Teachers, the New Piñata

A lot of "reforms" center on teacher quality as the critical factor in fixing our education system.  While I think teacher quality is important, I have argued on this blog that teacher quality and success are two different things.   Great teachers may not have the same connection and success with an entirely different class, and thus their success will vary across years.  I have also noted that I don’t think teacher quality is the largest part of why education in America is failing.  That said, it is important, and if we don’t start sending a message that teachers are respected, we risk losing the good ones we have and not being able to replace them.

The Problem

According to nearly every reformist’s model, you would think teachers are the problem with education.  If we just had better teachers, our kids would be fine.  You listen to them and hear about “the evil teacher unions” who favor bad teachers at the expense of children, you hear about the impossibility of firing bad teachers, you hear praise for programs that put 22 year olds with no real qualifications in the classroom, you see teachers being graded publicly for the results of their students’ test scores on one day and having their employment status and pay hanging in the balance.  Does this sound like a desirable job to you?  Yet so many great teachers go in day after day with low pay and decreasing job security. 

To illustrate this differently, imagine you were a foreman on the Ford assembly line.   Imagine that your right to unionize for a safe workplace and reasonable hours was being threatened.  Imagine that far cheaper kids in vocational school were starting to replace other foremen in your plant.  Imagine that your pay was determined by how well your team built cars on one arbitrary day of the year (and imagine that one team mate just got divorced and another’s dad just died and think how productive they might be).  Imagine that your boss did not want you to focus on quality or to innovate, but wanted you to focus on only a few bare-bones basics that were beneath your standards as someone with 25 years experience making quality cars.  That’s what it must feel like to be a teacher.

In summary, teachers are:

n      Unprotected:  Increasingly, teachers unions have come under attack as protecting bad teachers at the expense of student learning.  There are surely corrupt unions and bad teachers, and both are bad things.  That said, this idea that groups that protect teachers are simply unjustifiable is unwarranted.  In Texas, for example, a very powerful conservative group would sit in the back of classrooms and see if a teacher taught anything “controversial.”  Teachers do need protection from arbitrary firing.  Further, they are employed by the government, which means they can be used as a political football.  Given that the ultimate source of power is the government, a union serves to check that power.  Worse, in an era of increased firings and a new evaluation system every year that has real consequences, teachers deserve to have informed representation.  Many great teachers that I know (union affiliated) made the point that it is not in a union’s interest to keep bad teachers: it makes it harder to win gains for all teachers when you harbor a lot of bad teachers and it demoralizes really stellar teachers who may not want to be part of such a union.

n      Losing Job Stability: Because they are paid with taxpayer dollars and almost every level of government is struggling with debt, teachers are at the front-line of those job cuts.  Further, when you look at school leaders making headlines, many have fired teachers immediately upon getting a poor rating on a new evaluation system based largely on tests (Michelle Rhee fired 4% of DC’s teacher force in July 2010, Providence, RI, Mayor Tavares fires nearly 2,000 employees in February 2011, etc.).  Worse, a new trend in closing ineffective schools has teachers fearful that they may not even have a position from year to year, even if they are a great teacher in a bad school.

n      Paid or fired based on things out of their control:  The argument for using tests to judge teachers is that they teach a student, so if a student cannot perform well on a test, it must be the teacher’s fault.  That said, there are so many complications, including the weather and how a student is feeling or how well a student takes tests (not to mention whether the test contains worthwhile knowledge in the first place).  Nevertheless, that one high-stakes day can be used to determine the bulk of a teacher’s rating, their pay, and increasingly their employment status.

n      Denied creativity:  By basing scores on tests, many teachers feel like they run a test-prep program and are increasingly forced to waste time on practice tests and test-taking techniques rather than imparting knowledge or concepts.  Some districts (NYC, San Diego) suffered through the micromanagement of Anthony Alvarado who developed an exact reading curriculum that every teacher had to follow, down to having kids identify what kind of reading they were doing when they read a sentence (it had a mixed effect on scores at certain levels, and it did introduce a system of peer coaches for teachers that would have been good if they were encouraging all-around good teaching, not enforcing a model).  Many teachers have begun to question if they should remain teaching in a system that prioritizes teaching students what to think over how to think.

n      Paid poorly for a tough job: You are likely pretty highly-educated.  You have to work a full day, then go home and grade papers and plan lessons (and any good teacher will tell you that takes longer than delivering the lesson).  You may have to reach out to parents, attend school events, and supervise an extracurricular activity.  On top of that, you have to be accountable for the success of 30 students (some of whom are going through puberty) who change every year and may not be compatible learners to your style of teaching.  Then you have to be accountable to some 60 parents, and the local school board, and your principle, and the board of education.  Then you take home a whopping $40k ($45k if you have a Masters, maybe).  The majority of early childhood educators are not even clearing the poverty line.

n      Denied respect:  A special education teacher who was recently rated as “bad” in New York City (and publicly so at that) based on his special education student’s test scores not matching other students wrote a really hard hitting Op-Ed on the experience.  He notes that by virtue of teaching kids, everything he does from how he dresses to how he teaches is immediately critiqued by his students.  Worse, programs like Teach for America send the signal that any blind ape can teach.  We’re just going to throw these college grads into the worse environments after training for six weeks at a summer camp and let them figure out how to teach for two years before they go to business school.  Sending the message that you are easily replaceable and that your profession is merely a means to an end is a great way to increase people’s job satisfaction, right?  Sadly no: a recent survey of teachers found that in the last couple of years, teacher satisfaction dropped substantially (15 percentage points fewer teachers now feel very satisfied with their job) while the number of teachers that will likely leave the profession nearly doubled to 1/3 of all teachers!

n      Suffering from the pressure: As teachers are forced to pay the price for student outcomes on high-stakes tests or as they are expected to maintain high performance even as class sizes increase or budgets get slashed, it creates a high-stress environment that sets the teacher up for failure, an inability to give personal attention, and very little sleep. As the aforementioned Special-Ed teacher noted, his teaching became secondary to implementing the rather arbitrary requirements of his administrator (who controls his employment).  It isn’t an environment that supports good teaching.  It is an environment that punishes falling short of perfection.

The Implications

These are not all the problems, but even these few have some really devastating implications:

n      High turnover: As more teachers become too stressed, are fired because of a bad testing day, lose faith in the system, or are replaced by Teach for America members that largely leave after 2 years, more money is wasted finding and teaching new teachers.

n      Lost benefits of experience:  A teacher does not continue to become amazing after two to three years of teaching, but if experienced teachers feel unrecognized and leave and the new crops of teachers last (or are expected to teach) only two years, they leave right as they are getting their sea legs.  It is widely known that teachers gain the most in teaching quality in their first two or three years.  That means you have a perpetual crop of teachers stumbling to find their way that leave right as they get good and students are much less likely to benefit from a teacher who is excellent.

n      Lower-level thinking:  If your child’s teacher is teaching to a test (or as is often the case how to take a test), how much is your child learning?  Is it important that your son or daughter select the least bad summary of the topic in a poorly written essay?  That they can calculate the angles of a triangle in 45 seconds?  Some parents and many employers would like a well-rounded student that is able to work in groups, think through problems critically, and be well-rounded.  Very few of life’s problems or workplace tasks come with multiple-choice answers.

n      Exposure to fewer topics:  What is tested is what gets funded and taught, so if your child is not going to grow up to be a calculator, a dictionary or a test designer, they are severely disadvantaged by the push to have teachers teach to the test.

n      Greater inequality:  As the lowest performing students are subject to the whim of random reforms, teachers under fire, and school closures, they suffer from the problems they bring to school and a lack of stability and coherent instruction in the classroom. If they are getting a worse experience, they are more likely to perform poorly, become disengaged, and drop out.  My guess is that this is contributing to the widening inequality we see in our society.

n      Destruction of community:  When school closure based on testing or “poor teaching” is exercised, students lose the bonds they have formed with their peers, their teachers, and their community.  

Act on it!

n      Monitor your child’s homework and see what is being taught.  If you notice that the work is not very enriching and is more test-oriented, speak with the teacher.  If instructions come from higher, speak to the principal or go to a local school council meeting.

n      Don’t fixate on your child’s test scores.  If they do poorly, find out what concepts they find challenging and work with them.  If they are a bad test-taker, they may very well respond to a far different style of teaching and learning.  Worse, you are unnecessarily stressing them in a way that doesn’t encourage improvement.  Tests should extend learning, and these tests don’t.

n      Attend town hall meetings when school administrators want to close schools, punish teachers on untried evaluation systems, or fixate only on test scores.

n      Write to your member of Congress to repeal No Child Left Behind and to reign in Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan’s arbitrary use of discretionary authority to implement similar reforms.

People with the education level of many teachers can take their talents elsewhere.  If we make the profession appear so undesirable, those who might do really well and impact a whole new generation of kids will decide it is not worth it.  I already watched a friend who is amazing with kids, highly educated and organized, and a trained teacher leave the profession because it was too stressful and she was not supported.  I know scores of Teach for America alums who taught two or three years, were probably pretty great by the end, but who have now left the profession.  This doesn't fix our system, and it is unfair to our kids.

 

Speak out!

Tell me about a really great or bad teacher you had.  What made them good or bad?

How do teachers measure up?

The is a big push to improve teacher accountability and rating systems, and with good reason.  Many teachers get almost no feedback, rated either "satisfactory" or "unsatisfactory."  Feedback is often not continuous and does not feed continuous improvement: the feedback may occur once a year, it may be sporadic, and it may be reduced in frequency as one becomes a more experienced teacher.  There is often a very limited amount of "data" that goes into evaluations, and there may often be a limited amount of evaluators feeding into the assessment.

Michelle Rhee's The New Teacher Project proposed a new framework for teacher evaluations (pdf) that is largely based upon her very pro-charter, pro-standardized testing agenda.  It has a lot of great points, but it also is based upon some pretty egregious flaws.

The framework is based upon the idea that every teacher should be excellent, that several years of excellent teaching can bridge the gap between poor and wealthy students' performance, and that teachers need to be evaluated in a more rigorous way that focuses most heavily on the improvements made by their students.  On its face, this sounds very reasonable.

The  framework opens by citing a variety of studies that show how important great teachers are, which is certainly true.  Two of the studies she cites, however, paint an incomplete picture:

1. A 2006 study y Gordon, Kane and Staiger found that "having a top-quartile teacher rather than a bottom-quartile teacher four years in a row could be enough to close the black-white test score gap."
2. A 2002 study by Rivkin, Hanushek and Kain found that "having a high-quality teacher throughout elementary school can substantially offset or even eliminate the disadvantage of low socio-economic background."

These two studies, which are perfectly valid on their face, leave out some important underlying assumptions:

1.  Teacher quality is static - Northwestern University's Helen Ladd (pdf) evaluated teachers (2008) in the highest and lowest quintiles according to student assessments and found that most highly-effective teachers one year were not highly effective the next and many ineffective teachers were no longer ineffective the next.
2. An effective teacher is effective for all groups of students s/he teaches - If you are given a class that is significantly less prepared than the last one you taught, your performance may not improve and even a great teacher might fail to produce the desired gains.
3. Student gains and failures can be universally attached to the performance of a given teacher - Economist Jesse Rothstein surveyed data for 99,000 5th graders in NC and performed a statistical test asking "What effect do fifth grade teachers have on their students' 4th grade performance?"  Obviously, the effect should be 0, as they had yet to teach the kids.  Nevertheless, he tested three different "value added" measures and in all cases found that fifth grade teachers had an enormous impact on their students' test scores before they had even taught them for a day. There is obviously a flaw with the use of such value-added tests if such preposterous results are statistically significant. 
4. That the results of a good teacher can be added as the two studies suggest - Diane Ravitch notes in her The Death and Life of the Great American Education System that "nowhere was there a real-life demonstration in which a district had identified the top quintile of teacher, assigned low-performing students to their classes, and improved the test scores of low-performing students so dramatically in three, four, or five years that the black-white test score gap closed." 
5. Bridging the socio-economic gap is sufficient and means that our students are receiving a quality education:  plenty of white students from higher income backgrounds are doing terribly.  Bridging the achievement gap between rich and poor is a start, but certainly not the "destination" if a quality, world-class system is our goal. 

Now, the framework then continues with six key characteristic of a "good evaluation system":

1. All teachers should be evaluated at least annually;
2. Evaluations should be based on clear standards that prioritize student learning;
3. Multiple sources of data should be considered, especially those measuring student's academic growth;
4. Multiple rating levels to better differentiate teacher effectiveness;
5. Rating encourages regular, ongoing, and  constructive feedback; and,
6. Evaluation outcomes must have teeth, that is they should feed into teacher employment, bonuses, and pay.

I agree in general with the first five, though I see some constraints to the sixth characteristic.

All teachers should be evaluated annually

I think the more feedback a teacher can get from different evaluators during different types of lessons over the course of a year, the more useful a tool can be.  This seems like a great basis for an improved evaluation system that all teachers can use to improve.

Base evaluation on clear standards, emphasize student learning
Any evaluation, to be fair, should be based upon very clear standards with limited room for interpretation.  I agree also that they should be based on student learning, but I would urge caution in operationalizing the concept.  I think having impartial master teachers and principles observing or conducting a pop quiz to see if lesson plans are having an effect on a student's learning would get at this a lot better than using standardized tests.  Further, it would give teachers the freedom to teach a diversity of lessons that cover materials that are of extreme import but not necessarily on a standardized test.  The document does identify some opportunities like having a master teacher come in and note how many kids raise their hand or seem to "get" the material presented, though it does express a lot of support for the use of standardized tests.

Multiple sources of data should be used, focused on student growth measures
Diverse data--both in type and person evaluating--is critical to getting a more balanced assessment of a teacher's performance.  The focus on standardized tests is problematic as student performance on tests can vary and these tests may not test material that is all that worthwhile to know (or they may not test many subjects).  There is a further issue: a successful goal, according to the Harvard Business Review, is one that is concrete, that you can identify clearly when you have fulfilled it, and that is not dependent upon others.  Setting a goal for teachers that is dependent upon someone else (their students) is somewhat unfair.  Worse yet, these tests are not designed to test teacher performance.  They do not have the external validity to be misappropriated in this manner.  Create a standardized test for teachers, as that would at least have the validity necessary to make them an appropriate measure.  Additionally, if a test is administered mid-year, are the gains (or lack thereof) attributable to the current teacher or the previous ones? This is not clear. As I noted, I would prefer multiple observations and student and parent feedback.

Multiple Rating levels and on-going feedback
This is indeed preferable because it does improve upon evaluations to make them a tool for teacher encouragement and feedback rather than a narrow filter to remove only the worst teachers.  Further, if the ratings are meaningful and accompanied by concrete feedback, it gives teachers the actual tools to look at how they might improve and for the school to perhaps pair up that teacher with resources to help on their weaknesses. The more regular, the better.

Tie teacher ratings to their pay and employment 
All of the studies that I noted earlier should make us very cautious about this.  If teachers drop in and out of the highly-effective category (and the ineffective category) between years, then you need to be cautious about wantonly firing or punishing someone for doing poorly one year or rewarding someone who anomalously does brilliantly one year.  I think a more appropriate sixth metric would be to use student data and teacher performance data to try to determine what kinds of students a teacher teaches most effectively for future class assignments to try to set up student and teacher alike for success.  I recognize that this may not be realistic or might be logistically quite challenging, but it might be interesting to see what limits there are to this idea in practice.


In the end, my preference is for a rating system that looks a little different:

1. Monthly evaluations by an independent master teacher (15%)
2. Quarterly evaluations by school administrator/principals with experience in the classroom (15%)
3. Semester evaluations by external education evaluation experts (15%)
4. Round robin evaluations in which teachers evaluate their peers (10%)
5. Amount and quality of efforts made by the teacher to improve on areas identified in previous observations (15%)
6. Evaluations of student portfolios that look at growth on the subjects taught (10%)
7. Use of interviews to get randomized student and parent opinions of teacher (10%)
8. Performance on testing that can be attributed to that specific teacher, is included in that school's curriculum for the year, and that is value-added in nature (10%)

The weightings are my personal preference, but I think they reflect the importance of regular, directed feedback being used by a teacher for continuous improvement.  Ultimately consistently bad teachers should be counseled out, but those teachers who have a decent record of doing well should be retained and efforts should be made to match them with students with whom they will succeed (insomuch as is possible while still giving the most difficult to teach students access to quality teaching).

Speak out!

How would you evaluate teachers?

What are some interesting evaluation methodologies or criteria that you have seen/experienced?  

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?

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?

Charter to Nowhere?

While I respect any teacher or institution that educates our children well, I am not the biggest fan of charter schools and the so-called “parental choice movement.” A lot of research and preliminary tests show that many charters just aren’t that good (some are, but again, so are some public schools), though parents often overestimate how good charters are for their kids. Forming a parallel (yet still “public”) education system seems like reinventing the wheel, discarding all the infrastructure, funding and thought put into the current system. The idea that a public system should cater to specific parents’ desires even though it is funded by taxpayers who may or may not have children also seems questionable, blurring the distinction between public and private benefits. I also fear that having schools who select largely based on a lottery sets up many kids to be rejected and always relegated to a bad education. Finally, we need to ask ourselves, “do we want to use our school system to track students rather than to promote an equal opportunity for them to approach the world?”

Is Your Charter Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?

Sadly, many charters are not that good. According to the most comprehensive study comparing the performance of charter and traditional public school students (Stanford, CREDO, July 2009), only 17% of charter schools students perform better than comparable students in traditional public schools. In 37% of charters students do worse than their public school, and in about half students show no significant difference. English language learners and those in poverty do slightly better in charters, but Blacks and Hispanics do significantly worse. While the results vary depending on when a kid enters the charter, the charter's location, the race and economic stratus of the child, and other factors, this is quite disturbing for what is being hailed as the future of our education system.

Worse, some charters are considered good because they invest an inordinate amount of resources, and the assumption is that this is scalable. As a recent New York Times article on the connections between poverty and educational outcomes notes:

"Another rationale for denial is to note that some schools, like the Knowledge Is Power Program charter schools, have managed to “beat the odds.” If some schools can succeed, the argument goes, then it is reasonable to expect all schools to. But close scrutiny of charter school performance has shown that many of the success stories have been limited to particular grades or subjects and may be attributable to substantial outside financing or extraordinarily long working hours on the part of teachers. The evidence does not support the view that the few success stories can be scaled up to address the needs of large populations of disadvantaged students."

Now, DC has the idea of shutting down charters that are failing relatively quickly as a remedy to bad charters. In this way, its charters do slightly better than public schools (which is not exactly an accomplishment in the nation’s worst-performing system). Think about anytime that you or your kids moved or switched jobs because the company went belly-up (not because you chose to do so): it is a stressful experience; it could be highly detrimental to the child’s learning and emotional well-being (or at least distract them with adjusting to a new setting instead of focusing on learning); it disrupts social bonds that emerge among students that facilitate interpersonal skills; and, it undermines parental connection to any given school and may negatively affect the school’s performance or the parent’s involvement in the child’s education. What this says to me: we will give up on failing charters just like we gave up on failing regular public schools. If this didn’t work for public schools in the first place, why would it work for charters?

In the end, you have to ask why we would invest public money in another parallel education system that often does just as well or worse than the system it purports to fix.

The Shadow Network

We have invested money, time, energy, thought, political capital, administration, policies, personnel, and infrastructure in developing a public school system. Charters are fixing the system by not fixing the system into which we have funneled so many resources, but rather by duplicating all that effort. Is a new system necessary? If the answer is yes, might we not recoup some of the losses from what is already in place? If some charters are good, why can't we identify those best practices and use them in all schools?

The only answers that I can think of are the supposed problem of intransigent teachers' unions and the issue of rigid or inept school and system administrators. The supposed problem of unions is that they keep inept teachers in the public system and are averse to any kind of change. Having just visited one of the most dynamic teachers I've ever had--a union member--I find it hard to believe that teachers' unions are so averse to change that a new system that excludes them is needed. I went from welfare to Stanford with unionized teachers (who even went on strike one year), so the public system can work and unions can't be that problematic. There are certainly unions that are inept and mismanaged, sometimes with the worst teachers rising highest. That said, union push-back against replacing more experienced (and thus expensive) teachers every time their is a budget shortfall is a good thing. Protecting innovative teachers is a good thing.

As for school administration, that is universally viewed as a problem. When Michelle Rhee became chancellor of the DC system (the nation's worst), she found a bureaucracy so poorly managed that supplies and books were sitting in warehouses rather than classrooms. Corruption and nepotism were the norm. Regardless of your opinion of Rhee's policies regarding charters and unions (a recent report found that 15 DC charters were ranked at the bottom of the pack, compared to 5 at the top) the amount of change that she managed to achieve in the bureaucracy of the DC education machine was impressive after decades of failure and stagnation. Rhee demonstrated that change was possible within the system even as she aggressively promoted charters:. As my dear friend, who was a teacher in a charter, noted, the administration was still incompetent and she was constantly stressed until the point where she left. In that case, and in many charters, this new system did not resolve these administrational issues.

Public, but still “Mine, Mine. Mine!”

There are public and private schools for a reason, and no school will exactly fit the educational needs or desires of a given student or parent. It is incredibly unrealistic to expect this of public schools. The goal is to ensure that all of society is prepared to enter the workforce, to contribute. The idea that parental choice should exist for a public service is also questionable. The goals for a public system are to serve a societal good, not a private good. In some ways, then, it is society's benefit, not that of a particular parent or student, that is important.

The other irony in all this is that many parents cannot or chose not to be all that involved in their child's education. Vigorously promoting parental choice for a population that is not willing or able to make that choice seems weird. Given that poorer parents often (but not always, my mom was an exception) are working more and can't take the time to choose beyond their neighborhood school, it seems to me that the real goal should be to ensure that all schools provide a decent baseline.

The way parental choice works is that charters--which are assumed to be good schools--attract more and more demand. This causes public schools to close. The system is then only made of a good, charter schools. We have already seen that the myth of these schools being good is ridiculous, but we also will see that the amount of demand for these schools that still choose based on a lottery is not being met by supply. Further, we have to ask ourselves if it is acceptable for some students to get out of a sinking ship while others wait for it to be squeezed out of existence to get their shot (if it comes in time).

I Guess Some Kids Just Don’t Deserve a Good Education

According to the CREDO study mentioned earlier, while 1.4 million kids attend charters, 365,000 were on a waiting list to get into one. How is this mismatch between supply and demand decided? Usually, a student enters into a lottery and their future is chosen at random, by chance. Do we really want to play mad scientist with kid’s futures? A bad teacher or school can have detrimental effects on a student for the rest of their academic career and life, so should we not aim to provide a decent public education system to all kids, not just those that “win the lottery?”

What I suspect will happen is that parents who are most dedicated or able to invest in their children's education will do so and will be more likely to get their kids into the best schools (public, magnet, charter, wherever). The charter system, which largely depends on empowered parents who are invested enough to push for their child to go to a different school, will not best serve the children without parents, with bad parents, or with parents who are overworked or uninformed. Further, because charters have so much demand, they don't have the incentive to widely broadcast so that parents can realize there is this other option. In my case, I got into a magnet school because my mom found out through dumb luck that they were offering a test and she happened to be off that day. I might not be writing this blog if I were put up to a lottery!

There are some great charters, but they are often enabled by overworking teachers or by using private funding (why not just pay taxes or donate to schools, private donors?). Further, the idea that good performance should yield more funding is scary: if your child is at an underperforming school, they will likely see fewer resources. Perverse, no? A good friend of mine, who also has trouble with this, noted that schools with poor administration should not be rewarded with funding. I want to agree, but ultimately, you are punishing the students for the failures of the administrators. I like a lot of the changes that charters enable, but I also find it troubling to move toward a system with less accountability, fewer results, less supported teachers, and random choice of who succeed with a greater focus on testing...I would rather think of ways to make our system work than reinventing the wheel in a way that is just not working.

While I am not the biggest fan of charters, I am a big fan of all schools providing decent education to children. For this reason, I would rather see public schools better supported than charters defunded. I would like for all schools to have the same accountability. I would like to see more parents being given the information and ability to better participate in their child's education (or if they refuse, I'd like to see them compelled to participate).

Speak out!

1. What do you think is good about charters? What could be improved?
2. What obstacles do you see to implementing reforms in public schools? Does a charter resolve these issues? Is it the best way to resolve them?

Act on it!

• Support your local public schools and join their Parent Teacher Organization or Local School Council.
  
• Volunteer (either to help teachers or administrators or to directly help students. Check out my blog post on one way to do this!).
• Donate supplies to classrooms (a great site is http://www.donorschoose.org/), or go to your local school and ask what they need. Don't think in a limited way, as schools have music and art departments or gym classes that can benefit from donations that are not paper and pencils. Heck, maybe you are handy and your school needs repairs.
• Ask a teacher you know what they need (a friend who lived in my sophomore dorm has often asked for book requests for his 9th grade English classroom on facebook, so look out and help out! As if on cue, he started a new campaign, so I hope people will support my friend Tyler's classroom by going to https://npo.networkforgood.org/Donate/Donate.aspx?npoSubscriptionId=1002090&code=support+page+button and putting a note that you want to contribute to the "BHAG Book Fund," through which he encourages and enables his kids to read).
• Help a parent you know (especially a struggling one) to learn about opportunities for their kids to test into good schools early on!
  
• Stay vigilant and demand good schools of your local and national politicians for ALL children.