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: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Millage Defeated

September 16, 2009

For those readers of JPGB who care (and I mean to include both of you), the Fayetteville millage was defeated by a margin of 59% to 41%.  You can get the latest news and analysis at Mid-Riffs.

6 Comments | Fayetteville, politics | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Peer Review, DC Style

September 16, 2009

Harvey

Elwood Dowd admires a painting of himself with the DOE peer reviewer

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Eduwonk reports that Arne Duncan and his Race to the Top team are discovering just one of the many fun flaws of “peer review”:

A lot of behind the scenes chatter and concern and I’d say even worry that it’s going to be hard to get “Race to the Top” proposal peer reviewers who know a lot about school reform – and proposals like this are complicated.  There are a lot of conflicts among the usual suspects.  After all, teachers’ unions have to sign on off the applications and can benefit from them so they’re self-interested, most wonks outside of government are helping various states get together ideas and applications, and states themselves are pretty self-interested, obviously.  Add on to that the generally meager rewards of peer reviewing in the first place and this issue has a lot of folks chattering about exactly who can do this work in a high-quality way…

So it sounds like the standard they’ve set for themselves is to find reviewers who know a lot about school reform but have no vested interest in school reform. How many people did they think were going to fall into that category?

Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller (wide)

Anyone? . . . Anyone?

Maybe “peer review” wasn’t really an appropriate rubric for evaluating government grant proposals. Has anyone ever suggested, say, peer review for Pentagon contracts?

But then, if they don’t put some kind of academic-sounding veneer on it, the thoroughly politicized nature of the process will be too embarrassingly transparent.

Of course, when they do “peer review” in academia they have the best of both worlds. The process is just as corrupted by the self-interest of the participants – mostly not in terms of politics but in terms of their desire to promote research that agrees with their own findings and suppress research that might call their own findings into doubt – and yet because the reviewers are professional academics everything is assumed to be done in the interests of scholarship.

1 Comment | politics | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Borsuk: Democrats on Both Sides of K-12 Wars

September 15, 2009

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Good stuff from MJS veteran Alan Borsuk. Remember, you read it here first.

Leave a Comment » | school accountability | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Have you “Experienced” The Riffs at Mid-Riffs?

September 15, 2009

Mid-Riffs, a blog started by a bunch of my friends, is off to a great start with several posts on the high school millage in Fayetteville, Arkansas.  Sometimes I agree with them and sometimes I don’t, but they are always fun to read.

The election is today, so be sure to check out their excellent information and analysis.  In particular, they have argued:

  • The high school is not falling apart. (In a 2006 statewide ranking of buildings needing repair, Fayetteville high school was ranked 988 out of 1,129 K-12 public school buildings, where 1 was most need of repair.)
  • There is no evidence buildings improve student outcomes.
  • The current facility has deficiencies, but they don’t necessitate complete demolition and reconstruction.
  • There is a case to be made for economic development, but any positive effects will be much diminished by the necessary tax increase.

    • But Mid-Riffs did make a case for why we might want to spend $116 million to tear-down the currently functional building for a brand new one — we like shiny new things.  We don’t need to buy diamond engagement rings, but people like to have them.  We don’t need a new building, but we might still want to have one.

    It’s not a very compelling argument, but it is no worse of a reason than your reason for buying that new Lexus.

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

    Jay: Wake Up and Smell the Incentives

    September 14, 2009

    (Guest post by Greg Forster)

    Well, it seems to be op-ed day for friends of JPGB today. Below, Matt appreciates Robert Enlow as a man who has “the whole package” – and delivers it in today’s Indy Star. Meanwhile, over on NRO, Jay has a column on the perverse incentives that artificially drive up special ed diagnoses:

    Schools have discovered that they can get extra funding from state and federal ‎governments for small-group instruction to help lagging students catch up if they say that ‎the students are struggling because of a processing problem in their brains. School officials who admit that the students are lagging because of poor previous instruction or a difficult ‎home life, by contrast, are left to pay the costs of small-group instruction entirely out of ‎their own budget.

    If you’ve been reading JPGB, that part is all old hat to you by now. If not, this NRO piece is a good (though very brief) introduction to the topic.

    The NRO piece does make one point I hadn’t thought of before:

    In New Jersey, for example, 18 percent of all students are ‎classified as disabled, but in California the rate is only 10.5 percent. There is no medical ‎reason why students in New Jersey should be 71 percent more likely to be placed into ‎special education than students in California.

    Indeed.

    Leave a Comment » | special ed | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
    Posted by Greg Forster

    Enlow: Go for the Whole Package

    September 14, 2009

    (Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

    Robert Enlow brings it in today’s Indianapolis Star. Money quote:

    Bush argued for a comprehensive package of reforms, all of which were critical to Florida’s success. In his remarks to the Education Roundtable, clear accountability (grading schools), good incentives (merit pay) and real consequences (school choice) were inextricably linked. Without each component working together, success would not have been possible, a fact evidenced by a recent study showing that improvement among failing public schools went from double digits to zero after the Florida Supreme Court removed the school voucher option.

    Moreover, it was critical to assign each school a letter grade. Without that clear and easy-to-understand letter grade, there simply would not have been the same level of academic improvement among schools.

    As someone who fought alongside Gov. Bush in 1999 as he passed his reform package, I can state with confidence that both letter grades and parental school choice were essential to eventual success of the Florida accountability plan. The Star should consider supporting the whole package of common-sense reforms, not just some of the pieces.

    4 Comments | vouchers | Tagged: , | Permalink
    Posted by matthewladner

    More 21st Century Skills

    September 14, 2009

    I’ve written before about Tony Wagner and the 21st Century Skills movement, here, here, here, and here.  My colleague Sandra Stotsky has an excellent review in the current issue of The Weekly Standard of Tony Wagner’s book, The Global Achievement Gap.

    Here’s the money quote:

    It is disingenuous to imply that the development of analytical thinking and effective oral and written communication (goals of the lyceum in ancient Greece) are new to the 21st century. American education schools and their satellite networks of professional development providers heavily promoted such “21st-century skills” as critical thinking, problem solving, and small group work throughout the 20th century.
     
    If our teaching corps hasn’t yet been able to figure out how to translate these buzzwords into effective classroom lessons, what does this tell us about the teaching skills of our very expensive standing army of teacher-educators, either to prepare teachers properly in the first place or to get them up to snuff after they’ve failed in the field?…
     
    Evidence-free rhetoric in support of reducing academic content in the schools, diluting academic standards for K-12, and eliminating large-scale academic testing, has found a receptive audience across the country among those who don’t want any form of real accountability. Unfortunately, the valuable skills misidentified as 21st-century skills cannot be taught and assessed without a strong emphasis on academic substance, standards, and objective assessments–as academic researchers know.
     
    Wagner is the latest in a long line of educational pied pipers leading an uncritical and growing mass of school administrators and teachers into a curricular wilderness. And this latest book is just the current manifestation of the goal driving most of our education schools and professional development providers–how to reduce the academic content of the curriculum while claiming to enhance it–this time in the name of closing the “gap,” or providing worker bees for this century’s employers.

    1 Comment | instructional reform | Tagged: , , | Permalink
    Posted by Jay P. Greene

    Facebook in Reality

    September 13, 2009

    (ht: a Facebook friend)

    1 Comment | blogging | Permalink
    Posted by Jay P. Greene

    WSJ Recognizes the Real Education Outrage

    September 10, 2009

    The WSJ hasn’t been distracted by controversy over President Obama’s school speech.  They rightly recognize that the real scandal in the Obama education efforts revolves around the DC voucher program.  They write in today’s paper:

    “The D.C. voucher program has proven to be the most effective education policy evaluated by the federal government’s official education research arm so far,” writes the Education Department’s chief evaluator Patrick Wolf in the current issue of Education Next. “On average, participating low-income students are performing better in reading because the federal government decided to launch an experimental school choice program in our nation’s capital.”

    Democrats had pledged that if the D.C. Council supported the voucher program, they’d revisit it. “The government of Washington, D.C., should decide whether they want [the voucher program] in their school district,” declared Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, who sponsored the provision to kill the program. Well, a majority of the D.C. Council has since sent lawmakers a letter expressing support. Yet Democrats are still preventing Congress from living up to its end of the deal and voting to restore funding. Meanwhile, Mr. Obama sends his own daughters to the best private school in the District.

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

    « Previous Entries
    Next Entries »