The Other (More Important) Value-Added Measure

February 26, 2013

(Guest Post by Collin Hitt)

Some teachers are better than others when it comes to raising test scores, which in turn can raise students’ earnings in adulthood. But test scores aren’t everything. A new study looks at whether individual teachers can have similar impacts on suspension rates, school attendance, GPA and even graduation rates. It finds that they can, and do.

To put the non-test score estimates into perspective, having an Algebra or English teacher 20 at the 85th percentile of GPA quality versus one at the 15th percentile would be associated with 0.09 and 0.054 higher GPA, respectively. For both subjects, a teacher at the 85 percentile of ontime grade progression quality versus one at the 15th percentile would be associated with being 5 percentage points (0.14σ) more likely to enroll in 10th grade on time. Given that not enrolling in 10th grade is a strong predictor of dropout, this suggests significant teacher effects on dropout…

That’s from Northwestern’s Kirabo Jackson, His working paper uses state-of-the-art value-added methods to identify North Carolina high school teachers who have significant impacts on test scores. He then uses the same methods to see which teachers have an impact on “non-cognitive” behaviors. One would expect – at least, I expected – that the teachers who raise test scores also raise non-cognitive outcomes. Not so.

For all outcomes, Algebra teachers with higher test score value-added are associated with better non-test score outcomes, but the relationships are weak…This indicates that while teachers who raise test score may also be associated with better non-test-score outcomes, most of effects on non-test score outcomes are unrelated to effects on test scores. The results for cognitive ability are consistent with this…

Results for English teachers follow a similar pattern. English teacher effects on English test scores explain little of the estimated effects on non-test score outcomes…

Because variability in outcomes associated with individual teachers that is unexplained by test scores is not just noise, but is systematically associated with their ability to improve typically unmeasured non-cognitive skills, classifying teachers based on their test score value added will likely lead to large shares of excellent teachers being deemed poor and vice versa.

So teachers can have large effects on matters that are supposedly out of their hands. Suspensions, absence rates and GPA are functions of a student’s conscientiousness – or more generally, of his character. This study delivers another blow to the cop out lobby.

But it also presents a huge challenge to the proponents of test-based teacher policies. Read this line again: “classifying teachers based on their test score value added will likely lead to large shares of excellent teachers being deemed poor and vice versa.”  This is not a trivial matter. Jackson shows that non-cognitive outcomes are more strongly correlated with life outcomes than are test scores – especially for students with limited cognitive ability. This paper cannot be ignored.

Hat Tip: Joanne Jacobs

[Edited to correct formatting error and typos]


Chingos Strikes Again

February 22, 2013

Yesterday, I blogged about a new study by Matt Chingos and Marty West about pension reform in Florida.  Now I see that Matt has struck again with a great study about on-line learning in the current issue of Education Next.  Matt, along with co-authors William Bowen, Kelly Lack and Thomas Nygren, conducted a random assignment evaluation of an online statistics course that was offered at six universities.

Students were assigned by lottery either to a traditional course or a course where the bulk of the instruction was provided by inter-active software supplemented by weekly discussion sections.  The bottom line is that students did no better or worse in measured learning outcomes regardless of whether they received the course in the traditional way or via the internet.  The authors suggest that these results should temper wild claims about improved learning from online instruction as well as wild accusations that online fails to deliver.  They seem to be equally effective.  But the authors add that online delivery has significant potential to reduce the cost of delivering education and may have significant benefits for retention of students.

Here’s their conclusion in their own words:

In the case of online learning, where millions of dollars are being invested by a wide variety of entities, we should perhaps expect that there will be inflated claims of spectacular successes. The findings in this study warn against too much hype. To the best of our knowledge, there is no compelling evidence that online learning systems available today—not even highly interactive systems, which are very few in number—can in fact deliver improved educational outcomes across the board, at scale, on campuses other than the one where the system was born, and on a sustainable basis….

We do not mean to suggest that ILO systems are a panacea for this country’s deep-seated education problems. Many claims about “online learning” (especially about simpler variants in their present state of development) are likely to be exaggerated. But it is important not to go to the other extreme and accept equally unfounded assertions that adoption of online systems invariably leads to inferior learning outcomes and puts students at risk. We are persuaded that well-designed interactive systems in higher education have the potential to achieve at least equivalent educational outcomes while opening up the possibility of freeing up significant resources that could be redeployed more productively.

They also consider the implication of this higher education study for online instruction in K-12:

Extrapolating the results of our study to K–12 education is hardly straightforward. College students are expected to have a degree of self-motivation and self-discipline that younger students may not yet have achieved. But the variation among students within any given age cohort is probably much greater than the differences from one age group to the next. At the very least, one could expect that online learning for students planning to enter the higher-education system would be an appropriate experience, especially if colleges and universities continue to expand their online offerings. It is not too soon to seek ways to test experimentally the potential of online learning in secondary schools as well.

You can read the full article here.

[Edited to correct omitted co-author and for clarity]


Chingos and West on Florida’s Pension Reforms

February 21, 2013

Matt Chingos and Marty West have a new paper published by Fordham examining pension reforms in Florida.  Specifically, Florida offered its new teachers the option of choosing between a defined benefit and a defined contribution retirement plan.  The defined benefit plan is the type most commonly found for teachers and defined contribution is more commonly found for private sector workers.

Defined benefit plans have some unusual characteristics that may push some teachers out of the workforce before they really should leave and may keep others as teachers longer than they should.  These defined benefit plans also reward long-serving and immobile teachers at the expense of shorter-serving and more mobile teachers, like those most commonly found in charter schools.  And defined benefit plans shift all of the risk for achieving sufficient investment returns to the government, which given recently weak investment returns, government under-funding of plans, and overly generous promised benefits is putting many states in serious financial trouble.

So states like Florida are considering shifting more teachers to defined contribution plans, which are more like 401k plans where the employer and employee each contribute money to an investment account and then the employee bears the risk of investment returns.

Matt and Marty addressed four questions in their study: 1) What portion of new teachers have chosen the defined contribution (DC) option? 2) What kinds of new teachers were more likely to make that selection? 3) Did the teachers who chose DC more likely to be effective teachers? and 4) Is there a difference in attrition between new teachers who choose DC or defined benefits (DB)?

The quick answers are 1) Between a quarter and a third of new teachers chose DC.  This is a surprisingly large share choosing DC, especially given that DB was the default option.  2) Teachers with more advanced degrees and degrees in math and science (presumably those with the most attractive options outside of teaching) were more likely to choose DC.  3) There was relatively little relationship between whether a teacher chose DC and their later effectiveness as measured by value-added scores. 4) New teachers who chose DC were more likely to leave their teaching positions.

Check out the full report to see all the details.


SEED Charter School: The Charter Research Keeps Piling Up

February 12, 2013

(Guest Post by Collin Hitt)

Earlier this winter on JPGB I summarized the nine studies of charter schools (that I knew of) that use a rigorous random-assignment research design. I missed one. Harvard’s Roland Fryer and Stanford’s Vilsa Curto have released a study of the SEED charter school in inner-city Washington D.C.

SEED enrolls most poor, minority students. But it isn’t your typical charter school. While open to anyone who wins a seat through its enrollment lottery, SEED is a boarding school that’s quite expensive. It’s a ‘No Excuses’ school with strict discipline and high expectations. With control over students’ schooling, diets and leisure time, the school’s founders promised big results. From Fryer and Curto’s November 2012 report:

Our lottery estimates reveal that SEED is effective at increasing achievement among poor minority students. Students who enroll in SEED increase their achievement by 0.211 (standard deviations) in reading and 0.229 (standard deviations) in math, per year. Thus, SEED schools have the power to eliminate the racial achievement gap in four years.

Those are remarkable gains. But SEED comes at a steep cost.

At the SEED School in Washington, D.C., about $39,275 is spent per pupil per year, compared to $20,523 per student in District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS).

Leave aside for a moment that DC Public Schools spend $20,523 and get abysmal results. Sending a kid to SEED nearly doubles that cost. That marginal increase is somewhat understandable, since the school is housing and feeding adolescent kids. Nevertheless, those costs don’t typically fall squarely on the DC school system. So is it worth it?

Our lottery estimates suggest that attending the SEED school for one year is associated with a 3.8 percent increase in earnings (Chetty et al., 2012), a 1.0 to 1.3 percent decrease in the probability of committing a property or violent crime (Levitt and Lochner, 2001), and a 4.4 to 6.6 percent decrease in the probability of having a health disability (Auld and Sidhu, 2005; Elias, 2005; Kaestner, 2009). If SEED affects educational attainment as dramatically as achievement, the implied returns are dramatic (e.g. Card, 1999; Philip Oreopoulos, 2007). The public benefits alone from converting a high school dropout to graduate are more than $250,000.

For obvious reasons, SEED’s results are not indicative of all charter schools. It’s a unique type of charter school. But SEED’s results, while incredibly strong, shouldn’t have caught anyone by complete surprise. Fryer and Curto’s study is the tenth random assignment study of charter schools. All of them find gains for urban, low-income students.

(For the pointer, I thank Jon Mills)


Hogs Triumphant!

February 6, 2013

In a remarkably exciting upset, The Arkansas Razorbacks crushed the #2 Florida Gators last night in basketball at the Bud Walton Arena (“The Basketball Palace of Mid-America,” as the announcer likes to say).  My experience last night re-affirmed my confidence in the theory that school sporting events increase social capital, as I argued in yesterday’s post.  When the Spirit Squad forms their pyramid with the backdrop of a giant Arkansas flag, as pictured above, I have to admit that I get a little misty-eyed.  Sports make me feel more connected to Arkansas and my university, as I’m sure they do for others.

We were even graced with an appearance last night by Bubba Hog, whose dance enhances social capital with a good belly laugh in addition to the flag- pyramid’s tear to the eye.

Lastly, everyone should keep their eye on Michael Qualls, a freshman who jumped so high last night that I believe his head bumped the hanging scoreboard.  Here’s a highlight reel for Qualls from earlier games:


Sports and Academics: Coleman vs. Coleman

February 5, 2013

Nerdiness vs. Athleticism

The path-breaking sociologist, James Coleman, was not a fan of high school sports.  He thought the culture of athletic prowess swamped the culture of academic success.  Schools should get rid of sports and channel that competitive spirit into inter-scholastic academic contests, like Quiz Bowl.

But James Coleman also believed that the enhanced social capital produced by church attendance was key to the success of Catholic schools.  The adults would get together at church, share information about their kids and school, and thus be better positioned to work together to improve their school academically.  The adult culture of academic success could prevail more easily if the adults were better connected with each other by seeing each other on a regular basis at church.

But maybe high school sports are the secular equivalent of church.  Perhaps Friday night football is an event, like church, that gathers parents, allows them to share information about their kids and school, and more effectively work together to improve their school.

So which James Coleman is right?  Is it the one who fears athletic success subordinating academic success or the one who thinks social capital is the key to school improvement?

Dan Bowen and I decided to examine this issue with an analysis of Ohio high schools.  We look at whether high schools that give greater priority to athletic success do so at the expense of academic success.  The results of our analysis are in the current issue of the Journal of Research in Education.

We found that high schools that devote more energy to athletic success also tend to produce more academic success.  In particular, we looked at whether high schools with a higher winning percentage in sports also had higher test scores as well as higher rates of educational attainment.  We also looked at whether high schools that offered more sports and had a larger share of their student body participating in sports also tended to have higher test scores and higher attainment.

Using several different specifications, we find that higher rates of athletic success and participation were associated with schools having higher overall test scores and higher educational attainment, controlling for observed school inputs.  For example, we found:

With regard to attainment, a 10 percentage point increase in a school’s overall winning percentage is
associated with a 1.3 percentage point improvement in its CPI, which is an estimate of its high
school graduation rate.

We also looked at whether schools that offered more opportunities to participate in sports had different rates of attainment:

When we only examine winter sports, an increase of one sport improves CPI by 0.01, which would be a 1
percentage point increase in the high school graduation rate. For the winter, the addition of 10
students directly participating in sports is associated with a 0.015 improvement in CPI, or a 1.5%
increase in high school graduation rate.

In addition to attainment, we also looked at achievement on state tests:

We observe similar positive and statistically significant relationships between the success
and participation in high school sports and student achievement as measured by the Ohio
standardized test results. A 10 percentage point increase in overall winning percentage is
associated with a 0.25 percentage point increase in the number of students at or above academic
proficiency. (See Table 4) When we examine the effect of winning percentage in each sport
separately, once again winning in football has the largest effect. Girls’ basketball also remains
positive and statistically significant (at p < 0.10), but boys’ basketball is not statistically
distinguishable from a null effect.

Lastly, we looked at the effect of participation rates in Ohio high schools on overall student achievement:

As for participation and achievement, the addition of one sport increases the number of
students at or above academic proficiency by 0.2 of a percentage point. The addition of 10
students directly participating in a sports team improves the proportion of students at or above
proficient by 0.4 of a percentage point. Both of these results are statistically significant at p < 0.01. (See Table 5) When examining just the winter season, adding one winter sport increases the
percentage of students performing proficiently by 0.4 of a percentage point, while an additional
10 student able to directly participate in sports during the winter season relates to a 0.6
percentage point increase in students at or above proficiency (see Table 5)

It is a common refrain among advocates for education reform that athletics “have assumed an unhealthy priority in our high schools.”  But these advocates rarely offer data to support their view.  Instead, they rely on stereotypes about dumb jocks, anecdotes, and painful personal memories as their proof.

Our data suggest that this claim that high school athletic success comes at the expense of academic success is mistaken. Of course, we cannot make causal claims based on our analyses about the relationship between sports and achievement.  It’s possible that schools that are more effective at winning in sports and expanding participation are also the kinds of schools that can produce academic success.  But the evidence we have gathered at least suggests that any trade-offs between sports and achievement would have to be subtle and small, if they exist at all.  Descriptively, it is clear that high schools that devote more energy to sports also produce higher test scores and higher graduation rates.

I guess James Coleman was right — er, I mean, the James Coleman who focused on social capital, not the other one who feared the culture of athletic competition.

[Updated for clarity and to correct typos]


Lotteries for School Choice

February 4, 2013

(Guest Post by Collin Hitt)

On Aug. 11 inside a school gymnasium in West Englewood, more than 200 parents scribbled their child’s name on a pink raffle ticket.

They crossed their fingers, prayed and waited.

Representatives of Freedom to Learn Illinois fished the names of 15 youngsters out of a bin. The kids whose names were called won scholarships to attend private schools of their choice. They wouldn’t be stuck at their designated neighborhood school. Fifteen children from at-risk families went home that day with a new backpack and a chance.

That’s from the Chicago Tribune’s excellent Monday editorial. Freedom to Learn is trying to succeed where public policy has failed, by giving kids a choice. The group – where I’m a board member – is a grassroots group dedicated to school reform. It currently commits most of its resources to opportunity scholarships. The obvious goal is to better kids’ lives, immediately. A larger objective of the group is to have its scholarship program become the model for a publicly funded program, like those in nearby Indiana and Wisconsin.

The Trib goes on to highlight a new school choice proposal in the Illinois legislature.

A bill introduced in Springfield takes a new approach to school choice that its sponsor, state Rep. La Shawn Ford, D-Chicago, hopes will temper opposition.

Ford’s bill would use money from lottery ticket sales to pay for 1,000 scholarships each year of up to $6,000. Students who live in the top-grossing ZIP codes for lottery sales would be eligible. Most of those ZIP codes are located in Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods. One Chicago ZIP code alone, 60619 on the South Side, generates nearly $30 million in annual ticket sales.

When it was launched in 1974, the Illinois Lottery was supposed to be the panacea for education funding. It never happened. Lottery money merely replaced, not supplemented, what the state was paying toward K-12 education…

Ford’s bill draws a straighter line between the lottery and education. It would cost the lottery about $6 million out of about $708 million in lottery proceeds that go toward special causes each year…

The bill gets around one important argument against traditional vouchers: The scholarship money wouldn’t come from tax dollars.

You have to give Ford an A for creativity. And I love the use of the lottery. In some states, like Georgia and Arkansas, the lottery is used to fund higher education scholarships; why not K-12 scholarships, which would actually do more to increase higher education attainment by decreasing dropout rates and increasing college attendance? Ford has a difficult fight on his hands (and some personal legal difficulties to manage as well). Illinois’ leading Democratic champions for school choice – Rev. James Meeks, Kevin Joyce and Karen Yarbrough – have all quit the General Assembly. The fight for school choice in Illinois likely remains a multi-year battle.

But in the meantime, Freedom to Learn and other Illinois charities will be putting kids through school, giving them the choice that our public education system currently denies them.


Based on a True Story

January 22, 2013

Any movie that begins with the message, “based on a true story,” is in danger of engaging in bad story telling and insufficient character development.  Claiming that something is true appears to be license for lazy film-making.  My objection is not that many “based on a true story” films are barely connected to real events.  No, my concern is that because they claim to be real, film-makers think they can get away without doing the things necessary to make a great film.

Not all “based on a true story” movies are lousy; Argo, for example, tells a compelling story with well-developed characters.  But Argo’s effectiveness  is almost entirely derived from the ways the movie deviated from the “true story.”  [SPOILER ALERT] The tension-filled ending was great movie making even though — actually, because — it bore no resemblance to actual events.  And the most engaging  character played by Alan Arkin was the one almost completely invented for the movie.  In addition, we found the main character played by Ben Affleck so engaging in part because of the entirely fictitious back-story about his separation from his wife and son.  The greatness of Argo comes from its effective story telling, not from its “reality.”

Zero Dark Thirty, on the other hand, was a really disappointing film because it relied on its “reality” as a substitute for great film-making.  [SPOILER ALERT]  There was virtually no character development.  I didn’t know anything about what motivated the main character to join the CIA and hunt UBL.  Yes, I saw that she had a friend killed, but her obsession with UBL pre-dates that.  At one point in the movie, a supervisor specifically asks her why she was recruited by the CIA and she declines to answer.  So, I know almost nothing about her life other than that she is hunting UBL.  About 2/3 through the movie I realized I couldn’t even remember her character’s name because… well, because who cares about her?  The movie was also poorly paced, painfully slow at times, and lacking in comic relief or any other variation in tension.

The movie is gripping, but so is playing Call of Duty with my son.  Similarly, Call of Duty has no character development and maintains a numbing lack of variation in tension.  But it sure is fun while you are playing it!  It just isn’t a lasting story.  We won’t re-tell that Call of Duty match we had several years ago nor will anyone, in all likelihood, watch Zero Dark Thirty in ten years.  The appeal of it is entirely contained in the fact that it is topical.  The meaning and excitement of Zero Dark Thirty comes not from the story the movie tells but from the story that I know from the world that I impart to the movie.  When my knowledge of or interest in these current events fade, so will my (and everyone else’s) interest in the movie.  The movie requires my knowledge of current events to mask its inadequate story-telling and character development.  That’s not Best-Picture film-making.

Homeland is a much better version of Zero Dark Thirty.  It is better because it has well-developed characters about whom I care and because it is intentionally crafted to be properly paced.  It doesn’t have to worry about being true.  It can just be good.

It’s true that Zero Dark Thirty is popular, but then again so are reality TV shows and they suffer from many of the same defects.  If the Real Housewives of New Jersey were a scripted show, no one on Earth would watch it.  But the show is quite popular because it claims on some level to be “real.”  Everyone understands that it isn’t fully real.  But it is a little bit “based on a true story.”  And because of that, we accept its lousy story-telling and ridiculous characters.  We do that because we are actually imparting to it knowledge of other real people that we know who we think may resemble the characters in some ways.  We provide the context to make the stories work in reality TV.

Lastly, let me mention another recent film that claims to be “based on a true story,” The Way Back.  Despite claiming to be real, the movie works well with an engaging story and set of characters.  But as it turns out, the events on which the movie is loosely based are actually fiction.  According to IMDB:

The film is based on a memoir by Slavomir Rawicz depicting his escape from a Siberian gulag and subsequent 4000-mile walk to freedom in India. Incredibly popular, it sold over 500,000 copies and is credited with inspiring many explorers. However, in 2006 the BBC unearthed records (including some written by Rawicz himself) that showed he had been released by the USSR in 1942. In 2009 another former Polish soldier, Witold Glinski, claimed that the book was really an account of his own escape. However this claim too has been seriously challenged.

I don’t see this as an indictment against the film at all.  It was a compelling story that sold over 500,000 copies and led to a good movie because it was intentionally crafted to be a good story.  Life rarely gives us that in its reality.  That’s why we have imaginations to shape, combine, and alter our real experiences.  In some sense, every story is “based on a true story.”  The important thing is whether those stories are good, not whether they are true.

[Edited to add paragraph on Homeland]


Wolf and Witte Slam Ravitch on Milwaukee School Choice

January 18, 2013

Dwight Howard winning the 2008 Slam Dunk Contest.

As I’ve said before, I’m trying to avoid writing about Diane Ravitch because I think it’s now clear to all sensible people that she has gone completely nuts, lacks credibility, and was probablnever much of a scholar.  But I just can’t resist posting a link to the editorial my colleagues Pat Wolf and John Witte wrote today in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.  Wolf and Witte are responding to an earlier op-ed by Ravitch in which she declares:

Milwaukee needs one public school system that receives public dollars, public support, community engagement and parental involvement.

Vouchers and charters had their chance. They failed.

Wolf and Witte actually review the evidence on Milwaukee’s choice programs, including their own research.  They conclude:

Our research signals what likely would happen if Ravitch got her wish and the 25,000 students in the Milwaukee voucher program and nearly 8,000 children in independent charter schools were thrown out of their chosen schools. Student achievement would drop, as every student would be forced into MPS – the only game in town. Significantly fewer Milwaukee students would graduate high school and benefit from college. Parents would be denied educational choices for their children.

That’s not a future we would wish for the good people of Milwaukee.

There’s no point in trying to persuade Ravitch or her Army of Angry Teachers, since they abandoned rationality a long time ago.  But Wolf and Witte have done an excellent job of equipping sensible people with evidence that could help inform their views about school choice in Milwaukee.  Angry blather and bold (but false) declarations cannot compete with actual facts.

[Edited to correct typo in title.]


Head Start Revealed

January 14, 2013

Despite the obvious effort to delay and conceal the disappointing results from the official and high quality evaluation of Head Start, the Wall Street Journal shines the light on the issue in today’s editorial.  DC’s manipulating scumbags might want to take note that efforts to hide negative research might just draw more attention.  It’s comforting to see that the world may sometimes look more like Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment than Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors.

The Journal reveals that Head Start supporters have not only ignored the latest study, but they are trying to sneak an extra $100 million for Head Start into the relief package for victims of Hurricane Sandy.  They also note that the most recent disappointing Head Start result is just the latest in a string of studies failing to find benefits from the program despite a cumulative expenditure of more than $180 billion.

And then the Journal finishes with this:

The Department of Health and Human Services released the results of the most recent Head Start evaluation on the Friday before Christmas. Once again, the research showed that cognitive gains didn’t last. By third grade, you can’t tell Head Start alumni from their non-Head Start peers.

President Obama has said that education policy should be driven not by ideology but by “what works,” though we have to wonder given his Administration’s history of slow-walking the release of information that doesn’t align with its agenda.

In 2009, the Administration sat on a positive performance review of the Washington, D.C., school voucher program, which it opposes. The Congressionally mandated Head Start evaluation put out last month was more than a year late, is dated October 2012 and was released only after Republican Senator Tom Coburn and Congressman John Kline sent a letter to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius requesting its release along with an explanation for the delay. Now we know what was taking so long.

Like so many programs directed at the poor, Head Start is well-intentioned, and that’s enough for self-congratulatory progressives to keep throwing money at it despite the outcomes. But misleading low-income parents about the efficacy of a program is cruel and wastes taxpayer dollars at a time when the country is running trillion-dollar deficits.

A government that cared about results would change or end Head Start, but instead Congress will use the political cover of disaster relief to throw more good money after proven bad policy.

[UPDATE: And here is a good follow-up op-ed on the study by Lindsey Burke on the Fox News web site.]