One of the Best Education Books I’ve Read

June 13, 2011

(Guest Post by Stuart Buck)
And I’ve read quite a few. The book is Barker Bausell’s “Too Simple to Fail: A Case for Educational Change”, which just came out from Oxford University Press. Bausell was a biostatistician and professor for many years at the University of Maryland, but he started out in graduate school doing some fascinating educational experiments that showed the irrelevance of teacher training. He brings the perspective of a brilliant outsider.

His main thesis: that the only thing that improves education is spending more time on instruction at a given child’s level. In his words:

All school learning is explained in terms of the amount of relevant instructional time provided to a student.

That’s it: more time + suitability for a child’s level.

This may seem too simplistic at first glance, but Bausell marshalls evidence that his theory explains, well, a lot. Possibly even the achievement gap. Studies of home behavior have shown that middle-class families spend much more time talking and reading to their children at a high level. This is the most elegant explanation for why those children do better in school — they have had much more time devoted to their learning.

Consider too the success of KIPP. This is almost surely because KIPP has kids spend much more time in class. And reducing class size works for many kids (all else being equal), because teachers are able to 1) keep classroom discipline better, and/or 2) give more personal attention, both of which boil down to kids having more time being instructed at their own level.

Bausell also looks at historical studies on teacher quality. From a NY Times op-ed based on the book:

Thirty years ago two studies measured the amount of time teachers spent presenting instruction that matched the prescribed curriculum, at a level students could understand based on previous instruction. The studies found that some teachers were able to deliver as much as 14 more weeks a year of relevant instruction than their less efficient peers.

There was no secret to their success: the efficient teachers hewed closely to the curriculum, maintained strict discipline and minimized non-instructional activities, like conducting unessential classroom business when they should have been focused on the curriculum.

And both studies found that the teachers who taught more were also the teachers who produced students who performed well on standardized tests.

In the book, he describes a fascinating study he did early in his career: designing an elementary math lesson based on a few number theory topics and a test based on the lesson, and then having 15 accredited teachers and 15 undergraduates teach the same lessons for a week to children. It turned out that “there was absolutely no difference . . . between the amount the children learned in the 15 classrooms taught by experienced elementary school teachers and the amount the children learned in the 15 classrooms taught by inexperienced untrained undergraduates” (p. 29). As long as kids were taught the material for the same amount of time, it didn’t matter who was doing the teaching.

Bausell also has a provocative chapter ripping apart the entire industry of standardized tests. He contends that there should be no such thing as tests that aren’t matched perfectly to the curriculum. That is, if time is being spent teaching a certain curriculum, then any test should be based on that curriculum and nothing else. Whenever tests include anything outside of the curriculum (let’s say, a reading passage about snowboarding), they end up measuring something other than what was learned in school — such as one’s experience with snowboarding.

Bausell is scathing in his assessment of what standardized tests tell us:

This would be comparable to receiving a bank statement that tells you only that you have more money in your account than 52% of all U.S. citizens who have a checking account. Although perhaps an interesting piece of trivia, you might want to know a few more details. So, let’s pretend that you decided to call your local bank, which resulted in the following conversation with a help-center employee:
You: I’m glad to know that I have more money than the average person in the country, but what I’d like to know is what my balance is. You see, I have a more pressing concern. What I need to know is how much money I have in my account because I want to buy a mattress.

Help Center: I’m sorry, but we don’t keep records in that manner. We can provide you with an age-equivalent financial score, and we can predict what that score will be upon your retirement. We can even predict what your percentile rank is in terms of property and stocks, based upon your account. If I may be allowed to put you on hold for 45 seconds, I will provide you with all this information.

You: But I need to know how much money I have in my account. I don’t need to know all of this other information. . . .

Now as absurd as this conversation may sound, this is the only type of information that a standardized test is capable of providing. And what does it profit you (or a teacher for that matter) to know how well your child stacked up against other third-graders from Washington State or Florida . . . ?

For one thing, even this odd level of information can be quite misleading if our public schools as a whole are drastically underperforming — which they are. Wouldn’t it make more sense to you and your daughter’s teacher to know what percentage of the curriculum she had mastered? Even better, to inform the two of you exactly what your daughter hadn’t yet learned and how much additional instructional time would be required for her to correct this deficit? (pp. 133-34).

What are his policy prescriptions? Here are most of them; they’re all geared towards increasing the amount of relevant instructional time delivered to each child.

1. Pre-K, using direct instruction rather than constructivist principles (for which Bausell has contempt).

2. Increase the length of the school day, and devote the entire day to relevant instruction (not ‘candy sales, worthless school assemblies, loudspeaker announcements, sports activities, ad nauseam”).

3. Increase the length of the school year.

4. No tolerance for any behavior that prevents or distracts students from learning. (“If this means that we have to leave certain children behind because they can’t meet behavioral expectations (or we don’t know how to enable them to conform), so be it. . . . Schools exist to teach, not to be law enforcement agencies.”).

5. The entire curriculum should be exhaustive and detailed, and computerized tests should be based exclusively on the curriculum.

6. Grades and classrooms should be largely irrelevant, because students should each be learning material at their own level, whatever that happens to be.

7. Teacher behavior should be “monitored constantly to ensure the delivery of sufficient instruction, as well as satisfactory coverage of (and minimal departures from) the established curriculum.”

Bausell adds that the view of the teacher as an autonomous professional is “woefully outdated. Professions such as medicine have largely abandoned this intuition-laced mode of operation for a more evidence-based approach accompanied by practice guidelines. Thoracic surgeons, for example, perform the vast majority of their professional tasks according to rigidly prescribed protocols. Of course, they also don’t have tenure, and they can be sued if their outcomes are substandard, following divergence from these protocols.”

8. Use efficient instructional methods. Bausell points to an example of inefficiency: “my son once had a teacher who had an elaborate class project involving building a medieval castle out of popsicle sticks that stretched over a period of several months. Regardless of what the teacher thought she was accomplishing, this is valuable time wasted . . . unless there is an instructional objective in the curriculum mandating the ‘construction of medieval structures out of popsicle sticks.'”

9. Find lots of free tutors from parents, older students, retired persons, or welfare recipients. A high school diploma “isn’t required to give children (a) practice reading sight words or (b) learning simple mathematical operations via a set of flash cards.”

* * *

All in all, a great and thought-provoking read. Highly recommended.

3 Comments | instructional reform | Permalink
Posted by Stuart Buck

How the System Ensures Teacher Quality

April 4, 2011

(Guest Post by Stuart Buck)

As we have seen in the past, teacher licensing requirements have little relation to student achievement. One reason for this may be that rather than driving up teacher quality, licensure requirements can be so full of bureaucratic red tape that they drive away smart and knowledgeable teaching candidates who have other options.

In support of that theory, I offer an anecdote, namely an email from a good friend of mine who has more knowledge and training than most prospective teachers — she went to Princeton for undergrad, Yale for a master’s degree, and Harvard for law school. But before she can even get in the door and start studying pedagogical techniques and the like, she is being told that she has to take nine (9) more undergraduate courses of background knowledge.

Here’s her email:

Hey, Stuart! I am planning on entering a teacher licensing program this summer, with the goal of eventually teaching 4th or 5th grade in a low-income school. . . .

My current hurdle is that the local university took a look at my Princeton, Yale, and Harvard transcripts and determined that I need to take 9 undergraduate courses to even enter the licensing program. I can understand (on some level) needing to take three more science courses, but they also claim that I need to take courses in early American history (for some reason, constitutional law and all of my early American government classes don’t count), world geography (my specialization at Yale in international politics isn’t enough), and world civilization. Plus none of my corporate finance courses or econ courses can count toward the math requirements.

Very frustrating. I’m trying hard not to let the bureaucratic hurdles get me down.

So a graduate of Princeton, Yale, and Harvard is being told that she is woefully undereducated for the task of teaching disadvantaged 4th graders. Res ipsa loquitur, as lawyers say.

3 Comments | teacher quality | Permalink
Posted by Stuart Buck

Ravitch on Vouchers: Wrong Again

July 16, 2010

(Guest Post by Stuart Buck)

On July 14, Diane Ravitch wrote this:

La. students with vouchers do worse than peers in regular schools: http://tinyurl.com/347yht5. The panacea that never works, never dies.

Leave aside the uninformed claim that vouchers never work (in fact, they improve graduation rates, force public schools to improve, and improve test scores at least some of the time).

Has Ravitch found any actual evidence that Louisiana students are being harmed by vouchers? No.

Consider who receives vouchers in Louisiana. The program is limited to families with incomes under 250% of the poverty line — that is, students who tend to be poorer. On top of that, students must have attended “a public school during the 2009-2010 school year that is labeled academically unacceptable by the State.”

In other words, the voucher program is limited to students with lower incomes who attended failing public schools.

Now, as described in the EdWeek article that Ravitch so credulously cites, a former insurance executive and state board of education member named Leslie Jacobs came up with a comparison of voucher students and public school students. As far as I can tell, that comparison is available only in a blog post:

In the 2009-10 school year, 1113 children in grades K-4 received vouchers to attend one of the 32 participating non-public schools. Unfortunately, looking at the spring 2010 test scores, voucher students performed much worse than students in the New Orleans RSD – both its traditionally run public schools and public charter schools.

. . . .

Analysis

The performance of students enrolled in the voucher program raises serious concerns. While Louisiana’s proficiency goal is for all students to be Basic and above, in the voucher schools, only 35% of 3rd graders and 29% of 4th graders earned scores indicating they are grade level proficient in reading. Compare that to the RSD charters, where 54% of 3rd graders and 58% of 4th graders scored Basic and above. In fact, in English 4th grade students enrolled in the RSD charter schools outperformed students attending voucher schools by 2 to 1.

That’s the full extent of the “analysis” section. Evidently, all that Ms. Jacobs did was compare the raw average scores of voucher students to those of New Orleans public school students as a whole. Needless to say, this “analysis” is worthless — she’s comparing poorer students from failing public schools to everyone else. It’s unsurprising that the former might not be doing quite as well. Such an apples-to-oranges comparison tells us nothing about the performance of voucher-receiving private schools.

It’s a shame that Ravitch would treat this comparison with such gullibility while refusing to acknowledge the highly rigorous research done on vouchers.

10 Comments | vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Stuart Buck

Computers Hurt Children

June 21, 2010

(Guest Post by Stuart Buck)

Helen Ladd and Jacob Vigdor have a new CALDER Center/NBER working paper looking at how home computers and broadband access help students. (Interestingly, an earlier version of the same paper listed Charles Clotfelter as a third author.)

Turns out that home computers harm students:

Do students’ basic academic skills improve when they have access to a computer at home? Has the introduction of high‐speed internet access, which expands the set of productive tasks for which home computers might be used, caused further improvements? This paper addresses these questions by studying administrative data covering the population of North Carolina public school students between 2000 and 2005, a period when home computer access expanded noticeably, and the availability of home high‐speed internet rose dramatically.

. . .

Models with student fixed effects, which restrict identification to within‐student variation, by contrast, show modest but statistically significant negative impacts. In these models, we can trace the impact of home computer introduction for periods of up to three years; there is no indication that the negative effect of access diminishes over this time period. . . .

Similarly, the introduction of high‐speed internet service is associated with significantly lower math and reading test scores in the middle grades. Moreover, student fixed‐effect specifications reveal that increased availability of high speed internet is associated with less frequent self‐reported computer use for homework. On the margin, then, access to broadband internet appears to crowd out studying effort, presumably by introducing new options for recreational use by students and other family members. In addition, we find that the introduction of broadband internet is associated with widening racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps.

Gee, I wonder why giving kids computers would drag down academic achievement. Aren’t they all using computers to do math problems, read classics on the Gutenberg Project, watch science videos, etc.?

1 Comment | economics | Permalink
Posted by Stuart Buck

New Report on Teacher Pensions

April 14, 2010

[Guest post by Stuart Buck]

Yesterday, the Manhattan Institute and the Foundation for Educational Choice released a report written by me and Josh Barro. The title: “Unfunded Teacher Pension Plans: It’s Worse Than You Think.” The main finding:

According to the fifty-nine funds’ own financial statements, total unfunded liabilities to teachers—i.e., the gap between existing plan assets and the present value of benefits accrued by plan participants—are $332 billion. But according to our more conservative calculations, these plans’ unfunded liabilities total about $933 billion.

In addition, we have found that only $116 billion, or less than one quarter, of this $600 billion discrepancy is attributable to the stock market drop precipitated by the 2007 financial crisis. The Dow Jones Industrial Average would have to nearly double overnight to make up for the present underfunding of these plans.

The meat of what we did is this: Most state plans assume that their current investments will get about an 8% rate of return in perpetuity. So that means that they set aside less money now to cover the pensions that will be paid in 2015, 2020, 2025, etc. But the 8% assumption is wrong, we argue, for two reasons: First, recent history shows that it may be too optimistic. Second, investments that have an 8% expected rate of return necessarily carry some risk — risk that the plan will actually fall short in a given year or even decade. And when a plan falls short, the burden falls to the taxpayer to make up the difference.

So we reanalyzed the teacher pension plans using the same interest rate that private plans are allowed to use — about 6%, based on corporate bond rates. When we do that, it turns out that pension plans are way more underfunded than they are publicly admitting.

Over at The Quick and Ed, Chad Aldeman has a response to our study:

States, unlike private companies, do not fold under. Indiana, which according to the authors has a DB pension plan for teachers that is only 42% funded, is not likely to go out of business and take its workers down with it. The state of Indiana can assume a riskier investment return for its pension fund than an employer like those mentioned above or any other modern private firm (and, just for good measure, it’s worth pointing out that Indiana assumes only a 3 percent real rate of return).

All this is lost on the report’s authors, who would prefer states lower their assumptions on stock market returns from about 8 percent down to 6, the standard rate used by corporations in their calculations. This would mean telling a state like Pennsylvania, which has accumulated a 9.23 percent return in the stock market over the last 25 years (as of February 2010), that its 8 percent investment assumption is too high.

This is all irrelevant. We’re not saying that when states engage in risky investments, teachers then are at risk of not being paid their pensions. The problem is precisely the opposite: Teacher pensions are guaranteed by states that don’t go out of business. But that doesn’t make the risk magically go away. The risk just ends up being borne by the taxpayer. So if a state decides to blow all of its pension money gambling at a horse race, the teachers will still get their pensions, but taxpayers will suddenly find themselves paying higher taxes to make up the shortfall (or else seeing huge budget cuts to other important state services).

In the last sentence, Aldeman cites a document put out by the Pennsylvania pension system, but that document actually proves our point. The Pennsylvania pension system may have made an average of 9.23% per year for the past 25 years, but they still predict that looking forward, there will still have to be “significant and perhaps prohibitive tax increases at the State and/or Local levels.”

Moreover, to focus on the 25-year rate of return, as Aldeman does, ignores three things: 1) past performance is no guarantee of future success; 2) the PA pension system now has less assets on Dec. 31, 2009 than on June 30, 2004, which means it lost money over a 5.5 year period; and 3) this kind of variability (i.e., risk) requires taxpayers to pay extra when investments are disappointing for years on end.

The problem with Pennsylvania, as with many other states, is that when times were flush (the late 1990s or the mid-2000s), legislators did not have the foresight to let pension systems accumulate some savings for possible tough times ahead. Instead, they decided to lower contributions to pension systems and/or increase pension benefits, all on the assumption that high stock market returns would magically pay for it all. But when the stock market falls, the pension systems are left with extra liabilities that no one ever paid for, and the risk ultimately rests with the taxpayer.

It’s a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose system. That’s why taxpayers need state pension systems to use an accounting method that more properly and honestly accounts for all of the risk that they’re shifting onto us.

2 Comments | teacher pay | Permalink
Posted by Stuart Buck