Voice For Liberty

Tag: Education

  • Charter Schools Can Close the Education Gap

    We don’t have these, to my knowledge, in USD 259, the Wichita public school district, and there are very few in Kansas. Across the country, however, charter schools are making a difference, particularly in addressing the needs of urban and high-poverty students.

    Joel I. Klein, chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, and Rev. Al Sharpton, president of the National Action Network, wrote an open letter to president-elect Barack Obama in the Wall Street Journal. In it they “second [his] belief that school reformers must demonstrate an unflagging commitment to ‘what works’ to dramatically boost academic achievement — rather than clinging to reforms that we ‘wish would work.’”

    The coalition these two writers formed, the Education Equality Project (EEP), seeks to greatly narrow, if not eliminate, the achievement gap. It seeks to do so by what turns out to be a radical measure: “EEP seeks to ensure that America’s schools provide equal educational opportunity, judged by one measuring stick: Does a policy advance student learning? It’s an obvious litmus test. Yet the current K-12 school system is designed to serve the interests of adults, not children.”

    How can this be radical — advancing student learning? Isn’t that what schools should be doing?

    The reform paths that most public schools take are not ones that work. The characteristics of teachers, it turns out, is the most important factor in learning. (See Wichita Public School District’s Path: Not Fruitful for more.)

    “Finally, our coalition also promotes the development and placement of effective teachers in underserved schools and supports paying them higher salaries. By contrast, we oppose rigid union-tenure protections, burdensome work rules, and antiquated pay structures that shield a small minority of incompetent teachers from scrutiny yet stop good teachers from earning substantial, performance-based pay raises.”

    In Wichita, it appears that there are no proposals to pay teachers based on factors that make a difference in student learning. Instead, pay is based solely on education credentials earned and longevity — two factors shown to make no difference in student leaning. (Some researchers report a negative correlation between these factors and student learning.) Even a proposal a few years ago to offer teachers working in high-poverty schools a $1,500 bonus went nowhere.

    The Wall Street Journal article is Charter Schools Can Close the Education Gap.

  • In public schools, incentives matter

    Last week (Wichita Public School District’s Path: Not Fruitful) I wrote about an article by Malcolm Gladwell. This article describes a method for evaluating and paying teachers. It’s not based on what public schools do now, which is to reward teachers solely on the basis of longevity and education credentials earned. That’s because we’ve found that these two measures don’t do anything to improve the effectiveness of teachers. “Test scores, graduate degrees, and certifications — as much as they appear related to teaching prowess — turn out to be about as useful in predicting success as having a quarterback throw footballs into a bunch of garbage cans.”

    Instead, Gladwell finds that personal characteristics and behavior of teachers matter highly. These are discovered and evaluated through observation of the teacher in the classroom, as Gladwell reports.

    Teachers, however, resist this type of evaluation. Teachers complain about arbitrary actions by administrators. They fear that they will be fired or disciplined in some way for speaking out or not going along with the system.

    The problem that employees of government have is that without competition provided by markets and the profit and loss system, administrators can be arbitrary in their actions. There’s nothing to prevent them from being so.

    In private enterprise, a firm must earn a profit. If it can’t earn profits, it will fail and go out of business. Private firms earn profits by pleasing customers. They provide products and services that customers value, and they provide them efficiently. To do this, they seek to employ the best people they can. If a firm hires less-qualified employees — say someone’s brother-in-law just because he’s a relative — they will probably not be as profitable. If activities like this go on long enough, the firm will probably go out of business, as it won’t be able to compete against firms with better-qualified employees.

    The public schools, however, don’t have customers in the same way that private firms do. Most customers of a school district like USD 259, the Wichita public school district, don’t have an alternative.

    Furthermore, public schools districts like USD 259 don’t have to earn a profit. Their revenue stream is guaranteed. Their customers are, too. So why should the managers of USD 259 care about the quality of their employees? They can hire anyone they want for any reason. And no matter how qualified and successful a teacher may be, that adds nothing to the “profitability” of USD 259. So what are the motives and incentives in place?

    To learn more about the evaluation system mentioned in Gladwell’s article, see Neither Art nor Accident: A Conversation with Robert Pianta.

  • KU Study an Embarrassment to Sebelius

    Writing in National Review, Denis Boyles says:

    In the first study to measure the result of pouring all that money on the noggins of schoolkids, the University of Kansas’s Center for Applied Economics has released a study poetically entitled, “The Relationship between School Funding and Student Achievement in Kansas Public Schools.” The verdict? So far, the funding has produced “little evidence of improving student outcomes as measured by test scores.”

  • Wichita public school district’s path: not fruitful

    One of the issues discussed during the campaign for the bond issue for USD 259, the Wichita public school district, was class size. A major reason given by the district for the need for the bond issue is the desire to provide smaller class sizes. Some opponents such as myself argued that the evidence that small class sizes produce better student outcomes is sketchy. Also, small class sizes are very expensive.

    Just thinking about it, it seems like small class sizes would be great for student achievement. More individual attention and all that. But that’s not evidence.

    A recent article in The New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell — no one would mistake him for a conservative — tackles this issue. I use the word “tackles” as much of the article uses the difficulty of predicting which college football quarterbacks are likely to succeed in the professional league. Here’s what Gladwell learned from Eric Hanushek:

    What’s more — and this is the finding that has galvanized the educational world — the difference between good teachers and poor teachers turns out to be vast. … Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.

    That’s a powerful finding. I wonder if the Wichita school district is aware of this? Here’s some more about how importance of teacher characteristics:

    If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of their schoolchildren, the U.S. is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality. After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers.

    So how do we get more great teachers? Raise the pay of all existing teachers? Require more education and certification?

    … investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master’s degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost every district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in the classroom.

    The problem is that the current standards for teachers don’t “track what we care about.” The path to increased pay as a teacher — longevity and more education credentials — doesn’t produce better teachers. But because of union contracts that govern pay, that’s the only way to earn more as a teacher. This is one of the reasons why teachers unions are harmful to schools.

    Unfortunately for Wichita schoolchildren, USD 259 has started down a long and expensive path that is likely to produce little in the way of positive results. The existing ways of doing things are reinforced. Reform is postponed. Opportunities are foregone.

    Read the article at Most Likely to Succeed.

  • Video Reveals Uninformed Citizenry

    Utah Education Facts has released a video that illustrates the startling lack of information possessed by the average citizen. This video was made in Utah and uses Utah’s facts, but I’ve made some similar videos in Wichita, and the results are similar.

    People are mostly uninformed about basic facts. School districts use this to their advantage in order to push through their agendas. Citizens naively assume that everything their school district does is “for the children.”

    Here’s a link to the video: How much do we know about our education system?

  • Wichita Schoolchildren Face a Dangerous Future

    A recent piece in the Wall Street Journal by Terry M. Moe illustrates the danger that Wichita schoolchildren face. Here’s an excerpt from the article Change Our Public Schools Need:

    Democrats favor educational “change” — as long as it doesn’t affect anyone’s job, reallocate resources, or otherwise threaten the occupational interests of the adults running the system. Most changes of real consequence are therefore off the table. The party specializes instead in proposals that involve spending more money and hiring more teachers — such as reductions in class size, across-the-board raises and huge new programs like universal preschool. These efforts probably have some benefits for kids. But they come at an exorbitant price, both in dollars and opportunities foregone, and purposely ignore the fundamentals that need to be addressed. (emphasis added)

    Moe’s analysis is spot-on in describing the situation in Wichita. Now that USD 259 (the Wichita school district) has passed a large bond issue, the future of Wichita’s schoolchildren is assured, district officials say. There’s no need to worry. Everything will be well.

    The reality, however, is that the changes the bond issue spending will bring to the Wichita public schools will likely have very little effect on student achievement. But because the school administration tells us it will, and because they’ll be so busy managing the planning and construction of facilities for the next five years, desperately-needed reform measures will not be considered. A veneer of change and reform will appear. Fundamental reform is off the table, it appears.

    Opportunities foregone. This is the danger.

  • Obama Deserves a Scarlet “H” for Hypocrisy

    At the Goldwater Institute, Clint Bolick exposes Barack Obama as another in a long line of politicians that deny school choice to the masses, but exercise it themselves:

    During the campaign, Obama stated that school choice doesn’t work. If he believes that, why not simply send the girls to whatever school the District of Columbia bureaucracy happens to assign them to?

    The answer is obvious: As a parent, Obama knows that school choice does work. And studies show it especially works for low-income families, not only expanding precious educational opportunities for children in failing schools but also boosting performance of low-performing public schools by forcing them to compete for students and dollars.

    (From Obama deserves a scarlet “H” for hypocrisy.)

    Linda Chavez writes on the same topic in Obama’s School Choice.

  • Some Wichita Teachers Can’t Win Gracefully

    Helen Cochran, who was the spokesperson for a group that opposed the recent Wichita school bond, received a few email and telephone messages as part of the campaign that were a little over the top.

    In one set of messages, a Wichita High School East English teacher (we’ll call him “Kurt”) carried on the legacy of former superintendent Winston Brooks, who called an opponent a racist just because he didn’t support the bond issue. That was in the 2000 campaign. Here’s “Kurt” writing to Helen in October:

    People need to know that your organization is against the bond, not because you think it will put an “undue” burden on property owners and utility companies, but because your bigoted minds don’t want to give your money to students of Wichita who aren’t “like you,” i.e. urban students.

    George Wallace would be very proud of you.

    I looked at this person’s profile page in Facebook. He is, believe it or not, a youth director at a Christian church. He describes his duties as: “Organize church youth functions, teach Sunday school, and provide Christian guidance to the high school and middle school age students in the youth group.”

    Then, after the election Helen received this:

    Hmm, all that money, effort, hate, and bigotry for nothing.
    Now, you’ll be paying for a new track at my high school, new classrooms, storm shelters; oh yeah… and tennis courts and swimming pools.

    The people have spoken. And they’ve spoken louder than you.

    When your motives are based in bigotry and hatred, your guise of being “gracious in defeat” is merely a front for the truth of your flawed motivations. And that “one day” of which you speak when I stood for something culminated yesterday when PRESIDENT Obama was elected.

    So thanks in-advance for your mandated contributions to the betterment of the facilities of USD 259.

    I hope he doesn’t gloat like this in front of the Sunday school class or when providing Christian guidance.

    Besides these messages, Helen also received one from him that parroted the USD 259 official line about smaller class sizes, etc. This is ironic in light of this sentence from his Facebook page: “I encourage everyone to be a free-thinker, to ‘think outside the box,’ and continually broaden their capacity for conceptual abstract thought.”

    Nothing about this bond issue could be described as resembling “out of the box.” Everything about it is more of the same.

  • Obama’s Education Transformation

    At one time it seemed like Barack Obama might be an education reformer. He was actually booed when speaking before the National Education Association for his support of merit pay for teachers. But after observing Obama’s recent actions, Liam Julian, writing in the National Review Online piece Hoping for Change in Education? comes to this conclusion: “So far, it seems, tradition trumps change.”