henry V, the French sue for peace after Henry’s triumph at Agincourt. While the French king is away negotiating the final terms, Henry uses the opportunity to woo the King’s daughter Katherine to become his Queen.
Katherine is cool to this idea, but slowly warms to the notion under the glare of Henry’s charm. Finally, she asks “May it be possible zat I should love zee enemy of France?”
Henry replies:
“No Kate, it is not possible. For in loving me, you shall love the friend of France. For I love France so much that I will not part with a village of it.”
I think of this line often when K-12 reactionaries try to play the “well, I support public education” card. This you see, is supposed to put a reformer on a defensive and get them to scramble to say that they support public education too!!!
Nice try, but for my part, I have this to say: don’t tell me how much you love public schools unless you are willing to do what it takes to make them work for kids.
Yesterday Marcus Winters released a study showing that charter schools in NYC improve public school performance, especially for disadvantaged children. The effect sizes were modest, but what more can you expect given that the state still has a cap for the number of charters? The cap should be removed, and private choice options created.
Research has firmly established that ineffective teachers severely harm the education of children. Who is the enemy of public education- those who want to preserve tenure at all costs, or those who want to remove ineffective teachers from the classroom?
Last year, I was at a conference in Arizona. A philanthropist spoke movingly about the need to raise Arizona academic standards to internationally competitive levels. An assistant Superintendent of a tony school district said “We can’t meet the standards we have now, the last thing we should do is raise them.”
Who is the enemy of public education- the philanthropist or the administrator?
Later in that same meeting, I made a presentation about Florida’s success in improving public education, including the curtailment of social promotion to compel literacy training. One of the educators in the audience replied “I don’t want to see 9 year olds rolling on the ground crying because they don’t get to advance with their grade.”
That, you see, would be inconveint to her. It would be much less messy to simply pass the child along illiterate until he or she drops out in the 8th grade.
Who is the enemy of public education- me or her?
The reactionaries cleverly try to equate pouring more money on this broken system as compassionate. Balderdash. It is the goals of public education that people should be committed to, not any particular delivery mechanism, nor the employment interests of the adults working in the all-to-often dysfunctional system. We’ve tried the pour money method for improving public schools, and it failed miserably.
Show me don’t tell me how much you love public schools, apologists. As your critics multiply across ideological lines, the time has come to put up or shut up. I love public schools so much that I am willing to put in the right incentives and policies to make them work for a far larger number of children.
How about you?
2 Comments | politics | Tagged: Emma Thompson, Henry V, Kenneth Branagh, Marcus Winters, Matthew Ladner | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
Marcus Wins! Big Deal, So Does Everybody.
October 28, 2009
NOT the cover of Marcus’s new study
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
Well, I made no secret of who I thought was the winner in the Marcus/Murray deathmatch over college education.
But it turns out it’s no big deal, because Marcus says “Everyone Wins!”
In his new study of that title, I mean. Marcus finds that charter schools are improving regular public schools in NYC by creating healthy competitive incentives. The effect is small, fitting the overall pattern in the research – charters typically don’t give you as big a boost as vouchers, but having them is better than not.
For all you Rawlsians out there in JPGB-land, Marcus also finds that the lowest-performing students in NYC’s regular public schools benefit from charter competition; in fact, while the benefits for the overall population are statistically certain only in reading, they’re certain in both reading and math for low performers.
1 Comment | charter schools, competitive effects | Tagged: Greg Forster, Marcus Winters, NYC charters | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
Winters v. Murray Deathmatch on College
October 22, 2009
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
Today on NRO Marcus Winters throws down the gauntlet before Charles Murray and others who have made the increasingly common argument that too many kids go to college these days. As the economy requires workers to have more and more knowledge for good jobs, more kids should go to college, not fewer, Marcus argues; the research on teacher quality and school choice shows that improvements in K-12 education can increase the number of high school graduates who are genuinely able to handle college work; and the wage premium of a college degree is not going down, but up – because the K-12 system hasn’t kept pace with the increasing demands of technological development, and college does make students more productive workers (contrary to Murray’s claim that it serves mainly as a sorting mechanism).
Over on AEI’s blog, Murray responds, calling Marcus a “romantic,” going over a lot of research that doesn’t really address the point at issue, and then falsely claiming that Marcus presents only anecdotes about “a miracle school in the inner city” but offers no “interpretable data.” Anyone who reads Marcus’s piece will see that Marcus points to the eminently interpretable data of the broad research on teacher quality, school choice, and economic outcomes.
7 Comments | higher education | Tagged: Charles Murray, Greg Forster, Marcus Winters, NRO | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
Jay & Marcus in NR
October 2, 2009
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
In the new National Review, Jay and Marcus review the research on special education funding incentives, including the findings of their recent study on the impact of vouchers in Florida.
Financial incentives are particularly important in low-level disability categories like SLD, where a diagnosis is easily fudged. While you need pretty solid evidence to diagnose a child with a traumatic brain injury or other severe disabilities, schools have plenty of leeway on SLD. Some research suggests that public schools use low achievement alone to serve as an indicator of SLD. Studies dating back to the 1980s found that SLD students are indistinguishable from low-achieving regular-enrollment students, with one study estimating that over half the students identified as SLD in Colorado did not fit either federal or state definitions for SLD.
Digital subscribers go here; paper-only subscribers go here; non-subscribers go here.
Leave a Comment » | special ed, vouchers | Tagged: Greg Forster, Jay Greene, Jay P. Greene, Marcus Winters, special education vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
What Is “Merit”?
September 16, 2009(Guest post by Greg Forster)
As JPGB’s friend Marcus Winters notes on NRO today, the Obama administration has been staying the course on this issue, denying “Race to the Top” funds to states that disallow the use of objective measurement in evaluating teachers. Marcus also rightly links this to the topic of merit pay, which the president repeatedly embraced during the campaign. One of the biggest obstacles to enacting real merit pay is making sure that the measurement of “merit” really measures merit. Too many experiments with “merit pay” have really been experiments in peer evaluation pay, grade inflation pay, and so on. Check out Marcus’s article for more.
1 Comment | teacher pay, teacher quality | Tagged: Greg Forster, Marcus Winters, merit pay, NRO, Race to the Top | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
Tampa Tribune Op-Ed
September 3, 2009Marcus Winters and I have an op-ed in this morning’s Tampa Tribune on how Florida’s McKay voucher program for special education students has restrained the spiraling growth in special education enrollments in public schools. We write:
In Florida, as in most other states, schools receive additional funding for each student identified as disabled. Often, these additional resources are greater than the actual cost of providing special-education services, giving schools a financial incentive to increase their diagnoses.
The financial incentive to misdiagnose is particularly apparent when classifying students as having a specific learning disability (SLD). That’s because SLD is the most common, the most ambiguous, and the least costly category of special education. In many cases, school officials might simply be trying to get extra resources to help struggling students. But the net effect is the misclassification of a huge number of students as having an SLD.
The McKay program reduces the financial incentive for Florida’s schools to misdiagnose learning disabilities by placing revenue at risk whenever a student is placed into special education…
In our new study, we found as the number of nearby, McKay-accepting private schools increases, the probability that a public school will identify a student as having an SLD decreases significantly. The program reduced the probability that a fourth-, fifth-, or sixth-grader in a school facing the average number of nearby private options was diagnosed as SLD by about 15 percent.
5 Comments | special ed, vouchers | Tagged: Jay Greene, Jay P. Greene, Marcus Winters, McKay, special education, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
Special Ed Vouchers Restrain Growth in Disabilities
August 18, 2009Marcus Winters and I have a super-awesome study released today by the Manhattan Institute. It shows that offering disabled students special education vouchers reduces the likelihood that public schools will identify students as disabled.
This isn’t what Andy Rotherham and Sara Mead expected. They claimed in a 2003 report for the Progress Policy Institute that: “special education vouchers may actually exacerbate the over-identification problem by creating a new incentive for parents to have children diagnosed with a disability in order to obtain a voucher.”
It didn’t. The reason special education vouchers restrained growth in disabilities, rather than exacerbate it, is that the vouchers check public schools’ financial incentives to identify more students as disabled. Public schools may get additional subsidies when they shift more students into special education, but if they then make students eligible for special education vouchers, they risk having those students walk out the door with all of their funding. It makes the public schools think twice before over-identifying disabilities for financial reasons.
And outside of the DC bubble, schools control the process of whether students are identified as disabled — not parents. So, if we can check the positive financial incentives that public schools have for over-identifying disabilities, we can significantly slow growth in special education.
Nearly 1 in 7 students nationwide is now classified as having a disability. That’s 63% more than three decades ago. It’s clear that this huge increase in disabilities was not caused by a true increase in the incidence of disabilities in the population. No plague has afflicted our children over the last three decades to disable two-thirds more of them.
Instead, non-medical factors have been driving special education enrollments higher. Chief among these is the financial incentives we offer schools in most states to shift more students into special education by providing additional subsidies for each student classified as disabled.
Some states have reformed their special education funding formulas to end these financial rewards for higher special education rolls. Greg and I reported in a 2002 study that states that continued to pay schools per student identified as disabled had much higher rates of growth in special education than states that had reformed their funding formulas. Elizabeth Dhuey of the University of Toronto and Stephen Lipscomb of the Public Policy Institute of California have confirmed these findings.
Julie Cullen of UC San Diego has found that ”fiscal incentives can explain over 35 percent of the recent growth in student disability rates in Texas.” And Sally Kwak, a student of David Card at UC Berkeley and now a professor at U of Hawaii, finds a significant slow-down in special education enrollments when California reformed its funding system.
The new study Marcus and I released today builds upon this growing research by showing yet again that public schools strongly consider non-medical factors when deciding whether to classify students as disabled. I don’t mean to suggest that all school officials are conscious of these incentives or acting with evil intention. But it is clear that the system in which they operate and their actions are shaped by these financial incentives.
If we discovered that hospitals were filling their beds with healthy people who just felt a little tired in order to obtain additional government subsidies, we would be outraged and demand dramatic reforms. Public schools are doing the same and it is time we get outraged and demand reforms.
19 Comments | special ed, vouchers | Tagged: Andy Rotherham, Elizabeth Dhuey, Jay Greene, Jay P. Greene, Julie Cullen, Manhattan Institute, Marcus Winters, McKay, Progressive Policy Institute, Sally Kwak, Sara Mead, special education, Stephen Lipscomb, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
