Rock Star Pay for Rock Star Teachers Part Trois

May 7, 2009

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

A few months ago I got an angry email from an Arizona teacher claiming that her school had been terribly underfunded, and that she had 32 students in her classroom. I wrote to her:

If you have 32 children in your classroom, my first question is what is your school district doing with all of that revenue?

The JLBC put the statewide spending per pupil in Arizona at $9,399. A classroom of 32 at the statewide average would mean $300,768 in revenue from the students in your class.

Her response:

1-teacher, 1ELL teacher, 1 Special ED teacher, reading specialist, principal, janitor, secretaries, music, art, PE, computer teacher, Cafeteria workers, Para-educators, paper, textbooks, hands on science materials, Computers (this is the 21st century learning) building up keep, electricity, water, tables, chairs , etc…..

She forgot to mention administrative salaries from central command. There is one tiny little problem with all of this. According to the 2007 NAEP, 44 percent of Arizona 4th Graders scored BELOW BASIC in reading.

In other words, as Dr. Phil likes to say, how’s that hiring your average teacher from the bottom third of university students and supplementing them with crowds of others working out for you?

Shape up people!

The sad reality of American public education is that our schools have become revenue and employment maximizers that all too often are profoundly unfocused on the bottom line: student learning.  Public schools ought not to be jobs programs, but focused on their mission of equipping students with the academic skills necessary for success in life.

So, if you’ve got $300,000 in revenue from a classroom (many states have more) call me crazy, but I think you’ve got $100,000 for what research shows to be going away the most important factor for student learning gains: a high quality teacher. When I say a high quality teacher, I mean a verified high quality teacher whose student learning gains are being tracked over time by both administrators and parents on a continuous basis.

The best platforms for ongoing value added assessment are web-based data products that allow teachers to develop common assessment items based on state standards. If there are state standards for a subject, you can do value added analysis on it. When schools really get going on this, they give monthly assessments. This gives ongoing assessment data that greatly drops the amount of error (using only state tests, some of the pioneering value added models require 3 years worth of data).

Overall, it isn’t very hard to imagine a system that would improve upon the status-quo in these practices. We can no longer in good conscience socially organize our efforts to teach children to read along the lines of: let’s hire an army of people who want job security and summers off , do absolutely nothing to reward merit, and hope for the best.

This must change, and it will change.

 

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Posted by matthewladner

Rock Star Pay for Rock Star Teachers Part Deux

April 29, 2009

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Last year I was reading the comments section of a newstory online, and came across a comment from a public elementary school teacher. She was complaining that she had 34 students in her classroom.

So let’s do the math. The statewide average spending per pupil in the state: $11,000. Total revenue generated by this classroom = $374,000. Let’s assume the teacher gets a total compensation package of $60,000 including benefits. The question becomes- what did they do with the other $314,000?

Ah, that was what the teacher was really angry about. Her elementary school had 8 teachers in “non-classroom assignments.”

I don’t have a problem with 30 some odd kids in a classroom. It’s been done, and is being done. Remember?

 

Many insist that the period depicted by this photo constituted the “good ole days” of education. Jay and Greg have felt compelled to dispel the myth of the lost golden age of public education, back in the good ole days, when public schools were far more effective than they are today. The truth, of course, is that NAEP scores for 17 year olds are flat as far back as you can take them.

What has not been flat- public school spending- adjusted for inflation per pupil has steadily increased even while test scores have stagnated, even while Americans have become wealthier and poverty has declined.

Of course, there is no single explanation for this trend, but certainly the national obsession with lowering average class sizes must be viewed to have been an enormously expensive academic failure. Consider the international evidence:

 

 

class-size-11

Really big classes in Asia, really small in the United States. However, when it comes to achievement:

class-size-2

The average South Korean seventh-grader scores 21 percent higher than the average American on seventh-grade mathematics, despite having much larger average class sizes. While a variety of factors contribute to the relative deficiency of American public schools, many scholars are beginning to suspect the main factor is the relatively inferior average quality of American teachers.

In How the World’s Best Performing Schools Come Out on Top, the international management consulting firm McKinsey & Company point squarely at teacher quality as a key variable in explaining variation in international academic achievement. In its findings, McKinsey quoted a South Korean policymaker who noted, “The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.”

 

McKinsey found that the top-performing school systems around the world recruit their teachers from the top third of each graduating cohort. Moreover, South Korean schools draw from the top 5 percent of college graduates. Larger class sizes create the resources to pay South Korean instructors much higher salaries.

 

The Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development measures relative teacher pay by comparing the average salaries of teachers with 15 years of experience with a nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. A high salary compared with per capita GDP suggests that a country invests more of its financial resources in teachers and suggests a relative prestige of the profession. By definition, the average person in each of these countries will earn a ratio of 1. Figure 3 compares teacher-salary-to-per-capita GDP for the United States and South Korea.

teacher-pay-korea

An experienced South Korean schoolteacher makes a relatively impressive wage compared with teachers in the rest of the world. In South Korea, teaching is an honored profession—not just rhetorically but in compensation as well. In the United States, meanwhile, a teacher with a college degree and 15 years of experience makes a salary relatively close to the average GDP per person. Not surprisingly, there are many qualified applicants for each open teaching position in South Korea.

 

McKinsey quotes the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce to contrast the United States with those countries having more successful education systems: “We are now recruiting our teachers from the bottom third of high-school students going to college…. [I]t is simply not possible for students to graduate [with the skills they will need] unless their teachers have the knowledge and skills we want our children to have.”

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Posted by matthewladner

Rock Star Pay for Rock Star Teachers!

April 28, 2009

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

The Goldwater Institute released a new study today titled New Millennium Schools: Delivering Six-Figure Teacher Salaries in Return for Outstanding Student Learning Gains. In this report, my coauthors Mark Francis, Greg Stone and I argue that the United States has made a tragic error in emphasizing teacher quantity (through efforts to limit average class size) rather than teacher quality. The growing literature on student learning gains clearly demonstrate that teacher quality trumps the impact of class size variation by a wide margin.

The value added literature has revealed stunning equity issues. We don’t attract enough high ability teachers into the profession, we quickly lose many of those we do to frustration or administration, and we distribute most of the remainder to the leafy suburbs. I don’t have a problem with incentive “combat pay” but let’s face it: it is not enough to simply redistribute the limited number of high quality teachers. We need to attract many more of them.

After exploring foreign and domestic examples of systems that make the opposite choice, we propose a solution: a school model which not only employs value added assessment to identify high achieving teachers, but also splits the additional revenue for students after the 20th with the teacher. We propose a 2/3 teacher, 1/3 school split for the 21st student and beyond. This works out to a $5,200 bonus per child.

With this split, our school delivers a six figure teacher salary at 32 students based upon Arizona’s relatively modest funding for charter schools. A class size of 32 students is hardly outside of the historical practice for American public schools, or even the current practice entirely.

There are many practical issues to consider, and variations on the basic model, so please read the study. I’ll write more about the study in the coming days, but the most important point is this: there is plenty of money in the public school system to treat teachers like true professionals and reward them for excellence.

UPDATE: Education Week’s Stephen Sawchuck points out that principals already covertly increase class sizes for additional pay.

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Posted by matthewladner

Jay Mathews: Better Teachers, Not Tinier Classes, Should Be Goal

March 2, 2009

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Today may be the greatest day ever for education editorials and columns by the Washington Post, and yes there is plenty of competition, Mr. Snarky comments section guy. In addition to the editorial below, Jay Mathews weighs in on the tension between class size and teacher quality.

Mathews is not all the way to Indiana Jones and the Teacher Quality Crusade yet, but I think the evidence will lead in that direction.

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Posted by matthewladner

The Chart That Launched a Conference

February 24, 2009

 

The Quick and the Ed has additional comment on the teacher pension conference I discussed yesterday.  Rather than focusing on the financial sustainability of teacher pensions, Chad Aldeman at QATE focuses on how the odd accrual of pension wealth distorts teacher labor market decisions.  This is also an incredibly important issue.

In particular, he focuses on the work done by my colleagues Bob Costrell and Mike Podgusrky that finds that the convoluted design teacher pensions encourages some teachers to continue working to receive a large increase in the value of their pensions at a particular age, while it pushes other teachers out the door because they would lose an enormous amount of pension wealth if they continued working.

These “peaks and valleys” in pension wealth can have profound effects on teacher quality, by possibly keeping some teachers in the profession too long and by cutting the careers of others too short.  The chart above should give you a feeling for how convoluted teacher pension designs are.  Aldeman calls it “the chart that launched a conference” because the publication of these findings in Education Next sparked a flurry of new research on teacher pensions, much of which was presented last week.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

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.”

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

Doing Isn’t the Same As Knowing

January 25, 2009

I spent a few days with students at Amherst College last week discussing education policy.  In general those students were very impressive and had excellent questions and insights to offer.  One smart student raised an issue that I’ve heard numerous times and would like to address here:  Can one really make claims about education policy without having some experience as a teacher or administrator?

The argument goes something like this — Teaching is a complicated and challenging task with many nuances.  People who make proposals for education without having experienced those complications and challenges of teaching run a serious risk of missing important nuances.  Without the benefit of direct experience their proposals may well fail or backfire.  So, we need to be sure to consult educators when making policy proposals.

This argument amounts to giving educators intellectual veto power over policy proposals.  But arguing “you just don’t understand the issues because you haven’t been a teacher” isn’t very compelling. 

First, direct experience has limited usefulness for policy-making.  Policies apply to broad populations, but experience is necessarily limited to particular places, times, and circumstances.  You almost certainly cannot generalize from particular experiences to general policies.

Second, direct experience is almost universal.  Just about everyone has spent a large portion of their life in schools and/or sending children through schools.  The problem isn’t that people are unfamiliar with schools.  The problem is that everyone is so familiar with schools that they wrongly think they know everything about them from their direct experiences, even though those experiences have necessarily been limited by time, place, and circumstance.

Third, our direct experience creates interests that may well distort our policy views.  People who work for schools obviously have interests as employees that may be distinct from the interests of children, parents, or taxpayers.  But parents also have direct experiences that can distort their interests.   For example, if they have a child in GT, they may push for more emphasis on gifted and talented programs.

The antidote to these distortions of direct experience is consideration of systematic data.  We may never be able to fully check the biases that result from our direct experiences, but systematic data extends our knowledge beyond the limited and distorted information derived from those experiences.  And systematic knowledge can be shared among people of different experiences so that they can reference a common set of information to consider desirable policies.  To know things about education policy we should put the focus on systematic data and try to de-emphasize our experiences.

To help the student consider the limitations of experience, I asked her if we should let soldiers have an effective veto over military policy.  Why do we normally have a civilian secretary of defense?  Why have 4 of the last 5 presidents lacked any serious military experience and nevertheless been viewed as legitimate commanders-in-chief?  I know some people think we ought to defer to military personnel on military policy, but I think that view is as mistaken as deferring to educators on education policy. 

And should we defer to doctors in the making of health policy?  How about deferring to construction workers in the making of transportation policy?  Or how about deferring to bankers in the development of financial regulations?  The people who do something aren’t necessarily the people who know what should be done.  Doing isn’t the same as knowing.

7 Comments | politics, teacher quality | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Son of Super Chart!

January 22, 2009

The only good bug is a DEAD bug!

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Readers will recall Super Chart! showing that teacher quality makes a huge difference in student outcomes, while certification status does not. Drawn from the same Brookings study comes Son of Super Chart, showing that you can pretty much tell who your bad teachers are after a couple of years based on student learning gains.

This isn’t rocket science: invite ineffective teachers to do something else with their professional careers other than damaging the prospects of children. Give highly effective teachers more students and more money.

Now that we’ve sorted out this whole education crisis thing, I’ll look forward to reading Jay’s take on the season premiere of Lost.

scan0001

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Posted by matthewladner

AFT and UAW – More Alike Than You’d Think

December 30, 2008

aft uaw1

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Lots of people are picking up on the temper tantrum about alleged “demonizing of teachers” begun by a Randi Weingarten speech and continued in Bob Herbert’s column on the speech.

Even that notorious right-winger Eduwonk points out that Weingarten and Herbert are hitting a straw man. I think the real problem is not that school reformers demonize teachers but that defenders of the government school monopoly angelize them. When we reformers insist that teachers should be treated as, you know, human beings, who respond to incentives and all that, rather than as some sort of perfect angelic beings who would never ever allow things like absolute job protection to affect their performance, it drives people like Weingarten and Herbert nuts.

guardian-angel

A typical teacher, as seen by Randi Weingarten

But what I’d like to pick up on is the question of whether the troubles of the government school system are comparable to the troubles of the auto industry.

Of the alleged demonizing of teachers, Herbert had written:

It reminded me of the way autoworkers have been vilified and blamed by so many for the problems plaguing the Big Three automakers.

Eduwonk points out Herbert’s hypocrisy (though he delicately avoids using that word) on this point, because elsewhere in the column, Herbert praises Weingarten for expressing a willingness to make concessions on issues like tenure and pay scales. Union recalcitrance on these types of reform, Eduwonk points out, is precisely why the auto industry is in so much trouble, and Weingarten has been driven to make noises in favor of reform because a similar dynamic has been at work in the government school system.

On the other hand, Joanne Jacobs thinks the comparison between the AFT and the UAW is inapt:

 I don’t think skilled teachers and unskilled auto workers have much in common.  Auto unions pushed up costs, especially for retirees, making U.S. cars uncompetitive.  In education, the problem isn’t excessive pay, it’s the fact that salaries aren’t linked to teacher effectiveness, the difficulty of their jobs or the market demand for their skills.

But teachers’ unions have pushed up costs – dramatically. In the past 40 years, the cost of the government school system per student has much more than doubled (even after inflation) while outcomes are flat across the board. And this has mainly been caused by a dramatic increase in the number of teachers hired per student – a policy that benefits only the unions.

It’s true that high salaries aren’t the main issue in schools, although teacher salaries are in fact surprisingly high. The disconnect between teacher pay and teacher performance is much more important. But the UAW has the same problem! Their pay scales don’t reward performance, either.

The source of Jacobs’ confusion is her mistaken view that auto workers are “unskilled.” Farm workers are unskilled, but not auto workers. The distinction she’s reaching for is the one between white-collar or “professional” work and blue-collar work. But some blue-collar work is skilled and some is unskilled, and auto workers are in the former category. This matters because with skilled blue-collar workers, as with white-collar workers, there’s a dramatic increase in the importance of incentives as compared with unskilled labor.

In fact, a lot of smart people have been arguing (scroll down to the Dec. 26 post) that exorbitant salaries and benefits aren’t nearly as much of a problem in the auto industry as union work rules – including poor performance due to absolute job protection, pay scales that don’t reward performance, and rigid job descriptions that make process modernization impossible.

Sound familiar?

(Edited)

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Posted by Greg Forster

How a Physics Textbook Changed My Life

December 23, 2008

books

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Jay Matthews argues that most textbooks don’t serve enough of an educational function to be worth using:

Textbooks still make good dictionaries, with glossaries at the back. They also reassure parents, who don’t get to see teachers in action but are comforted, in a perverse way, that their kids’ schoolbooks seem just as dry and predictable as theirs were. But like the newspapers that have been my life, textbooks are creeping slowly toward obsolescence.

(HT Joanne Jacobs)

I can’t tell whether Matthews thinks textbooks are becoming obsolete simply because books themselves are becoming obsolete – he talks about how some teachers are starting to “write” their own textbooks for their classes by using the internet to gather material, etc. – but it sure looks like he thinks there’ s something especially obsolete about the textbook.

If so, I must strongly demur. Matthews seems to have missed what has always been the primary function of the textbook – to compensate for the teacher’s deficiency. It’s certainly true that some teachers are so on top of their material that they can write their own textbooks, but others are so not on top of their material that they just lean on the textbook as a crutch, teaching everything straight out of the book.

Indeed, who has not heard the frequent complaint about teachers who just teach everything straight out of the book? Welll, where would we be if they couldn’t even do that?

I must confess that looking back on when I first taught my own class at the college level, the biggest weakness of my teaching in that class was that I did too much by rote out of the textbook. But I did it because, as a novice, I lacked the confidence to strike out on my own.

But I have an even more striking example to set before you. When I was in high school, I had a really brilliant physics teacher who didn’t use the textbook at all. He spent the whole class illuminating the subject matter in his own highly motivated way, bringing in unusual examples and exploring subtle nuances.

As a result, his teaching was incredibly engaging to the few students who shared his intense interest in the subject, and completely useless to the majority who did not. They needed to be walked through the basics slowly and carefully – sort of the way a textbook does.

There was one girl in my four-person lab group in that class who was completely lost. She was getting a D and had no idea what was going on. So I started helping her out with her homework.

“Just ignore the teacher,” was my main advice. “Read the textbook and learn what’s in it. Don’t pay attention to anything in class, because almost all of it isn’t going to be on the test and will just distract you from what you really need to be learning.”

She went from a D to an A.

And you know what? I’m married to that girl today.

So don’t tell me textbooks are obsolete.

As a great rumination on the science of physics once put it:

This day and age we’re living in
Gives cause for apprehension,
With speed and new invention,
And things like fourth dimension.

Yet we get a trifle weary
With Mr. Einstein’s theory.
So we must get down to earth at times,
Relax, relieve the tension.

And no matter what the progress
Or what may yet be proved
The simple facts of life are such
They cannot be removed.

You must remember this:
A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh.
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by.

And when two lovers woo,
They still say, “I love you.”
On that you can rely!
No matter what the future brings
As time goes by.

Moonlight and love songs,
Never out of date.
Hearts full of passion,
Jealousy and hate.
Woman needs man,
And man must have his mate – 
That no one can deny.

It’s still the same old story,
A fight for love and glory,
A case of do or die.
The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by.

(Copyright Warner Bros. Music, 1931)

12 Comments | instructional reform, teacher quality | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

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