Nevada Aims for Education Reform

Nevada lawmakers are the most recent group attempting to change the state of education in this country. Two measures have been approved by the Senate Education Committee. The first amendment would require that at least fifty percent of teacher evaluation criteria is based on student academic achievement; the second reform would require all school districts to institute pay for performance programs for public school teachers. According to reports, the committee also voted to “extend a mandatory probationary period for new teachers to three years and send teachers back to probation if they receive unsatisfactory evaluations two consecutive years.”

Unfortunately, several reform efforts stalled in the committee, which voted down an amendment to end “last in, first out” practices of teacher layoffs. That system requires that the most recent teachers to be hired are the first to be fired if districts are forced to institute layoffs, instead of other factors like performance, classroom absence, disciplinary history, or a criminal record.

The article, while certainly promising, highlights the political difficulties inherent in education reform proposals. The Senate Education Committee is comprised of four Democrats and three Republicans. On many of the most “controversial” measures, like the last in, first out policy, members of the committee voted strictly on party lines, with the four Democrats defeating the proposals. Education has become a “Democratic issue” in this country, but upon closer investigation it is clear that this does not refer to the passage and proposal of good policy. Democrats garner some of their most reliable and massive political support from teachers and union officials. They risk losing money, man power, campaign support, and votes if they vote in favor of amendments that put quality education above the entrenched interests of teachers (good or bad). In order for education reformers to successfully leap these political hurdles, Democrats in state and national legislatures must chose to put the needs of America’s students ahead of job security for bad teachers.

More information can be found here: http://www.lvrj.com/news/teacher-tenure-reform-bills-advance-to-senate-vote-122381909.html?ref=909

Value-added: An important measure

A fantastic study published by the Brookings Institute called “Evaluating Teachers: The Important Role of Value-Added,” explores the benefits and challenges of a system that evaluates teachers by their students improvement on objective measures like standardized tests.

Here are the main points of the study and discussion:

Current evaluation systems that use principals to evaluate teachers end up classifying 99 percent of teachers as effective. Obviously principal evaluations alone cannot accurately determine a teacher’s effectiveness.

Value-added is “not a perfect system of measurement,” but it can “complement” other measurements like parent and student feedback, observations, and self assessments.

Many teachers are skeptical of value-added systems because they are afraid of being labeled as bad teachers solely because of their students’ test scores. “But framing the problem in terms of false negatives places the focus almost entirely on the interests of the individual who is being evaluated rather than the students who are being served. It is easy to identify with the good teacher who wants to avoid dismissal for being incorrectly labeled a bad teacher. From that individual’s perspective, no rate of misclassification is acceptable.”

The authors of this study illustrate the problem with this argument well when they point out that SAT scores are only moderately correlated to success in college, and between-season batting averages for baseball players are only moderately correlated to professional batting averages. Nevertheless, we use these measurements because they are the best we have. In the authors’ words, “We should not set unrealistic expectations for the reliability or stability of value-added. Value-added evaluations are as reliable as those used for high stakes decisions in many other fields.”

Value-added measurements are especially important when we examine the alternatives for measuring teacher performance: seniority (experience) or principal evaluations. This study finds that value-added measurements are the best way to determine effectiveness.

Teachers are worried that value-added indicators unfairly measure their effectiveness. While it is true that value-added will not be a perfect measure, it is still an important one. Combining an objective measure of student performance with more objective measurements is the only way to create a fair and comprehensive evaluation system.

StudentsFirst: A Call for Respectful Education Reform Dialogue

It is important to remember that in the education reform debate, teachers, unions, school administrators, government officials, parents, and students all have a lot at stake. Each party in the reform movement, however, is either fighting for personal reasons (i.e. for government officials to keep their jobs), for selfless reasons (i.e. what’s in the best interest of your child), or a combination of the two. While all of the sides may disagree about the problems within the American education system as well as the perceived effectiveness of proposed solutions, each party in the reform debate does not have to be disagreeable. One would hope, that at least on some level, all parties involved are advocating for greater success among American public school children, and that is a goal that we can all agree on. Unfortunately, education reform debates have turned ugly in many areas recently.

Olivia Demas, a mother of three from Ohio blogged Sunday on the Students First website about the actions that many opposed to education reform measures are taking to halt progress. While I’m sure that both sides of the debate have, at times, been less than civil, the drastic responses from teachers, unions, and other official outlined by Demas must end. Active debate in the education arena should be encouraged, but when that debate turns into the usurpation of free speech rights and the intimidation of parents and teachers who want the best for their kids, we fail to have a constructive dialogue and all parties in the education reform domain lose out, one way or another.

The article, published on StudentsFirst, can be found here: http://www.studentsfirst.org/blog/entry/a-call-for-civility/

How Expensive Is It (Federally)?

Soon, I will be publishing a blog post that highlights the four most daunting obstacles to education reform in America. One of those reform barriers is the perception that switching to a merit based system for teacher pay would drastically increase education expenditures at the local, state, and national levels. While deficit hawks are sorely needed in today’s fiscally irresponsible Washington atmosphere, education reform is simply not the policy arena that they should be scrutinizing for two reasons.

First, the education of American students is absolutely critical for the future success of this country. While it is almost impossible to cut spending in entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, the government simply cannot focus on critical domestic policy arenas, like education, to try and appear fiscally responsible. Second, education spending is a miniscule part of the federal budget, taking up approximately 1.8% of federal spending annually. Although a majority of the education spending in the United States comes from state and local government coffers, there are far larger sectors of the federal budget for those interested in fiscal responsibility. These statistics and a wealth of additional information can be found at the Federal Education Budget Project.

For those interested in exploring how federal education spending affects the national budget, be sure to check out the Committee For a Responsible Budget’s budget simulator. You’ll notice that only a few levers within the domestic part of the simulator touch on education reforms, and these changes do not drastically affect the overall federal budget. Try the simulator yourself at: http://crfb.org/stabilizethedebt/ .

Great video: Student First

There's a great two-minute video that really gets to the heart of how our current hiring/firing policies for teachers disadvantage our students:

The video explains three main issues:

1. How budget cuts means firing more teachers

2. How we fire teachers by an "outdated last in, first out" policy that always fires the newest teachers, no matter how good they are. Through "seniority based layoffs," we fire some of the best teachers, we have to fire more teachers to meet the budget requirements since the newest teachers are paid the least, and low performing schools "get hit the hardest" since they have the highest number of new teachers.

3. Teachers matter. Having a bad teacher for one or two years is enough to put a student at a substantial disadvantage for the rest of his/her education.

The video is short and interesting. I recommend taking the two minutes to really understand the research behind our current policies and their effects on students.

Students Struggle in Civics

In 2010, fourth, eighth, and twelfth grade students across the country took a civics exam administered by the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). The results of the exam demonstrate just how immediate the need for education reform is in this country. According to the exam, only twenty-five percent of American high school seniors are “proficient” in civics, and only seven percent of eighth graders could identify the three branches of the federal government. That’s twenty-five percent proficiency in civics for a group of people who will be eligible to vote within the year. If students cannot even reach proficiently, it makes sense that even fewer are sophisticated in the subject; only four percent of twelfth graders, and even fewer fourth and eighth graders were “advanced” civics students. These statistics make one point demonstrably clear: the American education system is not working, and government officials owe it to the children of this country (and this country’s future) to fix it. *

The article lists several other takeaways from the disturbing results of the exam, including the following:

· Only 50% of students could identify the purpose of the Bill of Rights

· 12^th grade scores on the exam actually decreased since the last test administration, while 8^th grade results stayed the same.

The results seem dire, but there may be an unfortunately simple explanation. According to Ted McConnell, Executive Director of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of School, the No Child Left Behind Act disproportionately emphasizes the teaching of certain subjects. While the act inundates students with reading, math, and science, it focuses little on art, music, social studies, and the humanities. In order for schools to attain NCLB funding and improve their students' chances of scoring well on exams that “matter,” little time is devoted to other extremely important subjects.

But are math, science, and reading pursuits more important than other academic areas like social studies? I think that answer is a resounding no, and so does Peter Levine, director of Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement at Tufts. According to Mr. Levine, “America has always relied on active citizens to solve our most serious problems. If the next generation of kids can’t rise to that challenge, we’ll be in trouble.” It is impossible to expect out governmental structure to work effectively if only half of America’s children understand the function of the Bill of Rights. We’ve been endowed with the longest lasting and most successful democracy in the history of the world, but if we fail to produce an educated mass of citizens, that system will fail to work properly and we may lose the freedoms that have defined us for so long.

This gaping hole in NCLB’s evaluation and incentive method can, however, be used as a teaching tool. In any future reform legislation, it is critical that certain subjects are not promoted over others. It may in fact be beneficial to pay teachers in math and science more, if it is harder to recruit people to fill those positions. What is not effective, however, is incorporating only certain subjects into potential teacher performance metrics, or driving many more resources into one academic area over another. We must learn from the pitfalls of past education reform bills, because giving academic preference to certain subjects is a problem that all future legislation must avoid.

The full article may be found here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/04/federal-civics-test-shows_n_857776.html

*Note, portions of this post are drawn from a strategy paper written for COCO 3 at Dartmouth College.

The Onion gets it right

Straying a bit from the usually serious tone of this blog, I wanted to share a fantastic article from the satirical news source The Onion entitled "Budget Mix-Up Provides Nation's Schools With Enough Money to Properly Educate Students."

The article is great because it points out the absurdity of our education problem and our reluctance to properly fund a solution. 

The link to the article is provided above, but I copied the text of the article here for easier reading: 

WASHINGTON—According to bewildered and contrite legislators, a major budgetary mix-up this week inadvertently provided the nation's public schools with enough funding and resources to properly educate students.

Sources in the Congressional Budget Office reported that as a result of a clerical error, $80 billion earmarked for national defense was accidentally sent to the Department of Education, furnishing schools with the necessary funds to buy new textbooks, offer more academic resources, hire better teachers, promote student achievement, and foster educational excellence—an oversight that apologetic officials called a "huge mistake."

"Obviously, we did not intend for this to happen, and we are doing everything in our power to right the situation and discipline whoever is responsible," said House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), expressing remorse for the error. "I want to apologize to the American people. The last thing we wanted was for schools to upgrade their technology and lower student-to-teacher ratios in hopes of raising a generation of well-educated, ambitious, and skilled young Americans."

"That's the type of irresponsible misspending that I've been focused on eliminating for my entire political career," Ryan added.

Ryan went on to tell reporters that the $80 billion budget slip-up will "unfortunately" help schools nationwide to supply students with modernized classrooms and instructional materials. Struggling to control his frustration, Ryan said he prayed the costly mistake would not allow millions of American students to graduate with strong language skills.

Jeff Sessions (R-AL), ranking minority member of the Senate Budget Committee, called for a full investigation into how the nation's schools were able to secure the necessary funds to monitor teachers and pay salaries based on performance.

"The fact that this careless mistake also ended up financing new teacher training programs, allowing educators to become more than just glorified babysitters, is disgraceful," Sessions said. "Now we are left with a situation where schools can attract talented professionals who really want to teach our children, which will in turn create smarter and more motivated students who wish to one day make a contribution to society."

"In all my years in government I have never seen such a shameful error," Sessions added. "Our appropriations process has gone horribly awry, and I for one demand to know how it happened."

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) echoed congressional leaders and vowed to do "everything in [his] power" to resolve the costly error that led to schools updating their curriculums to emphasize math, science, and language arts, and provided students with instruction on how to use newly purchased computers to aid their research.

"Once these kids learn to read and think critically, you can never undo that," Boehner said. "In 20 years, we could be looking at a nightmare scenario in which vast segments of our populace are fully prepared to compete in the new global marketplace."

"It could take a whole generation to cancel out the effects of this," Boehner added.

Congressional leaders also stressed that providing the nation's students with an adequate education that prepared them for college or supplied them with a solid grasp of basic knowledge could also have a devastating impact on the economy by creating a new class of citizens uninterested in settling for fast food meals and useless plastic knickknacks.

"And politicians will be adversely affected as well," Boehner said. "What will our nation do if the next generation knows that all we care about is our own selfish interests and pandering to the wealthy elite? Is that the future you want? Not me."

Source: http://www.theonion.com/articles/budget-mixup-provides-nations-schools-with-enough,20350/