There is no mass exodus of good teachers

Grounding our debates in real data and information is an important part of progressing education forward. Building up knowledge, trying new things and assessing their effectiveness, and searching for every edge possible is all a part of how the work should be done. There will be no silver bullets but there is promise, there are partial solutions, that can bring us closer to a more effective education system.

Keeping more great teachers with the students who need them most is a part of the solution. Read my piece at RealClearEducation on how rigorous teacher evaluation may be helping.

Finding the right problems in teacher evaluation

Teacher evaluation and feedback systems are complex beasts that hopefully serve many purposes and connect many dots. Problems can present themselves from many different perspectives and solutions can create unintended consequences. 

There is no easy answer but it does mean we have to constantly reassess the truth of our own conventional wisdom and keep our eyes on the big prize when deciding how to respond to potential issues.

See my post on Flypaper about getting observations right about balancing potential problems with long term solutions.

A Decision-making Question - Compared to What?

One of the ways I think about data, and also the purpose of teacher evaluation in general, is whether the information presenting itself is useful for decision-making. Ultimately, that decision-making is what much of policy is about. Are we making the best decisions possible, as a teacher, as a school leader, as a district staffer, certainly as a bureaucrat tasked with coaxing policy-making aspirations into in-reality improvements.

How you process all this brand new information is an important part of the decisions you end up making. You can see my post on the EDGEucator blog about the decision-making implications of the question "Compared to what?"

More Mythical Myths

Another article was published in the Washington Post taking aim at the myths education reformers are using to dupe the American people, or the media, or something.  It wasn’t so long ago that I used another article using the same myth gimmick as a launching point to talk about some of the major education reform issues that are out there.  These myth articles don’t really do it for me if only because they do not accurately represent the positions they are attempting to debunk.  Thus they are of minimal use.  This one in particular seems to be arguing against…nobody at all.

We’ll do this quickly myth by myth:

Myth 1: Our schools are failing

It isn’t just the education reformers who think a lot of schools are failing.  It is pretty much everyone who has a child in an urban school district.  It is most people paying attention to the educational outcomes of minorities.  Yes, things seem to be trending in the right direction.  But citing rising high school graduation rates that are derived from different methodologies and are often pulled from historically questionable data is not going to change the fact that way too many of our schools don’t educate students.  

Of course not all schools are failing.  There are good ones and bad ones.  Enough are failing and enough are failing in a systemic way that it feels quite cold to argue that there isn’t a problem.  For a little more oomph on this topic, responding to the same article, check out eduwonk who beat me to the punch with his pitch perfect response.

Myth 2: Unions defend bad teachers

Unions do defend bad teachers.  That is part of their job description.  And due-process can easily be code for really long, arduous, complicated process that is easy to file a grievance against.  That being said, unions are not universally bad, nor do they have bad intentions, nor are they unwilling to engage in productive reform.  A lot of the conflict between the reform movement and the unions comes down to negotiating.  There are of course high profile disagreements but on the ground and behind the scenes the relationships are not as antagonistic as they appear in the papers.

The real argument here is about reform minded administrators wanting more power over who their employees are.  This is really a myth about teacher evaluation, tenure and last in, first out policies.  Montgomery County is an interesting example.  I don’t know much about the program but according to the article it did result in 245 teachers exiting the schools over a five year period.  This is an interesting example and an interesting number to cite because 245 teachers over a five year period in a school system with 11,000 teachers seems shockingly low.  That comes out to less than half a percent of teachers per year.  I’ve never seen an organization whose human capital was so good that less than half a percent of its employees were better than replacement level.

Of course, there has been progress and unions have been a part of that progress.  More powerful and fairer evaluations are being developed.  They are still young, they are expensive but they are also essential.

Myth 3: Billionaires know best

There are some notable billionaires putting their money where their mouths are and forking over the dollars to some of the most difficult school districts in the country.  They are attaching those dollars to some pretty specific reform oriented programs that would not be possible without private dollars.  I didn’t realize this was a bad thing.  I’d rather risk Bill Gates’ money on new merit pay programs than tax payer dollars.  He was wrong about small schools, admitted his mistake and has moved on to a new idea that will hopefully be a part of a longer term solution to some of our country’s education woes.

This myth is really an attack on merit pay which I’ve already weighed in on.  But the final sentence really kills me:  “There’s no doubt that these schools can use every dime that rich guys give.  But attaching strings for pet projects is elitist and wasteful.” 

First of all I wouldn’t call merit pay for teachers the pet project of billionaires.  Secondly, wasteful would be pouring a billion dollars into a failing school district with no clear idea of what the money would be used for.  Failing school districts aren’t known for fiscal responsibility or effectively leveraging resources to create systemic success.  That is why they are failing. 

Distracting Everyone With Myths That Distract Policymakers: Part IV

Myth number three in the myths that distract policy makers is possibly the most important myth and probably the loudest myth in the education reform debate. The myth states that “removing incompetent teachers will save our schools.” The refutation is essentially that teachers are better at teaching than we give them credit for.

My primary issue with the refutation is the use of the Teacher Advancement Program as the source of their teacher evaluation data. TAP is a specific program intended to nurture the growth of teachers professionally and has shown promising results. It is not the average situation in urban districts. Also in most TAP schools teachers voted on whether to participate, which creates a pretty serious selection bias to apply their data to all urban teachers.

Nonetheless, I will take the 85% of teachers being evaluated as proficient or better at face value. That means 15% are less than proficient. Every year, when parents put their children in schools they are rolling a dice that their child will get a teacher that won’t damage his or her education. Every time that dice comes up as a six their child loses a year of solid education for a year that may put them behind their peers next year, and the year after, and the year after. That’s 15%. So go ahead and tell me that on average during your child’s elementary school experience he or she will have a teacher that will fail them is “obsessing over a small problem.” I think our expectations here are out of whack by a lot.

Furthermore, ineffective teachers tend to cluster in the schools that need great teachers the most. You know who can overcome a bad teacher? A child with the resources outside of school to keep on learning. So the problem of ineffective teachers is actually magnified for the children least able to cope with ineffective teachers.

Every professional workplace does include some lemons who need to be dismissed. It is a common rule of business. Ideally, your rate of turnover each year is similar to the percentage of ineffective employees you have and ideally most of the turnover comes from your worst employees. Show me a school district that turns over its bottom 10% year and upon year. Turnover rates are indeed high in urban districts but I would venture to guess that a good number of those who leave are the best. Unfortunately, due to a lack of historically strong evaluation systems, there is no longitudinal data that I can find to prove that (Really? 95% excellence on most of these evaluations? That isn’t useful evaluation). So schools are clearly not getting the normal turnover of low performers that one would find in other professional environments. I think we’re obsessing over a notable problem and the idea that it is a small problem is impressively damaging to everyone and an insult to students and good teachers.

I do however agree that the myth is a myth. Replacing ineffective teachers won’t save schools. Anyone who has ever been near an urban district knows there is no silver bullet. This is the truth and reminds me of another. Money doesn’t buy happiness. But it sure does help. Replacing ineffective teachers doesn’t save schools. But it sure does help.

Distracting Everyone With Myths That Distract Policymakers

Check out the Answer Sheet post about the five myths that are distracting policy makers from making good decisions. The crux of the post appears to be that everyone disagrees about what good teaching looks like. I think that’s probably true. Possibly because there’s more than one way to skin a cat. What this leads to, apparently, is political leaders who demand pay for performance based on test scores and value added statistical formulas.

First, I would like to take a little detour into the weird vilification of value added. The phrases “statistical formula” and “value-added” seem to always freak people out. I think it is because most people aren’t that comfortable with numbers (hey education system, fix this please), and certainly fear statistics, thinking it is a medium through which powerful people manipulate the truth. Nonetheless, statistics and numbers and value-added are part of our reality. We are constantly assessing how much value something is adding throughout our daily lives, whether in personal relationships, when buying bread, and when debating whether the Washington Redskins should blow $100m on another head-case free agent.

What people are trying to accomplish through value added models is to figure out how much a teacher is really helping a student while taking into account all the things that teachers can’t control and don’t want to be held accountable for. Basically, value-added is intended to protect teachers from being punished for teaching poor kids, with limited English skills and little parental involvement and prevent teachers from being rewarded just because their students are rich, learned a million vocabulary words in kindergarten and already speak five languages. This effort does not sound so nefarious to me. The intention is to even the playing field and minimize perverse incentives that push good teachers towards the schools that need them the least. Is it perfect? Like all statistical models, hell no. But discounting it as a tool in favor of the “I have no idea so I’ll just stick with the one-size fits all, lock step approach, that over rewards my worst employees” seems a little ridiculous. Maybe our time would be better spent learning more about how to use these models to ensure that they are fair and well connected to reality rather than dismissing them out of hand as voodoo magic. Because what we do right now is voodoo magic.

Secondly, I’ll break this into multiple posts because I’m feeling a little outraged right now and I haven’t even gotten to any of the five myths referenced in the actual blog post.