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 How we fire teachers by an "outdated last in, first out" policy that always fires the newest teachers, no matter how good they are.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/

"The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries"

About a week ago, The New York Times published an editorial that proposed some pretty radical and interesting solutions to our education crisis.

The editorial addresses several points, and is worth reading in its entirety, but I wanted to discuss some of its most interesting ideas.

The first is a question of properly using incentives to achieve a desired outcome. The federal government's No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) rewarded succeeding schools with additional funding and punished failing schools with less funding. So already-failing school were granted fewer resources, which ultimately punished students. In other words, the NCLB Act did not use incentives effectively.

The idea behind merit pay is to line up the incentives so that individual teachers work as hard and effectively as they can for their students. We believe that incentives should be based on individual performance so that they will incentivize individual teachers to do their jobs well. Most economists will tell you that incentives work best on the individual level. The failure of NCLB is a case in point. And as the editorial's analogy with the military goes, "when recruiting is down, we offer incentives."

The second interesting point is that with many teachers so near retirement, now is the time to rethink the way we treat the teaching profession in this country. The editorial discusses the percentage of teachers who leave before they have taught for five years (46) and the percentage of teachers who work second jobs to make ends meet (62). The editorial suggests recruiting elite college graduates to become teachers and treating the profession with more respect by increasing salaries.

While we agree that higher salaries would be a fantastic way to increase the prestige of the teaching profession, we also believe that even a ten percent bonuses for good teachers would do a lot to increase its appeal. Increasing the appeal of teaching by tying salaries to performance would make the applicant pool larger, and the more selective the teaching profession becomes, the easier it will be to hire the best teachers. The editorial provides examples of countries that have successful education systems because they have made teaching an important and respected career.

Indiana Law Gets it Right

State lawmakers “got it right” in Indiana on Saturday, when Governor Mitch Daniels signed one component of his comprehensive education reform package into law. The bill overhauls the way teachers are evaluated and incorporates merit pay into the education lexicon in the state of Indiana. According to WISH-TV, “among some of the provisions, teacher performance is now a factor in hiring, promotion, salary and dismissal.”

Under the new law, students would not be required to have an “unsatisfactory” teacher for more than one year, without parent approval. Additionally, the educators that rank in the bottom two of the four categories used for evaluation would be ineligible to receive automatic pay increases, and all new, incoming teachers, would be ineligible to receive tenure. Under Indiana’s current system, 99% of teachers are rated effective educators, but nearly 25% of the state’s children fail statewide examinations. It’s clear that 99% of Indiana’s teachers are not effective at what they do.

One important factor to note is the way in which Indiana will evaluate its teachers. The evaluation scheme for educators in the state will incorporate “objective student performance” or test scores into the assessment criteria, but it will not be the sole component of any scheme. In addition, performance reviews will become an annual occurrence, teachers will be evaluated based on how well and how often they use their best available resources, and peer and principal reviews will be incorporated into the overall assessment model.

Work with unions has been essential to the bill’s success, and will make the overall bill more effective than measures in other states. The previous union contracts, for example, prohibited yearly reviews of the state’s teachers. In addition, Indiana unions can see the collective bargaining big picture: it’s vital to both ensure good teachers are paid well and to produce high academic achievement for America’s children. The ABA, as well as the AMA, promote the welfare of their members, but they also make certain that their associates achieve the profession’s loftier goals and regulate the profession.

Daniels’ bill does take some collective bargaining rights away from the teachers’ unions in Indiana, but they don’t remove the organizations’ abilities to negotiate for wages and benefits. What is no longer in the purview of union negotiations is educational curriculum, classroom size, and other components of the general education system. These components do not drastically affect the working conditions of the teaching profession, but are vital to the success of public school children. In addition, many of the subjects now outside of the realm of negotiation, like classroom size, impact students and teachers in the same way. A smaller class size is a calmer environment for teachers and increases student performance (and in the case of the new bill, should increase teacher pay as well). Other state and federal teachers’ unions must emulate the union response in Indiana.

Finally, opponents cite two problems with the reform bill. First, they fear that any evaluation metric will fail to fairly grade teacher performance; and second, they claim that teachers are not in the education field for the money. While the first concern is always a valid one when a new metric is introduced, the Indiana bill goes as far as any can in producing a fair evaluation. The system incorporates both concrete, quantitative measures, as well as objective peer and administrator teacher review. In addition, the four levels of performance are much more expansive than what many other states currently use when evaluating performance (either effective or ineffective, or a third, middle category). When a choice is between lower student performance and a pay scale that rewards teaching longevity rather than performance, or higher student performance and a scale that, may somewhat imperfectly, reward the best teachers, I’ll choose the latter.

The second argument against the bill, even if a valid concern, demonstrates why this legislation was so necessary. According to Senator Earline Rogers, "I don't think teachers are in it for the money. If they had been in it for the money, they would have chosen another profession." This is precisely the problem. Although we would never discourage passionate individuals from becoming teachers to help children, the low salary of the teaching field dissuades many from ever giving it a shot in the first place. Some of the most highly qualified individuals and some of the most academically successful students would never dream of entering the teaching field, because the pay is so much lower than what they could earn at another job. Why would anyone strive to be a high quality teacher when they could succeed in finance, law, or medicine, and make five times the salary? What’s more, Senator Rogers is implying that the joy educators get from being a high quality educator and the impact they have on their students are more motivating than financial rewards. If this is true, then most, if not all, public school teachers should get the most out of their children, and American students should all be passing their standardized tests. That, however, is not the case.

The Indiana bill shows the considerable progress that we can make in education reform efforts if government bodies and teachers’ unions work together. Merit pay systems for public school teachers not only reward educators for high quality work, but they raise the level of all teachers, and in turn, improve the academic performance of America’s students.

For more information, visit Governor Daniels' website at: http://www.in.gov/portal/news_events/69879.htm.

Teachers Matter

At this point if you’ve been reading the blog, you know the daunting and unsettling statistics that rank American student test scores towards the bottom of the developed world. Our group has argued that among other reform measures, the United States has to end teacher tenure and increase teacher salaries in order to improve its education system. Higher teacher salaries would encourage higher achieving college students to enter the teaching profession, and it would reward quality teachers for stellar performance. The logic goes that if the monetary incentives are strong enough to both recruit (academically successful) teachers, and then retain only those who perform the best, teaching would become a prestigious and financially rewarding career, and, in turn, American students would be more successful. While it must be a part of a larger solution, we firmly believe that it is one of the most important factors in any large scale, education reform package. And a brand new paper written by education experts with McGraw-Hill agrees.

The paper, written by former West Virginia Superintendent of Schools, Dr. Steven L. Paine and the Director of the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment, Andreas Schleicher reach two conclusions. First, teacher quality is more important than any other factor in predicting and increasing student performance. Second, the prestige of the teaching profession must be strengthened to recruit high quality teaching candidates. Their study, “What the U.S. Can Learn from the World’s Most Successful Education Reform Efforts,” examined education systems in Singapore, Canada, and Finland, and found opportunities for the United States to improve its own education practices, as well as surmount many of the possible barriers to those reforms.

To begin, the paper argues that America needs to increase the number and quality of the individuals applying to become teachers. Finland, for example, only accepts 10% of applicants for teaching positions. Some opponents may argue that upon further analysis of the study, Finish teachers make about the same amount as American teachers ($39,000), which is true. What they fail to note however are the distinct cultural and economic differences between the Scandinavian state and the US. In Finland the teaching profession is just as highly respected as medicine or law, but in the United States, about half of all teachers graduate in the bottom third of their college classes. In a country like the United States where both wealth and high levels of education usually garner significant respect, the low pay, and sometimes lower quality of the teaching pool leaves room for drastic improvement. It’s impossible to radically increase the prestige associated with teaching overnight, but what reformers in the United States can do rather quickly is increase teacher salaries in order to recruit high performing college students into the education field.

Educational success throughout the world also shows us how to overcome some of the problems that develop when trying to implement successful reforms. In particular, other reform movements prove that teachers’ unions and the government can work cooperatively and effectively to both improve student performance and ensure equitable and competitive working conditions and benefits for teachers themselves.

Teachers’ unions and the government must work closely to align each party’s incentives. The lawyer’s job is to defend his client or prosecute a criminal; a doctor’s job is to heal the sick; and a teacher’s job is to effectively educate children. The teachers’ union and government officials used this logic to improve student performance in Ontario, Canada. According to the report, “The educators, through their union, agreed to accept responsibility for their own learning and the learning of their students; the government agreed to supply all of the necessary support.” The Ontario example proves that high teacher benefits and compensation and a strong union are not principles that diametrically oppose student success or rewards for high quality teachers.

The McGraw-Hill report should give us all hope. Not only does it shed light on concrete practices that have proven effective in global education reform efforts, it demonstrates that changes to the educational system are indeed possible. A strong union of educational professionals does not preclude education reform initiatives from incorporating measurements of teacher quality. In fact, success for America’s students will be the most profound and dramatic when government initiatives are combined with a strong teachers’ union devoted to the academic success of this country’s youth.