Jay P. Greene's Blog

Education Next is out with a set of great new poll results.  They ask a representative sample of the general public, parents, and teachers about a variety of salient education policy issues.  You can see the results in detail on this fantastic interactive site.

There are many interesting results to discuss, but the one that caught my eye is a question about how much schools do and should emphasize different topics.  The general public, parents, and teachers were asked to rate on a scale from 1 to 7 (with 1 being “a little” and 7 being “a lot”) how much they thought schools were emphasizing reading, math, the arts, history, science, character, creativity, global warming, athletics, and bullying.  Respondents also described how much schools should be emphasizing those topics.  I calculated the difference between how much parents said schools should and do cover different topics to see where parents think schools are currently most falling short of their priorities.

Parents would like to see schools increase their emphasis on every topic except athletics.  But the two topics they wanted to see increased the most were character and creativity.  Parents rated the emphasis that schools give to character as a 4.10 on the 7 point scale.  When asked how much schools should emphasize character, parents gave an answer of 5.41 — an increase of 1.31.  For creativity parents rated schools’ current efforts as 4.25 but would like to see 5.63 — an increase of 1.38.

Parent demand for increased focus on character and creativity is almost double their desired increase for reading or math.  Parents say schools are emphasizing reading at 5.62 and math at 5.66 but would like to see that at 6.28 and 6.31, respectively.  They want more focus on math and reading but only an increase of .65 or .66 compared to an increase of 1.31 and 1.38 for character and creativity.

Why do parents think schools are falling much further short in their emphasis on character and creativity?  Part of the problem is that character and creativity involve questions of values on which there is much less consensus than on technical skills in math and reading.  If we assign students to public schools, we are often forcing people with diverse sets of values into the same schools.  If they try to teach character, they invite fights over what the content of that character should be.  Public school districts can’t even agree amicably on what to name their schools let alone what kinds of values to teach.  The Cato Institute has put together a useful web site documenting the endless conflicts produced by forcing everyone into the same school system.

If we really want schools to give a much greater emphasis to teaching character, we will need to expand school choice.  Choice allows families with similar values and priorities to send their children to schools that will then be free to teach those values.  Schools won’t be deterred by struggles over values since parents seeking a different type of character education can choose a different school rather than fight.

Schools also fall short of parent expectations for teaching character and creativity because those concepts are ill-defined and even more poorly measured.  What do we mean by character and creativity?  How would we know if schools are doing it?  To address these difficulties, the Department of Education Reform has launched the Character Assessment Initiative, or Charassein (sounds like kerosene), under the direction of my colleague, Gema Zamarro. I’ve written before about some of the path-breaking research coming out of Charassein, but be sure to stay tuned as more is on the way.

With better understanding of what we mean by character, better ways of measuring those outcomes, and more choice so that schools and families are free to teach desired character traits, we may see a closing of the gap between what parents want and what schools do in teaching character.

(Guest Post by Jason Bedrick)

The myth that there’s no evidence that school choice works has more lives than Dracula. Worse, it’s often repeated by people who should know better, like the education wonks at Third Way or the ranking Democrat on the U.S. Senate education committee. In a particularly egregious recent example, a professor of educational leadership and the dean of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education wrote an op-ed repeating the “no evidence” canard, among others:

The committee also expands the statewide voucher program. There is no evidence privatization [sic] results in better outcomes for kids. The result will be to pay the tuition for students who currently attend private school and who will continue to attend private school—their tuition will become the taxpayers’ bill rather than a private one. Additionally, the funds for the expansion would siphon an estimated $48 million away from public schools, decreasing the amount of money available for each and every school district in the state.

It is astounding that a professor and a dean at a school of education in Wisconsin would be unfamiliar with the research on the Milwaukee voucher program, never mind the numerous gold standard studies on school choice programs elsewhere. Fortunately, friends of the Jay P. Greene Blog, Professor James Shuls of the University of Missouri-St. Louis and Martin Lueken of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, set the record straight:

…the Wisconsin Legislature commissioned a comprehensive five-year study by researchers at the University of Arkansas. The research team matched and compared children at private schools in the choice program to similar students at Milwaukee Public Schools. The study concluded that children in Milwaukee who used vouchers were more likely to graduate from high school, enroll in four-year colleges and persist in college.

These findings are very similar to those of “gold-standard” studies done nationwide. Among 13 peer-reviewed studies on voucher programs that use research methods based on random assignment, all but one study concluded that vouchers benefit students (the other was unable to detect an impact). In addition, recent work by a Harvard economist demonstrates that giving low-income families better educational options can help improve social mobility for children.

Just a year and a half ago–in response to yet another school choice denier who should know better–the coauthors of the Milwaukee study clarified that their research found school choice produced “a modest but clearly positive effect on student outcomes.”

First, students participating in the Milwaukee Parental Choice (“voucher”) Program graduated from high school and both enrolled and persisted in four-year colleges at rates that were four to seven percentage points higher than a carefully matched set of students in Milwaukee Public Schools. Using the most conservative 4% voucher advantage from our study, that means that the 801 students in ninth grade in the voucher program in 2006 included 32 extra graduates who wouldn’t have completed high school and gone to college if they had instead been required to attend MPS.

Second, the addition of a high-stakes accountability testing requirement to the voucher program in 2010 resulted in a solid increase in voucher student test scores, leaving the voucher students with significantly higher achievement gains in reading than their matched MPS peers.

Moreover, as Shuls and Lueken note, “private schools in the choice program obtain these results when the government funding for a voucher is 60 percent less than what public schools receive.”

The final two claims by the UW-Madison faculty–that the voucher program benefits students who would attend private school anyway and siphons money from the district school system–also fail to withstand scrutiny. A conservative analysis of the Milwaukee voucher program by Prof. Robert Costrell of the University of Arkansas found that “about 10 percent of low-income voucher users would have attended private school anyway.” The 2009 study also found that the voucher program produced significant savings to the state taxpayers, as shown in the figure below:

Chart by Robert M. Costrell.

A Friedman Foundation study released last year found that the Milwaukee voucher program saved the state more than $238 million since its inception in 1990. Moreover, as the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty notes in a recent report, Wisconsin gives a “school choice bonus” to district schools that lose students to the voucher program. Although a district’s total revenue decreases when a student leaves (along with the variable costs associated with that student), the “school districts will actually have more revenue per pupil because the district can continue to count students it no longer educates for equalization aid and revenue limit purposes.”

Sadly, opponents of school choice are likely to continue resurrecting the “no evidence” canard. But when they do, Van Helsings like Shuls and Lueken will be there to put a stake in its heart.

(First posted, with slight differences, at Cato-at-Liberty.)

(Guest post by Jason Bedrick)

In The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves, researcher James Tooley documented how low-cost private schools operated in the world’s poorest areas, from the slums of Hyderabad in India to remote mountain villages in China and shanty towns in Kenya. According to the international development crowd, these schools shouldn’t exist — after all, the governments in these areas provide schooling at no charge. Why would the poorest of the world’s poor pay for something they could get for free?   

The answer, of course, is that they know they get what they pay for. As one father in poverty-stricken Makoko, Nigeria put it:

“Going to the public school here in Nigeria, particularly in this area in Lagos State, is just… wasting the time of day… because they don’t teach them anything. The difference is clear… the children of the private school can speak very well, they know what they are doing but there in the public [schools], the children are abandoned.”   (Page 129, emphasis in the original.)

A recent article in The Economist illustrates this phenomenon:

THE Ken Ade Private School is not much to look at. Its classrooms are corrugated tin shacks scattered through the stinking streets of Makoko, Lagos’s best-known slum, two grades to a room. The windows are glassless; the light sockets without bulbs. The ceiling fans are still. But by mid-morning deafening chants rise above the mess, as teachers lead gingham-clad pupils in educational games and dance. Chalk-boards spell out the A-B-Cs for the day. A smart, two-storey government school looms over its ramshackle private neighbour. Its children sit twiddling their thumbs. The teachers have not shown up.

What’s the difference? It mostly comes down to a matter of incentives. Asked why parents choose to pay private school tuition when the government schools are “free,” one government school principal in Ghana explained:

It’s supervision. Proprietors are very tough. If teachers don’t show up and teach, the parents react. Private schools need to make a profit, with the profit they pay their teachers, and so they need as many students as they can get. So they are tough with their teachers and supervise them carefully. I can’t do that with my teachers. I can’t sack them. I can’t even remove them from [the payroll] if they are late or don’t turn up. Only the District Office can. And it’s very rare for a teacher to be sacked. (Page 71.)

It’s no wonder then that private schools are proliferating in the world’s poorest areas. According to The Economist, hundreds of new private schools are opening in Lagos, Nigeria, many of them charging less than $1 a week. In poor countries, official estimates show that private schools now educate more than one-fifth of all students, double the proportion a decade ago. And even that figure probably underestimates private school enrollment since a high proportion of private schools in poor countries are unregistered. As The Economist notes, “A school census in Lagos in 2010-11, for example, found four times as many private schools as in government records.”

The market is still emerging and although the private schools tend to outperform the government alternatives, that isn’t a very high bar. Parents often lack access to information about school performance from reliable sources. Schools have an incentive to exaggerate their performance, so some in the international aid community want the government to set and enforce national standards and mandate national exams. However, there is no good evidence that national standards or testing drive performance. Moreover, as The Economist observed, “where governments are hostile to private schools, regulation is often a pretext to harass them.” 

The absence of government standards does not imply the lack of any standards. In a competitive market, schools have an interest in demonstrating to parents that they provide high-quality education. The rapidly expansion of the private sector will create opportunities for non-profit or for-profit private certifiers to separate the wheat from the chaff. Indeed, as The Economist highlights, there are low-cost ways to provide parents with the information they need:

In a joint study by the World Bank, Harvard University and Punjab’s government, parents in some villages were given report cards showing the test scores of their children and the average for schools nearby, both public and private. A year later participating villages had more children in school and their test scores in maths, English and Urdu were higher than in comparable villages where the cards were not distributed. The scheme was very cheap, and the improvement in results larger than that from some much pricier interventions, such as paying parents to send their children to school.

In a corresponding editorial, The Economist calls on the governments of poor countries to “boost” private education through school vouchers “or get out of the way.” The editorial also argues that “ideally” the governments should “regulate schools to ensure quality” and “run public exams to help parents make informed choices” but also observes that “governments that cannot run decent public schools may not be able to these things well; and doing them badly may be worse than not doing them at all.” Indeed. 

Rather than lobby the often-corrupt and/or incompetent Third World governments, the best thing NGOs could do to improve education would be to grant scholarships directly to the poor and provide private certification and/or expert reviews of schools. If we want to ensure that even the world’s poorest children have access to a quality education, schools should be held directly accountable to parents empowered with the means to choose a school and the information to choose wisely. 

(First posted at Cato-at-Liberty.)

(Guest post by James V. Shuls)

If you’ve been in the education business or around a teacher for any significant amount of time, you have undoubtedly heard someone say something like, “Imagine if teachers were treated like professional athletes.” Well thanks to comedians Key and Peele, we no longer have to imagine. In a new segment, “Teaching Center,” the two spoof the popular ESPN show Sports Center to bring us the “top stories from the exiting world of teaching.”

The video has been a hit with teachers and is receiving a significant amount of attention on social media. Within 24 hours of being posted, it had more than a million views.  The response of most is, “Oh yeah, what if instead of paying LeBron James hundreds of millions of dollars, we did that with Mrs. Smith, the rock-star high school chemistry teacher?!?” Putting aside the economics of the supply and demand disparities for the LeBron’s and Mrs. Smith’s of the world (LeBron plays in front of millions of fans each year, while Mrs. Smith fights for class sizes with fewer than 20 students), there is one serious problem – most of the things being celebrated in Teaching Center are often opposed by teachers themselves.

For starters, Teaching Center continually focuses on test scores from standardized assessments. The ticker at the bottom of the screen shows ACT, SAT, and other test scores for schools. The number one teacher taken in the high school draft is chosen by the school with the “worst test scores last semester.” This hyper-focus on test scores (and competition in general) is anathema to most teachers. Indeed, teachers routinely oppose standardized testing.

This past year, for example, teachers’ unions led efforts to curtail the use of test scores in Florida and encouraged parents to opt-out in New York. The official position statement of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, says “Testing takes time from learning. NEA supports less federally-mandated testing to free up time and resources, diminish “teaching to the test,” and allow educators to focus on what is most important: instilling a love of learning in their students.”

Now, opposing a hyper-focus on testing is not all-together bad. Indeed, we do want teachers to instill a love of learning in students. The problem is that teachers’ unions resist almost any effort to differentiate between good and bad teachers. The fact is some teachers are better than others, whether we measure that by a test score or by some other metric. If we cannot differentiate between these teachers, then the Ruby Ruhf’s of the world will never get their $40 million in bonus pay.

This is the real crux of the problem; teachers espouse differentiation in the classroom, but resist it wholeheartedly when it comes to pay. Rather than pay a teacher for their teaching ability or their unique set of skills, schools use a single salary schedule to pay teachers. In this system, all teachers with the same amount of experience and the same level of degree (B.A., M.A., Ph.D.) receive the same amount of money, regardless of quality or teaching expertise. The best teacher gets paid the same as the worst and the mathematics teacher gets paid the same as the P.E. teacher. Imagine if Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rogers was paid the same amount as Cincinnati Bengal’s star kicker Mike Nugent. After all, they were drafted in the same year.

Million dollar contracts are impossible in education because there is no market for great teachers and there is no market for great teachers because schools fail to recognize differences in teacher quality.

I understand that Teaching Center is just a spoof and shouldn’t be taken too seriously, especially the part where the French teacher is traded for a head librarian and two lunch ladies to be named later. Still, even this segment highlights why teachers cannot be treated like professional athletes –they oppose giving administrators authority over staffing decisions.  Once a teacher reaches tenure, they have what most states recognize as an “indefinite contract,” making it incredibly difficult to get rid of bad teachers. Moreover, most collective bargaining agreements give preferential treatment for jobs based on seniority. This severely limits a school leaders ability to staff his school with what he believes would be the best team.

Let’s be honest, we will never treat teachers like professional athletes and teachers themselves are partly to blame for this. Teachers’ unions have fought to prevent differentiation between teachers and they have resisted efforts to focus on teacher performance. So, we most likely won’t see teachers on Wheaties boxes anytime soon.  It would be nice, however, if we could put policies in place that would allow us to treat them like professionals. They may not get million dollar contracts, but the best ones – the ones that significantly improve student achievement and make a lasting impact on students – could easily garner six figure salaries. Now, we just need to get teachers on board with this.

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James V. Shuls, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Missouri – St. Louis and a distinguished fellow of education policy at the Show-Me Institute. Follow on Twitter at @Shulsie