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?

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.