Of the many entrenched school customs that have been reconsidered and reformed over the past decade, social promotion has been among the most resistant to change. Holding children back in the same grade has long been frowned upon, and a large body of research seems to support that point of view: retained students tend to have lower test scores and are allegedly more likely to drop out than students who initially performed at an equally low level but were nevertheless promoted.

Despite the old habits and the old research, however, school districts across the nation have been slowly but steadily bucking convention. Several large systems, including Chicago (beginning in 1996), New York (2004), and Philadelphia (2005), now require students in particular grades to demonstrate a benchmark level of mastery in basic skills on a standardized test before they can be promoted. Florida (2002) and Texas (2002) have taken the lead among states in forbidding social promotions. In 2000, the most recent year for which national enrollment data are available, these five school systems alone enrolled nearly 20 percent of the nation’s 3rd-grade students. (For more on Chicago’s policy, see Alexander Russo, “Retaining Retention,” features, Winter 2005; and Robin Tepper Jacob and Susan Stone, “Teachers and Students Speak,” features, Winter 2005.)

But is this new approach to grade promotion effective? And what about those studies that say retention doesn’t work? Proponents of the new programs believe that schools do students no favor by
promoting them if they don’t have the skills to succeed at a higher level. But because these arguments, however plausible, have little research to support them, we set out to determine if they have scientific merit. Our findings from Florida suggest that the use of standardized testing policies to end social promotion can help low-performing students make modest improvements in reading and substantial improvements in math.

Florida’s Program to End Social Promotion

Over the past several years Florida has attempted substantial reforms of its struggling public school system, the fourth-largest in the country and one that consistently ranks close to the bottom on academic indicators, including high-school graduation rates and scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The Sunshine State had instituted school voucher programs, increased the number of charter schools, and devised a sophisticated accountability system that evaluates schools on the basis of their progress as measured by the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT). But in May 2002, the state legislature made one of its boldest moves, revising the School Code, the state’s education law, to require 3rd-grade students to score at the Level-2 benchmark or above on the reading portion of the FCAT in order to be promoted to 4th grade.

The hurdle created for students was not terribly high. The state’s department of education describes a student who scores at Level 2 (of five levels) as having “limited success” against the state standards; only students who score at Level 3 or above are considered to be proficient for the purposes of evaluating schools under No Child Left Behind. Even so, roughly 24 percent of 3rd graders tested in Florida in 2001–02, the year before the retention policy was introduced, performed below Level 2. This number fell slightly, to 22 percent, in the 2002–03 academic year.

Not all these students were retained, however, even after the policy change. The law allowed for exceptions to the retention policy if a student had limited English proficiency or a severe disability, scored above the 51st percentile on the Stanford-9 standardized test, had demonstrated proficiency through a performance portfolio, or had already been held back for two years. Altogether, roughly 40 percent of the 3rd-grade students who scored below the Level-2 threshold in 2002–03 were promoted.

The Problem with Earlier Studies

Traditionally, the retention of a student, uncommon as it was, resulted from an individual teacher’s assessment of the student’s ability to succeed at the next level. But such teacher discretion, while arguably desirable as a matter of policy, is the primary reason earlier studies of social promotion are flawed. We must assume from studying those retention programs, which are still the predominant practice in schools throughout the United States, that students who were held back were fundamentally different from students who were promoted. Because teachers were considering intangible factors, even when race, gender, family income, and academic achievement are the same, there was no way to isolate the effect of being held back, much less to make reasonable conclusions about the effects of retention on a student’s academic achievement or the probability of his dropping out of high school. Are students who were retained less likely to graduate because they were retained? Or were they retained because of characteristics that also predisposed them to drop out? Because the retention policies were subjective, we will simply never know.

There are also reasons to believe that subjective retention policies affect students differently than policies that use promotion criteria like performance on standardized tests. If promotion depends on an individual teacher’s assessment of a child, then that child is not likely to know what he or she must do to avoid being held back. Also, if few students were being held back, then those students might perform worse because they felt excluded and inferior. A policy that holds back thousands of students might dilute this sense of being singled out. Finally, subjective assessments of students are vulnerable to inappropriate influences, including teachers’ prejudices and pressure brought by parents, in ways that objective criteria of performance might inhibit.

Implementing objective standards, even if they were accompanied by subjective exemptions, might significantly change the effects of retention in ways that previous research could not anticipate or measure. For research purposes, objective retention policies also create a useful comparison group of students not subject to retention. In the case of Florida’s program to end social promotion, for example, we can compare students who were subject to the threat of retention with students who would have been had they been born a year later.

What a Difference a Year Makes

To determine the impact of ending social promotion for 3rd graders in Florida, we compared low-scoring 3rd graders in 2002, the first students to be subject to the program, with low-scoring 3rd graders from the previous year. Of the 43,996 3rd graders in 2002 for whom we have valid test scores on both FCAT math and reading assessments, 60 percent were actually retained. By contrast, of the 45,401 3rd graders in 2001 for whom we have valid test scores, only 9 percent were retained. Our analysis assumes that the students from the two school years should be similar in all respects except for the year in which they happened to have been born. We analyzed the test-score improvements made between each student’s first 3rd-grade year and the following year on both the state’s own accountability exam and the Stanford-9, a nationally normed exam administered at the same time as the FCAT but not used for accountability purposes.

We measure FCAT performance using developmental-scale scores, which allow us to compare the test-score gains of all the students in our study, even though they took tests designed for different grade levels. Developmental-scale scores are designed to measure academic proficiency on a single scale for students of any grade and in any year. For example, a 3rd grader with a developmental-scale score of 1,000 and a 4th grader with a developmental-scale score of 1,000 have the same level of academic achievement; if a student gets a developmental-scale score of 1,000 in 2001 and then gets the same score of 1,000 in 2002, this indicates that the student has not made any academic progress in the intervening year. The developmental-scale scores required to reach Level 2 on the FCAT reading test were consistent for each year’s cohort.

We began by measuring the effect on all low-scoring 3rd graders of simply having been subject to the new policy. That is, we did not distinguish in our initial analysis between students who were actually retained and those who received an exemption and were promoted to the next grade. This analysis provides an estimate of the average impact of the policy change on all students in the state performing below the Level-2 benchmark. It also allows for the possibility that exempted students enjoyed spillover benefits from the retention policy, since they were now being instructed in a system in which fewer students in 4th grade were unprepared to do grade-level work.

To identify the policy’s average impact, we compared the gains in developmental-scale scores made by students who first entered 3rd grade in 2002 and scored below the FCAT benchmark with gains made by students who first entered 3rd grade in 2001 and scored below the FCAT benchmark. In making this comparison, we took into account other factors that could affect achievement gains, such as the student’s race, whether the student received a free or reduced-price school lunch, whether the student was deemed Limited English Proficient, and the student’s precise test score during his first 3rd-grade year. With these differences accounted for, the only distinction between the two groups of students was assumed to be that the former group entered the school system a year later and was therefore subject to the new policy in 3rd grade.

As discussed above, however, many low-scoring 3rd graders were granted exemptions and promoted to the 4th grade even under the new policy. We therefore also evaluated the effect of actually being retained, again controlling for race, eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch, English proficiency, and baseline test scores. In conducting this analysis, we also needed to account for the fact that the students who were held back were a select group of students who could differ in important ways from the promoted students. Presumably, teachers and other decisionmakers expected these students, unlike promoted students, to benefit from an additional year as 3rd graders. Fortunately, the fact that simply having entered school a year later increased the probability of retention for all low-scoring students again provides a way around this obvious selection problem. In essence, the statistical method we use compares those retained students that our data suggest would not have been retained the previous year with a comparable group of students who were not retained. Our results therefore indicate the effect of retention on those students who were held back as a result of the new policy.

During this time, Florida was engaged in other education reforms as well: instituting several school-voucher programs, increasing the number of charter schools in the state, and improving the system used to assign grades to schools based on the FCAT. However, it is reasonable to assume that whatever effect these other policies have on our analyses is minor. In order for the existence of another policy to affect our results significantly, we would have to believe that the program substantially improved the education of the 3rd graders in 2002–03 without having a similar effect on the previous year’s cohort. Moreover, while a sudden policy change could conceivably explain the overall improvements between the two cohorts, it is difficult to see how such a change could cause substantially larger gains among those students actually retained.

Retention Works

Our fundamental findings from an analysis of the 3rd-and 4th-grade data for these two years indicate that the performance of students identified for retention, regardless of whether they were retained or exempted and promoted, exceeded the performance of low-performing students from the previous year who were not subject to the retention policy; and students who were actually retained made the larger relative gains.

Students identified for retention by the Florida policy gained 0.06 of a standard deviation in reading on both the FCAT and Stanford-9 over equally low-performing 3rd graders from the previous school year (see Figure 1). In math, students identified for retention surpassed low performers who were not subject to the policy by 0.15 standard deviations (4.8 percentiles) on the FCAT and 0.14 standard deviations (4.4 percentiles) on the Stanford-9.

Students who were actually retained experienced even larger relative improvements (see Figure 2). Retained students performed better than low-scoring students who were promoted by 0.13 standard deviations (4.10 percentiles) on the FCAT and 0.11 standard deviations (3.45 percentiles) on the Stanford-9 in reading. In math retained students improved 0.30 standard deviations (10.0 percentiles) on the FCAT and 0.28 standard deviations (9.3 percentiles) on the Stanford-9 over promoted students.

Some critics of the new retention policies argued that teachers and schools would respond to them by manipulating test scores, either directly by cheating or indirectly by teaching students skills that would help them to improve their test scores but would not provide real academic proficiency. This argument would have merit only if we found strong gains on the high-stakes FCAT and no similar gains on the low-stakes Stanford-9, for which there is no incentive to manipulate scores. But our results are consistent between the FCAT and the Stanford-9, indicating that there have been no serious manipulations of the high-stakes testing system. If teachers are in fact changing their curricula with the intent to “teach to” the FCAT, they are doing so in ways that also contribute to gains on the highly respected Stanford-9. This would indicate that teachers have made changes resulting in real increases in students’ proficiency.

An unexpected benefit of the retention policy is the improvement in math scores. This might seem odd, given that it is the reading portion of the FCAT that students must pass to earn promotion and that the rhetoric supporting Florida’s retention program emphasizes that it will improve student literacy. Of course, the math gains could simply reflect the fact that math skills are learned primarily in schools, while reading is practiced both in and outside of school. For this reason, evaluations of school reforms frequently find stronger effects in math than in reading. Alternatively, it may be that students who were retained specifically because of their poor reading skills are particularly poor in that subject and that this limits their room for improvement.

We also explored the possibility that the objective retention program could have different effects on students of different races. Our results show gains of similar sizes by the three racial groups for which we have an adequate sample size to have reasonable confidence in our findings: white, black, and Hispanic. The exception is for whites’ performance on the FCAT reading test. It is difficult for us to interpret why white students would fail to benefit from the retention policy as measured by the FCAT reading test but would be shown to benefit as measured by the Stanford-9 reading test.

Our results also suggest that low-scoring Florida 3rd graders who were given an exemption and promoted might have bene­fited from another year in the 3rd grade. This does not mean that it would be wise to eliminate all exemptions to the testing requirement. There are certainly students for whom testing is either inappropriate or whose performance on other academic measures could reasonably indicate that they would be better served by moving on to the next grade. However, our findings do indicate that teachers and school systems should be cautious when granting exemptions.

What It Means

At first glance our findings seem inconsistent with evaluations of Chicago’s program ending social promotion, to our knowledge the only similarly designed retention policy to be evaluated using comparable methods. In Chicago, students in the 3rd, 6th, and 8th grades must exceed benchmarks on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS), a respected standardized test, in order to be promoted to the next grade. In a study conducted in 2004 by scholars at the Consortium on Chicago School Research, the performance of 3rd- and 6th-grade students who scored just below the benchmark on the ITBS, most of whom were retained because of the mandate, was compared with the performance of students who scored just above the benchmark, most of whom were promoted. The Chicago researchers were able to measure test-score performance for two years after implementation of the program. They found benefits from the program after one year, similar to what we found in Florida, but discovered that those benefits went away after the second year. Third-grade students were not affected, and 6th-grade students were negatively affected by the policy in their performance on the ITBS reading test. The findings on the Chicago retention program emphasize the importance of following the progress of retained students in Florida over time.

Still, the Chicago policy differs from Florida’s in some respects. In 1999 the Chicago policy stopped allowing students to be retained twice, which Florida’s policy does allow. This difference might reduce teachers’ motivation to work with already retained students, whom they now can expect to be promoted the next year regardless of their performance. Other programs with different and more stable retention policies might show different results.

Finally, while our study provides valuable information about the effectiveness of Florida’s policy to end social promotion, it does not offer a full catalog of the policy’s benefits or of its potential costs. It will be some time before we can examine whether retention increased or reduced the probability of dropping out of school later on. Most important, it does not provide any information about the program’s effects on students’ academic progress the first time they were in 3rd grade. The policy’s greatest benefits could result not from retention itself, but rather from increased efforts on the part of teachers and even students to avoid being retained in the first place.

Jay P. Greene is professor and head of the Department of Education Reform, the University of Arkansas; he is also a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Marcus A. Winters is a doctoral fellow, the University of Arkansas and a senior research associate at the Manhattan Institute.

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Dramatic Growth Is Possible by Chris Whittle
A Reply to Henry Levin by Chris Whittle
Déjà Vu All Over Again by Henry Levin

The post Our Schools in the Year 2030 appeared first on Education Next.

Don’t worry; if you need a fetal-like retreat to times gone by, there is a place you can find respite: your childhood school is still here. Even if the old buildings are gone, your old daily routine within them has been superbly, if unconsciously, preserved to a degree that would make King Tut beam brighter than the gold in his tomb. And not only can you return to your school-day experience just by visiting your children’s schools; at the rate change is occurring in education, your great-grandchildren will attend the same ones!

The point is simple: how we educate our children today is remarkably similar to how we educated them decades ago. Perhaps more than any other modern-day institution, schooling is nearly impervious to change. If our “old school design” was working with a high degree of consistency and reliability, such inflexibility might be fine. But decades of facts say that it isn’t fine. Results from the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show that roughly 15 million American children—more children than reside in all of England—are achieving below basic levels of literacy and numeracy. If the scale of this number concerns you, you should find it even more troubling that it has been that way for decades. And our problems don’t stop with the children most in need. Even our best students are falling behind, in international comparisons and at home. Among the “talented tenth,” those in the top 10 percent of NAEP test-takers, reading scores have dropped four points since 1971, and math scores have not budged since they were first measured in 1978 (see Figure 1).

Simply put, we are not making the grade at the bottom or the top.

WHY THINGS STAY THE SAME

Why does America seem so unresponsive? Let me suggest three reasons.

First, because “numb” is the root word of numbers. We have lost our outrage (if indeed we ever had it) about the deplorable statistics noted above. Education inadequacy is not sexy. Illiteracy is not sudden in its cause nor quick with its solution and thus lacks the “production values” highly desired by our ratings-craved media. Illiteracy can’t compete with Katrina, 9/11, Iraq, or even a good Supreme Court nomination fight. Sure, there’s the obligatory annual story in most news vehicles about “our education crisis,” but contrast that to, say, round-the-clock, multiple-week coverage of a devastating hurricane. Our sound bite–oriented media find it far too complex to connect what is going on in our schools with the possibility of a 21st-century, full-eclipse of the American economy, imported from the Pacific Rim. Let C-SPAN or PBS do that kind of dull coverage.

A second reason is the colossal, $400 billion per year status quo that makes the military-industrial complex look nimble by comparison.

The third reason for our inaction is even more important: America does not believe there is a “next” generation of schools. What, we think, could be that different in schools of the future? We might change the calendar around, pay teachers a little more, update the curriculum, but none of those things is that big a deal. After all, schools are schools are schools.

A FAILURE OF IMAGINATION

I’ve now been involved in the world of public education for 15 years, as the founder and CEO of Edison Schools, one of the country’s first private companies to take on the challenge of improving public schools. If Edison, which now works in various ways in nearly 1,000 schools and serves more than 300,000 students, were a public school district, I would be one of the longest-serving heads of a major school system in the United States (average tenure for the superintendent of a major system is less than four years). I’ve seen and heard a lot. And one of the things I’ve seen is stunningly uncharacteristic of America, earth’s creative capital. We’ve had a national failure of imagination when it comes to what our schools can and should be. We don’t believe there is anything particularly new to discover in schooling, so, as a society, we don’t set out to find it. Columbus believed. NASA believed. When it comes to schools, we don’t. For sure, there are pioneers here and there, but our national mindset does not embrace the possibility that our schools could be and should be radically different.

Instead, because “the way school is” was imprinted on all of us with Intel-like precision by our own 12 years of schooling, America believes that schools are governed by a set of immutable, almost physical, laws, which include:

In schools, adults must supervise children virtually all of the time (Dickens would feel right at home).

The school day must be rigidly organized, generally chopped up into 45-minute or one-hour blocks (changing this to longer periods of time was, some years back, viewed as a grand breakthrough).

The smaller the number of children in a class, the better the education results (never mind if a smaller class might mean a teacher who is paid less and is less prepared).

Adults must run all aspects of the school—and do all the work within it (that many teenagers now work after school and on weekends is a fact to ignore).

There are no efficiencies, economies, or new qualities to be found in “design breakthroughs”; greater spending is the only way to improve education (disregard more or less flat education results after two decades of real-dollar annual spending increases).

What if all of the above “truths” are incorrect—truths that we will some day regard as myths, artifacts of a forgotten era? What if we approached the organization of a school without any of these “truths” as cornerstones? Where might simple logic and our own real-life experiences take us?

Let me suggest what some of the new truths of school design might be:

Learning accomplished through individual effort, or through working in small teams, is as “sticky” (well retained) as that served up in a classroom group, no matter what its size.

Learning can come in many forms, and the size of the learning group can vary greatly without any penalization of effect.

Children are capable of tremendous focus and responsibility, and they can be taught these traits at a much younger age than many people might think.

Variety matters in learning; too much of any one thing, like sitting passively in a classroom for 12 years, has rapidly diminishing returns; and lack of variety negatively affects teachers as much as children.

Students can teach as well as learn. Has your child ever taught you anything? Has one of your older children ever taught something to one of your younger ones?

THE FUTURE

Working from these potential new “truths,” let’s imagine what a school of the future might look like. In fact, in key respects, the best school of the future might share some aspects of the school of the past, the 19th-century past that existed in many places of America up to the 1920s: the schoolhouse where older students were instructors, teaching under the guidance of a highly qualified adult. Indeed, we can reconstruct a school of the past that is appropriate to the modern era, where teachers’ salaries are competitive with other professions, where students are taught by older peers under the supervision of master teachers who can use technology for pedagogical purposes.

Suppose, for example, that beginning in the 1st grade children spent an hour a day learning on their own, not under the direct supervision of a teacher (although perhaps watched over by an older peer). Let’s presume that by the 3rd grade, the amount of time students were “on their own” increased to two hours per day. By the 6th grade and throughout middle school, let’s assume that only half of a student’s time was spent in what we now think of as a classroom. Finally, imagine that by high school only one-third of a student’s time was in a traditional classroom setting. If this sounds overly radical, consider that many college students are in class fewer than 15 hours a week, half the time of a high-school senior. College freshmen are only 90 days older than high-school seniors. Did something magical occur in that short period to make them more capable of independent learning? Remember that fully half of all high-school seniors enter college.

If students are not in a classroom, where are they? Sleeping at their desks? Playing video games on school computers? Well, the answer is that they are learning—just not at that very moment with a teacher, just not in a class, but still “in school.” More often than not, they will be reading! Educators believe deeply that students should read, but there is very little time in the school day for that to happen. And after a long day at school and with other homework and important activities, how much time is realistically available in the evening? They also will be working with a small group of other students. And they might be on their computers, writing, researching, exploring, mining that almost endless, great new ethereal library—the Internet. All the while, they will be monitored by their somewhat older peers, just as graduate students supervise and aid undergraduates in college environments. Though they will not be in class half of their day, they will be in a school building all of it.

Many educators reading this are probably saying, perhaps in less kindly terms, “This idea is hopelessly naive. Students cannot be entrusted with their own education; they cannot be expected to manage their own time. Students don’t understand the importance of education and, therefore, can’t be expected to manage it.”

My response: schools have failed to make students the masters of their own learning, and we have the results to show for it. We are still operating in an 18th-century mindset, believing that these young, half-civilized things called children must be literally whipped into shape, if not with a stick then with a never-ending schedule. If students don’t understand the importance of education enough to take charge of their own, it is because the schools we have designed don’t spend any real time helping them understand this.

A huge side benefit of this “independent learning” model—and I am talking here mainly about middle- and high-school programs—is that it would double teachers’ compensation in the United States. If students spent half as much time in class, then half as many teachers would be needed. And we could pay those remaining twice as much—without increasing taxes by one cent.

I introduce the concept of large-scale, independent learning in America’s middle- and high-school communities and the corresponding increase in teachers’ pay to suggest that there may be a more powerful school design “out there” that is radically different from what we now know. My example is only one idea of what education might be like. There are many more concepts worthy of serious consideration and development. However, most of these will never achieve meaningful scale unless America takes a fundamentally different approach to how it brings about change in its schools.

FOCUS ON EDUCATION

This year, the federal government will spend $27 billion on healthcare research and development (R&D) through the National Institutes of Health. The Department of Defense recently invested $9 billion just on the prototype of the next generation of fighter planes. These investments are precisely why we have one of the finest health-care systems on the globe (providing our citizens one of the longest life spans of any country) and an unparalleled military. We have exceptional health care and national security because we constantly invest in change—above and beyond what we spend to merely operate our military and health-care systems. Our health care and national security may not be perfect, but there is little question about our international placement in these fields.

By contrast, we invest virtually nothing in changing our schools. Education research-and-development spending at the federal government level is 1/100th of what we spend in health care. Why, then, are we surprised when our K–12 schools are far from the envy of the world? We spend a staggering sum, $400 billion a year, to run the schools we inherited from one hundred years ago. At the same time, we are investing, by modern R&D standards, only a pittance ($260 million) to design and test the next generation of schools. As a result, we get exactly what we pay for—out-of-date school designs.

Our local school districts don’t have the scale to take on these R&D initiatives. The private sector of K–12 education, which is still in a fledgling stage, does not have the resources, either. And if you expect philanthropy to come to the rescue, think again. The endowment of just one Ivy League college is more than ten times all the annual giving to our public schools. Only one institution in America has the scale required to fund the invention of our next generation of public schools: our federal government. If 15,000,000 less-than-literate students are not enough to move it to action, let’s hope, for the sake of our children, that the looming threat of second-class economic citizenry in the 21st century does the trick.

-Chris Whittle is founder and CEO of Edison Schools and author of Crash Course: Imagining a Better Future for Public Education.

ON THE HENRY LEVIN COMMENTARY

Editors’ note: Since Henry Levin considered, in some detail, the record of Edison Schools in his essay on the future, Chris Whittle responds here to Levin’s essay.

Henry Levin’s essay criticizes the involvement of the private sector in public education, Edison Schools, and my vision of public education’s future. These responses to selected points are intended to provoke thought on the overall thrust of his argument.

Economies of Scale. Superintendents struggling with the loss of scale resulting from enrollment declines would strongly disagree with Levin’s contention that there are few economies of scale in education. Economies of scale occur at the system level—not the school level. As in well-run, large, public-school systems, Edison’s central costs have improved significantly, in percentages, over time, which is a key reason Edison is now profitable.

Academic Results. Levin calls Edison’s academic results “mediocre” and cites a recent RAND report and his view of results in Baltimore and Philadelphia. Readers can draw their own conclusions with data in hand, but this much we know: In the fall of 2002, Edison was assigned to manage 20 schools in Philadelphia with an average proficiency of only 6 percent. Proficiency has nearly quadrupled in 36 months. These schools—among the district’s most challenging—have kept pace with a district achieving the highest gains among America’s major urban systems. Edison was recently asked to manage two additional schools in Philadelphia.

Since the fall of 2000, Edison has managed three schools in Baltimore. The average ranking of those schools in 2000 was 101 out of 117 district schools. Today, their average ranking is 57 out of 115 schools, with one school going from 107th to 24th. Our contract there was recently extended.

The RAND report says, “From 2002 to 2004, average proficiency rates in currently operating Edison schools increased by 11 percentage points in reading and 17 percentage points in math. Meanwhile, average proficiency rates in a matched set of comparison schools increased by lesser amounts,
9 percentage points in reading and 13 percentage points in math (although the Edison advantage is statistically significant only in math).”

Greater Funding. Levin incorrectly says that Edison receives more funding than typical public schools. Edison on average receives resources below those of public schools in the cities where it works. Exceptions are rare. An excellent report from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation Institute shows charter-school funding well below comparable public school funding.

The Model. Levin uses a 40-year-old study to support his view that our current education model cannot be changed. However, a miraculous technological leap occurred on the way to the 21st century: the invention of the Internet and the PC. Levin correctly states that early uses of such technologies in classrooms have not worked well, but Wright’s first flight did not go very far either.

Hope vs. Pessimism. Mr. Levin foresees the “struggle of incremental reforms in a system designed to conserve rather than transform society.” While America’s public educators want to conserve democracy and freedom, they do not want an education design that dooms 15 million children to near illiteracy. We can change this outcome by transforming a model that may have once served us well but is now out of date.

— Chris Whittle

The post Dramatic Growth is Possible appeared first on Education Next.

Chris Whittle’s projection for 2030 is an elaborated echo of the 1990s, when for-profit education-management organizations (EMOs) proposed a mission and rationale for transforming American education. The standard fare promoted by those EMOs and their venture-capital sources was that the education industry was the next big opportunity for private capital, following the profitable example of the earlier HMO transformation of health care.

The lead financial actor at the beginning of that EMO era was Merrill Lynch, advisor to Whittle’s company, Edison Schools. Merrill Lynch published The Book of Knowledge, a 193-page report on the $740 billion education and training market. Distributed widely to potential investors, The Book identified five “Big Ideas” that would transform the education and training industry over the next decade. But the book’s story begins with the ostensible failure of public education and its rapidly rising costs, mediocre student achievement results, poor high-school graduation rates, and limp international rankings. The reason given for this miserable showing was the inefficiency of government.

Business enterprise efficiency would rescue the schools through organizational improvements; selection, training, assessing, and rewarding of principals and teachers on the basis of performance; and adoption of promising education technologies. Sophisticated business projections were conjured to assure potential investors that these enterprises would be highly profitable (doing well) while serving society (doing good).

The Wrong Assumptions

Not all has gone well, and Edison is a good case study, having lost more than six hundred million dollars of its investors’ funding. Edison has one of the most complete models among the EMOs. It has truly attempted to deliver a quality school, but the evidence on raising student achievement shows no revolution in results. According to a recent evaluation by the RAND Corporation and comparisons in Philadelphia and Baltimore, Edison’s record is not very different from that of similar public schools, though it has received greater funding than its public counterparts.

Somehow, in projecting to the future, Whittle posits a large number of changes in the basic institutions for delivering education, education research, and education personnel, based on the “success” of the EMOs, especially Edison. And despite the financial losses and mediocre achievement results, he believes that schools should be turned over to large businesses—with “economies of scale.” Teachers’ salaries would be double those of today to obtain the best professional talent; new training institutions for principals would arise through collaborative efforts of top business and education schools to churn out exemplary leadership; and government would increase funding for education research by a factor of ten or more.

The Whittle scenario also assumes that school districts would retain only a tiny percentage of federal, state, and local revenues, perhaps 1 percent, and limit themselves to “monitoring and quality-control” oversight of schools; private contractors would receive the other 99 percent. National and international education firms will compete for these contracts, and their retention by the district will depend on their performance. Teachers will be chosen by contracted schools, but will be employees of both districts and contractors (opening up districts to liability for personnel whom they neither select nor supervise). Teachers’ salaries will reach numbers like $130,000 (adjusted for inflation) at the highest ranks. Principals will earn up to $250,000 with a base of 60 percent of this amount and the remainder in bonuses.

Back to the Future

The complete shift of schools to for-profit contractors seems to be based on the old business claims of the 1990s and Whittle’s selective interpretation of Edison’s record. It is also based on the argument that the contracting firms will benefit from economies of scale that are unavailable to the average school district in the United States. This is a strange and stubborn argument for Edison, which persistently claimed that annual losses in the tens of millions of dollars were due to insufficient numbers of schools. Subsequent expansions led only to larger losses.

Research has shown that beyond very small schools and school districts, there are few opportunities for economies of scale in education because most of the costs increase with enrollments and are not fixed costs that decline with additional clients. In fact, the number of teachers and other employees per student has increased in recent decades (see Figure 1). Further, size tends to depersonalize education. As a consequence, the leading edge of school reform is the promotion of smaller rather than larger units.

Whittle supports his assertion on scale economies with a table (page 180 in his book) that contrives the appearance of economies of scale by comparing a school district spending $28 million in 2030 with a hypothetical contractor receiving $25 billion in revenues. The table purports to show where contractors would experience scale economies and how they would yield a profit of 10 percent of revenues. As Yogi Berra would say, It’s déjà vu all over again. It hasn’t worked in the past; there’s no reason to believe it will work in 2030.

Even more puzzling is how schools would prosper with half the teaching personnel. According to Whittle, this would be done largely through replacing teachers with student labor. Educators have long argued for greater participation of students in the education process, but not as a way of reducing costs. Four decades ago, noted economist William Baumol argued that the idea of reducing costs in education and similar labor-intensive industries by substituting capital for labor or less-skilled labor for higher-paid professionals was impractical, at best. According to Baumol, education, by its very nature and its intransigence to change (whether public or private), is a teacher-intensive activity and so cannot benefit from standard approaches to increasing productivity. Equally, it is not possible to eliminate half of the opera singers in a classical opera or to replace two members of a string quartet with music synthesizers as a cost-effective way of improving quality. To this point no one has succeeded in disproving Baumol’s thesis, nor has anyone discovered methods of providing the same education with half the number of teachers.

What Else Won’t Work

Whittle’s prime example of assigning students to peer tutoring is already used widely in public schools. I don’t know a single situation where this method has reduced teachers’ responsibilities. It is a form of supplementary instruction for selected students who are far behind other students (particularly for those with learning disabilities), not a substitute for regular teachers. And peer tutoring is not “free.” The cost of effective peer tutoring is higher than alternatives, such as computer-assisted instruction or smaller class sizes or longer school days, because of the needs for adult personnel to coordinate, train, and monitor the student tutors. If peer tutoring has the capability of replacing half of our teachers, why wait until 2030?

Whittle suggests that charters and EMOs would do well to establish demonstration schools to show how we can use student chores to reduce the teachers by half. But it is remarkable that at present he can promise a sweeping future based on this phenomenon without dredging up even a single example as a proof of its existence.

Whittle also assumes (in his book) that the “wireless revolution” will contribute to independent learning and a reduction in the need for teachers. But even if this claim were supported by evidence, the record shows that technology did not reduce teacher cost significantly enough to make Edison profitable or to create superior student achievement. Larry Cuban’s history of the overblown promises of education technology (in his 2001 book Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom) provides a concrete picture of why we cannot count on technology. Of course, even as astute an observer as Bertrand Russell got this wrong in predicting in 1933 that instruction by motion pictures would require only large auditoriums with low-paid classroom monitors. Whittle is in good company in his zeal for a strategy that has always generated more vision than reality.

In his infomercial on behalf of for-profit education enterprises, there is a technological determinism that assumes no opposition from or conflict with special interests such as teacher unions, administrators, and education bureaucracies. Every projected change is in the interest of all groups, a harmonious solution to what ails the schools. Even teacher organizations that would lose half of their membership and half of their collegial help at the school site will capitulate to the siren song of higher salaries. And new approaches to teacher training will enable them to get better results with half of the labor force and student assistance.

What Can and Should Be Done

Whittle’s assertion of the dominant role of for-profit firms in 2030 and the feasibility of halving the teaching force are not demonstrated to be feasible or desirable. Of course, the education system will be pressed to improve, especially on behalf of children from families in poverty, minorities, and immigrants, who will eventually compose a key component of the labor force. We will also need to find ways to ensure that all students master basic skills and that a substantial portion master the thinking skills and collaborative methods that will ensure a productive polity and prosperous economy. It should be noted that there has never been a golden age in education in which these goals were met, and the future will represent a struggle of incremental reforms in a system designed to “conserve” rather than transform society.

What types of reforms?

I agree completely with Whittle that we must improve the selection and training of teachers and principals, and increase funding for education research. Raising teachers’ salaries is absolutely necessary to get the best talent into teaching. At the same time, the system needs better career ladders for teachers and far more effective approaches to selection, mentoring, and evaluation in order to enlist such talent productively. Teacher turnover, a high-cost item, must be reduced. Almost half of the teachers in Ohio’s charter schools quit their schools in the four-year period between 2000 and 2004, in comparison with about 8 percent in conventional public schools and 12 percent in high-poverty, urban public schools, suggesting that new organizations are not a magic formula for school stability. Although technology is unlikely to replace many teachers, it is still a powerful tool for raising education quality by providing a vehicle for topic enrichment, student research, more challenging student projects, and greater student engagement. At the same time, the education community must be open to new forms of enterprise wherever it can make a contribution, such as contracting of specific instructional services, teacher cooperatives, and information technologies that enhance evaluation of students’ knowledge and capabilities.

If present evidence is to be used, two potent contributions to raising student achievement will be widespread: effective preschool programs for all children and intensive interventions that build capacities of families to support the education of their children. I believe that both of these will be prevalent by 2030 because they show evidence of great promise even today. If I had my druthers, I would also add that education of at-risk students will shift from remediation and “drill and kill” to enrichment and acceleration, as we have tried to accomplish with the Accelerated Schools Project over the past two decades. The instructional approaches used in the best gifted and talented programs, with their emphasis on engagement, depth, and real-world applications, reinforce both basic skill development and more advanced learning. And the implementation of powerful and widespread approaches to building parents’ capacity to support out-of-school learning will gain support from community organizations.

Where will the money come from? By recouping funds that are “lost” to society because of poor education we can easily fund the improvements. Recent work by economists and other academic researchers—some of it presented at a recent symposium at Columbia University (“The Social Costs of Inadequate Education”)—concluded that such investments have large payoffs in raising national income and tax revenues and reducing the cost of public services. For example, improvements in the availability and quality of preschool education would save large expenditures on special education and grade retention and improve high-school graduation rates and college attendance, especially among the poor, minorities, and immigrants. Just the loss in state and federal tax revenues from the 23 million high-school dropouts has been estimated at $50 billion a year. High-school dropouts pay about one-half the taxes of high-school graduates, and about one-third the taxes of those with more than a high-school diploma. Public health costs for the estimated 600,000 high-school dropouts in 2004 totaled about $58 billion. Some $10 billion could be saved each year in public assistance through universal high-school graduation; a mere 10 percent increase in the high-school completion rate would shave about $14 billion from the cost of crime. By investing in more productive educational practices, we can recoup magnitudes of investment that can easily fund the improvements set out above. And we don’t have to wait until 2030.

-Henry Levin is professor of economics and education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

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The headlines in those early years of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) were consistently alarming. “As Standards Rise, Too Few Teachers,” was the one the Christian Science Monitor story referred to above. “Federal Education Report Finds Shortage of Qualified Teachers,” noted a headline in the Washington Times the following year.

In the flurry of activity surrounding implementation of NCLB’s student proficiency mandates, the federal requirement to have a “highly qualified” teacher in every classroom by 2005 seemed more like an impossible goal. The concern predated NCLB, of course: “Clinton Addresses U.S. Teacher Shortage” was a headline from August 2000. But NCLB’s demand that all new teachers hold at least a baccalaureate degree or higher, be fully licensed, and have demonstrated subject-matter competence in the areas they teach surely heightened the anxiety. However, 2005 has come and gone and the highly qualified–teacher crisis never happened. Why not?

The shortest answer is that the dearth of qualified teachers is largely a myth. So is the related notion that raising teachers’ pay across the board would bring significantly more qualified numbers to the profession. In fact, the resources provided to most public schools are adequate to recruit and retain a competent teaching workforce. A much more productive line of inquiry is one that explores the costs of the inefficient, rigid structure of the teacher compensation system and the possible benefits of replacing it with a more market-based system.

In Search of a Qualified-Teacher Shortage

Are school districts really beset by a shortage of the qualified teachers needed to meet regulatory standards? Despite the headlines telling us of the teacher drought, there are at present no nationwide data that would help us answer this question. One reason for this is that licensing standards vary from state to state. The most commonly used national data file, the Schools and Staffing Survey, includes a survey in which roughly 42,000 public school teachers were asked about their education backgrounds and teaching credentials. In the most recent available survey (1999–2000), 90 percent of public school teachers reported that they have regular state certification in their primary teaching area.

Administrative data from states or school-district report cards tend to reinforce these findings, even in those states that are said to have the most significant problems. California certainly represents one of the most highly stressed public-school systems in the nation. The school-age population is growing rapidly. The state has major fiscal difficulties. Much of the stress is self-inflicted: recall that in 1996 voters on a statewide ballot passed a class-size reduction initiative that greatly exacerbated teacher shortages and led to an exodus of teachers from many urban classrooms as suburban jobs opened up. In spite of these travails, in school year 2003–04, 89.4 percent of California public school teachers held full teaching credentials in their teaching area. Another 5.3 percent were in supervised intern or pre-intern programs. Only 5.2 percent were teaching with substandard credentials (emergency or waiver).

Still, virtually no school district is in full compliance with licensing laws. Missouri, for instance, tracks the percentage of courses taught by teachers with inappropriate licenses. During the 2002–03 school year, only two Missouri K–12 school districts had no courses taught by an inappropriately licensed teacher. The state average for teachers without proper credentials was 9.5 percent per district. Worth noting is that the prevalence of such teachers seems to have little to do with per pupil district spending. In fact, the district data show that higher spending per student is associated with a decrease in the percentage of courses taught by licensed teachers (see Figure 1).

Why is noncompliance unrelated to spending? Presumably, districts with higher relative pay would have lower turnover and thus fewer vacancies. They would also have larger applicant pools and thus more qualified applicants per vacancy.

But consider teacher licensing laws in Missouri. Like most other states, Missouri issues a single license to practice medicine, law, dentistry, accounting, nursing, and veterinary medicine. However, in the area of K–12 education, its Department of Elementary and Secondary Education currently issues 260 different certificates and endorsements (171 vocational, 89 nonvocational). This is only part of the story. There are levels of certification (permanent or provisional) for all of these and a host of grandfathered codes. The result of all this is 781 valid certification codes in the master teacher-certification file. And there is nothing unique about Missouri.

Now combine this complex licensing system with the dynamics of the teacher labor market, and the result is less than complete compliance even under the best of conditions. At the district level, roughly 10–12 percent of teaching positions turn over each year. Many of the exits are temporary, for child rearing or other family matters, and roughly one-third of district-level turnover comprises interdistrict transfers of experienced teachers. Inevitably, many school administrators find themselves scrambling against short deadlines to fill classrooms with qualified teachers.

Even with qualified teachers available, some classrooms necessarily will be filled with teachers whose certification papers are not in order. Perhaps the teacher’s license has expired and new approval is pending. Or maybe the state regulators have simply misplaced the certification paperwork.

Given the byzantine complexity of state teacher-licensing laws, the natural dynamics of the teacher labor market, and bureaucratic delay in granting and transferring credentials, full compliance is nearly impossible. Teacher labor markets likely have a natural rate of noncompliance that is above zero for many of the same reasons that the national economy has a “natural rate of unemployment” that is above zero. For this reason, it is unrealistic to hold school districts to a standard that requires perfect compliance with state licensing and NCLB requirements.

Pay: Teachers Compared with Other Professionals

Interestingly enough, pay is not the main stumbling block to more, and more-qualified, teachers. Despite the conventional wisdom that teachers are underpaid relative to other professions (thereby depressing the quality of the pool of teachers that schools can recruit and retain), teachers are paid a salary that is comparable to that of other professionals.

I compared teacher and nonteacher pay for 2003 in the 15 largest metropolitan areas, accounting for roughly one-third of the U.S. population. We can safely assume that they represent roughly one-third of the public school teachers as well. For the comparison, I selected occupations for which college degrees (but generally not postgraduate degrees) are common or required and for which U.S. Department of Labor data are available for many of these metropolitan areas. I do not claim that these occupations represent the relevant nonteaching earnings for teachers in all fields, but they probably are relevant for some. More likely, these occupations represent the general wage structure in the local labor market. Most teachers take jobs near where they grew up or went to college. So it isn’t national earnings of, say, computer analysts that matter; it’s the earnings of computer analysts in the local labor market. The weekly salary calculations shown in Figure 2 are based on pay for weeks worked rather than weeks under contract. Measuring pay by weeks worked increases the weekly pay for nonteachers because they have more paid leave than teachers.

The analysis of these data shows that, in these 15 metropolitan areas, teachers have a very large premium in comparison with clinical lab technicians and social workers. Compared with librarians, teachers have virtual parity in annual earnings but a 20 percent premium in weekly earnings. Their annual pay is roughly 10 percent below computer programmers, but on a weekly basis is 20 percent above. Teachers’ annual pay is less favorable than that of architects, engineers, managers, and administrators, but weekly pay is very similar. In sum, these data suggest that on a weekly basis, teachers’ pay is quite competitive with that of many other professions.

Data from a survey of households by the Census Bureau’s March 2003 Current Population Survey reinforces the findings based on the Department of Labor data. The data from this survey enable us to look at teachers’ pay in both urban and rural areas. Since wages tend to be lower across the board in rural areas, one will overestimate the nationwide teacher versus nonteacher gaps unless one takes urban and rural pay differences into account. Once we do so, the annual pay of female teachers rises to 96 percent of that of other female college-educated workers. Thus, on a weekly basis, female teachers earn more on average than nonteachers.

Anecdotal data also suggest that, even setting aside the enormous benefit of the job security that accompanies tenure, the fringe benefits of public school teachers compare favorably with those in the private sector. According to recently released Department of Labor data, insurance (primarily health insurance) and retirement contributions are a substantially larger percentage of total compensation for teachers compared with professional employees in private-sector employment (see Figure 3). Most teachers are not covered by the federal Social Security system, so legally required contributions by their employers are somewhat smaller for teachers, but overall, benefits total 20.2 percent of payroll for teachers and 17.0 percent for private-sector managers and professionals.

Whether we look at salary or fringe benefits, there seems to be ample evidence that, when compared with other professions, teachers are paid adequately enough to attract qualified individuals to the job.

Better Teachers’ Pay Does Not Mean Better Student Outcomes

Even if our nation’s schools are not beset by a widespread shortage of qualified teachers and teachers are paid salaries comparable to other professionals, there are still those who believe that teachers’ pay is too low, that their salaries are simply not commensurate with our expectations of a good education for our children. This conviction, which we can call “social underinvestment,” views teachers’ qualifications as a continuum. We are underinvesting in teacher quality in the sense that a dollar increase in teachers’ pay would yield more than a dollar of benefit to society in the form of student achievement gains. However, research to date finds little evidence of a strong positive effect of teachers’ pay on student achievement.

One review finds that 14 of 17 studies that use student-level data and include measures of previous student achievement to assess the value that a teacher adds to student learning showed teachers’ pay to have no effect on student achievement. Two sophisticated studies of teachers’ effects conducted in 2005 cast further doubt on a positive wage effect. Brian Jacob and Lars Lefgren find no relationship between teachers’ pay and their performance in a mid-sized, western school district (see “When Principals Rate Teachers,” research, page 58); and Eric Hanushek, Steven Rivkin, and Daniel O’Brien, in a 2005 working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, report no relationship between teacher productivity and changes in pay, suggesting that surrounding districts do not pull the most effective teachers from the city by offering higher salaries. Moreover, even in studies finding a positive effect, there is no evidence that across-the-board pay increases are a cost-efficient policy.

To supplement this research evidence, one can also learn from the private-school market for teachers. Suppose, for instance, that the benefits of higher teachers’ pay did, in fact, outweigh the costs, and that public schools were setting teachers’ pay inefficiently low. If that were the case, one would expect to see private schools, which operate in a very competitive market, paying teachers more. After all, private-school parents should be willing to pay higher tuition to support higher-quality teachers if it enhances their own children’s achievement. And many of these same parents will soon be paying college tuition rates, far in excess of those in K–12.

There are, of course, legitimate objections to public–private comparisons. First, many private schools have a religious orientation and are staffed by teachers of the same religious denomination. To the extent that such schools are advancing a religious mission, they and their teachers are not comparable to public K–12 schools. Second, private schools are generally more selective in admissions than public schools and, on average, have students with higher socio economic status. To the extent that this results in better-behaved and more academically motivated students in private-school classrooms, it makes for a more attractive teaching environment.

I attempted to compare public and private school teachers’ salaries in a way that would address these concerns. I analyzed earnings data only for private school teachers in nonreligious private schools. In addition, I excluded private schools that have a special emphasis (such as special education, Montessori, Waldorf) and focused on schools that most closely resemble traditional public schools in mission.

Even with these adjustments, the data suggest that private school teachers earn only 87 percent on average of what public school teachers earn. A critic of private–public comparisons might still argue that private school teaching is not comparable to public school teaching since the socioeconomic status of the former students is higher. In order to make public schools more comparable to private ones, therefore, I exclude more than 90 percent of the public school teacher sample and retain public school teachers only in low-poverty (less than 5 percent eligible for free or reduced-price lunch) suburban schools. In such cases, private school teachers earn even less, just 80 percent of what their public school counterparts earn. And not only are private school salaries lower, but the benefits are lower as well.

It is possible that teachers find the ability of private schools to exclude unruly students a form of “compensation,” but the fact that we observe selective private schools paying much lower teachers’ salaries suggests that whatever positive effects higher teachers’ pay could have on teachers’ quality, administrators must believe that the outlay would not produce commensurate benefits in student achievement, or at least benefits of sufficient magnitude that parents would be willing to pay for them.

The Bottom Line

In the end, the most reasonable standard for determining if teachers’ pay or quality is adequate is whether a district is meeting current regulatory standards. Some skeptics argue that qualified-teacher standards are not very high. And no doubt there is some merit in this charge. But what standards do we use?

However seriously we may wish to improve student achievement through higher teacher quality, the research to date does not provide observable buttons to push. In fact, the evidence linking any type of teacher training, licensing, or testing to student achievement is mixed at best. While measures of teachers’ general academic skills, such as SAT scores and college selectivity, are often statistically significant predictors of teachers’ effectiveness in raising student achievement, their effects are modest in size.

All of this virtually guarantees shortages, or recruitment difficulties, in some fields and schools at some time, even if the overall level of resources for pay and benefits in the district are more than adequate. For example, in 2004 there were 25 applicants for every elementary-school vacancy in Missouri, but just 5 for each chemistry opening. If a single-salary schedule for a school district yields a large surplus of qualified applicants for elementary education, social studies, and physical education, but no qualified applicants in physics or speech pathology, is teachers’ pay in this district adequate? By suppressing performance or field-based pay differentials, these schedules may be driving able teachers out of the profession. A district that insists it must raise the pay of all teachers in the district because it cannot recruit a certified speech pathologist is not spending money wisely.

Finally, state licensing standards must have some flexibility. As noted above, the large number of certifications and endorsements guarantees that virtually no district can assure that every class will be taught by a teacher with the right certificate and endorsement. Indeed, most of the “out of field” teaching in public schools would disappear overnight if states issued a single license in K–12 teaching as they do in medicine, law, accounting, and other professions. Short of that, aggressive development of “alternative route” licensing programs that target existing vacancies holds considerable promise. Teachers in some small rural schools cannot be licensed in every field in which their teaching skills are required. Here, too, licensing standards must have some flexibility.

In short, there may be a good case for raising the pay of some teachers—such as those in fields or schools that are difficult to staff or who are exceptionally effective in the classroom. However, there is little evidence that across-the-board increases in relative pay for all teachers are necessary to staff public schools with qualified teachers.

Michael Podgursky is professor of economics at the University of Missouri–Columbia.

The post Is There a “Qualified Teacher” Shortage? appeared first on Education Next.

Among schools all across Milwaukee that autumn, word about the test-box rebellion spread quickly, if only because acts of subversion were such rarities in a system where power was closely held by bureaucrats and where schools were expected to respect, honor, and obey the central office.

At a time when Milwaukee’s schools were attempting to show they could compete with new publicly funded alternatives, Fritsche Middle School became the poster child for public schools’ trying to reinvent themselves. Andrekopoulos, who at the time was a student of a national performance-management program, proved what could be done when sound decisions were made by entrepreneurial leaders at the school level rather than at the central office. (To remind the bureaucrats in the Milwaukee Public Schools that they existed to serve their school, for example, the Fritsche team later developed a report card, which it used to grade all of the various central office departments, based primarily on the value added each provided for Fritsche’s teachers and students.)

Do Andrekopoulos and Fritsche Middle School represent the future of American education? Or are they the exceptions that prove the rule about immovable bureaucracies? Though it could be a bit of both, there is increasing evidence to suggest that entrepreneurship can, and does, exist within the modern public-sector education system.

More educators and school leaders are taking risks to transform their classrooms, schools, and districts. They take ownership of the success or failure of everything that happens under their watch, often welcoming innovative ways of improving the delivery of education to students. In many cases, these public-sector school entrepreneurs have a keen ability to recognize opportunities that exist for improvements to (or abandonment of) the status quo in their schools and to find imaginative ways to take advantage of those opportunities to benefit students.

Modern public-school systems have a poor track record in taking bold steps to solve clearly identified problems. Poor student achievement in the general sense has been widely documented and reported, as has the significant achievement gap that exists between white students and their black and Hispanic counterparts. Instead of changing to solve the performance problems, however, our public-school system seems to have absorbed them, made them part of the system.

Schools like Fritsche in Milwaukee have historically been the exception within public education. Increasingly, though, the trends that made Fritsche possible, including strong leadership in the principal’s office and shifts in power caused by private-school vouchers and charter schools, are apparent throughout the United States.

Andrekopoulos advised other schools in the district on how to control their own destinies, then went on to become the superintendent of the Milwaukee Public Schools in 2002. He described the new environment: “It’s a matter of schools’ self-actualizing and pushing the school community to take on a leadership role, to take ownership.” The plethora of choices available to Milwaukee’s parents has forced the Milwaukee schools over time to be more responsive and enterprising. As Andrekopoulos says, “Innovation is now part of our DNA.”

The New Educators

Not every education entrepreneur is a Bill Andrekopoulos. But the increasing number of such risk-takers suggests that there are others out there and that they may just be changing the landscape of education. They are independent thinkers, creative bureaucrats; their efforts are being encouraged by programs like Teach For America, alternative certification programs like New York City’s Teaching Fellows, and leadership training initiatives like the Leadership Academy and Urban Network for Chicago, New York City’s Leadership Academy, and San Diego’s Institute for Learning. The upside of these programs is that they attract professionals who are less inclined to settle for bureaucratic inertia and incompetence and care little what is said about them in the teachers’ lounge or at the administrator’s conference table. They are the kinds of teachers and administrators willing to go public, in the press, at town hall meetings, or in Internet blogs, and they’re not afraid to talk about real barriers that classroom teachers face within their school systems. Education writers across the nation are drawn to them because they are considerably more interesting than the status quo.

Mitch Kurz is one of these new educators. “I am determined to be a foot soldier in the movement to inject equity into our education system,” said the 51-year-oldexecutive. Kurz left his job managing 8,000 employees in 250 offices in 77 countries for the advertising firm Young and Rubicam in 2002 to teach in a Bronx middle school.

He graduated from New York’s Teaching Fellows program, created in 2000 by former chancellor Harold Levy, who himself left his job as a corporate lawyer for Citigroup to take on the nation’s largest school system. Instead of three years at a teachers college talking about teaching in the abstract, Kurz participated in an intense summer program and then jumped right into the classroom while earning a master’s in education at night through the teaching fellows program.

Beginning their work without formal pedagogical training in education schools, some of these career changers are more open than traditional entrants to the profession to discovering and implementing teaching methods that they can see work with their students. (For example, on leaving the advertising world, Kurz found classroom discipline to be the biggest challenge in his school, and he set out to find the best strategies to deal with disruptive students.) Critics have complained that such career changers are too inexperienced and ill-prepared to be helpful to children. Stanford’s Linda Darling-Hammond has argued that they tend not to stick around in their jobs. Groups like Teach For America have disputed that concern, pointing to research it commissioned that found their corps members outperformed veteran and certified teachers in their schools. Aside from friction created by education-school scholars like Darling-Hammond, however, career changers face other obstacles in school systems, which, at their core, tend to be disdainful of those who exercise initiative or who rock the boat. Many New York teaching fellows in the early years reported that they felt like second-class citizens in their schools and were even set up to fail by administrators who had little interest in seeing them succeed. Chuck Lavaroni, co-director of the International Academy for Educational Entrepreneurship (IAEE), notes, “While the ‘system’ says it respects and wants creativity, more often than not, it does nothing to encourage or support it.” The IAEE, a California-based organization, encourages and supports teachers who turn innovative ideas about how to improve education into action. “The creative teacher,” says Lavaroni, “often has to literally fight for time, money, resources, and/or equipment necessary to truly create and become involved in all aspects of the creative process. The ‘system’ makes it difficult for teachers to share ideas, plan mutual activities, and build upon each other’s strengths and interests.”

Sometimes teachers find themselves at odds with the school administration’s low expectations for their students and staff. Zelman Bokser, 42, a Fulbright Scholar with a Ph.D. in music who had taught at the university level, couldn’t have been hired as a New

York City teacher without the alternative certification program because he didn’t have the required education-school courses under his belt. But even after landing a teaching job in 2000, he had to overcome institutional habits that discouraged innovation. His proposal to teach violin to students in his struggling Brooklyn school was met with disbelief:  “Too difficult,” a waste of time. These kids had enough trouble getting through the school day, administrators counseled; why throw more hurdles their way? One administrator advised him to forget the whole idea, suggesting she was doing him a favor by preventing the failure that was sure to follow.

But as a career changer with an attitude, Bokser didn’t let the naysayers stop him. Two years later, as his students tuned their violins inside Manhattan’s Hammerstein Ballroom for a performance welcoming that year’s crop of new teaching fellows, Bokser reminded his peers what they were up against by telling the story of the nay-saying administrator.

Rebels with a Cause

Some call them crackerjacks, others call them hard-nosed, and still others would say they are just difficult. For our purposes, we’ll refer to them here as education’s James Deans; except that these subversives are rebels with a cause. Perhaps it’s the principal in Queens, New York, who blatantly disregards the clear directions of her regional supervisors by throwing away the kindergarten curriculum because she has concluded that her kids haven’t even come close to mastering the skills taught in the pre-kindergarten curriculum (instead using a pre-K curriculum that she has discovered produces better results). Or maybe it’s the principal in Jersey City, New Jersey, who figures out it is easier and more efficient to get school supplies for her teachers by creating an account at the local Staples store than to go through central purchasing. These James Deans use what they consider to be common sense when picking and choosing their battles within the system’s regulatory framework. Often they are driven by their determination to simply do the right thing.

Like some of the maverick school leaders in Milwaukee, the education rebels tend to become folk heroes of sorts, and they often have rather complicated power relationships with administrators and union leaders. They also tend to have a healthy chip on their shoulders and some degree of confidence in their own ability to make things happen. Often they remain employed only because they can point to measurable results and have used their entrepreneurial skills to create political support among key stakeholders like politicians, business leaders, parents, and the media. School superintendents tend to allow them to exist quietly at the margins rather than tempt the political fates by messing with them.

Anthony Lombardi, principal of Public School 49 in Middle Village,Queens, is a perfect example of a James Dean, but there are thousands of them quietly forging their way through dysfunctional school systems nationwide, getting the job done for their students and teachers. On Lombardi’s desk,which he moved into the hallway to create more classroom space, are three portraits of Frank Sinatra and a copy of Regulations and Procedures for Pedagogical Ratings. He loves the crooner, but doesn’t believe a word of Regulations and Procedures. For principals who want to rid their schools of incompetent teachers, the directions contained in the manual make disciplining bad teachers counterproductive. “It’s impossible to prove incompetency,” Lombardi says. In giving a teacher an “unsatisfactory” rating, a principal is preparing for a two-year process that may not even result in the teacher’s being removed from the school. More important,once a teacher gets an “unsatisfactory” rating, he or she is prevented from transferring elsewhere, further adding to the probability that such ratings are futile exercises for school leaders.

Lombardi is obviously not the first principal to figure this out: of the city’s 80,000 school teachers, only a few hundred a year on average receive ratings of “unsatisfactory” from their principals. Lombardi’s entrepreneurial skills, however, persuaded him not to give up. Rather than avoiding paperwork, he crafted careful memos to all of his teachers based on his in-class observations. He drafted detailed plans for improvement for each teacher, set the bar high, and encouraged all of his teachers to work according to high professional standards. In short, he created a climate in which his weakest teachers found themselves asking whether they even wanted to stick around at the school to see whether or not they could rise to the occasion. “I’ve set a high expectation and when they hadn’t met it, they had to make a professional decision if they wanted to be a member of this staff,” Lombardi said. It becomes a kind of compact between the bad teacher and the principal: he won’t give the “unsatisfactory” rating if they agree to take their act to some other school.

Lombardi has been able to survive through several regime changes in the city’s school scene in large part because these schemes have paid off. In 2002 the school made it onto the list of the city’s 200 most-improved schools. Test scores in math and reading shot through the roof at the 500-student school under Lombardi’s leadership. Clearly as a result of his sidestepping the normal way of doing business, PS 49 students and teachers are better-off today. The school was even recognized by the New York State Education Department in 2004 for its success in narrowing the achievement gap between white and minority students, and it has received numerous other awards from business and civic groups for its success.

Another warrior is Mary Beth Minkley. In the mid-1990s she was a principal at Congress Elementary in Milwaukee. She, too, got used to hearing about all the things she wasn’t allowed to do and got used to ignoring it. She managed to start the city’s first year-round school, then battled bureaucrats who refused to fix the air-conditioning in the summer months. When she needed more space to accommodate the swelling student population of kids who suddenly wanted to be a part of her popular school, her bosses warned her to slow down. At a 1999 breakfast honoring her work in creating the year-round

school,Minkley told the crowd: “I know there are people from the central office in the audience, but you made things extremely difficult for us when we were trying to make this happen.” (Minkley retired from the Milwaukee Public Schools soon thereafter and became an administrator in the Racine, Wisconsin, Unified School District.)

Planting Seeds of Change

Despite the obvious successes of people like Lombardi and Minkley, the question remains: Are they the exceptions that prove the rule? Is there anything systemic about what is happening? Lombardi, through his careful consideration of which rules are worth following and which are worth avoiding, has effectively taken care of business for his school, but he admits that he has done so at the expense of the city’s other schools, which have been forced to accept bad teachers who have been driven out of his building with “satisfactory” work evaluations in their files. “I made my school better, but I made your system even worse,” Lombardi told the city council’s education committee during 2003 hearings on the impact of contractual work rules on the running of good schools.

In fact, creating leaders like Lombardi and Minkley is what a number of people have turned their attention to. A growing number of entrepreneurial programs, like the legendary Johnny Appleseed, focus on planting seeds to produce school leaders who will someday lead transformations at the school level. The goal? An army of agents for change.

The Leadership Academy and Urban Network for Chicago (LAUNCH) is one such agent. A joint effort of the Chicago Public Schools, Northwestern University, and the union that represents principals in the Chicago schools, this program to train new school leaders was started in 1998. The program intended “to seize that opportunity by finding and training the best and brightest candidates,” according to Albert Bertini, an education professor at the University of Chicago at the time, “creating a critical mass of ‘change agents’with the promise of transforming individual schools and—potentially—the entire system.”

Aspiring principals in LAUNCH participate in hands-on lessons that emphasize leadership and management, in addition to education. Participants take summer courses at Northwestern’s Kellogg Business School and are then paired with a principal mentor for five months of intense professional development. The principals’ union participated in the creation and implementation of LAUNCH, essentially eliminating one potential internal obstacle.

To date, 100 LAUNCH fellows have become principals in the Chicago schools, and many others have assumed other leadership roles within schools and atthe district office. Not wanting to put all of its eggs in one basket, the district also partners with the University of Illinois-Chicago and the nonprofit group New Leaders for New Schools to help find and train promising change agent school leaders. Similar leadership programs have been run in districts like St. Paul, Minnesota; Columbus, Ohio; Norfolk, Virginia; and elsewhere.

As mentioned, seed-sowing programs such as these, because they are aligned with and sanctioned by the official school leadership, tend not to produce the kind of rulebreaking

James Deans mentioned above. (Neither Lombardi nor Minkley graduated from a leadership academy.) The leadership programs tend to encourage their students to look for ways to do a better job of leading schools within the existing rules and framework. On a visit to training sessions conducted at New York’s Leadership Academy in 2004,

I observed a session conducted by the education department’s legal division, instructing principals in how to build an airtight case against an incompetent teacher. The lawyers went over the common technical mistakes that often cause arbitrators to rule against management before they can discuss the substance of the charges. Essentially, these budding school leaders were being taught how to dot there Is and cross their Ts so that they can find effective ways to level the playing field with labor. One longtime administrator who was present for the session remarked to me: “The way it used to work, you were lucky if someone pulled you aside and talked to you about these issues. The labor contracts were something nobody felt comfortable bringing up at meetings and training sessions.”

The NCLB Effect

Of all the types of school entrepreneurs, the one least understood, perhaps, is that which could have the most impact: the NCLB opportunists. These secret entrepreneurs were silent until the 2001 federal No Child Left Behind act and other standards-based reform efforts opened a window of opportunity for them to use their creative and risk-taking skills. They have seized on the new accountability measures to turn around their own struggling schools. These old school entrepreneurs see sanctions for repeated failure as opportunities rather than punishment.

Another new approach is what some believe to be the emergence of “teacher partnerships,” being pioneered in Minnesota and a few other places, in which teachers literally own charter schools and are ultimately accountable for learning. These teachers help select the staff, decide teaching methods and curriculum, evaluate their performance, and decide their compensation.

Similarly, the United Federation of Teachers, the union representing New York City teachers, took the unusually entrepreneurial step in 2005 of applying for and opening its own experimental charter school in an impoverished neighborhood in Brooklyn. The school operates without a principal (it uses a lead teacher), and teachers sit on the schools’ board of directors. Union leaders have said they hope to show through increased student achievement that it is possible to run successful schools in the city within the confines of the teachers’ contract.

Two things that entrepreneurial school leaders have in common is a desire to improve the delivery of education to students and the willingness to try every means imaginable to make it happen. They understand that empowering principals and teachers to be change-agents will create fundamental change in the culture of school systems, a culture that has historically stifled and even frowned on creativity and innovation.

A prominent example of a modern entrepreneurial catalyst is Philadelphia schools’CEO, Paul Vallas. He comes from a nontraditional background, he has little invested in preserving the way things have been done in the past, and his own professional background convinced him that radical change is not only necessary but will occur only with poking and prodding from multiple directions.

Vallas, who helped Mayor Richard Daley transform Chicago’s schools, sent clear messages to entrepreneurial types when he took over in Philadelphia in 2002: your innovative spirit is welcome here, so let’s talk. Business leaders, who for years sat on the sidelines because their efforts to assist the school systems were often squandered by ineffective school leaders and systems, suddenly found hope and became early partners in reform.

Vallas has engaged in internal tinkering and engineering in ways that are not unique, such as breaking up large campuses into smaller learning communities, virtually eliminating middle schools, and attempting to infuse schools with better technology that can be used in conjunction with the city’s instructional programs. But he has also turned Philadelphia into a stomping ground for outside groups trying to push innovation. In that regard, his support from the highest levels of the school system has been unprecedented. Private companies, like Edison Schools, have found a welcome home under Vallas and are operating several schools in his district. The University of Pennsylvania and Temple and St. Joseph’s universities also are now running schools for the system.

While such privatization schemes are often extremely controversial, Vallas has managed to win some degree of support from teachers and from the larger community. From day one he has unveiled a dizzying array of reforms, programs, and partnerships, creating the image that things are moving at lightning speed toward improvement. One teacher union leader went so far as to note, “I don’t remember a superintendent ever being on a honeymoon for three years.”

In addition, businesses that are peripheral to education have been brought onboard as well by Vallas’s vision. The software giant Microsoft is building an experimental new high school in the district. The result is what Thomas Toch, a writer on education, calls “the early stages of a revolution in public education.” Vallas, Toch noted,“has forced the Philadelphia education community to rethink the status quo and question the effectiveness for kids of a system built around rules and regulations designed to protect adults.”

Can We Institutionalize the Incentive to Reform?

Entrepreneurs within the public school system clearly play a role in improving conditions for learning in the schools under their charge. In cases like Philadelphia’s Vallas, their efforts have the potential to go a long way toward transforming entire systems.

It is still not clear whether it is possible for entrepreneurship alone, however, to change the overall culture of public-sector school systems, which are as a rule disdainful of innovation and imagination even in the face of obvious failure.

Entrepreneurial educators face common obstacles in their efforts to improve education: institutional resistance from forces within the system, the bureaucrats, labor unions, education schools, and the state’s tight control over entry to the teaching profession. In fact, there is strong evidence that public-sector school systems themselves are their own most formidable barriers to more entrepreneurial thinking and leadership. Thomas Edison, it could reasonably be argued, would never have been able to invent the lightbulb had educrats been breathing down his neck all day. As Bill Andrekopoulos, who is now superintendent in Milwaukee, puts it, “Creativity and problem solving disappear in a bureaucratic structure.”

Policymakers who wish to unleash more entrepreneurial energy in struggling school systems should consider an approach that makes risk taking more glamorous and rewarding than is currently the case. Pay scales for teachers and principals currently leave little room for incentives that reward risk taking to find better ways to educate children.

As more districts seek ways to attract alternatively certified teachers and administrators, careful consideration should be given to the aspects of plans that provide meaningful training and continuing support for educators coming from other sectors to work in schools. And given the pressure of No Child Left Behind, policymakers should also continue to consider actions that encourage educators to take advantage of the accountability measures in the law to reform their schools. The current climate of ferment has the potential to unleash an unprecedented wave of entrepreneurship from school principals and teachers who wish to be part of the solution rather than the problem. The key question will be whether districts can reinvent themselves in ways that no longer require school leaders to break the rules or to put their own necks on the line to do what is best for their kids. Soon, perhaps even rule followers will be capable of running great schools.

-Joe Williams, a former staff writer on education for the New York Daily News, is a nonresident senior fellow with Education Sector and author of Cheating Our Kids: How Politics and Greed Ruin Education.

The post Breaking the Mold appeared first on Education Next.

The answers to these important policy questions are strongly disputed by both supporters and critics of the NBPTS. Considering the opportunity costs of the millions of dollars spent on the NBPTS and with research documenting that the quality of teaching is the most important within-school variable determining student success, the stakes involved could hardly be higher. In this article, we consider these questions in light of published material and research on the NBPTS and telephone interviews we conducted with prominent stakeholders, leaders of the NBPTS, and policy analysts and researchers holding varied views, pro and con, on the topic.

History, Purpose, and Approach of the NBPTS

The idea for the National Board, first articulated in a speech in 1985 by American Federation of Teachers president Albert Shanker, was a centerpiece of the 1986 report of the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy’s Task Force on Teaching as a Profession, titled “A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century.” The report called for the creation of a national board for professional teaching standards “to establish high standards for what teachers need to know and should be able to do, and to certify teachers who meet that standard”; to restructure schools “while holding them accountable for student progress”; to “restructure the teaching force, and introduce a new category of Lead Teachers …”; and to “relate incentives for teachers to school-wide student performance.”

Launched in 1987, the NBPTS describes itself as “an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan, and nongovernmental organization” whose “mission is to advance the quality of teaching and learning by maintaining high and rigorous standards for what accomplished teachers should know and be able to do, providing a national voluntary system certifying teachers who meet these standards, and advocating related education reforms to integrate National Board Certification in American education and to capitalize on the expertise of National Board Certified Teachers.”

At the outset, the founders of the NBPTS had no idea how time-consuming and expensive the pursuit of its goals would be. It took six years of debate, planning, and development of the standards and assessment process before the first group of teachers was certified by the National Board. While the board originally thought its plan might cost around $50 million, few anticipated how much developing its standards and certification process and campaigning for its acceptance and adoption across the nation would ultimately cost. Total costs to date are about $400 million.

All the standards are based on the five core propositions of the NBPTS: 1) teachers are committed to students and their learning; 2) teachers know the subjects they teach and how to teach those subjects to students; 3) teachers are responsible for managing and monitoring students’ learning; 4) teachers think systematically about their practice and learn from experience; and 5) teachers are members of learning communities. National Board assessments consist of two main parts: portfolio entries and assessment center exercises. Specific entries and exercises vary among content areas (at first just 2, but now 27), but the major parts are consistent. The portfolios consist of videotapes, student products, teaching artifacts, and candidate analyses of their teaching practice. Assessments reflect specific knowledge of content areas and are meant to validate the content of the portfolios.

The fee for certification by the National Board is $2,300. According to the board, “A candidate’s efforts to achieve National Board Certification will likely take the better part of a school year and involve a total of 200-400 hours of work.” Certification must be renewed after ten years. One of the National Board’s accomplishments has been maintaining a high and rigorous standard for certification. Only about 50 percent of candidates are successful in their first effort at certification; this has helped the credibility of the venture with business and political leaders by demonstrating that not everyone meets the board’s high standards. At the same time, the cost-effectiveness of the board’s approach, its focus on what teachers should know and be able to do rather than on the student outcomes or achievement associated with teaching, and its methods of assessing teacher quality, are features that have attracted strong criticism–issues we will return to later in this article.

Whatever the criticisms of the NBPTS, its accomplishments are impressive considering the odds against the effort when it began in 1987. Efforts to create rigorous standards for teachers, to evaluate them against such standards, and to offer differential or “merit pay” fly against the egalitarian ethos of the teaching profession. Such initiatives have always faced strong resistance from teacher unions. Further complicating matters, the two national unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), were very much at odds at the time. Moreover, before the development of the NBPTS, there had been no demand from policymakers or the public for the creation of a cadre of master teachers. As Jane Hannaway and Kendra Bischoff of the Urban Institute have written, the NBPTS “had significant hurdles to clear–both on the supply and demand side. The organization had no certification process, nor was there an existing research basis for assessment. In addition, it was unclear why teachers would opt for this special certification given the prevalence of the single salary schedule.”

How did the NBPTS overcome these obstacles? In a nutshell, it gained extraordinary support from foundation and government leaders through a powerful combination of astute leadership, political savvy, skillful lobbying, and an organizational structure and process that gained legitimacy with educators by giving a majority of the places on the National Board to teachers–two-thirds of the 63 seats on the board, in fact. This led to long-standing criticisms that the board is controlled by the teacher unions, but it is another example of the political savvy of its founders.

As the early leaders of the board sought to reach teachers, they also sought to build the board’s legitimacy among state and federal policymakers as well as business and foundation leaders. Among those working to build support were AFT president Al Shanker, a key force behind the idea from the earliest days, and Mary Futrell of the NEA. Along with this key union leadership, indispensable and remarkably effective leadership came from North Carolina governor Jim Hunt, chair of the board of directors for the first ten years, and James Kelly, president of the board for its first 12 years and a veteran of years of work in education and social policy for the Ford Foundation. Hunt and Kelly were ideal for their roles because of their prominence and wide acceptance as leaders in their respective arenas of politics and foundations. Both were well liked, effective in bipartisan efforts, and extraordinarily well wired into national networks of influence.

As part of the effort to cultivate acceptance of the National Board, Kelly told us that not only was the board composed of a wide array of “blue ribbon” representatives, in an effort to “get all the players to the table,” but also board members were allowed to bring guests to the meetings. Further, Kelly and Hunt traveled together and met with many key business and political leaders across the country. After the NBPTS began certifying teachers, outstanding board-certified teachers were often invited to meetings with governors to discuss why they had sought certification and what they thought about it. The enthusiasm, commitment, and testimonies of these teachers often helped governors see the value of supporting the NBPTS effort with incentives for teachers. Eventually, a nonpartisan policy environment at the state level was established in support of teachers certified by the NBPTS. All 50 states now offer regulatory or legislative support for National Board certification, and a number of states and more than five hundred school districts offer financial incentives. According to the NBPTS, these incentives range from grants to cover the $2,300 certification fee to a $6,000 salary increase in South Carolina and a 12 percent salary bump in North Carolina.

Assessing the Effectiveness of the NBPTS

The NBPTS can be evaluated in terms of its effects on institutional change, student achievement, and cost-effectiveness. On the institutional front, the development of national standards for teaching has clearly had a significant effect on the teaching profession in the United States. As several experts told us, the NBPTS has “changed the conversation” about teaching, within the profession if not outside it. As K-12 students are increasingly held to higher standards, the same is becoming true for teachers. But critics wonder what the NBPTS standards really tell us about the quality of teachers where it counts most: their impact on students and student achievement. Advocates of the National Board refer to the rigor of the standards as well as the process of certification to support their claims that National Board–certified teachers will improve the quality of teaching.

As evidence of the NBPTS’s impact on the profession, David Imig, the former president of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, notes how the standards have affected the design of many teacher-preparation programs. For instance, many master’s candidates expect their program to provide some preparation toward National Board certification. Further, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) now requires that teacher-preparation programs show the influence of NBPTS standards as a condition for accreditation. For example, education schools must provide evidence that their graduates can teach successfully.

As part of the way the NBPTS has “changed the conversation” about teaching, it has gained increasing acceptance in the education profession (including the national teachers’ associations) for performance assessment and for differential certification and pay for outstanding teachers. Even getting the door opened partway on these controversial items has been an accomplishment. Through its growing cadre of NBCTs, moreover, the board is potentially in a position to foster and aid real education reform through the expertise and leadership potential of the NBCTs as mentors, coaches, and school leaders.

At the same time, serious questions remain about the effects of NBCTs on student achievement and about the cost-effectiveness of the NBPTS’s approach to improving the standard of teaching. Certification remains quite expensive in both time and fees, and NBCTs still compose only 1 percent of the U.S. teaching force. In recent years, some state policymakers have begun to question their state’s ability to continue to pay the financial incentives created to encourage teachers to undergo the arduous board-certification process.

Beyond cost-effectiveness, however, a number of critics continue to regard the NBPTS as misguided and question the value of the whole enterprise. In his book, Common Sense School Reform (2004), Frederick Hess says, “In theory, [the NBPTS] is an interesting idea,” but “in execution, it is a disaster.” He sums up his criticisms as follows:

The NBPTS approach undermines commonsense efforts to link teacher compensation or recognition to their effectiveness as a classroom teacher, faculty colleague, and member of the school community. Instead, it has constructed an exhausting, expensive process that wastes time and money while suggesting that the measure of teacher quality is not whether students learn but whether teachers write sufficiently passionate essays about their “commitment” and “reflectiveness.”

Similarly, in a 1999 National Review article, Danielle Dunne Wilcox and Chester Finn wrote, “After a dozen years of R & D and the investment of $120 million, [the NBPTS] cannot demonstrate that its blue-ribbon winners actually produce higher-achieving students. Worse, the board actually rewards teachers for being good at the opposite of what most parents think teachers should excel at. Its idea of a great teacher is one who embraces ‘constructivist’ pedagogy, ‘discovery’ learning, and cultural relativism–not one who imparts to students fundamental knowledge or even has it himself.” Thus, as some of our interviewees agreed, “The NBPTS is focused on inputs rather than outputs. It is all about the quality of the teacher and not about the impact the teacher has on students.”

A lack of research evidence about the effects of NBCTs on students made the National Board especially vulnerable to criticism. This was highlighted in the fracas that occurred in 2002 when one of the critics, J. E. Stone, of East Tennessee State University, released a seven-page report, “The Value-Added Achievement Gains of NBPTS-Certified Teachers in Tennessee.” Stone found that none of the 16 board-certified teachers in Tennessee who taught grades 3-8 (the only grades for which value-added scores were available) met a standard for exceptional teaching set by an incentive program in Chattanooga. Stone concluded that his results “present a serious challenge to NBPTS’s claims” and that “they suggest that public expenditures on NBPTS certification be suspended.”

In a “Goliath takes on David” scenario, this tiny report by a single professor prompted no less than the Education Commission of the States to empanel four independent experts to review the validity of Stone’s research. The panel acknowledged that Stone had addressed an important policy question and that the absence of studies of this type was due in part to “the Board’s own approach in identifying excellent teachers–examining practices rather than the learning of their students,” but concluded that Stone’s study was badly flawed (primarily because his sample of 16 teachers was too small to enable generalizations) and his claims were therefore completely unsupported.

This did not slow down Stone, who, in a recent paper with George Cunningham, claimed, “NB teachers don’t come close to producing the learning gains produced by teachers who have been identified as highly effective by means of a value-added assessment.” In this paper, Cunningham and Stone assert that a “good value-added assessment is more likely to accurately identify teachers who really pack a punch than the less accurate, more expensive process used to identify and certify National Board teachers.”

The idea of measuring and certifying teacher quality by student performance is being pursued by a recent alternative to the NBPTS, the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (ABCTE), which was founded in 2001. The ABCTE says that its proposed master-teacher certification “not only tests candidates in subject area knowledge, requiring them to perform at the distinguished level, but also requires teachers to demonstrate classroom effectiveness over time, as determined by a longitudinal study of student academic achievement. This link between classroom experience and student achievement distinguishes American Board certification from other master teacher programs–the students, not the process, are the central focus.” The ABCTE’s program will be less expensive and time-consuming than the NBPTS process, but it is also less recognized by states and school districts, in large part because it is not yet operating, due to trouble developing a practical measure of the effects of teachers on student achievement.

The NBPTS has endeavored to answer its critics by commissioning 22 independent studies. These research awards, funded by the U.S. Department of Education and private donors, were based on an independent review process designed and managed by the RAND Corporation. Three studies completed in 2004 showed a positive correlation between board-certified teachers and student success. The first and most rigorous of the studies, by Dan Goldhaber and Emily Anthony of the Urban Institute, found that on average North Carolina students in grades 3-5 whose teachers were board certified scored 7 to 15 percent higher on tests than students whose teachers attempted but failed to gain certification. The effect sizes were an average of 3 percent of a standard deviation, with larger effects for young and low-income students. North Carolina has an accountability system that enabled the researchers to link more than 600,000 student records in reading and math to individual teachers over a three-year period, providing pre-test and post-test scores. This study thus examined student gains and controlled for both observed and unobserved differences in the types of students included. The other two studies, in Arizona and in Miami, reached conclusions similar to Goldhaber and Anthony’s.

Critics draw attention to other, less positive findings of the Goldhaber and Anthony study. Goldhaber and Anthony found that NBCTs were more effective than teachers who failed to achieve certificates. They did not become more effective as a result of the application process, which is what the NBPTS suggests. It is unclear how simply identifying more effective teachers will improve teaching. Also, NBCTs were actually less effective in the year they applied for the program, perhaps because of the burdens of the application process. Finally, all the reported differences between NBCTs and non-certified teachers are relatively small, especially given the program’s cost. Thus, for critics, these findings do not make the NBPTS a resounding success.

Critics continue to question the National Board’s cost-effectiveness and its ability to identify better teachers. They wonder if the board’s process is making anyone better, or if certification is simply a “gold star” given to the best teachers. In response to the latter criticisms, the NBPTS points to letters it receives from candidates for certification saying that the board’s certification process is the best and most valuable professional development they have ever experienced.

Conclusions

Clearly, criticism and skepticism about the board continue to exist. But it is also clear that the NBPTS has changed the conversation about teaching within the profession by setting and gaining acceptance of its high standards and by persuading teachers and their unions to begin to accept performance evaluation and differential certification and pay for teachers. Considering how hard it is to change the character and momentum of an institution and a profession, this is no small accomplishment. But one of the issues the NBPTS is struggling with is getting the board-certified teachers into the schools that need them the most. Several studies have shown the positive impact of board-certified teachers on low-income and minority students, but several other studies have found that a disproportionate number of these teachers are in high-performing schools serving advantaged students, not where they seem to be needed most (see Figure 2).

A major remaining bone of contention is the cost-effectiveness issue surrounding the NBPTS. To complaints about the costs for developing and campaigning for the acceptance of the NBPTS, Jim Kelly replies that the “total, one-time capital costs should be [viewed] in the context of annual expenditures on public education in the U.S. of about $400 billion dollars during the period of NBPTS development. Thus, the proper public finance perspective is to ask, Is the creation of this system justified at a total one-time investment of [approximately] $200 million, about half of which was privately financed, during a period when total public expenditures on public education were something on the order of $6 trillion?” About cost-effectiveness, Kelly adds that salary incentives for board-certified teachers should be compared with public education’s notoriously weak and sometimes perverse incentives, which actually reward teachers for getting out of teaching and becoming administrators.

Nevertheless, critics continue to question the NBPTS’s method and focus for measuring quality teaching and to call instead for what they believe should be simple and direct measures of effects on student achievement. The idea is attractive, but in a penetrating discussion of quality teaching, in the January 2005 issue of the Teachers College Record, Gary Fenstermacher and Virginia Richardson of the University of Michigan make clear that appraising teaching is not a simple matter. They differentiate between the task of teaching and the student achievement that one hopes will (but does not always) occur. Any adequate appraisal of teaching must consider both the teaching itself and the learning that results from it. Attention to just one or the other is inadequate and incomplete. National Board certification, in fact, requires that teachers gather and present evidence of their students’ learning as well as evidence of their teaching. However, critics, such as Dale Ballou of Vanderbilt University, raise doubts about the adequacy and validity of this process.

While it seems obvious that quality teaching requires strength in both knowledge of content and pedagogical techniques, getting the balance right between these components remains controversial. Except where individuals are self-taught, learning is a jointly produced outcome, involving effort by both a teacher and a learner. The pedagogical techniques help engage and communicate to the learner. Fenstermacher and Richardson stress: “We all know that learners are not passive receptors of information directed at them. Learning does not arise solely on the basis of teacher activity … [I]t follows that success at learning requires a combination of circumstances well beyond the actions of a teacher.” Consequently, they conclude, it makes sense to appraise the dimensions of both the task and the achievement of teaching. If there is no recognition of this difference, then it is hard to recognize some of the NBPTS’s important virtues and easy to be impatient with it.

As we have reflected about the impact of the NBPTS and its board-certified teachers, who still constitute only 1 percent of all teachers, it seems that the National Board and education reformers need to give far more attention to trying to increase the cost-effectiveness and the multiplier effects of board-certified teachers as leaders and exemplars. Greater emphasis and attention–by the board, by schools and school districts, and by reformers–to structuring, encouraging, and supporting the leadership roles that NBCTs can and should play could maximize the influence of these teachers as coaches, mentors, and leaders for other teachers. Research is only now emerging that explores the social and productive consequences for schools of introducing the status differences associated with NBCTs into the egalitarian ethos of public school teaching. For NBCTs to affect the greater populace of teachers and students, their expertise must be shared, which is not easily accomplished in the typical milieu of schools, where teachers usually work as isolated solo practitioners. Given the increasing emphasis being placed on shared or distributed leadership within schools, the potential of sharing the expertise of NBCTs is especially significant and important for efforts to reform education, for the teaching profession, and for education leadership.

William Lowe Boyd is editor of the American Journal of Education and professor of educational leadership at Pennsylvania State University. Jillian P. Reese is an editorial assistant with the American Journal of Education and a doctoral student at Pennsylvania State University.

The post Great Expectations appeared first on Education Next.

The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. Crown Publishers, 2005

Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope. Crown Publishers, 2000

Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools. Crown Publishers, 1991

Free Schools. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1972

Death at an Early Age. Penguin Group, 1967

Checked by Marcus A. Winters

Jonathan Kozol has made a good living talking with students. His books chronicle travels among poor, minority children, most of them
African Americans in struggling public schools. They are not gentle accounts. His first book, published in 1967, was called Death at an Early Age. Nor are his books politically tepid: his latest, published in 2005, is called Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America.

In the four decades that Jonathan Kozol, now 70, has been writing books—11 so far—his message has hardly wavered: minority children are unsuccessful because rich, white Americans have little interest in using their vast resources to help them. In each of his works Kozol seems intent on burdening other white upper-class Americans with guilt enough for them to see the light and share their wealth. With this attractive message Kozol has won a loyal following among school teachers, policymakers, and book-reading citizens. Not only are many of his books bestsellers, but they have become staples on education-course syllabi. Even education researchers think his work has value: he has been cited 1,790 times in journals counted in the Social Science Citation Index, quite a feat for a popular author. Ordinarily, only influential scholars achieve such recognition. Shame of the Nation got a prepublication boost when Harper’s magazine ran an excerpt and featured it on the cover. The author also received a fawning New York Times Magazine interview; Shame leaped on to the Times bestseller list two weeks after its publication in September.

The notoriety has perhaps gone to Kozol’s head. In his first book, Death at an Early Age, he described the horrific experience of teaching at, and being fired from, a segregated public school in Boston. The book has the feel of being written by a young, dedicated, public school teacher on the frontlines of a major battle, which is exactly what Kozol was. So open to new ideas was he at that time that in another of his earlier volumes, Free Schools, he even hinted at a solution not much different from the one advocated by choice supporters today. More on that later.

In the books that have followed, however, Kozol, no longer in the trenches, seems to have less to write about and offers little more than the old, tired, and failed solutions for the problems of our schools. He tells similar stories, revisits old haunts, has, essentially, the same conversations. Adding to the monotony, Kozol’s most recent books, in fact, are as much about him as about American education. They contain long digressions about his compassionate understanding of the plight of urban youth. In my copy of Ordinary Resurrections, published in 2000, Kozol is even featured on the cover, showing the dramatic transformation of the author from reporter of others’ stories to chronicler of his own. Though he writes with a compelling sense of injustice, much of Kozol’s work is a form of self-reflection that masks—brilliantly, given the popularity of his books—what is an increasingly skewed description of our nation’s schools.

Though it is difficult to judge Kozol’s specific impact on education policy in America, there is no doubt of his influence on the way Americans frame the questions that drive that policymaking. But is the Kozol prism a clarifying one? Is his insistence on our racial sins a sufficient or even accurate way to understand our education problems?

Those Slippery Facts

Shame of the Nation, as its subtitle proclaims, purports to be about segregation. Kozol’s point that urban public schools are too racially homogeneous is certainly not novel; many urban public schools clearly have majority single-race populations. However, Kozol misses the mark in attributing that problem to, or suggesting that its solution is in, our education system. In fact, as Duke economist Charles Clotfelter has pointed out, segregation levels within school districts have actually decreased since the 1970s, after allowing for the changing demographic of urban populations. That decrease has only been offset by the tendency of higher-income families, both black and white, to move to suburban communities with more family-friendly schools and safer environments.

Kozol recognizes that migration is the explanation for continuing segregation, but says its cause is racism. This leads him to propose policies that are so impractical as to be unhelpful. For example, he advocates school busing and other such measures that attempt to get whites to mingle with blacks through coercion, measures that are outside the realm of the politically feasible. Oddly, he rejects more promising policies that rely less on the power of the state. He eschews school-choice policies, for instance, even while conceding that they have led to school desegregation in cities where they have been tried. He says that choice does not work unless it is regulated. Even if we concede his point, it is unclear why he should oppose regulated choice policies if they work. Why should integration be worthwhile only if it is forced?

That Kozol expresses such strenuous opposition to vouchers is all the more peculiar, given his earlier passion for “Free Schools.” His 1972 book of that title is a manual on how to start and operate private schools outside what he saw as an excessively regulated public school system. In Free Schools, Kozol wrote that urban parents should exit the public school system because reforms within the system, “no matter how inventive or how passionate or how immediately provocative,” are simply an “extension of the ideology of public school.” Those reforms, said Kozol, “cannot, for reasons of immediate operation, finance, and survival, raise serious doubts about the indoctrination and custodial function of the public education apparatus.”

Racist Reforms

But his tune on that particular reform has changed since he became the idol of that same education establishment. Now Kozol has little interest in improvements outside the current system, such as vouchers and charters. Why? Because, he says in Shame, it “opens up a gate of sorts for a small fraction of poor people.” Never mind that the body of empirical evidence suggests that choice helps not only the children who leave failing public schools but also those left behind. Studies of voucher programs in Florida, Milwaukee, and San Antonio all find that vouchers not only have not harmed public schools; they have improved them.

Vouchers are not the only reform to which Kozol objects. On the contrary, he treats almost any proposed restructuring as little more than racism in disguise. “Although generically described as ‘school reform,’” he writes in Shame, “most of these practices and policies are targeted at poor children of color,” failing to explain why reform should not be directed at the lowest-performing schools. One favorite Kozol target is accountability testing, which is treated as a racist plot to harm minority children, hatched by “politically conservative white people.”

In Shame Kozol pays particular attention to Success for All, a school-wide reform program that requires teachers to followstrict schedules and test students frequently. He likens Success for All, now used in more than 1,200 schools nationwide, to a military training facility. And not just any military facility: “My attention was distracted by some whispering among the children sitting to the right of me. The teacher’s response to this distraction was immediate: His arm shot out and up in a diagonal in front of him, his hand straight up, his fingers flat. The young co-teacher did this too. When they saw their teachers do this, all the children in the classroom did it too.” It was all there, for Kozol, except for the Sieg Heil !

So committed is this veteran author to damning interventions designed to preserve order in the classroom that he overlooks the considerable evidence that Success for All actually helps exactly that population for which Kozol expresses a profound allegiance. As is his wont, he ignores the results from a randomized field trial, conducted by Johns Hopkins researchers, that found that Success for All has large, statistically significant positive effects on student literacy.

The Original Sin: Unequal Education Spending

So, besides desegregating schools, what does Kozol want to do? Surprisingly enough, for all of his self-expressed idealism, he turns out to be as naive a materialist as one would expect from someone who has found his own money­making formula. Again and again Kozol returns to his primary message: give those schools more money! No reform short of unloading a dump-truck filled with hundred-dollar bills on the campus of each urban public school will solve today’s education ills.

While his books consist largely of a series of sad stories, it is Kozol’s use of numbers that gives those stories their meaning and impact. He and his faithful readers believe that the dollars not spent on education make all the difference. To highlight the funding disparities in urban centers, Kozol produces an appendix in both Shame of the Nation and Savage Inequalities with tables comparing per pupil spending in several cities, including New York, Chicago, and urban New Jersey, with that in select surrounding suburban districts. Not surprisingly, the wealthiest districts in the area spend a good deal more money than the most poverty-stricken parts of the city.

Kozol points out that the wealthiest suburban school districts surrounding New York City, for example, spend more per pupil to educate their mostly white student bodies than the city spends to educate its mostly minority population. He produces interviews with children in schools receiving less funding; the children ask, in their small voices, why it is that they do not have everything that rich children have. It is a powerful rhetorical device perhaps, but not one that has much bearing on the question of student outcomes. The fact is, though Kozol ignores it, that changing the incentives of urban schools (with choice or accountability) yields much more of a change in performance than more money does.

One indication that more spending might not be the answer is that while urban public schools might not spend as much as the wealthiest districts surrounding them, they do spend what those wealthy districts spent in the past. For example, Kozol points to funding disparities around Boston, which is where he started his career. In 1999 Weston, a Boston suburb, spent $10,039 per pupil, in adjusted 2003 dollars, and that year its 4th-grade students averaged a scale score of 248 on the state reading test. In 2003 the Boston school district spent $10,057 per pupil, similar to what Weston spent in 1999 in real dollars. However, while Boston’s spending caught up to Weston’s previous expenditures, its test scores did not. Boston’s students scored an average of 224 on the 4th-grade reading assessment in 2003. Boston’s reading scores were only a one-point improvement from 1999, when the district spent an inflation-adjusted $9,213. Similarly, in their book, No Excuses, the Manhattan Institute’s Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom point out that the financial inequalities in urban New Jersey had largely been done away with by 2000–01, yet school outcomes showed no discernible improvement. Since suburban students certainly have other advantages over the average student in the cities, we might not expect equal spending to produce identical results. But if Kozol is right, shouldn’t it at least bring about progress?

Kozol’s analysis is just as wrong elsewhere in the country. New York City schools, for instance, might spend less than the few school districts that educate the sons and daughters of New York’s investment bankers (who live in those rich suburbs). My analysis, using the same data on school districts in the Empire State that Kozol cites, finds that districts with a higher percentage of African American students actually spend more money than other districts in the state on average.

A Relative Problem

Kozol scoffs at figures suggesting that schools are failing to improve despite increases in funding. In Savage Inequalities he attempts to rebut what is perhaps the most popular critique among education reformers—that over the past 30 years there has been a doubling in real dollars in education spending and no significant progress in education achievement measured in test scores or graduation rates. Discussing a Wall Street Journal editorial that pointed this out, Kozol writes, in Inequalities, “What the Journal does not add is that per-pupil spending grew at the same rate in the suburbs as it did in urban districts… thereby preventing any catch-up by the urban schools.” The most important education reform, in Kozol’s view, is for urban schools to have as much money as the richest suburban ones. He ignores the fact that, overall, central-city schools out-spend the typical suburban school, to say nothing of those in small towns and rural areas (see Figure 1).

But why should a district’s performance depend entirely on what is happening elsewhere? Greater spending must lead to at least some education gains as long as the funds are well spent. Kozol is the first to argue that urban schools lack the physical amenities of suburban schools. So when urban schools get more money, as even Kozol admits has been the case, why can’t those amenities be provided, regardless of what suburban schools are doing? If a school lacks air-conditioning, for example, and if one expects this amenity to affect student performance, then the addition of air-conditioning should improve outcomes regardless of whether another school builds a swimming pool.

Kozol argues that only relative spending matters, because both suburban and urban schools are hiring out of the same labor pool. Thus it might not matter how much urban districts spend, because as long as they spend less than other districts they will get the same poor-quality teachers. But this assumes that the labor pool for teachers cannot change. As schools have more money they should either bid up the price for teachers or be able to hire more teachers at the same price. In theory, either of these changes should lift all boats, either by improving the overall quality of the labor pool or by reducing class size. If more money does not provide better amenities, or a higher quality workforce, or smaller classes, or if it produces these things and performance does not improve, then we must conclude that more money is not the answer.

Kozol often insists that he will believe that more money will not improve urban public schools when rich Americans stop trying to spend more money on their schools. The trouble with this seemingly reasonable quip is that it fails to recognize that urban and suburban schools are more separated by their incentive structure than they are by their bank accounts.

If we assume that suburban districts improve with greater funds (perhaps a stronger assumption than many realize), it is also reasonable to assume that they face consequences if they use those additional resources unwisely. If suburban schools do not live up to their price tag, then their active parents and other taxpayers worried about their property values put pressure on policymakers to improve them. If the school continues to fail, suburbanites will move to the next town over, or they will send their child to a private school.

On the other side of the tracks, however, urban schools have a captive clientele. Low-income minority parents have neither the resources to move out of their city nor the political power to force policymakers to meet their education needs. Without consequences for failure, urban public schools have little incentive to use their resources wisely. Thus increasing urban public-school budgets will fail to improve their performance until urban schools are operating under the same incentives as suburban schools. Kozol blithely ignores the existence of these differing incentives in his Ahab-like pursuit of more money.

When we step back and look at the evidence, it becomes clear that changing the incentives for urban public schools is far more attractive a reform than providing them with more funds. Increasingly, the scientific research indicates little to no relationship between escalating education expenditures and improvements in academic outcomes. Erik Hanushek’s 1996 review of the research on school funding found that only 27 of 163 studies indicated that spending more dollars improved student outcomes. Kozol ignores these findings. He ignores the evidence (by Hanushek and Margaret Raymond, as well as by Martin Carnoy and Susanna Loeb) that changing the incentives for public schools with high-stakes testing is succeeding where simply increasing resources has failed. He ignores the wide body of research suggesting that school-choice policies improve public schools by forcing them to compete for students that they used to take for granted. He lamentsthat paying teachers for their successful performance taints their “unselfish inclinations that are not at all unlike the call to ministry,” without discussing the evidence suggesting that these programs have been successful at improving student outcomes.

Who Needs Research?

Kozol is contemptuous of empirical research on education. Test scores, he says, tell us nothing about the number of times a day that a child smiles, which is what really counts in our schools. Kozol feels it unnecessary to rely on empirical measures of achievement because they “don’t speak of happiness.” We can understand schools only by walking around in them and talking with children. In Shame of the Nation, he writes that he trusts his interviews with children because, “Unlike these powerful grown-ups, children have no ideologies to reinforce, no superstructure of political opinion to promote, no civic equanimity or image to defend, no personal reputation to secure.”

Unfortunately, what all but the most unusual children lack is perspective, foresight, and knowledge. This is why we don’t let children marry, imbibe alcohol, or, for that matter, decide what time they will go to sleep. We should be similarly hesitant to base decisions that cost billions of dollars and might affect the structure of society on their musings.

What makes children so useful to a Kozol-style researcher is the ease with which the researcher can evoke the answers that are sought, especially when one can pick and choose from among the children one wants to include in the next bestseller.

When one follows the basic canons of social science, which require sensitivity to the biases of respondents and the biases that can come from selecting individuals in any way other than randomly, then one cannot so easily construct fanciful castles out of the comments of either children or adults. That is the greatest virtue of the social-science methodologies that Kozol regularly denigrates. Quality research forces us to step back, removing ourselves from our predispositions and the feelings that might force our eyes to lie to us. Statistics can surely be manipulated, as Kozol himself proves, but at least the limitations are verifiable and the truth of the matter is not dependent on the eye of the beholder.

Admittedly, many scholars pay more attention to how well children are doing on tests designed to measure how much they are learning in school than to the simplistic responses children tend to give. But that is the only way we can find out if they know how to read, or write, or add numbers. Without skills, these children whom Kozol professes to love so dearly, and whom he quotes so extensively, will never acquire the skills that will allow them to lead happy, productive adult lives. Money is Kozol’s only reform model, and it will hardly preserve the smile on those children’s faces.

It’s difficult to visualize the system Kozol wants for us. Beyond his insistent pleas for an equitable distribution of the money in education, he provides few specifics. In fact, though, the best argument against Kozol’s prescription is that the money spent on American public schools doubled over the past 30 years—yet outcomes in education have remained as savagely unequal as ever and will remain so until the incentives of urban schools are changed. To the extent that it persuades people to avoid reforms that change school incentives in favor of ever-increasing school spending, Jonathan Kozol’s work is an impediment to the very thing that he claims to desire most: a day when urban minority children receive an acceptable
education.

-Marcus A. Winters is a senior research associate at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. He is also a doctoral fellow in the department of education reform at theUniversity of Arkansas.

The post Savage Exaggerations appeared first on Education Next.

So teacher quality matters. A lot. Yet the standard measure of quality today, the teaching credential or license, is no sign of quality. A man may carry a driver’s license in his wallet, but that does not mean he will stay in his lane. Similarly, we are not guaranteed an effective teacher because of a license verifying that he or she has passed a batch of education-school courses and spent a few months practice-teaching.

Still, states continue to require one or another of literally dozens, even hundreds, of different education credentials for each and every subject. In the process they have managed to manufacture an apparent shortage of “qualified,” that is, credentialed teachers. On this matter, Michael Podgursky (“Is There A ‘Qualified Teacher’ Shortage?”) provides fascinating information from the state of Missouri.

All this focus on credentials obscures the genuine shortage of an adequate number of truly qualified teachers: those who can help students realize their full potential. By paying teachers according to their credentials and the number of years they have been on the payroll rather than how well their students perform, the rewards go to the credentialed careerist, not necessarily to the meritorious teacher. And when talent is not rewarded, talented people turn to other fields of endeavor, all the more so in an age when able women have many new career opportunities.

Attempts to introduce merit pay have been effectively thwarted by strenuous union opposition. Unions argue that one cannot easily distinguish between a good teacher and a bad one. While that may once have been the case, many districts and states are now collecting information on student performance in such a way that principals and superintendents can track how much a given child is learning from one year to the next, and from one teacher to the next.

That information can be a powerful tool for identifying effective teachers. Brian Jacob and Lars Lefgren (“When Principals Rate Teachers”) show that teachers that were effective with last year’s class will tend to be effective this year as well. By the same token, teachers who have never been effective are not likely to become so. To those who remember the great teachers they had in school, the finding may appear obvious. It is all the more distressing that teacher pay schedules ignore it.

The Jacob-Lefgren study also shows that school principals are good at identifying the very best teachers as well as the weakest ones, exactly the capability needed to reward the topflyers while weeding out those who belong in another profession.

To its credit, as William Boyd and Jillian Reese tell us in their feature essay (“Great Expectations”), the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) has tried to enhance teacher quality. And the certification process seems to be able at least to identify more effective teachers. Perhaps NBPTS-certified teachers deserve an extra reward, if they go to the effort of applying for and then actually passing their “boards.” But so far, the jury is still out on whether the program helps create good teachers or simply spots the existing ones.

The solution to the so-called shortage of qualified teachers may well lie with more commonsensical solutions. Let principals, themselves to be chosen for their effectiveness, recruit, reward, and retain the truly qualified teachers. That is no different from the personnel policies followed by successful firms in competitive industries.

Once talented teachers are so recognized—and paid according to their effectiveness—there is no reason not to compensate them a lot better than they are today. It is true that teachers’ weekly compensation packages are, on average, often better than in other professions. But students could learn a lot more, and teachers could be paid a lot more, if schools paid bigger salaries to the best and the brightest, but not to the ineffective.

— Paul E. Peterson

The post Of Teacher Shortages and Quality appeared first on Education Next.

Kitzmiller was launched after the school board in Dover, a town outside Harrisburg with just 3,600 students, voted to require the district’s 9th-grade biology teachers to read to their students a four-paragraph statement advising them that evolution is a theory, “not a fact.” The board told teachers to refer students to Of Pandas and People, a text favored by many creationists that defines ID as the belief “that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency, with their distinctive features already intact—fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, etc.” A more usual definition holds merely that ID finds some organic matter to be of “irreducible complexity” and thus not explicable as a product of evolution.

Eleven local parents (one named Kitzmiller) sued, with help from the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and an elite Philadelphia law firm, Pepper Hamilton. The suit claimed that the board’s action violated the First Amendment ban on establishment of religion.

The defendants were badly beaten on every front. In November, soon after the six-week, non-jury trial ended, the Dover electorate voted eight of the school board’s nine members out of office. The following month they were beaten again by Judge Jones, whose 139-page opinion called the board’s ID decision religiously motivated and accused it of “breathtaking inanity.” Jones said that ID was not science. He also ordered that the school district pay the plaintiffs’ legal costs. Pepper Hamilton hinted that it might send bills to individual board members who voted for the ID statement.

The defeats, along with the turmoil caused by hordes of reporters from far-flung places, are likely to make other local boards hesitate before raising even timid questions about evolution. At the least, a prudent board might want to have the backing of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based nonprofit and a principal proponent of ID, which had distanced itself from the Dover  defense, perhaps anticipating the loss. The defendants were instead represented by Richard Thompson of the Thomas More Law Center of Ann Arbor, Michigan, which is dedicated to protecting the religious freedoms of Christians.

Earlier in the year a Cobb County, Georgia, school board was similarly rebuffed by a federal district judge. The Georgia board had ordered that a sticker be attached to biology textbooks stating, “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.” The judge in that case ruled that the statement was an unconstitutional endorsement of religion because it was supported by religious opponents of evolution. Unlike Dover, however, the Cobb County board survived to file an appeal, which was being heard by the 11th Circuit as Jones handed down his opinion.

Will there be fresh lawsuits in the wake of Kitzmiller? The victors appear ready to turn to state school boards, where proponents of ID have made the most headway. State boards in Kansas and Ohio, among others, have adopted science standards that call for critical analysis of evolution. The day after Jones ruled, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that Americans United had obtained boxes of records from the Ohio Department of Education and was threatening a lawsuit. “We hope Ohio takes notice and cleans house,” said an official of Americans United.

There remains the question of what the litigation, no matter the outcome or opinions, means for science education, and beyond that whether science education has much effect on what Americans believe. Polls show that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe in a providential being and are skeptical about evolution. Critics of evolution seem to be fighting a battle that they have already won.

-Josh Dunn is assistant professor of political science, the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs.

-Martha Derthick is professor emeritus of American government, the University of Virginia.

The post A Setback in Dover appeared first on Education Next.