Finding the right incentives to improve public education
A New York Times story today reports what many have already assumed: New York students’ remarkable test score gains over the past few years were due in large part to the fact that the tests were getting easier, not that the students were necessarily learning more. The story is a reminder of one of the fundamental flaws in the No Child Left Behind law that the Obama administration is now trying to fix – the incentive structure. Under NCLB, schools were punished if they didn’t make constant and steady improvement on state tests, so states had an incentive to make tests easier and easier.
How to get it right this time remains an open question, however. Underlying the current efforts is the assumption that people will do the right thing if given the right incentives, and that we just have to find the ones that will motivate everyone from state politicians to teachers to improve the delivery of public education, particularly to the most disadvantaged kids. Gold stars may motivate five-year-olds, but grown-ups need something a little heftier.
Avoiding shame was the main incentive offered by the Bush administration: it was assumed that school leaders and teachers would want to avoid the “failure” label. Unfortunately, wanting to avoid being labeled a failure isn’t the same thing as wanting to improve public education, as we saw in places where tests appear to have been dumbed down.
The incentive favored by the Obama administration — along with allies in New York City, Denver, Chicago and elsewhere — is money. The Race to the Top competition is the most obvious example, but the philosophy that money will entice people to improve also underlies other popular reform movements right now, including the campaign to implement teacher merit pay and Roland Fryer’s experiments with paying students to perform better.
(photo courtesy of U.S. government)
The question now is whether wanting to earn more money for improving student achievement is linked with actually improving student learning. So far, the results are mixed when it comes to students and teachers; we’ll have to wait and see whether the billions poured into states that win round two of Race to the Top do the trick. Supporters argue that already, the monetary incentives in the competition have induced lawmakers to change state laws in favor of reforms like increasing the number of charter schools.
Teachers unions like to point out that teachers don’t go into the profession for the cash — although obviously one of the main goals of unions is to get them more of it. Rather, they are drawn to the job by altruism, the summers off, the joys of teaching, and other less quantifiable enticements. The same is true of educators who are higher up the rungs of the system – Joel Klein could clearly make a lot more money in the private sector, but he’s nevertheless stuck with his job at the NYC Department of Education for eight years.
And even if we were to discover an incentive, or mix of incentives, that would draw the right people into the profession and motivate them to improve throughout their career, would that be enough? Or is there more to it?
Recess round-up: July 20, 2010
A daily dose of education news around the nation – just in time for a little mid-day break!
Virtual schools: The Massachusetts State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education is set to vote on proposed regulations that would limit the growth of virtual schools tomorrow. (Boston Globe)
Standardized tests: The New York Board of Regents has agreed to changes to the state standardized tests that will “cut down on the high number of students who earn ‘proficient’ scores” without mastering basic skills. (Albany Times Union)
Graduation rates: Dan Freund, incoming superintendent of the Mansfield City Schools in Ohio, says his district has “got to do a lot better” than its current 79.4 percent graduation rate. (Mansfield News Journal)
Technology: Nanakuli and Waianae high schools in Hawaii this year will take part in a “one-to-one” laptop program as part of an initiative to help turn around low-performing schools through the New Tech Network model. (Honolulu Star Advertiser)
Financial aid: The number of federally funded work-study college jobs will decrease by 162,000 this coming year. (U.S. News & World Report)
School funding: Rhode Island’s school funding formula — the first such formula the state has had in over 15 years — might be an improvement but it doesn’t fix all the problems, critics say. (Education Week)
Texas’ incredibly shrinking dropout problem
(Photo by Gideon Tsang)
Reports of another “Texas Miracle” are making the rounds in the media, as the Lone Star state says that the dropout rate for the Class of 2009 was 9.4 percent. That is, only one out of 10 students in Texas who entered high school in the fall of 2005 had quit school four years later.
A widely circulated Associated Press article opens by saying: “State officials are claiming the state dropout rate declined by almost 11 percent over the last year, but critics say the data being used is flawed and doesn’t accurately reflect what’s going on in Texas schools.”
An 11 percent decline in the dropout rate sounds fabulous. And in just one year? Wow! This, my friends, sounds like true progress.
But is it? How exactly was the figure calculated? Conveniently, both the AP article and the Texas Education Agency’s press release provide a straightforward explanation: 45,796 students dropped out in 2007-08, whereas only 40,923 students dropped out in 2008-09. Voilà! A decline of 11 percent. Actually, 10.6 percent, but the Texas Education Agency can be forgiven for rounding to the nearest whole number.
The trouble is that calculating dropout rates is tricky — and highly political. The above calculation, we’ll soon see, is a gross oversimplification. The 11 percent decline in the dropout rate is “fabulous” in the truest sense of the word, which comes from the Latin fābulōsus, for “fable.”
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the primary federal body that collects and analyzes education-related data, introduced a uniform definition of dropouts that states are expected to adopt in the near future. Currently, about half of the 50 states use the definition. The Texas legislature, which adopted the NCES definition back in 2003, provides a helpful summary of the definition: “a dropout is a student who is enrolled in public school in Grades 7-12, does not return to public school the following fall, is not expelled, and does not graduate, receive a GED certificate, continue high school outside the public school system, begin college, or die.”
(It’s worth noting that for decades the federal government has collected data on four different but related rates: the event dropout rate, the status dropout rate, the status completion rate and the averaged freshman graduation rate. The distinctions are important but subtle; click here for the federal government’s explanation of these rates.)
You’d think the new definition would make calculating dropout and graduation rates easy. Or easier. Think again.
Kids move and schools lose track of them. Parents take their kids out of public school to homeschool them. Some kids flee to private schools. It gets very complicated very quickly.
The problem is exacerbated because data are typically reported by districts, which lessens the data’s reliability. School administrators and district leaders have clear incentives to underreport dropouts.
In fact, no one likes high dropout rates — not the public, not teachers, not administrators, and certainly not the politicians who stake their careers on improved graduation rates.
Let’s return to the NCES definition of a dropout to see why the color gray dominates in dropout-rate reports. The big loophole turns out to be the category of students who “continue high school outside the public school system.” How do we really know if a student who leaves a school has continued his or her education outside the public school system? Short of implanting chips in students and tracking their every move — which I don’t hear anyone advocating — the unfortunate answer is we don’t really know. If a student or parent reports that the family is leaving the state or country, schools and districts believe it. Why wouldn’t they?
They believe it because there’s no surefire way to know otherwise. That is, they believe it because it’s convenient to do so.
Now, it’s time to look more closely at Texas. Under the NCES definition, students who legitimately leave a state’s system aren’t counted as dropouts. But what does it mean to leave a system “legitimately”? A student might graduate from high school early or complete a GED elsewhere — or even die young. Such “leavers” cannot be held against a school, district or state and shouldn’t be counted as dropouts. But few students fall into these highly specialized categories.
A student might also leave the public school system to be homeschooled, return to one’s home country, enroll in a private school or enroll in a school outside the state. And these are the four categories into which the vast majority of “leavers” in Texas fall. These “leavers” aren’t dropouts, but they aren’t necessarily graduates either. They’re just gone, someone else’s responsibility.
The Class of 2009 in Texas, which started high school in the fall of 2005, was comprised of 308,427 students. State data suggest that four out of every five students, or 248,500 individuals, actually graduated in 2009. Other estimates put Texas’ graduation rate closer to 70 percent, including new data from the U.S. Department of Education, the annual “Diploma Counts” study by Education Week, and figures from the Intercultural Development Research Association.
According to state data, the number of students who officially quit the Class of 2009 was 28,856, or 9.4 percent of the total. (The rest of the students — 30,000+ strong — either earned GEDs or started on their fifth year of high school; they don’t count as dropouts.)
But here’s what is potentially troubling: there were another 61,179 students in the Class of 2009 who were written off as “leavers,” and they don’t show up in any of these calculations. These students ostensibly left the Texas public schools to return to their home country, to be homeschooled, to attend private schools or to attend public schools in other states. But did they? All of them? How do we know?
That’s the $25,000-question.
Let’s be generous and say that fully 95 percent of the students reported as “leavers” really did leave the state system. What if five percent didn’t? What if instead they just dropped out? That’d be another 3,000 dropouts for the Class of 2009, which would push the dropout rate over 10 percent. It would also erase any claims about improvement between last year and this.
Finally, here’s another puzzling piece of information. In claiming that the state’s dropout rate fell by 11 percent between 2007-08 and 2008-09, the Texas Education Agency had to use data from the 2004-05 academic year, a time when the state’s dropout rate was calculated differently.
So no comparisons can be made. Apples to apples this is not.
The TEA admits as much in its press release, in fact, but not until the penultimate paragraph: “Because of the phased in collection of the data, the Class of 2009 data is the first set of graduation statistics available using four years of data collected under the NCES definition. Therefore, statistics for the Class of 2008 are not directly comparable because they are based on three years of data collected using the NCES definition and one year using the previous state definition.”
So why the direct comparison in the press release’s second paragraph?
Hmm. You’d almost think this is an election year with an incumbent fighting for his political life!
Recess round-up: July 19, 2010
A daily dose of education news around the nation – just in time for a little mid-day break!
Budget cuts: In a “major setback,” several California school districts will have to trim days off the school calendar as a result of budget cuts. (San Francisco Chronicle)
Appoquinimink School District in Delaware joins a growing list of districts looking for “nontraditional means of funding.” It will launch an independent foundation in August to help foot some of its bills. (Delaware Online)
Online testing: Florida will use virtual testing for statewide standardized exams next year. But few school districts are prepared. (Orlando Sentinel)
Teacher evaluations: Maryland grapples with trying to figure out a good system for evaluating teachers. (Baltimore Sun)
Teacher certification: Nevada’s “rigid” standards can make it difficult for teachers to get licensed in the state. (Las Vegas Sun)
Homeless students: The number of homeless students in Oklahoma has increased 870 percent in the last five years. (Tulsa World)
Summer school: Funded by stimulus money, Portland is operating its “largest free summer school in years.” (The Oregonian)
Dropouts: A new report released by the Texas Education Agency says the state’s dropout rate is 9.4 percent – almost an 11 percent decrease from last year. But experts question the validity of the figure. (Education Week)
A bump in average starting salaries for English majors?
By Casey Selix | MinnPost.com
To me, it’s news when English majors see their average starting salary increase. It’s not news when engineering grads see another bump in pay that’s sometimes double an English major’s. That story is getting kind of old, frankly.
The National Association of Colleges and Employers this week released its summer salary report for the Class of 2010. While the average starting salary for all liberal arts majors fell 3.9 percent to $34,747, the salary for English grads jumped 7.1 percent to $37,154.
Prairie Home Companion host Garrison Keillor and the Professional Organization of English Majors probably should not write a celebratory script yet.
The news is in the eighth paragraph of a 10-paragraph press release. I kept looking for some kind of footnote that a small sample might skew results. Finding none, I checked with the NACE communications office.
Alas, it’s premature to declare that salaries for English majors are outperforming those of liberal arts majors as a whole.
“Data for English majors is fairly limited at this time, and the increase is likely the result of just a few high salary offers,” NACE spokeswoman Mimi Collins wrote in an email. “Most of the offers to English majors were for teaching jobs, which paid an average of $32,746. Therefore, I would not make anything of that increase. We will have more data and a better sense of the picture for English majors when we release the final report in September.”
Another press release from NACE will bring liberal arts majors back down to Earth. It’s a list of the degrees that attracted the top-five average starting salaries. No. 1 is petroleum engineering: $74,799.
This story is the product of a collaboration between The Hechinger Report and MinnPost.com. It can also be found here on the MinnPost site.
At a school where a student drowned, more than one lesson to be learned
Four years ago, at an open house for his new middle school, I met Jose Maldonado, the New York City principal who may be put on probation after one of his students drowned on a field trip to the beach. Afterward, I wrote in the New York Sun that the school, Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science and Engineering, was “nearly certain” to be an academic success.
Maldonado was energetic, charismatic and earnest about his goal to create a rigorous new school for the Harlem community. One of the school’s planners was a Nobel Prize winner. Some of the teachers would have PhDs from Columbia, as does Maldonado himself.
The idea for the school was to create a selective school that wasn’t just for whites and Asians, which the city’s other top selective schools, like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, increasingly have become. Although it was certain to draw upper-middle-class students from the Upper West Side, the school was expressly designed to reach talented students from the poorer neighborhoods of Upper Manhattan. Maldonado said he had traveled all over Harlem and Washington Heights searching for students, and the line wrapping out the door of the open house attested to these efforts. Most of the families were black and Hispanic, and desperate for better schools for their kids.
Principal Jose Maldonado recruited from Harlem and Washington Heights (photo courtesy of Rup)
Last year, the school’s demographics were 69 percent black and Hispanic, and 30 percent white and Asian. More than half of students received free or reduced-price lunch. Compare that to Stuyvesant High School, where only 5 percent of students last year were black and Hispanic, and a third received free or reduced- price lunch.
Columbia Secondary is not a charter, but in many ways, it has behaved like one. The academics are intense and test scores high, as were the expectations for staff. The news stories that have come out after the drowning include teacher complaints that they were driven to work 12-hour days, plus weekends, and it seems that teacher turnover also has been an issue. In a New York Times story today, teachers complained that there never seemed to be enough people to do everything Maldonado wanted to do to enrich the educational experience there, like take students on field trips and expand sports offerings.
The story of the drowning is tragic, but in some ways, so is the story of the school’s efforts to do more for the students it serves. We’ve asked in previous posts whether the current fight over jobs versus reform is perhaps a false dichotomy. To reform education in Harlem, Columbia Secondary needed both people and ideas to get the job done. When I talked to Maldonado four years ago, I heard plenty of exciting ideas, but from the reporting we’ve seen this week, it seems like he fell short when it came to manpower to carry them out.
On a more positive note, Columbia Secondary has shown that minorities are not out of place at a selective school on par with some of the city’s top schools. Of the lessons to be learned from Columbia Secondary’s fate, maybe that will be one of them.
Recess round-up: July 16, 2010
A daily dose of education news around the nation – just in time for a little mid-day break!
Student placement: Three civil rights groups quit their work with the Boston public schools on finding new ways of assigning students to schools, citing concerns about “BPS’ lack of meaningful engagement with the community during this process.” (The Boston Globe)
School budgets: A statewide poll in Georgia revealed that half of those surveyed favor paying more in taxes to restore cuts to the education budget. Thirty-nine percent were opposed, while 11 percent were undecided. (The Washington Examiner)
Charter schools: Prior to the debut of Waiting for Superman at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival, Mike Seccombe takes a look at the “simplistic” argument of the film. (Vineyard Gazette)
Superintendent salaries: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie announced plans to limit superintendent pay based on the number of students served, which will save districts $9.8 million. (NJ.com)
School alignment: San Antonio, Seattle, Richmond, Va. and Petal, Miss. have been chosen by the National League of Cities to “receive special technical assistance for their pre-K-12th grade alignment efforts.” (The Hattiesburg American)
Online learning: At the Online Leadership Summit, keynote speaker Susan Patrick, president of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, described how the practice has grown from “the fringe of education to the heart of it.” (NewsOK.com)
Report on stimulus spending reveals a job well-done, for now
A report released today from the Center on Education Policy (CEP) concludes that the broad goals of the roughly $100 billion education portion of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) — also known as the stimulus package — are being met at the school-district level. At least for the 2009-10 school year.
The findings, based on a survey of district-level administrators polled in Spring 2010, reveal that nearly two-thirds of the nation’s school districts used the federal money to save or create jobs in the 2009-10 school year.
This news comes on the heels of an announcement by White House economists who reported that the $787 billion stimulus saved or created 2.5 million to 3.6 million jobs since it was signed in February 2009. In essence, this means that the stimulus succeeded in its goal of providing a financial boost to the economy.
At least so far.
The CEP report suggests that come 2010-11, as many as three-quarters of the nation’s school districts expect to cut teaching jobs due to decreasing budgets.
While much of the education stimulus package was meant to save or create jobs, the unprecedented boost in funding was also intended to transform public education as we know it. In that regard, CEP found that districts focused more aggressively on reform goals related to improving teacher quality, bolstering standards, strengthening assessments and participating in the creation of state longitudinal data systems rather than on improving low-performing schools.
Earlier today, in response to the report, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, White House Director of the Domestic Policy Council Melody Barnes and White House Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors Christina Romer discussed by phone the need for jobs and reform. Their comments echoed an opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal co-authored by NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, “Obama’s School Reforms are a Priority.”
The debate is heated, especially since a bill before the Senate proposes cutting $500 million from Race to the Top, $100 million from the federal charter schools program and $200 million from the Teacher Incentive Fund. Should it reach his desk, President Obama has vowed to veto it.
Meanwhile, in the stimulus spending arena and the CEP report, we now know that ARRA provided $10 billion in supplemental funding for low-achieving children in low-income areas, as well as more than $3.5 billion in School Improvement Grants. Of the districts receiving these funds (under Title I), nearly 60 percent used at least some of it to save or create jobs for Title I teachers and/or principals, and about 65 percent used at least some of it to purchase materials and supplies and/or instructional hardware and software. The report explains that “the popularity of these types of one-time purchases may signal districts’ reluctance to expand services to students that might have to be retracted later, or to hire staff that might have to be let go after ARRA funding disappears.”
Schools are said to be teetering on the edge of a funding cliff; just how steep the cliff is, and how far the fall, we won’t know until 2010-11.
Recess round-up: July 15, 2010
A daily dose of education news around the nation – just in time for a little mid-day break!
Standardized testing: A new study finds that when given a little monetary incentive, 12th-graders perform better on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). (EdWeek)
As Connecticut marks its 25th year of its state standardized test, Robert A. Frahm takes a look back education over the past quarter-century. (The CT Mirror)
Mayoral control: Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm wants to see mayoral control on Detroit’s ballot in November. (MLive.com)
Non-closing schools: Nineteen New York City public schools slated for closure will be allowed to stay open – but they shouldn’t expect any extra help from the Department of Education. (The New York Daily News)
The city’s Department of Education has also managed to find new places for seven out of 16 schools that will open this year. The remaining nine will still go where originally intended, now sharing space alongside the saved schools they were meant to replace. (The New York Times)
Special education: School officials in Farmington, New Mexico are doubling the size of the district’s special education preschool in response to increased enrollment. (The Daily Times)
Education policy: William McKenzie, an editorial columnist, gives his two cents on the proposed education policies of Texas’s gubernatorial candidates, including one who would give companies a tax credit to let dropouts pursue a high school degree or GED. (Dallas Morning News)
Meanwhile, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan spoke at a NAACP meeting in Kansas City yesterday, telling delegates that education is “the civil rights issue of our generation.” (Kansas City Star)
Budget cuts: Louisiana State University has proposed ways to cut $133 million from its budget for FY 2011, including “cutting back financial aid, shuttering research programs and eliminating support personnel.” (The Times-Picayune)
Recess round-up: July 14, 2010
A daily dose of education news around the nation – just in time for a little mid-day break!
Dropout recovery: While “credit recovery” might be expanding for students who are a few courses behind their peers, blogger Tom Vander Ark details a “more robust strategy” for those who are several years off track. (EdReformer)
Teacher tenure: Perry Zirkel argues that getting rid of teacher tenure is not enough to fix all the problems plaguing the nation’s school systems. (Washington Post)
Principal academy: Indiana officials announced today the creation of a new academy at Marian University where principals, teachers, and non-educators can take intensive courses for a year, followed by two years on the job with a mentor. (Indianapolis Star)
Online learning: Benson School District in Arizona has been granted permission to start an online school for the upcoming school year. (San Pedro Valley News-Sun)
NCLB: The U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of Connecticut’s lawsuit that had argued No Child Left Behind was “an unfunded mandate.” (Hartford Courant)
School budgets: If the Kansas state legislature wants to stay true to school funding laws put into place before the recession, the state needs to increase school funding by $471 million. (Lawrence Journal-World)
