Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
Necessity is the mother of invention: Hit by funding cuts, community colleges are trying to boost revenues by renting facilities to businesses, charging more for specialty courses and other ideas.
Also on Community College Spotlight: Data collection is a challenge as community colleges pilot a new measure of effectiveness that goes beyond graduation rates.
Good teachers are valuable, writes Eric Hanushek in Education Next. A teacher at the 69th percentile in effectiveness will increase lifetime earnings by $212,000 for a class of 20 students. A very low-performing teachers at the 16th percentile will decrease earnings by $400,000. Compared to the average teacher’s salary — $52,000 in 2008 — the effects are large.
U.S achievement could reach the level of Canada and Finland, if we fired the least effective 5 to 12 percent of teachers and replaced them with average teachers, Hanushek estimates.
That would lead to a huge increase in economic output: $112 trillion over the lifetime of someone born today.
How do we do it? Hanushek has little faith that efforts to improve recruitment or teacher training will be effective. Trying to change poor teachers into average teachers also has proven difficult, he writes. “While such efforts undoubtedly help some teachers, there is no substantial evidence that certification, in-service training, master’s degrees, or mentoring programs systematically make a difference in whether teachers are in fact effective at driving student achievement,” he writes.
He proposes “a clearer evaluation and retention strategy for teachers” to “deselect” the least effective 5 to 10 percent. “At a minimum, the current dysfunctional teacher-evaluation systems would need to be overhauled so that effectiveness in the classroom is clearly identified.”
The teachers who are excellent would have to be paid much more, both to compensate for the new riskiness of the profession and to increase the chances of retaining these individuals in teaching. Those who are ineffective would have to be identified and replaced. Both steps would be politically challenging in a heavily unionized environment such as the one in place today.
With all teachers paid the same, regardless of performance, salaries now lag pay in other professions, he writes.
In the 1940s, the salaries of male teachers were slightly above the average pay for all male college graduates, and female teachers had higher salaries than 70 percent of other female college graduates. Today, despite the collective bargaining process, the salaries of male teachers are at the 30th percentile of the distribution of all college graduates, and women who teach are at the 40th percentile of their college-educated peers.
“Salaries several times higher than those paid teachers today would be economically justified if teachers were compensated according to their effectiveness,” Hanushek concludes.
Teacher effectiveness is the theme of this week’s National Journal experts discussion. At the labor-management conference, Education Arne Duncan warned that there are tough decisions ahead in many districts about which teachers are retained and which are laid off.
”If you have to make tough calls, you have to figure out for the most disadvantaged communities how you keep your best talent,” he said.
. . . Are there ways to evaluate teachers such that in lean times, the best ones stay on the job? Or are those kinds of assessments so fraught with peril that it makes more sense to make a clean cut from the bottom or the top?
Make sure you’re defining and measuring what you really care about, writes University of Colorado Professor Kevin Welner. Then, “make sure you’re creating the right incentives.”
In the abstract, making personnel decisions based on effectiveness is a no-brainer. But the approach needs to be balanced, bringing in multiple measures that capture a full picture of teaching quality.
Welner thinks value-added scores should be used for only 15 percent of a teacher’s evaluation because of reliability issues.
The Los Angeles Times ranked teachers by value-added scores based on “demonstrably inadequate” research, concludes a National Education Policy Center study, Due Diligence and the Evaluation of Teachers. University of Colorado researchers found “serious weaknesses” in the LA Times’ work.
. . . it is likely that there are a significant number of false positives (teachers rated as effective who are really average), and false negatives (teachers rated as ineffective who are really average) in the L.A. Times’s rating system. Using the Times’s approach of including only teachers with 60 or more students, there was likely a misclassification of 22% (for reading) and 14% (for math).
But that’s not how the newspaper sees it. Separate study confirms many Los Angeles Times findings on teacher effectiveness is the Times’ Feb. 7 headline, claiming NEPC “confirms the broad conclusions of a Times’ analysis of teacher effectiveness in the Los Angeles Unified School District while raising concerns about the precision of the ratings.”
After re-analyzing the data using a somewhat different method, the Colorado researchers reached a similar general conclusion: Elementary school teachers vary widely in their ability to raise student scores on standardized tests, and that variation can be reliably estimated.
But they also said they found evidence of imprecision in the Times analysis that could lead to the misclassification of some teachers, especially among those whose performance was about average for the district.
NEPC is livid about the Feb. 7 story (pdf), saying the study by Derek Briggs and Ben Domingue “confirms very few of the Times’ conclusions.”
“We raised major concerns was with both the validity (“accuracy”) and reliability (“precision”), and our bigger focus was on the former rather than the latter,” writes Professor Briggs.
While the Times claims the study “largely confirmed” the newspaper’s rankings of most and least effective teachers, Briggs responds, “No, we did not, quite to the contrary. (Reporter Jason) Felch seems to be again focused only on the
precision issue and not on the accuracy problems that we primarily focus on in our report.”
Principals won’t be judged “effective” or “highly effective” based on students’ progress, reports Justin Baeder in On Performance.
In September, the Department of Education proposed using growth in test scores — at least one grade level in an academic year — to determine which districts and schools are eligible for federal education grants. The National Association of Elementary and Secondary Principals protested, saying principals shouldn’t be held “accountable for outcomes far behind their control.”
“Nonetheless, it’s likely that many principals will find student growth factored into their evaluations thanks to changes to state laws” designed to qualify for Race to the Top funding, Baeder writes.
If teachers can be judged, in part, on their students’ progress, why not principals?
Students’ assessments of their teachers tend to match value-added measures of effectiveness, concludes research funded by the Gates Foundation. From the New York Times:
Teachers whose students described them as skillful at maintaining classroom order, at focusing their instruction and at helping their charges learn from their mistakes are often the same teachers whose students learn the most in the course of a year, as measured by gains on standardized test scores . . .
Researchers are looking for correlations between value-added rankings and other measures of teacher effectiveness, reports the Times.
Classrooms where a majority of students said they agreed with the statement, “Our class stays busy and doesn’t waste time,” tended to be led by teachers with high value-added scores, the report said.
The same was true for teachers whose students agreed with the statements, “In this class, we learn to correct our mistakes,” and, “My teacher has several good ways to explain each topic that we cover in this class.”
“Kids know effective teaching when they experience it,” said researcher Ronald Ferguson, who designed the student questionnaires. “As a nation, we’ve wasted what students know about their own classroom experiences instead of using that knowledge to inform school reform efforts.”
Twenty states are redesigning their systems for evaluating teachers, often asking the Gates Foundation for help in assessing effectiveness, Vicki L. Phillips, a director of education at the foundation, told the Times.
Teachers who spend a lot of time on test prep have lower value-added learning gains than those who “work their way methodically through the key concepts of literacy and mathematics,” Phillips said.
Teachers in high-poverty schools are only slightly less effective than teachers in low-poverty schools, concludes a study conducted in Florida and North Carolina. But the least-effective teachers in high-poverty schools are worse than the least-effective teachers in affluent schools, according to a new analysis (pdf) from the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, or CALDER. That means low-income students are more likely to be taught be a very bad teacher.
“Teaching experience seem to improve a teacher’s effectiveness in a low-poverty school, but less so in a high-poverty school,” writes Stephen Sawchuk on Teacher Beat. After awhile, teachers in tough working environments burn out.
The bottom line of the study, according to the authors: Simply attempting to import teachers with great credentials into high-poverty schools probably won’t make a long-term difference. Instead, “measures that induce highly effective teachers to move to high-poverty schools and which promote an environment in which teachers’ skills will improve over time are more likely to be successful.”
Go here for more on strategies to get good teachers to high-poverty schools.
Los Angeles teachers rated on effectiveness by the LA Times respond to the value-added evaluations. Some teachers are pleased to be recognized as effective; others feel their hard work and commitment has been disrespected.
Here’s a link to all the teacher responses.
Many teachers do not understand value-added analysis: They think they’re being judged on students’ scores, not on whether students performed as well in their class as they did in previous years.
A few teachers raised real issues: The data may ignore team teaching, the availability of tutoring or the presence of exceptionally disruptive students who make it much harder for their classmates to progress. Teachers with very high-scoring students may not be able to show improvement.
“Weaponized” education research and “study laundering” are illustrated by a Great Lakes Center study knocking Teach for America for high turnover and “mixed” performance, writes Eduwonk.
Half of TFA teachers leave after two years and 80 percent leave after three, the study says. However, the researchers use data from studies that conflate TFA teachers who leave their original school placement with those who leave the teaching profession, Eduwonk charges. A 2008 Harvard study (pdf), found that 61 percent of TFA teachers stay in teaching beyond the two-year commitment.
Teach For America surveys its alumni regularly and the most recent survey found that 65 percent of Teacher For America’s 20,000 alumni remain in education, with 32 percent continuing as teachers. And remember, that’s a survey of alums going back almost two decades now so that one in three figure should be viewed in that context as well as the larger context of TFA’s mission.
On the performance issue, studies that use rigorous methodology find that “Teach For America teachers perform as well or better than other teachers, not only emergency certified teachers but traditionally trained ones and veterans,” Eduwonk writes, including lots of link to research studies. The results are not mixed.
By “study laundering,” Eduwonk means getting the mainstream media — in this case, the Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss and the New York Times’ Michael Winerip – to report uncritically on the study without mentioning other research or noting that Great Lakes’ board “is made up of people with a track record of trashing Teach For America and NEA affiliates fighting to keep TFA out of various states.”
Update: Another survey finds TFA teachers are more likely to leave their original school if they’re assigned to teach multiple subjects or grades or out of their field, reports Teacher Beat. Sixty-one percent teach for more than two years, the study found, matching earlier results.
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