Sara Mead’s inscrutable opposition to McKay Scholarships

May 19, 2010

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Thumbing through the latest edition of Education Next I found a letter from Sara Mead taking exception to Jay and Stuart’s previous article on McKay Scholarships. Mead’s argument seems to boil down to the idea that Jay and Stuart forgot that vouchers for children with disabilities are bad.

Jay and Stuart note in their response that Mead failed to cited any evidence for her opinions about special education vouchers. I will be happy to present some evidence that Ms. Mead is entirely mistaken. The above chart shows gains on the 4th grade NAEP reading exam between 1998 and 2009 for the nation and for Florida.

For those squinting at your IPAD, that big red column more than two and a half times bigger than the blue column is Florida. Florida beats the nation in progress for students with disabilities on all four big NAEP tests.

Now several other factors certainly were involved in driving Florida’s gains among children with disabilities. For instance, policy changes such as heavy weighting of children in the bottom 25% certainly played a role, and I suspect that the revamping of literacy instruction did as well. I make no claim that McKay was the sole cause of this improvement.

If however the fact that all children with disabilities gained the ability to attend private school early in the Aughts negatively impacted their learning, it is awfully difficult to see any evidence of it in their test scores. In fact, it seems far more reasonable to assume that it helped.

Mead wrote:

But there’s no evidence that children with disabilities need additional education options more than any other youngsters in underperforming schools, or that vouchers address the underlying problems in special education. Rather, voucher proponents have seized on this population because they are more sympathetic beneficiaries than poor and minority youngsters. Using children with disabilities to increase public support for vouchers may be smart politics, but it doesn’t mean that special education vouchers are good policy.

On the first point, I can’t help but wonder how much Mead has spoken to parents with children with disabilities. More broadly, this is quite an achievement for a single short letter: a number of unsupported assertions and faulty ESP regarding the motives of McKay supporters. It falls to me to break the news to Mead, but the case for special education vouchers is extremely powerful. If for some strange reason you wish to halt their progress into law, you’ll have to do better than to imagine theoretical problems.

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Posted by matthewladner

McGuire on Unions and Urban Students

June 16, 2009

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

 MaryEllen McGuire of the New America Foundation takes on the unions for dealing out the least experienced teachers to the neediest children in U.S. News and World Report:

Teachers with the least experience are educating the most disadvantaged students in the highest poverty, most challenging schools. Low-income kids are being “triaged” not by experienced teachers, but by those with fewer than three years of teaching to go on.

Does it matter? Absolutely. According to the research, teacher experience is at least a partial predictor of success in the classroom and, at present, one of the only approximations for teacher quality widely available. Experienced teachers tend to have better classroom management skills and a stronger command of curricular materials. Novice teachers on the other hand struggle during their initial years in any classroom.

McGuire’s point is valid, but of course we should not be content to use experience as an approximation for teacher quality. There are both outstanding young teachers and truly awful experienced teachers, as you might recall from the Son of Super Chart:

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The Son of Super Chart broadly  backs up McGuire-the curve for 1st year teachers is centered on -5, and the curve for 3rd year teachers on 5.  All else being equal matching inexperienced teachers with high needs kids is an abominable practice.

Of course, all else need not be equal, which is why Teach for America works well.

McGuire proposes solutions:

Once we can wrap our heads around the true extent of the problem we can start taking down the second obstacle: figuring out a way to entice more experienced teachers to teach in high need schools. This will require a long-term commitment to systemic reform including investing in low-poverty schools to make them more attractive teaching placements and funding incentives to initially attract experienced and, we hope, higher quality teachers to low-income schools.

Will this require dollars beyond what we have? Not necessarily.

Federal law already provides schools with money to pay for this. It’s just that the funds typically go to reduce class sizes or provide professional development for teachers instead – strategies that have mixed results. Some of these funds should be redirected to pay for incentives drawing teachers into high-poverty schools. This is also a great use of stimulus money.

I’m glad to see to someone from the New America Foundation describe the results of class size reduction as “mixed.” Wow- you are half way there. The real word you are looking for however is “c*a*t*a*s*t*r*o*p*h*i*c” and the issue goes much deeper than the distribution of experienced teachers. On average, American colleges of education are recruiting from the bottom third of American college students based on admission scores. 

Reading between the lines, the world is precisely as the unions want it to be: an emphasis on class size and seniority over teacher quality or equity. The system is also perfectly designed to deliver the most needy students low-quality teachers.

John Rawls is surely spinning in his grave.

UPDATE/CORRECTION

I loaded the wrong Brookings study Super Chart! The correct Super Chart! is from page 28 of the same study and shows a  weaker relationship between experience and student learning gains, with year one teachers with a bell curve centered around -3 and second and third year teachers around zero.

10 Comments | teacher quality | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner