Should Teachers Be Paid for Performance?

Paying teachers for performance should be a great idea, right?  In the corporate world, paying based on merit seems a great way to incentivize someone to do a better job.  For some reason, however, most teachers are against so-called “merit pay.”  I have to say, I was very surprised by this reaction.  My thoughts were similar to many critics, “Well, if you are doing a great job, you should have no worries and should welcome the recognition of your work.  So, it seems like the worst teachers would be the biggest critics, not being able to perform or having to work harder.”  I started to realize that a lot of teachers were quite against merit pay.  Not only that, but unions, who traditionally fight hard for increases in teacher pay, were also against it.  In this post, I hope to identify the arguments for and against merit pay to better understand whether it is a way to improve student achievement and teacher retention, among other things.

The Arguments for Merit Pay

Teachers are often severely underpaid and underappreciated, and the position is not attractive to people with large student debt.  There are some very compelling reasons why merit pay could strengthen public education:

1. After Michelle Rhee implemented bonuses for teachers being rated “highly effective” for two years or more, one such highly effective teacher who was considering leaving the District to teach elsewhere decided to stay. 
2. Paying good teachers more should make the profession more attractive to more highly educated individuals.
3. The private sector has, for years, used merit pay to improve efficiency and allow people to advance for performance rather than simply for working a long time or taking shallow credentialing.
4. Merit pay can be adjusted to reflect the goals we want to elicit out of the system: you can design the weight that standardized tests have in determining performance; what kinds of training or activities are deemed best practices, etc.
5. The way teachers are currently rewarded (premiums for having an advanced degree) has not been shown to correlate with gains in student achievement.
6. Being paid for performance has the potential to encourage teachers to be more creative in how they teach, trying to improve outcomes to earn these incentives.

The Arguments against Merit Pay

While rewarding and retaining quality teachers seem like pretty strong arguments, I have to give pause to some of the incredibly strong arguments against merit pay:

1. What if merit pay doesn’t work? According to a Harvard study of a New York City merit pay program, merit pay did not affect teacher behaviors, student achievement (in the areas measured: English and Math tests) actually declined, and made only negligible improvements in other measures like student attendance, behavioral problems, graduation exam scores, and graduation rates.  Fryer, the economist who conducted the study and was initially supportive of merit pay, noted that the literature was mixed on the effects in other countries, but that NYC’s $75 million investment was not worth it.  Research on performance pay continues to show that it does not work, not even for CEOs in the private sector.
2. How do you measure merit? In a letter to the editor of St. Louis Today, it was noted that measuring merit is usually largely determined by test scores.  As I noted in my post on standardized testing, this is not a measure of real learning or of good teaching, but of shallow learning and uninspired teaching.  The more test scores are used to determine pay, the more we are incentivizing mediocre instruction.  
3. Is merit consistent across all teachers? The St. Louis Today letter also noted that just because a dermatologist performs better than an oncologist in terms of number of deaths, you would still not want the dermatologist to treat every illness.  Likewise, a kindergarten and Junior Math teacher need two very different skill sets in terms of subject matter expertise and classroom management skills. 
4. Are the student’s entering competency and personal challenges accounted for? Just as it is more likely for someone treating cancer to have more patients die than a podiatrist, it is more likely for a teacher in a poor district to have lower test scores because students enter with lower test scores.  It is unreasonable to expect a teacher in a rich, suburban district to end up at the same place as someone from a poor, urban or rural district.
5. Are teachers (good or bad) offered the assistance needed to improve? The Washington teachers’ union criticized merit pay (the IMPACT program) in DC because it is used more as a stick (to fire bad teachers or simply offer a cash bonus to teachers who do well) rather than to provide tools to facilitate a teacher’s improvement.
6. Do teachers want merit pay? According to a survey of American Federation of Teachers members, there is limited support for merit pay based on improvements in portfolios of students’ work, but virtually no support for merit pay based on test scores.  Teachers were far more inclined to think that experience or taking on additional responsibilities are better reasons to extend a bonus to a teacher.
7. Is it redundant? Studies show that more experience tends to make teachers more effective in the first five years of teaching, so wouldn’t the natural increase in teacher’s salary for tenure that is in place already reward improved performance? Further, most teachers I know aren’t really in it for the money, so there is the question of whether it would elicit more performance or dedication from someone who took such a grueling job that pays so little in the first place.
8. Is bad teaching is the root of all problems in the American education system? As I noted in my post on some rather bombastic solutions for how poor kids can help themselves succeed, there are many problems that go beyond the ability of a good teacher.
9. Does merit pay serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy?  Psychology shows us that people respond more to positive feedback than to extrinsic rewards, and this article in the Washington Post raises good concerns about whether merit pay undermines the intrinsic value teachers have for their craft and if the pressures of constant focus on testing improving might make a good teacher perform worse.

Different Ways of Structuring Merit Pay

To be honest, I was surprised in writing this post to have my opinion changed so fully.  Merit pay seems like a brilliant way to infuse the system with new creativity, to get rid of those bad apples, and to reward actual work.  That said, the most salient point for me was that it simply hasn’t worked all that much, even in the private sector.

That said, I think teachers who do have a proven track record do deserve recognition.  I would urge that some of the following points be considered in structuring merit pay programs:

1.     Merit pay should be designed on improvement during the time the teacher is with the student. It is unfair to say “your students still read below grade level” if they entered two or three grade-levels below average in the first place. 

2.     As a corollary, teachers should be rewarded for taking on the most challenging classrooms, as that is where gains really need to be made.  If you just base merit pay on testing, teachers are incentivized to work in the classrooms where kids already start at or above level, which effectively entrenches or worsens the problem of teaching quality in the most struggle student populations.

3.     Merit pay should compare apples to apples.  Comparing an art teacher to a math teacher or a 1^st and 11^th grade teacher is not fair, as the positions require different skills to be successful.

4.     Merit pay should not be informed greatly by standardized tests.  We already have seen the deleterious effects of tests in my last post, and to reward teachers for producing bubble-filling automatons that have not learned any significant skills is an awful idea.

5.     Merit pay should be linked to programs to help teachers improve and work together.  An interesting model was one that rewarded a whole school’s teachers for improved performance, thus creating a sense of teamwork to improve all kids’ education.  Nobody thinks bad teachers should be in the classroom, but if the system offers only back-handed financial rewards and creates competition, it is not creating a healthy environment for students.  Further, students spending 6-8 years in a school will need all their teachers, not some of them, to be good, so creating whole schools with great teaching is key.

6.     Merit pay can include experience for the first five years to incentivize teaching retention, but this factor should lose weight after 5 years, as most studies agree that there are no benefits to experience after that point.  

7.     Merit pay should not be viewed as a panacea, as teachers—particularly in the poorest environments—are not going to be able to overcome the gaps in basic needs like proper nourishment and parental support that many kids bring to the classroom.

Speak out!

What are your thoughts on merit pay? Do you have an experience with merit pay (in teaching or elsewhere) you can share? In your opinion, what are the limits of merit pay?

What ideas do you have for how to structure merit pay in an effective manner for teachers so that quality teaching is rewarded and students are given access to the best quality teachers possible?

Because Every Parent Wants a Standardized Child

Testing can be a very useful tool to help students cement learning and help teachers to better design their lessons. Testing, in its ideal form, is a form of reinforcement, which is a critical component of learning something. When I posted on teaching foreign languages, I noted that tests are a great way for students to have to use the skills they have been recently taught, apply them, and commit them to memory.

Just like using a screwdriver to hammer in a nail, however, tests can also be misused and have deleterious effects. Tests can be used only to gauge and not to reinforce learning. Tests can be poorly designed to cover what students have learned. Tests can be designed so that the student doesn’t need to know the material to do well, but merely needs to know test-taking strategies. Tests can be timed in a way that does not reinforce learning. Tests can be designed to trick, rather than to teach. Tests can be designed in ways that disadvantage certain segments of society (while many debate whether there is an ethnic bias of tests and there are certainly exogenous factors, it is worth noting that Asians consistently do better on SAT math, whites consistently do better on reading/writing, and those with an A- or higher high school GPA do better on tests in general, suggesting some kind of bias). When a test is standardized and administered from afar at an arbitrary time, the likelihood is that the more negative side of testing emerges.

This is a real shame because under President Bush’s signature education bill “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB), standardized testing became a mandatory component of our education system. Now, this is not just problematic because it increases the likelihood of the dark side of testing. It is worse because it appears that the bill is largely a boon to giant multinational corporations that make a fortune, but have very little accountability for the tests that determine whether your son or daughter—or your child’s school—is a failure. According to a very comprehensive article by Barbara Miner at the onset of NCLB, required testing could cost $2-6 billion a year in direct costs and up to 15 times that amount if you factor in wasted class time and test preparation. Worse yet, not all the NCLB-required testing was funded by the federal government. Because all multiple choice tests cost about $1 to grade while those including essays can go up to about $7, State and District Departments of Education may have an incentive to administer the least useful kinds of tests when they are strapped for cash (as they have been for quite some time).

When you hear the names of the companies that administer these tests, your blood should run cold: McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Riverside and Harcourt. Now, it is slightly odd that something that is “standardized” is administered by several competitors nationwide and that the type of test can vary from all multiple choice to a heavier focus on short answers and essays. Aside from having very deep connections to the Bush family and to Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital, these companies also may sound familiar to anyone who has ever used a textbook or taken a college entrance exam. Why does this make my blood run cold? A multinational company with insider political clout could decide what materials are taught in your child’s class, what metric their worth as a student is evaluated along, and what college they get into. If your child isn’t a good test taker or isn’t a strong English speaker (but is otherwise quite brilliant), your child could be doomed from the get-go, as no part of their career is untouched by a major testing company or its parent corporation.

Diane Ravitch, a former Assistant Secretary of Education and prominent voice in the Education Sector, went from supporting to opposing NCLB as she saw the increased testing used not to improve faltering schools, but to simply shut them down. The majority of schools shut down were in low-income, minority, and non-English speaking communities. Rather than accept that poverty and achievement are deeply connected, these policies further entrench the achievement gap between wealthier and poorer children. Further, they close schools in these neighborhoods, reducing the sense of community that was once present and the connections between parent, child, teacher, and school. And while I noted the link between two Republicans—Bush and Romney—to these testing conglomerates, Ravitch makes the very good point of noting that Obama’s “Race to the Top” program very much continues in the same pro-privatization and –testing vein as Bush’s policies (and to be fair, Obama does have a responsibility to enforce NCLB until it is revamped by Congress).

As I mentioned in my post on charters, unions are often the scapegoat for failing schools. The logic goes that intransigent teachers who are lazy and inept band together to keep failing their students while extracting higher and higher pay and benefits. In my home state, Illinois, for example, the majority of education costs are now flowing into paying pensions. This simplistic line of reasoning that selfish, unionized teachers are failing our kids and taxing the system ties everything into a nice neat bow and makes you just want to move all children into non-unionized charters with their non-union Teach for America staff, right? WRONG. Turns out, the state with the highest test scores is Massachusetts which is 100% unionized. The country with the highest test scores is Finland, which is also 100% unionized and administers only one standardized test towards the end of high school with a random sampling taking the internationally administered PISA test. (And the reason why pensions are such a large part of education spending in IL is largely because corrupt politicians have not been paying into pension funds for years, compounding the debt to rather poorly paid teachers.)

Washington Post Education Blogger Valerie Strauss notes that there are some unfortunately misguided assumptions behind standardized testing in theory:

• A sample of material that arbitrarily ends up on a 45-question test (especially multiple choice) can assess the quality and amount of what a child is learning.
• High test scores of students at any particular school prove that there is high student achievement and quality teaching at the institution.
• Teachers are motivated to improve by punishments or rewards based on test scores.
• Test scores better reflect student learning than any other form of assessment.
• High enough stakes to a test motivate people to worker harder to meet the challenge.

Unfortunately, as Daniel Koretz notes, test scores “usually do not provide a direct and complete measure of educational achievement.” Further, Gerald Bracey has made a pretty compelling list of things that a standardized test cannot measure and that a teacher that teaches to a test may never instill in his or her students, which includes “creativity, critical thinking, resilience, motivation, persistence, curiosity, endurance, reliability, enthusiasm, empathy, self-awareness, self-discipline, leadership, civic-mindedness, courage, compassion, resourcefulness, sense of beauty, sense of wonder, honesty, integrity. “ I find that I use most of these characteristics far more at work, on this blog, and in life than I do my ability to define an archaic word or to select a poor approximation of the “main idea” of a boring short story.

On a more personal and anecdotal level, I would note a few things about my standardized testing abilities:

• As I got older and learned to think more critically, I went from being amazing at Standardized Tests to being above average, but not particularly stellar. At the same time, I had learned how to speak five languages.
• I retook my SAT and got a 150 point boost by using testing preparation booklets to learn strategies, rather than actual knowledge. Now, how can a test score vary by so much in a couple of months and be considered reliable as an assessment of what I know?
  
• My teachers and I never received any meaningful feedback from a standardized test that allowed us to improve my learning or better identify how I learn.
• I took my GRE after spending 9 months in three different countries speaking Italian, then Spanish, then Arabic and did way better in math than in reading/writing, even though I am not a big fan of math and have much more experience and instruction in reading and writing related courses. My grades were always much stronger in English and Social Studies than in Math or Science.
• As someone who is rather fidgety, every day-long test I took was maddening and made me want to jump out of my skin.

Beyond my personal experiences with tests, an Education Week article written by Alfie Kohn and published in September 2000 (pre-Bush, pre-NCLB) warned of the rise of testing with some rather disconcerting facts:

1. About 89 percent of differences in state testing scores were statistically found to be tied to parents’ educational background, number of parents living at home, type of community, and poverty), which have nothing to do with instruction and everything to do with the need to address systemic inequalities that affect students before they enter the education system and when they leave school each and every day.
2. Standardized tests measure superficial thinking.
3. Most standardized tests were designed not to test learning, but to rank students and separate them, with some tests containing as many as half of their questions designed so that most people couldn’t answer correctly.
4. Time spent to prepare students for and then administer tests comes from other instruction (and I’d add that as testing rises, our system is stagnating and doing worse, so let’s think for a moment).
5. Many good teachers, seeing this negative trajectory, are leaving a system that they find increasingly poisonous and harmful to children.
   
6. Most specialists even in 2000 agreed that children should not be tested at too young an age.
7. Our children are being tested more than any other time in history and more than anywhere else in the world.

Some of these concerns will prompt California Governor Jerry Brown to make a laudable call for less class time wasted on standardized testing today, according to the Sacramento Bee. Brown also noted that testing tends to cause instructors and schools to shift their focus to what is being tested, which is usually limited to Math and English, but little else. Even if good teachers manage to avoid "teaching to the test," most students, taught to be validated by grades and scores and eager to do well, will take the hint and shift the focus of their studies. Even as a smart kid who loved to learn, I would take to heart the words "you won't be tested on this."

We need to eliminate nearly all of these tests. We need to ensure accountability for the ones that we keep. We need to ensure that the tests are used to reinforce learning and support struggling schools, not to rank children, punish teachers for teaching the most underprivileged, and close schools in ways that disproportionately affect minority and low-income communities. And we need to decide as a society that we are not going to accept poverty as an excuse for failure but that we are actually going to make meaningful changes that mitigate the effects of poverty rather than bullying teachers into being responsible for a child’s background and upbringing.

At the end of the day, real life rarely has one clear, obvious answer…so should our kids be molded and assessed by an instrument that does?

Act on it!

1. Teach kids some of the greater values of empathy, critical thinking, and creativity at any chance you get, be it through parenting or volunteering to mentor a child to supplement for the decreasing amount of classtime dedicated to such values.
2. Write your Congressmen (federal and state) and tell them what you feel about standardized tests, what you think can be done to improve student assessment, and demanding that testing companies be more accountable and student-oriented.

Speak out!

What is your experience with standardized testing? What are the pros and cons that you see with the use of testing nowadays?

What are some better ways to assess children’s learning and teachers’ or schools’ performance? Should these be jointly assessed?

Stop Bothering Society, Poor Kid: Help Yourself!

People who know me, know that I am a firm believer in systemic inequalities. Our country has done a lot to reduce the legal barriers that inhibited certain races from realizing their full potential (though much still remains). That said, in a country that was built on slavery and did not fully protect the rights of Blacks in law until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, you have to imagine that the way the country operates is still favorable to Whites. Even if you full equalized everyone in law and you enforced those laws properly, all American institutions and measures of success are largely based upon White measures of success. Specifically, the White middle and upper class. This article may make you uncomfortable if you are squeamish about talking about race and class (or dislike sarcasm), but my philosophy is that you cannot fix a problem by ignoring it and political correctness is the quickest path to inertia.

An article recently published in Forbes Magazine, entitled “If I Were a Poor Black Kid” recently caught my attention. I responded to the article and then to the author’s response in forceful (and recognizable) terms My intent here is not to rehash my response, but to outline the problem with this author’s overly simplistic assessment and to go one step further by showing the math that debunks his “solution.”

Hey Black Kids, Follow the Binary Road!

Anytime someone who has never been poor or Black and who is not a kid decides to write a treatise on what poor, Black children should do…you should be apprehensive. In the article, a man who is a middle class (and always was middle class) technology expert gives advice to poor black children on how they themselves can and should lift themselves out of poverty. This advice includes:

• Getting good grades
• Using all the free sites on the web like Ted Talks, Cliff’s Notes (a real resource for understanding literature), Google Scholar and Project Gutenberg to do well.
• Finding study partners and using Skype to hone your intellect
• Making sure you get into an elite charter school or get a full ride to a private school
• Sucking up to the guidance counselor so that they help you find jobs, college, and other opportunities
• Learning software programming or computers or another "skill."

All of this advice builds to the conclusion that “Technology can help these kids. But only if the kids want to be helped. Yes, there is much inequality. But the opportunity is still there in this country for those that are smart enough to go for it.” (so, you see, poor, Black people are not smart because they aren't trying to not be poor...that is what you are saying, right sir?)

Wait, There Are Holes in This Guy’s Logic!?

Technology was good for this author: rather than giving him a healthy dose of my backhand, he only had to face my comments. As someone who grew up poor in a big city and who ended up going to Stanford, I actually have a lot of relevant experience to comment on this article (which he denied because poor kids, even after going to Stanford, are not smarter than he). A big part of his solution involves poor kids using computers, and he suggests that in the “unlikely event” that they don’t have one, they can just go to one of their wonderful public libraries.

The problem with libraries

As a child, I DID that. I went to the library, and I almost never touched a computer because poor kids (of all races) are competing with retired, unemployed, homeless people and others. Many computers also have a time restriction (in Chicago it was 30 minutes if someone is waiting, which they always were). Further, some of the things he mentions (google scholar, TED) can probably be accessed from a library computer. That said, most do not have the software or hardware for using Skype or for learning how to code. Further, if you don’t live near a library or it is in a sketchy area, the journey there could be dangerous.

Finally, I did a little calculation using Philadelphia to demonstrate the absurdity of his proposal:

According to the most recent census data, approximately 36,000 children in Philadelphia would be considered “poor, Black kids.” (I calculated this by multiplying Philly’s population by the percentage under age 18, multiplied by the percentage of people who are black, multiplied by the percentage of people who are “in poverty,” which probably understates the amount of people who might benefit from his “solutions.”) According to the Philadelphia Public Library Website, there are 68 public libraries. Not all libraries are open right now, no libraries appear to be open on Sundays, so I am again overstating the library’s ability to absorb people. Libraries are open from 9am to 8pm generally 5 days a week and 9 am until 5 pm on Saturdays (not all, but I’ll be generous). That means each library is open 3,285 hours a year. With 68 libraries, the whole system is open 223,380 hours a year. Let’s assume that each has an average of 20 computers (unlikely, but what the heck, we are white and middle class!). Then the system has just under 4.5 million computer hours to offer to poor black kids. That means, each of our 36,000 poor, black kids gets 125 hours with a computer per year if most skipped school for their allotment and if all other library patrons were banned from the computers. This also assumes perfect mobility and that all kids in poor neighborhoods have equal access to equally capacious libraries, which is a stretch.

Now, with about 1,200 of those library hours occurring during school time (40, five-day weeks lasting from 9am until 3pm), each library can realistically only offer 2,085 hours per year, reducing the system’s capacity to 142,000 non-school hours per year, and with 20 computers assumed per library about 2.8 million computer hours. This amounts to 78 hours per “poor, black kid.” How many skills have you mastered by dedicating 78 hours per year? Now if you assume that a kid needs about 30 minutes of homework help for the 200 days that school is in session, that leaves the kid with -22 hours for learning how to code. How many skills have you learned in -22 hours?

As I noted in my article on teachers correcting for systemic inequality, Chicago just moved to close most of its libraries on Mondays. With many cities facing budget shortfalls, the likelihood that public libraries can serve our nation’s poor as much as is needed to escape poverty is decreasing by the day.

Non-logistical problems with the article

Now, aside from the absurd idea that every kid can get the computer access they need to be able to use technology to solve all of their problems, there are many more problems with the author’s arguments:

1. Think back to high school…how was your guidance counselor? I lucked the heck out and I had a great one who helped me apply to colleges, but with a parent that had not gone to college and being in one of the worst public school systems in the nation, the likelihood that this is a sure path is very low.

2. When you are in a single-parent home or have no parents or your parents are working so much that they cannot help you with homework, how do you get good grades? How do you find out about all of these tech resources? How do you know to read interesting middle class guys on Forbes.com to save you from your poverty?

3. The Harvard Business Review recently wrote several articles that note that most people fail to achieve their goals because they are contingent upon things outside of themselves (for example, if I set the goal "get more hits on my blog," that is outside of myself, because you choose to come here, I can't force you...better goals might be: write more posts, leave the link to my blog in other fora, and use social media to attract people to my blog, all of which I can control). Getting good grades depends a lot a teacher’s subjective assessment, having enough food to be able to concentrate on studying/homework, having utilities to be able to see or not shiver to do your homework (or to go online if you are one of the many poor black kids with computers!), or having access to homework help.

4. I noted that the system is probably rigged in subtle ways to favor its creators: higher income whites. Kids are actually quite receptive to this, and kids have to have a lot of willpower to overcome the stigma that being studious often comes with. Many poor black kids get teased or bullied if they try to be studious, often for “acting white.” An educated child also experiences a lot of distance with their less educated family, which can make it tough to keep fighting an uphill battle.

5. The article ignores entirely the severe disadvantages with which most poor kids enter the public school system. The lack of preschool or structured afterschool programming sets them up to be disadvantaged going in. Further, given the amount of tracking (assigning kids to a regular or more accelerated class which usually determines their future trajectory), many kids may already be routed into the “slow lane" of public education.

6. If kids need to fight to get into good schools, then you are admitting that the public school system is failing them in a disproportionate way, which is antithetical to the point of PUBLIC education, as I noted in my article on charters. As the propaganda film “Waiting for Superman” clearly shows, there is not enough supply of charter /private school seats for poor pupils.

7. It is really hard to fight for 78 hours of public library time after school while also getting a job or internship care of your amazing guidance counselor. Further, what if you are an older sibling caring for your younger siblings?

8. Did you skip childhood? Do you know how hard and counterintuitive it is for a child to be that self-disciplined? Part of the advantage that all higher-income kids have is that they are embedded in a web of discipline that is geared toward doing well in school.

9. This article is incredibly paternalistic (I won’t go so far as to say that the author is racist, because I think he believes his ignorant, ill-informed ideas and thinks that they really are a way to help poor kids.). One, it assumes knowledge of something that the author has never experienced. Two, it assumes that poor, black people should work themselves into the ground to be qualified to serve people like him and his business needs.

10. The article completely removes all culpability from the system or from wealthier people. It is rather unfair that his kids, which he notes “have it a lot easier” and not inherently smarter than their lower-income counterparts, do not have to bootstrap their way to the top. I can’t help but wonder if the author were writing in 1840 if the article would blame slaves for not working hard to cozy up to their masters, save up, and buy their freedom. Life is unfair, but let’s not pretend like this is good for our country. We need to attract and keep good teachers. We need for kids to have proper nutrition. We need for kids to have more equal opportunities to succeed or take advantage of an extra-curricular program/job (within the bounds of child labor laws, please!). We need excellent guidance counselors and capacious libraries. We need safe streets. We need to enable working parents to better participate in their kid’s education and put food on the table.

If I Were an Ignorant, Middle-Class Dude

This is my challenge to Gene Marks, the author of this article: put your money where your mouth is. You, as a high-tech employer are probably suffering from a dearth of high-quality talent, so you benefit from having more people to choose from. Further, as a father, it should concern you when kids are unable to escape poverty and realize their full potential. As a taxpayer, you subsidize all the kids’ education that gets wasted when they drop out, their higher incidence of crime (prison is costly!), their higher likelihood to have a teenage pregnancy, and their lower wages that may push them onto the dole. You have a vested interest as a businessman, father, and taxpayer to help poor kids succeed.

I therefore challenge you to go to North and West Philly and take a handful of poor children under your wing. Find them consistent, regular access to a computer and help orient them to all the tools out there. Give them internships. Help them to learn a skill. Give them strategies and structure to help them navigate their school, extracurriculars, and college effectively. Then report back to everyone on all the challenges your article didn’t account for. Report on the amount of resources that it took for you to succeed.

Mr. Marks, my issue with your article was not that the solutions themselves are bad. I used several of them to succeed: I worked my ass off to get good grades and get into magnet schools, I befriended my high school counselor, I went to the library most days of the week, and I taught myself one (and then several) foreign languages. My concern is that it is impractical to expect a kid without any guidance to even think to do all these things, especially when they are logistically improbable. So help some kids to think of these solutions and to carry them out. I want more kids to succeed like me, but I know that my success and theirs is tied to the amount of people who are willing to offer extra guidance and to the ability of the school system and libraries to support and reinforce these kids’ successes.

Act on it!

• Write Mr. Marks or comment on the Forbes article and encourage him to accept my challenge. Write other businessmen and encourage them to offer guidance and cultivate a generation of leaders from the lower-rungs of the socioeconomic ladder of society.
• Take a kid under your wing and offer them access to some of the great tools that Mr. Marks suggests. Consider Big Brothers and Sisters of America or the scores of other organizations working to help kids overcome poverty.
• Fight to keep your local library system open more, give it more resources, and help kids to use them for success.

Speak out!

What other problems do you see with the solutions that Mr. Marks offers? Which of his solutions do you find salient or salvageable?

What do you think it takes for a poor person or someone who suffers from institutional inequality to make it if the system is unable to help them?

-----

For those who are curious, here is what I wrote to the author:

“Sir, as a white kid who grew up on welfare in a single-parent home and went on to graduate from Stanford, you might think that I would support you. Instead, I am so incredibly disappointed in your ignorant “recipe” for success. I got into a magnet school that my mom found out about by sheer accident. I went to the library and read a lot because it was the only place with adequate heat and electricity. The problem? I got evicted more times than I can count. Our utilities got shut off so often. I did not, contrary to your “teacher friends’” assessment, have a computer at home. Had I known about any of these tools (likelihood is that I would not have and that my mother would have been even less likely to as a waitress working 15 hours a day 6 days a week), I still wouldn’t have been able to use them. What library system could accommodate all the poor kids (of any race) to help them to realize this goal? Where would I find the time to use these resources when I started to work at age 15? Where would I get my stamina to study “coding” when we didn’t have enough food to eat dinner that day? It is articles like these that perpetuate the systemic ignorance of the role class and race play on success and prevent us from real solutions. You clearly do not understand what it is like to be poor, and your blindness is a danger because this article will only reach those who are well enough to-do to have an impact on policies that directly affect your mythical “poor black kid.” And those policy makers will make terrible choices that entrench systemic racism and class division even further in our country. Shame on you.”

Here is his response:

“Thanks for your comment. I still stick to what I wrote, and believe that the opportunity is there for everyone if they study hard and get good grades, use technology to help them get good grades, apply to the best schools they can, get help from their guidance counselor, and make sure to learn a good skill.”

You be the judge. Don’t accept inequality of opportunity. Don’t blame the victims. When one person succeeds, we all benefit in concrete ways. Our country’s future depends on everyone being proactive, not washing their hands of blame.

Teaching for or against America?

In a previous post on charters, I noted that aside from their very mixed performance, charters seem wasteful because they suppose that you should scrap the entire old public system for a new, semi-public system. The organization Teach for America (TFA), which essentially takes recent graduates of elite universities and puts them in challenging classrooms across the U.S. for two years, seems problematic in the exact same way. It effectively replaces our old set of teachers (many who happen to be more experienced and unionized...and thus expensive) and replaces them with untrained teachers who may be smart and have unbridled passion, but often have little else that qualifies them for teaching (unless they've taught before, TFA corps members receive a 6-8 week "boot camp" in a summer school program as their only experience). I have met some extraordinarily talented TFA corps members who do an amazing job and do beat the odds (just as I've met amazing teachers that went through normal channels), so my critique is of the organization's purpose and goals, not individuals. (full disclosure: I applied and was admitted to TFA in 2010, though I ultimately rejected the position.)


The Issues with Teach for America

A recent Washington Post blog entry by Andrew Hartman on Teach for America, ties the organization and charters in a different way, asserting that both charters and TFA advance a Conservative agenda to privatize education. The author notes that the organization does so by undermining unions (most TFA recruits are low-paid, non-union recruits that can replace a more expensive unionized teacher), by promoting standardized testing as the means to measure whether kids are learning (TFA is very driven on having teachers be able to bridge an achievement gap between rich and poor, minority and white that is only measurable through such tests), by going outside of the political system to make any reform (which is my big concern, given that education is a universal right and public good), and by pretending that regardless of your origins, an enthusiastic enough 22 year old from Harvard can fix your life and send you to college (which I also question as a goal for all kids).

Hartman also notes that the organization fails to deliver on its four stated goals. It is designed to raise the prestige of teaching, yet the organization's existence is predicated on teachers not needing training, many TFA members do not stay beyond the two year commitment and use their participation as a rung in the ladder to higher education. TFA is also designed to accommodate a short-fall of teachers in more challenging schools, yet there is no shortage in teachers applying via normal channels, especially given mass layoffs since 2008. Third, TFA would craft a corps of ambitious professionals armed with experience in challenging environments to "fix the system." This one has proven most true, with many teachers going into policy work (my public policy program at Georgetown was no exception, many of my colleagues were TFA alums), though they have yet to fix the system and seem to perpetuate (if you look at former DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee) solutions outside of the system. Finally, TFA is supposed to bridge the so-called "achievement gap" between the wealthy and the poor and between whites and minorities in educational success. Julian Heilig and Su Jin Jiz conducted an extensive study on TFA that found that TFA teachers do only comparably well to normal public school teachers based on their level of education and training.

Put simply, TFA is not delivering. This should not be a surprise, as it is a bandaid solution: you cannot permanently attract cheap, quality teachers with experience and keep them there by supressing their wages, showing they are easily replaceable, signaling that a profession requires no training, and assuming that being poor, living in a dangerous area with no extracurricular resources, and having parents with low education levels (or a parent, or no parents at all) has no impact on a child's success. Teach for America is doing as well as, but not better than, the public school system. If it is duplicative and cannot even offer improved outcomes (except in some cases where TFA taught math better), why duplicate our public school teacher corps?


How Does TFA Compare to the World's Best Education System?

An interesting counterpoint, and one I will likely return to in a future post, is Finland, which is consistently the best performing school system in the world (and also quite equitable). This amazing summary of Finland's model and success by the Atlantic highlights some key features of the Finnish system: there are NO private schools (charters!), schools rely on less homework and almost no standardized testing, teachers are all highly-educated and -trained, teachers are given great autonomy and do their own assessments of student progress, and all students are given access to feeding, health care, and psychological programs. You will note that all of these directly contradict the ideas behind privatizing education through charters and TFA. Promoting such policies will entrench stagnation and inequality in the U.S.


Why TFA Is Worth Fixing

Despite failing (on average) on its mission and feeding into a system of inequality, I still think TFA has accomplished a lot:

• It helped raise the profile of education and appreciation of quality teaching enormously.



• It created a network of highly-educated, dedicated people who are working to improve education policy and administration.



• It helped people of higher-income backgrounds to experience the challenges that have-nots face and understand people different from themselves.



• It has made recruitment for teaching into something that is very competitive even at elite universities without improving the pay (though this, I would argue is temporary and needs to be accompanied by increasing pay with experience).

How Can TFA Be Put to Better Use?

Just as I think it is a waste to give up on the public system, I think it would be equally wasteful to give up on TFA as a force for change IN the public education system. I have some alternative ideas for how the program can be put to better use:

1. Maintain TFA as a recruiter of inexperienced, but very educated university students, but put them in the highest performing classrooms. "WHAT?!" you say? Many TFA recruits are not accustomed to low-income areas or their needs and are really overwhelmed (some quitting before their commitment is up, others simply moving on after two years). If we put an inexperienced teacher in classroom with fewer issues, they can develop classroom experience and become qualified to teach in the worst classrooms. If they have more confidence before entering a difficult classroom, they may be more capable and more likely to stay later on. Meanwhile, I would suggest we use TFA allow Master Teachers with a lot of experience who would be much more likely to do better in a challenging classroom to do a one or two year rotation to a low-income classroom.



2. Use the program to recruit teaching assistants or secondary teachers for more challenging environments (low income, special ed, etc.) so that we can tackle the issue of high classroom sizes and allow students with greater needs to have more resources.



3. Use TFA to start up a system of early childhood education so that students are more likely to get the education they need while they are young that our nation is not delivering on.



4. Tie TFA more closely to Schools of Education to increase the likelihood that corps members stay in Education, that the profile of ALL educators is increased thus drawing more talent, and that TFA recruits receive a stronger network of support and training. I could also see TFA coordinating student teaching for Masters students as a service to Schools of Education that would improve the practicum requirement for rising teachers.



5. Use TFA to recruit for public school systems, but expand their recruitment beyond college graduates to professionals or civil society members who are adept at conveying information and connecting with people in challenging circumstances.

Speak out!

Have you applied for TFA or were you a Corps member? I'd love to hear more about your experience and your ideas for improving the organization.

How else could TFA serve the public education system? What other strengths or weaknesses do you see in the model?

Teachers as Babysitters

While teachers do have responsibility for your children for a good portion of the day and they get paid like they are babysitters, babysitting is not their responsibility. In much of the discourse of late, however, there is an unspoken assumption that teachers should be filling the role of parents. Particularly in classrooms with poorer students, teachers are expected (and mandated by law in a throwaway clause of Bush’s No Child Left Behind education legislation) to have all their students at a passing level regardless of their socioeconomic background. This is wrong because it distracts teachers from educating and can undermine learning for all kids in a classroom. Worse, it implies that a teacher in a privileged classroom—with kids who have both parents, three square meals, no gang or drug problems in their neighborhood, educated parents who understand how to support their children and have the leisure time to do so, and no trauma related to frankly scary neighborhoods and home-environments—is able to make the same impact with the same amount of work as kids in settings where some or all of these attributes are missing.

I would like to see policy makers take teachers at the best schools for one month and move them to the worst schools and have them deliver the exact same lesson plans they had delivered (each teacher would teach on different material so that the kids would not both be getting a second month of Shakespeare, for example). I would then like to see a pre- and post- test for all students in the test classrooms. My guess is that the students in the more well-to-do classrooms will likely gain more that the poorer classrooms from the exact same teaching of the exact same material (actually, the poorer kids would get a better version, as the teacher will have previously delivered the material and had a chance to work out the kinks). Further, I bet the kids in the well-to-do classes, if given teachers of far worse quality, would absorb the effects of bad teaching a lot better than poor kids would.

The Problem with Expecting Teachers to Overcome Poverty or Parental Absence

Because I think people may not get why subtly assuming teachers can babysit, I’d like to flesh out some of the impact I see with asking this of teachers:

1. Teachers in poorer classrooms will have higher absenteeism, which requires reducing the amount of time planning lessons in order to call parents, schedule make up exams and work, and engaging in classroom attendance activities/reporting. (The following talk about the strong link between poverty and absenteeism: Zhang 2007; this excellent study (pdf) shows that while 16% of 4th graders were absent 3 days or more per year in schools with 10% of students eligible for free lunch, a full 22% are absent three days in schools with 75% free lunch eligibility (less poverty, thus means higher attendance). The study also shows that students who are absent are more likely to suffer from a wide variety of psychological disorders—including suicide—and economic ramifications).


2. When kids come in malnourished, they are less likely to be able to concentrate or participate. This means teachers will have to spend more time reiterating concepts than necessary (if a kid doesn’t get it, then it IS necessary, let me be clear!). They will also likely be more disruptive or likely to distract fellow classmates, which means more time will be dedicated to classroom discipline.


3. When kids' parents are working or not around (many poorer children have single parents, are orphans, or are in the foster system), then nobody is there to keep a child focused on homework, help them through tough assignments, encourage them, etc. In this case, the child arrives less prepared to class, and the teacher is forced to spend more time on wasteful activities like reading with the class, doing homework as a group, or teaching a concept from scratch, which reduces the amount of interactive time that can be spent on engaging activities that yield much greater learning.


4. When parents are less educated, they are less likely to know how to support their child’s learning. Good teachers will spend more time helping these parents and their children to learn proper study habits, which drains the time available for lesson planning. Teachers SHOULD do this, but the point is that classes with more kids coming from low-education backgrounds will require more teacher effort on non-teaching tasks.


5. Kids in dangerous neighborhood may suffer from psychological issues that impede their ability to learn, may have loud (gunshots in the night, fighting in the street, etc) environments that prohibit study and homework, or may be more likely to have discipline problems.


6. Poorer kids have less access to the internet, libraries, cultural venues or money to take public transit, which limits the teacher’s ability to assign projects that will have a greater impact and allow children to engage in their own problem-solving or extra-curricular learning.


7. As a corollary, children in poorer households are less likely to have access to weekend, evening and holiday educational programming. Because children start to lose material they don’t use or refresh, the hard work of the teacher will be undone if it is not stimulated. A 2007 study of the effects of unscheduled school closures found that years with an “average amount of closures” (that is, five days) resulted in a 3% loss of learning for 3rd graders compared with years with no unscheduled closures. That’s just five days scattered through the year. Learning loss over the summer results in a loss of nearly 3 months of instruction if the child is not being engaged!

This is not a comprehensive list, but this gives you an idea of just how much all children suffer when teachers are expected to do the work of parents and to compensate for the deficiencies in the lives of their poorest students. Many good teachers also take on the psychological trauma of worrying about their students, which could affect their performance in the classroom.

Suggestions for Reducing the Babysitting Time Spent in Classrooms

Sadly, our education system cannot remedy the problem of poverty, but there are some things that our policy-makers and community leaders can do:

1. Increase school breakfast, lunch, and even dinner programs, as school feeding is associated with increased student achievement and performance.


2. Offer funding and incentives to teachers, parks, community organizations, or other volunteers to offer after-school, weekend, and holiday programming that helps children overcome learning loss related to gaps in learning.


3. Stop cutting library hours and make libraries more relevant to students. Chicago just decided to close nearly all of its libraries on Mondays. This affects me personally, as libraries provided a safe, climate-controlled environment in which I could learn and occupy myself positively while my mom was working that was away from the gangs on the street that often harassed me en route to/from my bus stop.


4. Education Boards should offer greater outreach to parents that actually reaches them on ways to better help their children learn and excel. This outreach should benefit from focus groups and town halls in poorer communities to ensure that parents are able to attend, understand what is being taught, and have their needs reflected.


5. Make parent teacher conference day a responsibility by making it a holiday and requiring that employers be flexible in scheduling to allow people to attend (akin to what we do now for voting day).

Act on it!

There is a lot that you can do to help teachers save more time for actual instruction, which include:

1. Tutor or mentor a child to help them develop better study habits, fill vacation/weekend time with learning, or transport them to places they’d otherwise be unable to access.


2. Volunteer in a classroom to help with classroom management and discipline so that a kid can focus on learning.


3. Support your public library and other efforts to help kids read!


4. Engage in tutoring or homework help to ensure that more kids arrive prepared and confident to learn.


5. If you know of a poor kid, send an extra lunch with your child and tell them to share or give it to their teacher. Be careful not to upset a kid or parent’s pride, but finding a way to feed a kid who goes without could go a long way.


6. If you employ parents, actively encourage them to make their schedule fit parent teacher conferences and homework help. Parents will probably work better because they won’t have to worry about their kid so much, and you will likely not lose any hours of work time.


7. Act as a crossing guard or set up a neighborhood watch to help kids travel to and from school as safely as possible.

Speak out!

What other problems does using a teacher as a babysitter pose? What other problems are associated with expecting teachers to perform as well in high-need environments?

What other solutions can you think of (either from the government or at the grassroots) that will support students and teachers in overcoming problems in their home environment that may impede their learning and reduce a teacher’s ability to adequately plan and teach?

Easing the College Debt Bubble Before It Pops

In what was the first of several posts in my "Is College Worth It?" Series, I questioned whether college should be the default destination for all high school graduates. One of the big reasons for asking the question, I noted, is the amount of debt students are accruing--and increasingly unable to pay. Everyone remembers how the economy almost collapses when bubbles have burst in the past, right? Remember how all that bad debt to homeowners to buy houses way out of their price range resulted in the collapse of the housing market? Well, the next bubble may have been identified, and it is student debt.


The Problem

Student debt is often called "good debt." It is an investment in yourself, the story goes, because you will make more and pay back that money no sweat with the swank job you land out of college. College also cost a lot less. Now, college prices are increasing astronomically. The College Board reports (pdf) that over the past decade the tuition for public four year colleges has increased by 54 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars. For private universities, tuition increased by 33 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars. That's a huge increase, especially when we already have seen that nearly a third of college graduates are not improving in any higher-level thinking skills. With high unemployment and increased credentialing, many people are not getting those good jobs they were promised. Without good jobs and with greater amounts of debt, more and more people are unable to pay. Even those who drop out are often saddled with debt (69% of college drop outs have debt according to the Economist).

When people cannot pay, suddenly good debt becomes bad debt, and increasing amounts of bad debts create bubbles. As the Huffington Post reported, this year the amount of student loan debt eclipsed the amount of credit card debt. Yikes, maybe dropping you Visa on some Gucci is the new "good debt." Either way, over 10 million American students hold debt amounting to at least $750 billion dollars with Sallie Mae alone (wasn't that the amount of one of those bailouts?) and perhaps as much as $1 trillion if you include private loans. The average student graduating in 2010 owed about $25,000. Without jobs, the amount of students that could not pay and defaulted on their loans increased from seven to nine percent last year.


Just How Enslaved Will You Be?

Let's do some brief calculations using the FinAid! loan debt calculator:

• If you have the average amount of debt ($25,000) after college and you get a "reasonable" interest rate of 6.8%, you will need to pay $290 a month for ten years and need roughly $35,000 in annual income. At the end of the day, you will have paid almost 40% more for your college education ($35,000) than you were told college would cost.


• If you go to a private university, and borrow $25000 per year at the same interest rate, you will be paying $1,150 per month for ten years and will need to earn about $92,000 per year after graduating. At the end of it all, your degree will have cost you $38,000 extra in interest.

With so many students affected and saddled into debt for so long (student loan debt is one of the few kinds of debts that you can never get rid of, interestingly enough), something needs to change. Parents and students need to stop taking it for granted that college will always be worth it and that they will be able to pay off whatever debt they take on. Schools and banks need to do a better job of both reigning in tuition and fees and making sure that the consequences of taking on debt are clear to borrowers. The federal government needs a better managed system. I am a bureaucrat, and I work with many talented colleagues. They are not so talented at managing loans, as evidenced by my having to call the Department of Education FOUR times to try to figure out how to consolidate my loan. The fourth call was me telling some clueless Department of Education sap how to go about doing their job, and that is scary.


What can be done?

One of the big failures I see with the Occupy Movements is that they have not moved beyond identifying the above problem and pushing for concrete policy changes. So, I would like to propose some things that will help ease this bubble at the grassroots level, in the banks, and in the government.
At the grassroots

1. Students need to understand the burden college will represent for at least ten years out of school. HS counselors should be trained and required to dispassionately walk through how much going to a school will cost, how long it will take to repay that amount, how much income one will have to earn to repay, etc.


2. Parents and students might read more of the works of James Altucher and
   decide whether or not there is a more cost effective way to learn than college
   that will not saddle them with so much debt (particularly in the case of
   students who are not terribly inspired to go to college).


3. Start saving money early for your child (or self) and consider delaying college until you have a sizeable savings. If you save just $500 a year from your child's birth,
   the calculations I did above change dramatically. Someone with the average
   amount of debt now only owes $16,000 and pays only $190 a month. Someone
   with 100,000 in debt will pay a large, but more manageable $1047
   monthly.


4. Encourage your child to pay some money while in school to reduce the
   amount of principle.
   

In the banks

1. Don't allow banks to capitalize interest until 6 to 12 months after graduation (when interest capitalizes, it becomes part of the principal, meaning you are going to pay interest on your interest!).


2. Cap interest rates at a certain percent (I would say 5%), and let them float if the national borrowing rate is below that amount (but not above). I pay a much higher rate (7.3%) to borrow than banks pay to borrow money right now. That is ridiculous given that education is a public good.


3. Small banks are more responsible lenders and loans should be federally backed and administered through them. They are likely to be more honest and communicative and will want to help the student to pay back the debt. Further, it distributes the debt so that it doesn't hit any one single lender and cause a huge collapse.


4. Offer rate incentives for responsible payers, or consider offering perks to those who save and take out a loan or to those who take out a loan and continue banking with your institution.

In the Government:

1. The federal government should guarantee, but not service loans. They have proven time and again that most of them are simply not capable. It's not their fault either: you are asking bureaucrats to be bankers. You might as well have them managing oil rigs or building bridges. Regulating to ensure equal access to credit for college aspirants is more appropriate than providing the loan.


2. Make student loan debt not-for-profit: if the federal government makes far more than the ticket price of the degree plus inflation, there is an issue. The government already reaps the benefits of lower likelihood to commit a crime and a higher likelihood to have a job. Georgetown's Center for Workforce Development found that kids with graduate degrees have only a 3% unemployment rate.


3. Create a program that allows parents and children to deduct savings for college from their pre-tax income. If the tax payer is footing the bill either way, it might as well be for actual skills development instead of paying interest.


4. Build stronger alternative schooling that feeds directly into high school (especially vocational programs) so that kids have a viable option if they choose not to go to college.
   Increase awareness of grant programs early in high school to avoid saddling people with debt. EdWeek blogger Caralie Adams wrote a piece on how many parents do not know about federal grant programs, based on a report from the College Board that showed that poorer, less educated, and Latino parents were all far less likely to know about these opportunities. Fewer than half of parents knew the cost of a college education in-state.


5. Promote policies that reduce or eliminate debt with much more certainty for key sectors. For example, teaching would be impossible for me right now given teachers' salaries and my own debt. But, if I was allowed to pay at an income-based rate and had my interest capped, I could enter many fields that would allow me to invest more in society.


6. Deny funding to and publicly censure colleges that raise their rates unjustifiably. If a college is not doing better at producing employment, post-grad degrees, or enhancing students' skills, they should not be allowed to increase tuition. This is particularly true for schools that do not incurr higher expenses directly related to student learning or in schools that increase class sizes (without staff increases), widely slice majors, or defund research or volunteer opportunities for their students.